Have you ever seen something so beautiful and awe-inspiring that you just have to take a picture of it? Perhaps you’ve been to Yellowstone National Park, for example, and stood on the platform just at the top of the Lower Falls, where the mighty Yellowstone River plunges into the gorgeous canyon below. You thought, “I need to share this beauty!” You took your expensive smartphone with all of its state-of-the-art cameras and snapped a picture. Then you texted the image to your sweet 90-year-old grandmother who still uses a flip-phone! A day or two went by and she finally responded with, “What is this?”
What’s the problem? Once the full-resolution image gets crunched down to something that can be easily transmitted through outer space the final resolution is terrible. The image on grandma’s flip-phone is grainy, unimpressive, and barely recognizable. The same thing can happen with Jesus. In our efforts to more easily share the beauty and glory of Jesus, we inadvertently compress him down. We flatten him to a one-dimensional “character.” And we end up with a “low resolution” version of Jesus – a version that is easy to transmit, but not very impressive, and ultimately nothing like the real Jesus of Scripture.
The book of Revelation is the correction to this challenging problem. Therefore, join us as we look at Revelation 1:9-20. But we need to brace ourselves because the vision of Jesus we’re presented with in the book of Revelation is unsettling at times. It’s not the picture of Jesus hanging in your grandmother’s living room! For those who have perhaps found “low resolution” Jesus unimpressive, this correction may be exactly what you’ve been waiting to see: Jesus in full HD!
