The world is full of trouble and the sway of evil seems immensely strong. In the face of it all, the average person finds it very hard to believe that there is a loving God in control of it all.
"If God is almighty, then He is not Love, or the world would be a better place. If He Love, then He's not almighty, or He'd put a stop to what goes on in it."
That is how the man in the street tends to see it.
No book in the Bible meets that complaint head-on like the book of Revelation does.
John, the man who was inspired to write it, knew that God is Love, and that He is Almighty, and John did not have to bury his head in the sand to go on believing it. He saw the evils of the life in this world and its tragedies very clearly - so very clearly that the way he tells them is enough to put some people off the book altogether. John shuts his eyes to nothing. But he also saw God very clearly - and he saw Him on the throne of this world, ruling its life in righteousness and love, and with real power and great glory. The facts of life are all square with the truth about God as Jesus revealed it. That is John's vision of things; and it is a vision God gave him to be shared with all Christians, whether in the first century or the twentieth, so that even amid life's worst tribulations, we may not lose faith.
The way of understanding the Book of Revelation that I have followed is not one many are used to; nor indeed is it the one I myself grew up with; better men than I have understood it differently and it may well appear presumptuous, even suspect, to see it so differently. Let me say two things briefly about that.
First, it is not so independent an approach as might be supposed. For a very long time there have been four ways, broadly speaking, of interpreting the book of Revelation.
The preterist
view holds that most of the events described in Revelation
occurred in John's own day - in the first century.
The futurist view holds that it is a prophecy of events still
to come.
The historicist view sees it as a chart, so to speak, of the
whole of history from Christ's first coming to His Second coming, and
beyond.
The idealist view holds that between messages for the 1st
century Christians for whom it was written and prophecies of the far
future, it deals chiefly with spiritual principles on which God rules
the world in every age.
All four views have a long history, and arguments about the respective strengths and weaknesses of all four will no doubt continue. In the Library of the British Museum alone there are more than 800 interpretations of Revelation to choose from!
The idealist view, the one that convinces me, has received a very readable statement in a book by Michael Wilcock, 'I Saw Heaven Opened', an IVP publication in 'The Bible Speaks Today' series edited by John Stott.
Second, and more important, the first requirement of exposition as I understand it is to say plain what you see clear. I can only say that I have felt the Spirit of God grip my soul as I have pondered this book, and I have to share what I believe I have been given. Woe to me if I preach it not! So I have passed it on as plainly as I can; and to do that I have tried not to confuse the issue by bolstering it up with endless and tedious explanations. That may well have given an impression of dogmatism. That is a risk I have knowingly taken. But I have been guided by a piece of advice I received in my college days: "Tell me of your certainties," said a layman to his pastor, "I have doubts enough of my own." I write with conviction and without apology. You would hardly thank me to bumble my way through a mushy maze of 'ifs,' 'buts,' and 'maybes.'
But I defend your right to disagree with me! I have presented what I see as the truth I see as clearly as I can. But you will find me very willing to be friends with you still ... even if your disagreement with me should be violent! I do not scorn the other ways of interpreting Revelation or despise those who believe them. Indeed I can say an honest 'Amen' to the convictions about God and His sovereignty, and about our Lord Jesus and His Lordship that shine through them all. It is simply true of us all, that "now we see through a glass darkly: now we know in part." Only in glory shall we know fully, as Paul reminded us in I Cor. 13:12. In the life to come, when we at last see all things in the clear light of eternal day, we shall, I believe, lean on each other's shoulders and laugh into each other's faces over the comedy of errors that divided us here. Let us not spoil the laughter we shall laugh then by losing our tempers with each other now. I am well aware that I offer an interpretation that must be put in the pool with all the others and there be open to every sort of testing and examination. No-one in the end will be seen to have been entirely right and all the rest entirely wrong.
That said, let me now attempt the impossible. I would like to try in the barest outline to indicate what I understand the remainder of Revelation to be saying. This will mean that what I say may well sound more outrageously dogmatic than it has already! But I feel I at least owe it to you to indicate whether the whole book can be consistently understood the way I have been presenting it. I would like you at least to have a sketch map to help you find your way.
Remember that John had firmly in view as he wrote Revelation the great need of the despised and persecuted churches of his own day for vision and courage to give God the service He wanted from them.
