“Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb!”
“Never give up!” That is a very popular message on t-shirts here in the Philippines. I don’t know the history of this message on the shirts and why is it so popular. But this message always leaves me thinking, “This is the motto, the slogan, and the mindset of the Saints!” The saints are not those who never had failures in life or who never had grave sins in their lives or who never had struggles and sufferings in this life. The Saints are not those with a perfect history or a blissful future. The Saints are simply those who just chose never to give up.
Never gave up on what? Today’s First Reading from Revelations addressed to Christians being persecuted in the Roman empire of the first century A.D shows us three things in which the saints never gave up. First of all, they never gave up on belonging completely to God. They had been marked as belonging to God before the times of devastation, “Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servant of God.” God claimed them as His own even as they faced hardship. They never stopped acting out of the conviction that they and everything that they had now belonged to God.
Secondly, they never gave up on hoping and expecting all things from God. We find this in the song of the saints in heaven, “They cried out, ‘Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb.’” Salvation and the means to attain it all came from God.
Thirdly, they never gave up on the life of bearing witness to Jesus Christ even in all the trials and distresses of life. “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Like Jesus, the faithful witness, they too bore witness to Him even to the point of death as they shared in the power of His blood shed for them.
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