Revelation 20:4-6 “They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.”

The people John sees died for their faith. Yet they were alive in heaven, more truly alive than they had ever been before. They were the living dead, and John lists their blessings.

First, they are participants in the “first resurrection.” This is not the resurrection of the body, which Jesus says will take place one time for all people on the last day in John chapter 6. This is the resurrection Paul is talking about when he writes the Colossians about how they have “been buried with him (Christ) in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God.” We have been raised with Christ through faith. God has raised us from being dead in our sins to being spiritually alive with Christ. This is the new birth, the resurrection to new life in faith.

This is why we can say these martyred Christians are blessed. In their earthly life, they didn’t look very blessed at all. They struggled with the struggles that are common to us all. They got sick. They weren’t particularly rich. Then they became Christians, and they didn’t fit in with their own family and friends anymore. They were like foreigners in their own hometowns. Eventually the authorities came and put an end to their short lives.

But in heaven, they don’t just live. They reign. “The second death has no power over them.” Yes, they died the first time. When the Roman authorities separated their heads from their bodies, their blood spilled freely, their hearts stopped beating, and all went dark. But that was just a temporary condition. The death that’s really scary, the one that cuts us off from God, the one in which people wake up in hell, the one that never ends–that one has no access to their souls, no way of touching their existence. They are finally, fully, completely beyond its reach because they live and reign with Christ.

In their heavenly life “they will be priests of God and of Christ.” In most Lutheran churches, we don’t call our clergy “priests” because every Christian is a priest by faith. “A royal priesthood” Peter calls us in his first letter. At the beginning of this book John tells his readers that Jesus has made us “a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father.” Men, women, young, old–every believer is a priest.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need someone teaching or preaching to us. It means that through Jesus we all have a direct line to God. There is not a class of believers closer to God than anyone else. We don’t need to know an influential Christian who can get God to do us special favors, because we are all influential Christians who know Jesus personally. The only difference between us and the beheaded martyrs is that we say our prayers and practice this privilege by faith. They see Jesus face to face.

So, “they will reign with him for a thousand years,” during the whole time from death until Judgment Day. They are kings and queens in God’s kingdom. Everything in heaven and on earth has to serve them, because it all has to serve Christ, alongside whom they rule. They may have lost their earthly lives for their faith, but they aren’t to be pitied. They live and rule. They are blessed.

Sometimes the picture looks bleak for us Christians. It looks like we are losing. But in this scene from Revelation we get to skip ahead to read the last pages of the story–not just of the Bible, but all human history. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid, even if we die. The truth is, we still live. We reign. We win.

Revelation 20:4 “I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God.”

Through the ages, the world God wants to save has wanted to kill the very people the Lord sends to their rescue. Many of the Old Testament prophets met an untimely death at the hands of the people to whom they were sent. Isaiah was sawed in two on the orders of the king. Several attempts were made to murder Jeremiah. Jewish tradition says he was eventually stoned to death. Zechariah was killed inside of God’s own temple.

Of Jesus’ apostles, John, the writer here, was the only one who died a natural death. Many missionaries since have died at the hands of the people they were trying to reach. When the established Christian churches across Europe became corrupt, many faithful men who tried to reform them and lead them back to the Scriptures were burned at the stake for their efforts.

At the time the Apostle John saw this vision in Revelation, beheading was the favorite method for getting rid of Christian leaders. Feeding them to the lions would come later. John was writing to comfort people who had seen their spiritual leaders put to death this way. The people in his vision are not necessarily, however, limited to those who died under this kind of persecution. It is not out of keeping with John’s vision to see others added to this group by various methods across the span of history.

The reason for killing prophets, preachers, and missionaries was not just to silence their voices. It was also intended to intimidate the Bible-believing Christians who followed them. It could even drive some away from the Christian faith. Christians in our country have been spared this kind of treatment for most of our nation’s history. It has been an island of safety, an odd blip on the historical timeline. This is due in part to the influence of so many persecuted Christians who fled here from the very beginning.

