The Revelation of Jesus Christ

Friday evening I was invited over to the Christiansen's house for a Bible study. There wasn't any particular study that we were going to do. It started out as just a time to share about what we had read the past week and what we might like to study in the future. Someone mentioned they would like to study Revelation and so we started then with reading the first chapter.

Revelation is a complex book with a lot of complex imagery. I read it about four years ago for the first time and haven't really spent any time there since. It honestly didn't really caption my attention because I didn't understand everything that all those Revelation seminars pull out of it. I didn't really expect much out of it Friday night either . . . but boy was I wrong! Revelation is kinda exciting . . . (all the pastors out there are probably saying 'duh' right about now . . . lol).

The one part that stood out to me the most were verses 5 and 6 where the justification and sanctification process is clearly (at least to me it was clear) presented in the first chapter. This blew me away especially since it's been only within the last year that I have fully understood the beauty of justification and sanctification.

"To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen."

So in the first part where it says "washed us from our sins in His own blood," that's the justification part. When we come to Christ with all our dirt and choose to follow Him, He sees us as He sees Himself: perfect. That's justification . . . being seen as perfect simply because we choose to believe in Jesus who is perfect.

But it doesn't stop there. Then comes sanctification where Jesus helps us build our characters into ones that can resist the temptation to sin. That's where we become "kings and priests." In order to work as a priest in the temple one had to go through a cleansing process above and beyond the others in the camp before they could do certain tasks (I don't know too much about this process—priest cleansings . . . only that it took place).

After reading this I was pretty excited about what else I might find in Revelation that I actually understood! haha!

Anyway . . . maybe this is far out . . . after all, I'm not a theologian . . . these are just my thoughts.