How can anyone know God? Only through what he has chosen to make known. Everything else is guessing.

Penn and Teller sometimes perform an illusion and then show you how it worked. That is what the word revelation means - information handed over that you could not have had otherwise.

The Belgic Confession says God gives it two ways. First by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, which stands before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are his letters. Second, and more clearly, by his holy and divine word.

Psalm 19 is built in exactly those two halves. The heavens declare the glory of God. Day pours out speech to day and night reveals knowledge to night, and there is no language in which their voice is not heard. Then the psalm turns, and the second half is about the law of the Lord - perfect, reviving the soul; sure, making wise the simple.

The sky can tell you that God is. It cannot tell you his name, or what he asks of you, or how you might be saved.

For that, somebody has to speak.

Ted Turner once told a room of newspaper publishers that the Ten Commandments were outdated. When Moses went up the mountain there were no nuclear weapons and no poverty, he said, and today the commandments would not go over, because nobody likes being commanded.

Set aside that poverty was rampant in Moses' day. The deeper problem is the assumption underneath the complaint - that being commanded is optional.

Outback Steakhouse advertises No Rules, Just Right. So try it. Walk in at lunchtime past thirty people waiting, take the first table you like, and make the people sitting there get up and leave. Then go into the kitchen and eat whatever happens to be on a plate. Then, when the bill arrives, decline to pay it, because there are no rules.

Nobody actually wants that restaurant. What they want is to be the one making the rules.

Which is the point. You will be commanded by someone or something. The only live question is whose commands you follow.

And notice when these particular commands arrive. God brought his people out of Egypt first, then gave them the law - not to earn their freedom, but to keep it.

Rules given by someone who has already rescued you are a different kind of rule.

It was an eleven-day journey from Sinai to the edge of the Promised Land. It took forty years.

The people had refused to go in, so God let them wander until that entire generation died in the wilderness. Now Moses stands with their children on the east bank of the Jordan, and this speech is his attempt to steel them for what their parents would not do.

His argument is not that the land will be easy. It is that their God is near. What great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?

Then comes the warning, and it is not about idolatry first. It is about memory. Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen.

Forgetting is the danger. Not the giants, not the fortified cities. Forgetting.

A generation died in the wilderness because they would not believe what they had already watched God do. Their children are being handed the same story so that it does not happen twice.

Twelve spies go into the land. Ten come back and say it cannot be done - the people are giants, the cities fortified with walls to the sky. Two come back and do not contradict a word of it.

That detail is the hinge of this sermon. The two never argue the facts. They never say the report was exaggerated, the giants smaller than claimed, the walls lower than they looked. They saw exactly what the other ten saw. They simply also looked at God, and at what he had already done.

The people rally around the bad report and refuse to move.

Moses retells this a generation later, and the way he tells it is pointed. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you saw how he carried you as a man carries his son. Yet in spite of this word, you did not believe.

Not: you weighed the evidence badly. You did not believe.

The giants were real. That was never the problem.

In college it was called the DTR - the conversation where you define the relationship. It is possible to rehearse that conversation so many times in your head that you become convinced it already happened, which is how this sermon opens, with the woman in question having to ask: so what is going on between the two of us?

Deuteronomy is one long DTR. Speaking through Moses, God tells a people standing on a border exactly where they stand with him - what he has done, what he asks, and what he intends to do.

That matters more than it may sound. A tornado once shifted a house a couple of inches off its foundation. From the street it looked fine. It had to be demolished anyway, because a compromised foundation cannot be patched. Our most foundational relationship is not with a husband or a wife but with the God who made us, and when that one shifts, everything built on it eventually follows.

Deuteronomy may be the most consequential book in the Old Testament. Jesus quotes it more than any other book of the Pentateuch, and it echoes through the New Testament nearly a hundred times. This sermon opens the series by asking what being in covenant with the living God actually means.

