Revelation 1.1-3.
1.1 The revelation of Messiah Jesus, which God gave Him to show His servants what’s going to come quickly. The Sender gave this information, through His messenger, to His servant John, 2 who witnessed God’s message and Messiah Jesus’s witness—as far as he could see.
3 How much better it is for those who precisely know the words of its prophecies, and guard the things that were written in it! For the time is near.
I started Revelation some years ago, to coincide with a bible study at my church. It was a very frustrating group. People didn’t want to talk about what was actually in the book. They wanted to talk about all the popular interpretations, about certain current events that may correspond to the visions in Revelation, and conspiracy theories about how the Antichrist might be among us, plotting to take over the world even now. One pastor simply wouldn’t stop bringing up how he was sure Blackhawk helicopters were the locusts from the pit in Revelation 9.1-12, and how amazing it was that John foresaw helicopters.
In any event, if you’re ever going to discuss Revelation at your church, be prepared to discover just how much paranoid insanity has permeated Christianity. It may disturb you. Anyway, I found it impossible to teach. They simply wouldn’t stop their side discussions and look at the book. When I clamped down on consipiracy-theory time, they lost interest and the class shrunk down to zero, so that was the end of that. I didn’t even make it through all the messages to the churches.
Time to rectify that.
Revelation is an apocalypse. That’s a type of book that not a lot of Christians are familiar with. There are some bits of apocalypse in the bible; specifically Isaiah 25-27 and 40-55, Daniel 7-12, and Zechariah 9-14. But more apocalypses are found in books that didn’t get included in the bible: 1-2 Enoch, 2-4 Esdras, the Book of Jubilees, the Sybilline Oracles, the Apocalypse of Peter, and other odd books full of the following unfamiliar things:
Prophecies of the distant future. Since people don’t read the Prophets, except for the few prophecies about Messiah, and since they know Revelation is about the future, they just assume “prophecy” means “prediction of the future.” That’s quite wrong. Prophecies are about now—what’s going on right now, in the culture, in people’s current lives. Any mention of the future usually has to do with the consequences of this behavior: predictions that basically say, “If you keep sinning, God is going to have to do this.” The prophets were warning people away from those possible futures. They weren’t successful, which is why a lot of people teach that those predictions of the future were, in one way or another, inevitable—but they didn’t have to be.
Apocalypses, on the other hand, usually are inevitable. This stuff will happen. The message isn’t, “Stop it or bad stuff will take place,” it’s “Bad stuff is coming. Get ready.” Nearly all of them deal with the End.
Avatars. I know, “avatar” is a Hindu idea, but it works. Apocalypses consist of figures that represent reality, but aren’t reality. Think of them as 3-D parables. They aren’t to be taken literally. When Jesus holds seven stars in His hand, (Rv 1.16) they aren’t literal stars; they represent angels. (Rv 1.20) But John saw stars.
Because neither Jesus, the Spirit, the angel, nor John explained what certain visions meant, there’s a rather popular interpretation that they’re to be taken literally—which is what we see regularly in the Left Behind novels. That’s a bit naïve, but when you’re used to taking the rest of the bible literally, it stands to reason. Still, it’s a false assumption. Other than the interpretations of what John was seeing, nothing in Revelation is meant to be taken literally. Not even (and I know this is going to be controversial) the lake of fire. (Rv 20.10-15) Not to say there isn’t some form of eternal consequence for God’s opponents. It may resemble the lake of fire. But apocalypses aren’t literal. The lake of fire is an avatar. It consists of the worst thing we could think of—representing the worst thing ever, eternal separation from God.
Mysteries. The things we read about in apocalypses are stuff we’d otherwise know nothing about: the heavenly perspective of human history, what’s going to happen to everyone after Jesus judges them, what God’s throne room is like. And of course, the future.
Heavenly guides. Because of all the avatars, the person witnessing the apocalypse needs an interpreter: an angel, or Jesus, or some other knowledgeable being who can interpret what these things mean.
Though, aggravatingly, they often don’t interpret what these things mean to our satisfaction. What is “Babylon” (Rv 17.3-18) meant to represent? The angel’s explanation really doesn’t tell us much. Is it Rome, New York City, an apostate church, the world’s economic centers? There are a thousand guesses, all based on people’s personal prejudices.
But you see, part of the reason why the apocalypse is presented in this way is for the same reason parables are likewise unclear: God doesn’t want people to figure them out. He wants us to know the future, but He wants our knowledge to be partial and vague. He doesn’t want us ignorant or caught by surprise, but He doesn’t want us to know everything—nor does He want His enemies to know everything.
Because Revelation is confusing, a lot of people put off reading it. Or worse—they read about the book instead of reading the book. They read Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, John Hagee, or any of the other popular interpreters. Trouble is, when you read their books, you begin to see that none of them recognize that John was seeing avatars, and they all take Revelation as literally as they can. Consequently the rest of their interpretations (particularly their carefully-calculated timelines) fall apart.
This passage here wasn’t written by John. It’s an introduction to the rest of the book, which was written by John. As its writer put it, “How much better it is for those who precisely know the words of its prophecies.” (v3) We should know what this says more than what interpreters claim it means. We need more than a secondhand analysis. After all, this stuff, like the Kingdom, is near. Parts of it—like all prophecies—are happening now. So let’s read it and not ignore or avoid it.
Rv 1.1: Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἣν ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ ὁ θεὸς apocalypse of Yeshua Christ which gave to him (the God) δεῖξαι τοῖς δούλοις αὐτοῦ ἃ δεῖ γενέσθαι ἐν τάχει, to show the slaves of him what it is necessary to become in swiftness, καὶ ἐσήμανεν ἀποστείλας διὰ τοῦ ἀγγέλου αὐτοῦ τῷ δούλῳ αὐτοῦ Ἰωάννῃ, and he gave a sign ([the] sender) by the angel of him to the slave of him, to Yochanon, 1.2: ὃς ἐμαρτύρησεν τὸν λόγον τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ τὴν μαρτυρίαν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ὅσα εἶδεν. what witnessed the word of the God and the witness of Yeshua Christ as much as he saw.
1.3: Μακάριος ὁ ἀναγινώσκων καὶ οἱ ἀκούοντες τοὺς λόγους τῆς προφητείας καὶ τηροῦντες τὰ ἐν αὐτῇ γεγραμμένα, how much better the [ones] knowing exactly the words of the prophecies and [ones] keeping guard the [things] in it, [things] having been written, ὁ γὰρ καιρὸς ἐγγύς. for the time nearly.