They had been taught that Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the Son of God. Since He was one with God, He was Lord of all, in control of every situation. He had indeed been rejected by the Jews and crucified in weakness by the hands of lawless men. But that had been no accident. It had in fact been vital to God's plan of salvation. His death was the means by which the sin of the world had been atoned, and the pathway to renewed fellowship with God opened up for sinful men. Having died for men, He was risen, for ever triumphant over all the power of sin and death. He had ascended to His Father's throne from whence He would continue to rule the world until the Kingdom of Evil was finally overthrown and the Kingdom of God established with His Second Coming in power and great glory.
It was an inspiring faith, and those early Christians embraced it with fervour. They looked and longed for the promised climax of history.
And nothing happened! The church remained a despised and persecuted minority in society, despite the converts who joined her. The empire continued on its wicked way: injustice and oppression were not removed, the power of evil men seemed only to grow, idolatry ruled the minds of men as it always had, and because Christians would not conform to the beliefs and life-style of the rest, they were being turned on by the herd. There was every likelihood they would be wiped off the face of the earth, by the ruthless, godless power of the State.
What had become of the message that had led them to become Christians in the first place? If the Ascended Lord really was ruling the world from Him Father's Throne, it needed a very strong faith to believe it. What evidence was there for the faith they had given up so much to embrace?
These were the questions John was called to answer, and he set out to do so very fully. He wrote the Book of Revelation to a carefully worked out plan. There are seven divisions overall. Each of them opens with a vision, in the light of which the teaching that follows is to be understood. Each of those blocs of teaching is further in patterns of seven. They are -
1. Christ among the Lampstands (Ch.1-3)
• teaching about the church in letters to seven churches
2. God's Throne in Heaven and the Lamb (Ch.4-5)
• teaching about God's government of the world - 7 seals and 7 trumpets
3. The Woman, her child, and the Dragon (Ch.12)
• teaching about the spiritual conflict behind the scenes which is the real truth about the meaning of history - 7 visions (Ch.13-14)
4. The Seven Angels of the Plagues who emerge from God's Temple (Ch.15)
• teaching about God's final judgments on the earth.
5. The Scarlet Woman on the Beast (Ch.17)
• teaching on the mystery of iniquity that inspires the whole world - its government ideology, commerce and society - how God will destroy it and replace it - seven Utterances (mostly about Babylon)
6. Christ on a White Horse (Ch.19)
• teaching about the final overthrow of all God's enemies, the wind-up of the old creation and God's creation of a New Heavens and a new earth.
7. The Holy City, the Bride of Christ
• seven last Words.
Briefly to summarise all that, the chapters up to the middle of ch. 15 are concerned with history up until the end, and the remaining chapters with the end itself and what lies beyond it (which is the difference between prophecy and apocalyptic).
Even a swift and superficial reading of the whole book conveys the impression very clearly that the business of cleansing the world's life of its evil is a long and difficult business; for if it is to be accomplished in the spirit of righteousness and patient love that was revealed in Christ crucified, it cannot be accomplished by just blowing up the whole works.
God will not make an end of evil men until the last of such men who may repent and be saved has been gathered in. For the sake of those who are to be saved, the evil of the rest must be endured. God's people must recognise this and face up to the challenge. It is really true that those who follow Christ must take up the Cross to do so. We must live in the spirit of those who have lost their lives in this world for Christ's sake and the Gospel's. The spirit of the martyrs must be the spirit in which all Christians live. The conflict between good and evil, between Christ and Satan, between Jerusalem and Babylon, between the Lamb and the Beast, is going to be a long and dreadful conflict, but it will end in a triumph by which God redeems and renews His entire creation. That is absolutely certain.
Remember all the way through John's exposition of these awesome themes, that the evil that is in the world can be cleansed out of it in only two ways - either by destruction or by regeneration. Men must be born again or they must perish ... and God will not go back on His avowed intent to establish a cleansed world. So judgments there must be. But though God's judgments are restrained so He may show His mercies in the midst of them, there must come a time when judgment is final, so that mercy may be final too (as Paul said in Rom. 11:32). In the end, men must bear the seal of God or they must bear the mark of the beast and only those bearing the seal of God shall live.
Let me meet the uncomfortable feeling this book generates in all those who try seriously to come to grips with it, no matter what school of interpretation they follow - the feeling we might express by saying, when our senses have been assaulted by all John's horrific visions of judgment, "Whatever has happened to the message of suffering love and forgiving grace which we learned at the Cross? It all seems to have got drowned in John's visions of wrath and punishment."
It is a fair question. Unless there is an answer to it, a huge question mark must hang over the book of Revelation - whether it is worthy to be accounted a truly Christian book at all. If the God of this book is not the same God we see revealed in the Cross of Christ, then He is a false God - for God does not change.
