The Stadium That Sang in Every Language

On a sweltering July evening in 2019, sixty thousand people packed Busan Asiad Main Stadium in South Korea for the closing worship of the World Scout Jamboree. Scouts from 152 countries — teenagers from Kenya and South Korea, Brazil and Finland, Papua New Guinea and Iceland — stood shoulder to shoulder in a sea of mismatched uniforms and sunburned faces. When the worship song began, something extraordinary happened. Without coordination, without rehearsal, each group began singing in their own language. Swahili layered over Portuguese. Korean wove through Arabic. Finnish rose above Tagalog. The melody was the same, but the voices were magnificently, irreducibly different.

One chaplain present described it as the closest thing to heaven he had ever witnessed on earth. Teenagers who had spent two weeks enduring brutal heat, mud, and exhaustion — the Jamboree had been disrupted by Typhoon Faxai — were now standing together with arms raised, their hardship forgotten in a single moment of shared joy.

That stadium offers a dim reflection of what John saw in his vision. A multitude no one could count, drawn from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne of the Almighty. These were not people who had avoided suffering — they had come through it. They had walked through the great tribulation. And now every tear was wiped away, every thirst quenched, every sorrow swallowed up in worship. The song they sing is the same song: "Salvation belongs to our God." One melody. Ten thousand tongues. Home at last.