06 May 2023
It's not that John's Revelation says nothing about the End Times, but that what it says must meet the needs of those who received it before John died, as well as our needs today. The only way it can do that is if we read it the way John wrote it. He was a Hebrew mystic with a schoolboy's understanding of Greek. His mission was putting Hebrew thoughts into Greek words, and it wasn't easy.
It's obvious to anyone that John takes a lot from Ezekiel's prophecy. It's the same kind of symbolism, and equally long-winded, but the whole point was to call the churches one last time to learn how to think in the Hebrew way that God built for the task of revealing Himself and His ways. So just like Ezekiel and the other prophets had been translated into Greek well before this time, John used the same kind of Hebrew-in-Greek ideas to translate His Hebraic vision of God into the vernacular of his audience.
The whole point is to lay out a vision of what Christians can expect between the approaching death of this last Apostle and the Second Coming. John had no idea we'd still be talking about this 2000 years later, but what he wrote is timeless. It was not something for some far distant future, but something that stands true outside of time and space boundaries. You cannot relate such a vision in literal terms, nor can you read it that way. John didn't watch a movie in his head; he was fed a message of God into his heart.
The problem Christians faced in John's day was a human government that hated the Christian faith. How should we deal with such a thing? One of the first things we see is God on His Throne with that rainbow, the symbol of Noah's Covenant. It's the standard God will use to judge what earthly governments do. It should be painfully obvious that there is really very little we can do, because almost the whole book is taken up in telling what God is going to do without our help. Our part is to learn the lessons from the Seven Churches.
If you take the three cycles of visions literally, then they cannot possibly happen in the sequence presented. If the stars fall from the sky literally, then they won't be there for a subsequent action that requires stars. Rather, the logic is spiritual and moral, not sequential. There is also repetition, so that some events happen again, but seen from a different angle.
The one thing that stands out most is that God acts most strongly when faith is under attack. We do get an overview of how human governments will inevitably tend toward attacking genuine faith. It may be that a particular government won't survive long enough to engage persecution that way, but that's where they all trend. Should a human government last long enough to arrive at that part of their life-cycle, then God has an answer for them. You and I may end up coming home to wait for the Final Judgment, but that's really not considered a major issue.
In other words, the Book of Revelation is a symbolic pattern with an otherworldly outlook. It shows how human governments operate from a spiritual viewpoint: They are all under Satan. They all believe the same lies and keep chasing the same false ambitions. And God uses the same kind of destruction on all of them. He keeps on holding them to that standard of Noah's Covenant, and they all keep failing. They rally their people to oppose the gospel, and God sends His wrath and all kinds of awful things happen, but what matters most is the ancient Hebrew meaning of the symbolic actions John reveals. Just to make sure we have a clue, John sometimes piles up descriptions and titles and names so we'll understand what he's talking about. Notice those cues and you'll make a lot better sense of it all.
If you haven't seen any of our Radix Fidem community commentaries on the Bible, try this commentary on Revelation. Yes, it covers some application for the Second Coming and End Times, but it's put into the proper context of what kind of writer John actually was.
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