But persecution has not been absent altogether. It grows as American Christianity shrinks. Tolerance for Christian teaching on sex and marriage, the sanctity of life, Jesus as the only way to heaven, etc., has been eroding. People of influence in industry, entertainment, sports, politics, and even religion vilify ideas that can easily be demonstrated to be the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. They regard them not merely as ignorant or misguided. They denounce them as hurtful and evil. The point of the campaign is to shame such beliefs and those who hold them.

The Lord’s reason for showing John these persecuted martyrs of the faith was not to kindle a spirit of revenge or rally believers to violent resistance. We need to guard against those kinds of reactions. That’s not Christ’s way.

But he understood the temptation to despair under persecution, abandon the faith to escape it, and hide our faith to avoid it. These are the inclinations we need to resist. For believers, death always leads to reward, even if that death was violent and unjust. “Thrones” are in view in John’s vision. These martyred believers didn’t die in defeat. They were granted a promotion. We still have every reason to believe, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” (Hebrews 13:6).

1 Corinthians 9:12 “If others have this right of support from you, shouldn’t we have it all the more? But we did not use this right. On the contrary, we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.”

Paul did not collect a salary from the people to whom he preached. Of course, he had to have some kind of support. Sometimes he received gifts from people on the outside, Christians in other cities who wanted his mission work to succeed. Many times he worked with his own hands. Jewish rabbinical students generally learned a trade in addition to their theological studies. Their teachers recognized the ministry would not work out for all of them, and they needed to have a backup plan so that they didn’t starve. Paul learned how to make tents while he attended seminary with Rabbi Gamaliel. He used this skill to support himself when he began his mission work in Corinth.

So while Paul defended his right to receive a salary, and taught that this was the normal thing for those who preach, he confessed that the thing that really drove him was doing whatever it took to win people to Christian faith. “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law, I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:19-22).

The apostle is describing different kinds of people in these verses, the kinds of people he met in his mission work. Sometimes he preached to Jews. They still lived under the Old Testament restrictions that forbad pork or shellfish, certain kinds of cloth, and limited activities on the Sabbath. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection made these things optional. He set us free. But Jewish people who were new to Jesus didn’t know that yet. Paul continued to observe these laws so that Jewish people would not automatically dismiss him before he had a chance to tell them about the gospel.

Sometimes Paul preached to Greeks and Romans. They thought Jewish ways and customs were weird. They might be offended if they served Paul pork chops or shrimp scampi and he wouldn’t eat it. Keep in mind that for Paul, growing up Jewish, these foods had always been considered “unclean.” He might have had to work to choke them as we would struggle to eat certain insects or rodents common to other nations’ cuisines. But rather than offend his host and lose the chance to share his faith, Paul “made himself like one not having the (Old Testament) law.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard “to win those not having the law.” He wasn’t going to let his tastes get in the way of someone’s salvation.

In one way or another, all of these people were “weak.” They did not yet know Jesus. They did not yet know grace and forgiveness. They did not yet know about Christian freedom. They did not yet know how Jesus united people from every culture and made them his own by faith. These were the main things. If it wasn’t sinful and it meant people would let him tell them about Jesus, Paul was willing to give it a try. “I do this all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.”

For this reason Paul even relinquished his rights to a salary, “for the sake of the gospel.” As long as the Lord was keeping him fed, clothed, and housed by other means, he didn’t want a little money to come between some blind soul and salvation. Religious hucksters were part of the religious landscape in his day, too–maybe more than our own. Paul had the truth: this incredible message of God’s love, that God left heaven to become one of us, died in our place, forgave all our sins, and gave us heaven as a guarantee. Maybe if Paul gave the message away for free, people would realize his preaching was sincere. So, he relinquished his rights. He hoped more people would believe.

Today Paul’s example applies to more than paying preachers. It is a model for how all Christians can approach the rights and freedoms Jesus has given them. In the Gospel Jesus has not only set us free from all our sins. He has given us great freedom about our food, our clothes, our worship, other matters of personal taste in various facets of our lives. By all means, defend your rights and keep the free things free. Don’t let anyone take your gospel freedom away. But indulging these rights and freedoms is never so important as loving others and saving their souls. It’s okay to set them aside if it means we can bring someone the gospel.