When I used to travel for business I enjoyed reading Tom Clancy novels. Clancy was a master of weaving threads into his stories. You would be reading about a Russian submarine commander and then, with the turn of the page, the story would shift to a cargo ship in a storm which accidentally loses the ties on a piece of lumber which tumbles into the sea. 300 pages may go by before all of these separate threads suddenly merge into a final climax of the book.
But God, the greatest author, is the master of creating a tapestry of inter-joining threads through time. He started with a single thread, “in the beginning, God”. He is the thread, the origin of the story. From here he spins Himself out into all of creation, the heavens and the earth, day and night, plants and animals, us. He allows for darkness to exist, because He wants us to choose the golden threads of light. But even when we choose darkness through sin, God still, like a master weaver, simply weaves that into His masterpiece to further highlight the brilliance of His gift.
We as humans, tend to think of this spinning and weaving as always going out and becoming bigger, wider, longer. Stretching and expanding, spinning further and further out of control. But the greatest author, God, tells a different story in the bible. These multiple threads are not the conclusions in and of themselves. Instead, there is one protagonist, one single main character, that interconnects every thread of life throughout eternity. The point is not to spin off into a million or billion different stories, but instead to open our eyes to the fact that all of these different stories all lead back to a single, unbroken, thread.
In the book of Revelation, we see the climax of the story. We see the author separate the dark from the light, we see the lifting and joining of every story and every soul who is connected through grace and faith. We see the destruction of the darkness, but, more so, we see not only the salvation of God, but we see how everything, through all time, has not been about us, but it has always been about Him. We think of the bible as books of law and poetry, as history and prophecy, but, it is actually a biography, written so we may understand God and God’s big story.
And, finally, while we reach the climax in Revelation, we don’t reach the conclusion, because, as we will read and study, that thread continues into the sequel, into new life in a new heaven and new earth through the same amazing, eternal God.
The Notes are Good 