The Bible opens in a garden, with God as the gardener. He makes a world fit for people to flourish in, puts them in a garden, and tells them to be fruitful - which is what every garden is for. A flower garden produces blooms. A farm produces a crop that feeds a family or gets sold to feed somebody else's. Fruit is the point of the exercise.

John 15 returns to that image at the very end of Jesus' life. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.

Two things follow, and neither is comfortable. Branches that bear no fruit are taken away. And branches that do bear fruit are pruned - cut back deliberately, so that they bear more. Fruitfulness turns out not to be a reason to be left alone.

Then comes the word the whole passage rests on. Abide. It lands again and again in a handful of verses. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you.

The vine never asks the branch to produce. It asks the branch to stay attached.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

This is said in an upstairs room, at a Passover meal, on the last night before the crucifixion. Jesus has just told the disciples he is leaving, and that where he is going they cannot follow. They do not understand it, but they understand the part that matters. He will not be with them.

What he does not say is worth noticing. He does not tell them things are about to get hard so they had better pull themselves together. There is no bracing, no instruction to be men about it.

He says: let not your heart be troubled. In my Father's house are many rooms. I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and take you to myself.

Then Thomas asks the practical question in two parts. We do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?

Jesus answers both at once, and the answer is not a set of directions. I am the way, and the truth, and the life.

Thomas asked for a map. He was given a person.

You do not find the way to the Father. You follow him there.

John records only seven miracles in the whole of his Gospel - water into wine, an official's son, a paralytic, five thousand fed, walking on water, a blind man given sight. Lazarus is the seventh, and the last.

What unsettles this passage is the timing. Word comes that Lazarus is ill. Jesus, who loves this family, stays where he is for two more days. By the time he arrives, Lazarus has been in the tomb four days.

Martha meets him on the road with the sentence anyone would have said. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus tells her that her brother will rise. She agrees - on the last day, in the resurrection - which is exactly what a well-taught person would say. She has the doctrine right and it is doing nothing for her.

So he moves it. I am the resurrection and the life. Not something scheduled for later. Someone standing in front of her.

Then he asks a question this sermon lets sit there unanswered for a while: do you believe this?

Martha believed in the resurrection. She had not yet met him.

In the ancient Near East, shepherding was not a quaint occupation. It was the economic bedrock. Sheep meant meat, milk, wool and skins - the raw material of staying alive. Everyone in that world either lived in a household that owned sheep or watched shepherds grazing flocks at the edge of town. Sheep were as ordinary to them as cars are to us.

So when Jesus says I am the good shepherd, nobody needs the metaphor explained. What they need is the adjective.

Because the passage turns on a comparison. There is the shepherd, and there is the hired hand. The hired hand sees the wolf coming and runs, and the reason is given without any cruelty in it: he cares nothing for the sheep. They were never his. Nothing about the arrangement was ever going to hold once it cost him something.

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. And then, twice over, Jesus insists that nobody takes it from him. He lays it down of his own accord.

The hired hand leaves when it gets expensive. That is the whole difference, and

it is the only difference that matters.

John 10 makes little sense without John 9. A man born blind has just been healed - on a Sabbath - and the religious authorities are furious. Jesus has broken their rules, and worse, he has no standing with them at all. "We know that God has spoken to Moses," they say, "but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from." He never sought their approval and never received their stamp.

So when Jesus says "I am the door," he is answering them directly. Everyone before him who claimed to control access, everyone who climbed in another way, was a thief and a robber. The gatekeepers had made themselves the gate.

This is the lesser known of the two I AM statements in John 10, overshadowed by the Good Shepherd a few verses later. But it settles a question the Good Shepherd assumes: who gets in, and on whose terms? Jesus does not say he points the way to the door. He says he is the door. "If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture."

Not managed access. Pasture.

William Tiptaft, born in 1803, wrote this: if you had a thousand crowns, you should put them all on the head of Christ, and if you had a thousand tongues, they should all sing his praise, for he is worthy.

Those are not the words of a man who knows several nice things about Jesus. They belong to someone whose whole life has been reorganised by seeing him.

