Chapters 1:1- ; 5:1-5; 11:15-18
The Book of Revelation is often neglected by the average Christian because its language is so strange. It is full of bizarre and bewildering images: like beasts with seven heads and ten horns, or a dragon whose tail sweeps down out of heaven to earth a third of all the stars and pours water from its mouth like a river; or a bottomless pit belching out smoke and a plague of locusts. How can anyone make sense of it all?
Not surprisingly, the attempts to do so have been many and varied … which tends only to increase the confusion, so the ordinary Christian gives up in despair and puts the book aside. And that is a pity, because it was written to help Christians keep faith.
At the time Revelation was written Domitian was the Roman Emperor. To maintain unity within an empire so huge and diverse was no easy task, and he was even more determined than other emperors before him to use the power of religion to bind the empire together. He sought to do this by making the cult of emperor worship compulsory; he demanded, literally, to be worshipped as Lord and God. Christians stubbornly refused to comply; not Lord Cæsar was the lord of this world but the Lord Jesus, they believed; so they would not knuckle under.
John, the writer of Revelation, saw that the power of Rome was becoming Satanic: led by its head of state, the earthly state was exalting itself as God. That was bound to mean two things:
1. Life for Christians would get very rough.
2. Rome would fall.
So John wrote to the churches dotted round the circular trade road in Asia Minor (of which his own church, Ephesus, was one) to fortify them to face up to inevitable persecution.
That was his first concern - to put heart into them. And the way to do that was to show them what it meant - in their situation - that Jesus was Lord. He was given a vision of the way Christ rules from heaven, not simply over the Church which believes in Him, but over the world which does not.
That was his second concern - to spell out in terms of real life how the risen and ascended Lord exercises His authority over all life. "All authority, in heaven and in earth, has been given to me," He had said (Matt. 28:18). But if Christ ruled all life on earth, how did you explain the blood bath into which the church was being plunged? This book comes up with the answer.
Jesus is Lord. But He rules in the Spirit of His Cross. That cross was fashioned, not simply by the love of God, but also by the sin of man. Evil was given its head there, and in Christ, God met it head on, absorbed it, and neutralised it with suffering love. In a sinful world, suffering is love's only path to victory, and Christians can only have that victory with their Lord as they share His suffering. But it is a real victory.
So Christians will suffer and Rome will fall, as in the end the church will triumph and the world will fall, and the last of evil with it. That is the conviction in which this book was written.
In the Roman Empire of John's day that made it treasonable stuff of course. To peddle that sort of literature round Asia Minor was as dangerous as it would have been in Communism's heyday to sell pamphlets in Moscow's Red Square that promised the overthrow of Russia. So John wrote it in code, a code the Jews had in fact already developed during their periods of persecution. The code consisted of images and symbols drawn from the Old Testament. The books of Daniel and Ezekiel and Zechariah contain language of this sort, called Apocalyptic. In John's day there was already a considerable body of Jewish apocalyptic literature: Revelation is Christian apocalyptic. Unless you knew your Old Testament, you could make no sense of it. So if the State Police found you in possession of it they could hardly substantiate a charge against you on the grounds of what it said; Rome and its Emperor were not named in it, only referred to in code (as Babylon, or the beast e.g.). So the obscurities in the book of Revelation were deliberate … but decipherable nonetheless. And when they are deciphered, what a message they turn out to convey! Here are to be found the Christian answers to those questions that so distress us.
Disasters … earthquake, floods, famine, plague, disease; man's inhumanity to man ... strife and violence; suffering, pain and death: why are these things permitted in the world of the Christian's God? There has to be an answer.
It will not do to say, "We are not meant to understand; we must not try. We must just believe." Only an armchair critic, an uninvolved spectator of history can say that - not a victim. When we are the ones suffering, we need to know why, or our suffering has no meaning; and we have to see meaning in it or we cannot endure. And John wrote for Christians when just to be one was to go in peril of your life.
Besides, when the Church does not offer an answer seekers become disillusioned and turn away. Too many men and women have experienced war and disaster. Have they no right to ask of the Church, which professes to have been shown the whole truth God has spoken, that she tell them what answer God has given? They may not like the answer - but they have a right to hear it. This book supplies it. It grasps all the nettles. It shows us how all life's wretchedness can be squared with faith in a righteous God of love.
