Every Color of Face, One Family

The Lamb had taken the scroll, and now he broke its seals one by one. Riders went out over the earth, and the last rider's name was Death. The sky rolled up like a scroll, and kings hid in caves, crying, "Who can stand?"

Then four angels held back the four winds while God's servants were marked on their foreheads. (Think of four people holding a bedsheet still by its corners, only the bedsheet was a storm.) John heard their number, a hundred and forty-four thousand from the tribes of Israel. Then he turned and looked.

He saw a crowd too big for anyone to count. God had once told Abraham to count the stars if he could. Abraham couldn't, and nobody could count this crowd either.

They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, and they came from every nation and tribe and people and language, with faces of every color. They wore white robes and waved palm branches, the way crowds greet a king home from a victory, and they all shouted at once:

"Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

Every angel around the throne fell flat on his face. "Amen!" they cried. "Glory and wisdom and thanks and power belong to our God forever and ever!"

One of the elders turned to John. "These people in white robes," he said. "Who are they, and where did they come from?"

John had no idea. "Sir," he said, "you know."
"These are the ones who have come out of the great trouble," said the elder. "They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

The great trouble meant hard days for belonging to the Lamb. Some of these people had been locked up, and some had been killed. Blood is a strange thing to wash a robe in, but the Lamb's blood was his own life, given for them, and it made them clean.

"So they stand before God's throne and serve him day and night," the elder went on. "He will spread his tent over them. They will never be hungry or thirsty again, and the sun will not scorch them. The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd. He will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe every tear from their eyes."

The kings had cried, "Who can stand?" Here was the answer, on its feet, too many to count.

When John saw this, the people who loved Jesus could fit into a few rooms in a few towns. A crowd from every country on earth was hard to imagine.

But John had seen it start. Years before, John and the other followers had gone into a Samaritan town to buy food. They came back to find their teacher at a well, talking with a Samaritan woman, someone their people would never speak to. While they were gone, he had told her, "Whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty again." Later the same man said, "I am the good shepherd. I have other sheep that are not in this pen. I must bring them too, and there will be one flock and one shepherd."

Jesus is that shepherd. He is calling his sheep in from every corner of the earth, and he will not stop until the last one is through the gate and the crowd John saw stands complete, one flock around one shepherd.