That distinction runs underneath this whole sermon. In John 8, Jesus says I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. The Pharisees answer with a procedural objection - you are testifying about yourself, so it does not count. Jesus does not soften the claim to meet them halfway. He knows where he came from and where he is going.

They know neither.

Paul writes that when we behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, we are transformed. Not informed. Transformed.

Knowing about Jesus and seeing him are two different things, and only one of them has ever changed anybody.

Light is not something you learn. It is something you walk in.

One second of hand-drawn animation - a jaguar's tail flicking, her cub blinking - takes around twenty-five separate cels, each drawn and laid over the one beneath it. No single cel is the picture. Stack them and something moves.

That is what this series does with the seven I AM statements. Each reveals a different aspect of what Jesus does for people who need it: light because we walk in darkness, a shepherd because we need leading. Laid over one another, they make a portrait.

The first comes in John 6, and it arrives as an argument. The crowd has just been fed and now wants a sign, so they raise the bar. Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness, bread from heaven. Moses gave us that. What have you got?

Jesus corrects the premise before he answers it. It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread. Then: I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger.

They wanted a better delivery of what they already had. He offered himself instead.

Manna kept people alive one more day. This does not.

At a ball game, a close call gets replayed from three or four camera angles before anyone rules on it. A runner tagging up, a throw to the plate, a tag, an out call - then the replay from this side, and that side, and the other, until the full picture assembles itself.

That is how Revelation works. John shows the same stretch of time again and again from different vantage points, and chapter 20 is another angle rather than the next event.

Chapter 19 carried us to the very end: final judgment, every enemy of God destroyed. Then chapter 20 goes back to the beginning of the church age - the period between Christ's first coming and his second, which is to say the period you are sitting in right now.

Satan bound. The souls of those beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, reigning with Christ. Then the release, Gog and Magog, the surrounded camp, and fire from heaven that ends it in a sentence.

The thousand years is among the most fought-over passages in Scripture. This sermon reads it the way John's own method demands: as another view of now.

Same play. Different camera.

Western weddings are about the bride. There are bridal magazines by the dozen and no equivalent for men - no Say Yes to the Dress for grooms, no Don't Suck in the Tux. Afterwards people say she looked radiant, and nobody remembers the groom.

Revelation 19 takes the wedding and turns it around.

The marriage supper of the Lamb is announced, and the bride has made herself ready, clothed in fine linen - which the text pauses to tell us is the righteous deeds of the saints. Blessed, the angel says, are those invited to the supper.

Then heaven opens, and what John sees is the Groom. A rider on a white horse called Faithful and True. Eyes like a flame of fire. A robe dipped in blood. A name written that no one knows but himself, and on his robe and on his thigh,

King of kings and Lord of lords.

There is a bride at this wedding, and she has been made ready. But nobody is looking at her.

On the second of November 2016, after a hundred and eight years, the Cubs won the World Series. Plenty of fans had died waiting. The game went like a heavyweight fight - the Cubs ahead, Cleveland roaring back, a seventeen-minute rain delay, then a slow roller to third in the tenth and a throw skidding across the infield into Rizzo's glove.

The best footage is not the field. It is the crowd outside Wrigley, thousands of people watching on their phones and the marquee, and the roar that moves through them as the out registers.

That roar is Revelation 19.

Chapters 17 and 18 showed the destruction of everything that had corrupted the earth - commercial, political, religious. Chapter 19 opens with the response.

Hallelujah. Then again, Hallelujah. Then the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fall down and say Amen. Then a voice from the throne. Then a sound like many waters and like mighty peals of thunder.

Four times the word comes, and Revelation 19 is the only place in the entire New Testament where it appears at all.

Heaven's reaction to justice finally being done is not relief. It is noise.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood tells his partner there are two kinds of people in this world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.

You dig.

There are endless versions of the line. Those who walk into a room and say "there you are," and those who say "here I am." Those concerned with doing the work and those concerned with getting the credit. Those you want to drink with, and those who make you want to drink.