We need this. Here the principles are unfolded on which Christ rules the world from His Father's throne in heaven. And it speaks volumes for the truth of them that in every age men have recognised in various features of John's vision events in their own time. Life does work out the way this book says it would.
John's theme is in fact, quite simply, 'The Kingdom of God,' as it had been Jesus' theme all through His ministry. The phrase means, not the territory covered by His rule, nor even the society in it, but His active rule, His reign. It would be better rendered the 'Kingship of Heaven.' That rule God has given into the hands of His Son, and the book of Revelation spells out for us how He exercises it. It is a detailed expansion of Paul's assurance in I Cor. 15:25 "He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet."
The whole of the New Testament cries out for this book to be written, for what it supplies is the Christian philosophy of history. Without it the New Testament is like an unfinished symphony, celebrating Christ's coronation, but having nothing to say about His reign. We should make it our serious endeavour to come to grips with it so that we may be able, as Peter exhorted us, "to give a reason for the faith that this in us." The world is so full of trouble and the sway of evil so immensely strong that 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 isn't love, or the world would be a better place. If He's love then He isn't 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 squares up to that complaint as this book does. John knew that God is love and that He is almighty, and he did not have to bury his head in the sand to go on believing it. He saw the evils of life in this world and its tragedies very clearly - so very clearly that the way he tells them is enough to put some Christians off his 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 with great and effectual power.
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 amid life's worst tribulations we may not lose faith.
John had primarily in view as he wrote, of course, the great need of vision and courage among the despised and persecuted Christians of his own day. They had been taught that Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the Son of God. Since He was God, manifest in our human flesh, 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 not been a defeat; it had been an essential feature of God's programme for the saving of the world, in fact. Christ's 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 thus died for us He was now risen, for ever triumphant over all the 'powers' that blight our life on earth, including the power of sin and death. He had been exalted to His Father's throne, from whence He would rule the world until the kingdom of evil was finally overthrown and the Kingdom of God established 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 lifestyle of the rest, they were being turned on by the herd. There was every likelihood that 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 His 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 upon to answer, and he did so very fully.
He wrote the book of Revelation to a highly disciplined and carefully worked out scheme, and we shall first try for an overall grasp of that scheme.
There are seven major sections. Each opens with a Vision, in the light of which the Teaching that follows is to be understood. Each of those blocks of teaching is further developed in patterns of seven.
The conventions of writing in ancient times did not allow for the use of visual breaks in the text like paragraphing or cross-headings; changes of theme had to be notified by the use of repeating editorial phrases. The major divisions of Revelation are conveyed by such phrases …
FOUR 'IN THE SPIRITS'"… on the Lord's Day" 1:10
"… in Heaven" 4:2
"… into a wilderness" 17:3
"… to a high mountain" 21:10FOUR 'OPENS' (Second above and first below combined into one)
Open Door 4:1
Open Temple 11:19
Open Tabernacle 15: 5
Open Heaven 19:11
Because the fourth 'In the Spirit' is combined into one with the first 'Open' (4:1-2), there are seven, not eight sections.
At each of these points a Vision is recorded which controls the teaching material which follows it.
The teaching material is always organised in 'sevens'; where these cannot be indicated by actual numbering (as they are in the Seven Seals, Trumpets and Bowls), John does so by seven repeating phrases like 'I saw ...' e.g., 13: 1, 13:11, 14: 1, 14: 6, 14:14, 15: 1, 15: 2; or again, 19:17, 19:19, 20: 1, 20: 4, 20:11, 20:12, 21: 1. Chapters 17 and 18 contain seven 'utterances.'