The answer is that we fail to see what happened at the Cross as John saw it.
He saw first the judgment on sin that was in it. Sin was judged there; not excused, not ignored, not pardoned either ... for sin is never pardoned - only sinners are. Sinners are pardoned, not sin. Sin is condemned, judged, destroyed. Indeed, in the very act of forgiving us, God condemns the sins He forgives. The Bible knows nothing of forgiveness without a reckoning. The very sin that is to be forgiven must be exposed, condemned, withered by the holiness in the very love that forgives us. The love that forgives is death to the sin it forgives - it is life only to the sinner. God looses us from our sins that we ourselves may not die in the death of them.
If we will not be loosed from our sins by repentance and forgiveness, then we must die in our sins.
John's vision of God's holy wrath upon sin is not a whit different in the book of Revelation than it is in his Gospel. Only, in the Cross it was absorbed in Christ's suffering and death. In the Parousia, it will be absorbed in unrepentant man's, for as Campbell Morgan once so solemnly wrote: "The only thing which love can never forgive by way of its own suffering is refusal to be forgiven by love through suffering."
God's wrath with sin is no less stern in the Gospel of the Cross than it is in the Book of Revelation.
But that's not all John saw in the Cross; he saw more. He saw that sin was embodied, not simply in individual men - like Judas - but also in human institutions like the state, and false religion, headed up in Pilate and in Caiaphas.
It was not men merely, as individuals, who crucified Christ but the "powers" - the principalities and powers of this world - to which men sell their souls to have their power. Those powers were instituted by God - the power of the state and the power of religion; but when men seize them for their own selfish ends, they corrupt them. They turn them into false Gods and open the door to Satanic influence. Blinded by their pride and ambition, men do not know this. But it is the truth - the sinister truth.
The worldly powers - of the Roman State and of Jewish legal religion - conspired to crucify Christ. They did not know - the rulers of this age - that the power they wielded had ceased to be God's and had become the devils.
The state (the beast from the sea of Rev. 13) and false religion (the beast from the earth) - had delivered their power to the Prince of this world - to the Dragon of Rev. 12. They formed a sinister coalition to destroy the Holy Child. John saw that in the Cross.
And they were permitted the unbridled exercise of their power, because it was precisely in the full expression of their evil will that they encompassed their own defeat. They thought that by putting Christ to death in the flesh they would defeat Him. But they were blind to the truth. "As long as Christ was in the flesh He was subject to temptation. His being in the flesh supplied the only possibility there had ever been that He might 'do the works of the flesh,' and so allow sin to reign in His mortal body." But with the death of His flesh, that possibility no longer existed. In putting Christ to death, the powers were not asserting their control over Him; they were losing the only chance of control they had ever had." (G. B. Caird, 'Principalities and Powers', Oxford, p. 91-2)
By suffering Himself to die at their hands, He disarmed the principalities and powers - took from them the only weapon they had ever had. Once He was risen, they were powerless over Him forever ...
And John saw that at the end, it will be as it was at the beginning.
At the end, too, the powers - the principalities and powers - will be permitted the unbridled exercise of their power. "The devil will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth; they will march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints." (Rev. 20:7-9). And then, as before, it will be precisely in the free expression of their will that they will encompass their own final defeat. The Body of Christ, the corporate body of the Church they think to destroy, will be snatched away from their grasp, and the very earth they were ambitious to possess will be destroyed by their own hand.
"The kings of the earth and the beast will hate the harlot (the great city of their evil dream), and burn it with fire; for God has put it into their hearts to carry out His purpose by being of one mind, and giving over their royal power to the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled." (Rev. 17:16-17)
In the very hour of its vaunted pride, evil will encompass its own final defeat. It will be at the end as it was at the beginning; the arms of Christ they thought stretched out on the Cross in surrender and defeat were in fact stretched out for an embrace of holy love which was death to them and in which they were crushed.
The Book of Revelation is the same Gospel of the Cross which was heralded at the beginning of the age. The only difference is that it sees it worked out on the wide stage of the world, where once it was worked out on the narrow stage of a hill outside the city.
"The final victory is the Parousia - the appearing in power and great glory - of Him Who once was crucified. And that means that when God pronounces His last word in the drama of this world's redemption, He will vindicate the Way of the Cross, and He will vindicate nothing else." (ibid. G. B. Caird, p.101) And it will be God's victory.
"When you see these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, for your redemption is near." (Luke 21:28)
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