Then there is the Red River Showdown, where the stadium is split down the middle - crimson on one side, burnt orange on the other. Two kinds of people, literally, seated in two halves of one building.

Revelation 14 gives two visions of two groups, and both are set in the future.

The first is the Lamb on Mount Zion with those redeemed by his blood, singing a song nobody else can learn. The second is judgment, and this sermon does not soften it.

Chapter 12 looked back to the Christ child and the dragon. Chapter 13 showed the present, with its counterfeit trinity attacking the church. Chapter 14 tells you how it ends.

Everyone is sitting in one half of the stadium. The question is which one.

Revelation covers the period you are living in - the stretch between the resurrection and the second coming - shown over and over from different angles.

Its purpose is encouragement, written to first-century churches trying to stay faithful in a world hostile to them.

Chapter 11 opens with a measuring rod and a strange instruction. Measure the temple, the altar, and those who worship there. But leave out the outer court, because it is given over to the nations, and the holy city will be trampled for forty-two months.

Both things are true at once. The church is measured - counted, known, kept - and trampled.

Then the two witnesses. They prophesy. They are killed. Their bodies lie in the street of the city where their Lord was crucified, and the people watching refuse to let them be buried. They exchange presents over it. For three and a half days the world celebrates that the testimony has finally stopped.

Then a breath of life from God enters them, and they stand up on their feet.

Trampled, testifying, triumphant. In that order, and never out of it.

Lost ended its first season with characters staring down into a hatch and no explanation. Dallas made the country wait months to find out who shot JR. The cliffhanger is an old trick and it works, because a story that stops in the middle of a question is almost unbearable.

Revelation 6 ends exactly like that. Six seals opened, judgment poured out, people begging the rocks to bury them - and then a question nobody answers: who can stand?

Chapter 7 is the interval. Before the seventh seal opens, John is shown the answer, and it comes in two parts.

First, 144,000 sealed from the tribes of Israel. A number counted out tribe by tribe, ordered, complete, nobody missing. Then John turns and sees something he cannot count at all - a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing in front of the throne in white robes.

The question was whether anyone could possibly survive what chapter 6 described.

The answer is more people than can be numbered, and they are already standing.

Not a cliffhanger after all. A pause, so you could see who was safe.

If you have seen Tombstone you already know Revelation 6:8. Johnny Ringo translates the priest's curse for the outlaws - "Behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was death, and hell followed him" - and it becomes the film's theme, vengeance riding in.

It also gets the book wrong, and this sermon opens by saying so. It is the book of Revelation, singular. Not a catalog of disclosures about the future, but one thing revealed: the glory of God and his plan of redemption carried out through Jesus, the Lion of Judah who is also the Lamb who was slain.

That changes how chapter 6 reads. The four horsemen are genuinely terrifying and the sermon does not soften them. But the hand opening the seals is the Lamb's.

Conquest, war, famine and death ride out because he permits it, not because he has lost hold of it.

By the end of the chapter people are begging the mountains to fall on them and bury them, and a question is left hanging that chapter 6 refuses to answer.

The horsemen are not the point. The one holding the scroll is.

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The commercial said the world may never know, and forty years on it still doesn't. Purdue built a licking machine modeled on the human tongue and got 364. Michigan got 411. A high school group, unimpressed by the universities, ran their own experiment and got 144.

Nobody agrees on the number. Everybody agrees the center is the point, and the shell is just what you get through to reach it.

Revelation 4 pulls the curtain back on what sits at the center of the universe. Not a system, not a force, not history quietly working itself out. A throne, with someone seated on it. Lightning and thunder coming from it. Twenty-four elders around it who keep taking their crowns off.

John has just finished writing to seven struggling churches - compromised, exhausted, one of them dead. Then a door opens in heaven, a voice says come up here, and he is shown what had been true the entire time they were struggling.

The center was never in doubt. Only our view of it was.