So the major divisions of Revelation are:
1: 1 - 1: 9 Prologue -Seven First Words
1. 1:10 - 3:22 Vision I - Christ among the Lampstands
... teaching about the Church
Seven Letters to Churches
2. 4: 1 - 11:19 Vision II - God's Throne in heaven and the Lamb
... teaching about God's government of the world
Seven Seals, Trumpets
3. 12: 1 - 15: 4 Vision III - Woman, Child and Dragon
... teaching about the spiritual conflict behind the scenes (the real truth about the meaning of history)
Seven Visions in chs 13 - 14
4. 15: 5 - 16:21 Vision IV - Temple filled with Smoke
... teaching about God's final judgments in the earth
Seven Bowls (Angels of the Plagues)
5. 17: 1 - 19:10 Vision V - Woman on Scarlet Beast
... teaching on the Mystery of Iniquity which inspires the world system
Seven Utterances, most about 'Babylon'
6. 19:11 - 21: 8 Vision VI - Man (Christ) on a White Horse
... teaching about the final overthrow of all God's enemies, the wind-up of the old creation,
and the creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth
Seven 'I saws'
7. 21: 9 - 22: 5 Vision VII - The Holy City - All Things New
... teaching about Heaven
Seven 'Features'22: 6 - 22:21 Epilogue - The Bride of Christ
Seven Last Words
There is a very obvious development in the progress of these sections. One of the clearest indications of it is the repeating statements about "Lightning, Voices, Peals of Thunder." Notice how they are developed:
i. 4:5 flashes of lightning, voices, peals of thunder
ii. at 8:5 an earthquake is added
iii. at 11:19 hail is added
iv. at 16:18, 21 they are loud noises, a 'great earthquake' such as had never been since men were on the earth, and "great hailstones."
Lightning voices and thunder were marks of God's presence at Sinai, earthquakes and hail are signs of judgment.
Another development is notified by the repeating comment: "Here is a call for the endurance of the saints" at 13:10 and 14:12 Note how these refer back to 1:9 and 3:10.
Again, John indicates that he wishes the sections beginning at 17:1 and 21:9 to be understood in connection with ch.16 by telling us that it was one of the Bowl Angels who introduced him to the revelations that follow.
Yet another is the
relationship between 'Trumpet' judgments and 'Bowl' judgments: both
follow the same pattern of development:
Earth, Seas, Rivers and Fountains, Sun, Anguish, Euphrates,
Voices.
By the absence of 'thirds' in the second series, John clearly means us to see it as in some way an intensification of the first series.
Again, what follows 17:1 is shown to John by one of the Bowl Angels (cf. 17:1 and 21:9) and is therefore simply an expansion of the Babylon theme in the Bowl Series; it is a "flashback" section". This is one of the clearest examples of the fact that events do not unfold sequentially in the book of Revelation: in 14:8, Babylon has fallen, in 16:19 God "remembers her", but in 17:18 she still has dominion over the kings of the earth!
These are only a very
few examples, but they are enough to show with what complex care
Revelation was written.
They show too that with every major section John intensifies his
statements, and that indicates how the scheme of the book is to be
understood: he is not adding a fresh period each time, rather he is
recapitulating the last one at a deeper level. The scheme is
concentric, not linear.
THE PURPORT OF THE BOOK
How shall we summarise all that? Briefly, the chapters up to the middle of ch. 15 are concerned with history up to the End of the age, and the remaining chapters with the End itself and what lies beyond it.
Even a superficial reading of the whole book conveys the clear impression that cleansing the world's life of its evil is a long and difficult business; for it is to be accomplished in the spirit of righteousness and patient love that was revealed in Christ crucified. It cannot be accomplished just by 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. The spirit of the martyrs who have lost their lives in this world for Christ's sake and the Gospel's 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 for sure.
To recapitulate briefly, the major divisions of Revelation are:
• 1: 1 - 1:9 Prologue - Seven First Words
1. 1:10 - 3:22 Vision I - Christ among the Lampstands
2. 4: 1 - 11:19 Vision II - Throne in Heaven and the Lamb
3. 12:1 - 15:4 Vision III - Woman, Child and Dragon
4. 15:5 - 16:21 Vision IV - Temple filled with Smoke
5. 17:1 - 19:10 Vision V - Woman on Scarlet Beast
6. 19:11 - 21:8 Vision VI - Man on a White Horse
7. 21:9 - 22:5 Vision VII - Holy City
• 22: 6 - 22:21 Epilogue - Seven Last Words
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