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June 4, 2019 |
| Revelation Overview | ||
It hardly needs to be said that the book of Revelation is difficult to understand. There are some things that can be understood though. In this lesson we take a high level look what the book of Revelation is and also at some of the book's most important warning messages.
What is the book of Revelation? That's a basic question but many people don't know the answer. It's a book about a message to us from God the Father. The book contains the message but it also describes how the message got to us and has some closing remarks. The top-level breakdown for the book is shown below.
| How the message got to us | The message from God | A message from Jesus |
The first two verses of Revelation describe how the message got to us.
The Revelation of Yeshua the Messiah, which God gave to him, to show his Servants what had been given to soon occur, and he symbolized it when he sent by his Angel to his Servant Yohannan, 2 who witnessed the word of God and the testimony of Yeshua the Messiah - everything whatever he saw. (Revelation 1:1-2)
Instead of "symbolized" many translations use the word "signified". This is a problem in the translation. The Greek language doesn't have a word to describe what Jesus did to the message given him by God. Neither does English and probably no other language. They are struggling to describe a process that is almost unique in literature and so no exact word exists. God is about the only author who chooses to communicate through symbols. You could say he turned it into signs or that he turned it into symbols, "symbolized it."
In summary then, God gave this message to Jesus who turned it into beasts, horns, crowns, harlots, and all those things that make it hard to understand. Then Jesus gave the message to an angel to give to John.
If we want to see a precedent for this process, we only need to look at Jesus' parables. In these, each element represents something - the seeds represent the word of God, the different soils represent the different spiritual conditions of people, etc. Therefore the scrolls part of Revelation is essentially a 19 chapter long parable.
Something is missing from the verses though. The message is given to an angel to give to John, but there is no mention of the angel giving the message to John. Surely John would have mentioned that. It would be expected in verse 3, but that is the start of the message.
Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things that are written in it, for the time is near. (Revelation 1:3)
The message (prophecy) continues all the way through chapter 22 and ends in a similar way to how it started. The last verse of the message is this:
"And behold, I come soon. Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book." (Revelation 22:7)
They both contain a blessing for the reader who hears. Inside of that they both refer to time being short. God does use textual markers that way in the Bible (see Chiasms).
The angel who brought the message isn't mentioned until the verse after the message.
I am Yohannan, who saw and heard these things. And when I saw and heard, I fell to worship before the feet of the Angel who was showing me these things. 9 And he said to me: "Seer, no! I am your fellow Servant and of your brothers the Prophets and of those who observe these words of this book. Worship God!" (Revelation 22:8-9)
After these two verses the angel speaks a message from Jesus. Remember that the main message is from God. Then 22:21 and perhaps the last half of 22:20 are John's closing salutations. That ends the book of Revelation.
So this is what happened. God gave a message to Jesus, who "symbolized" it and gave it to an angel, who went to John and "downloaded" it (for lack of better words) into John's mind. In a flash the entire book of Revelation was in his head. After seeing and hearing it, John is stunned. The angel gives a message from Jesus and leaves. John begins to write the book of Revelation and its message. It probably takes him many weeks to do that.
When he writes the book, John writes the first two verses. But then he doesn't say something like "an angel appeared and downloaded a message into my head". Instead he writes down the message that is in his head. Then he writes about having been shown the message by the angel. Then he writes down the message from the angel.
The purpose for the symbolization process is to hide the meaning until the time is right and God is ready to reveal it.
Understanding the start and the end of the prophecy now, creates a real complication about who John is. There is a John outside of the prophecy, mentioned first in Revelation 1:1, and there is a John inside the prophecy, mentioned first in Revelation 1:9. How are these two John's related?
The only explanation that makes sense is that they are the same John, and that God wanted some of John's experience recorded in the prophecy, as God's word, not as John's words. John was an apostle and highly respected in his time, but he was a man.
This is not unique to Revelation. Daniel says very specifically that he saw a vision and in that vision he saw himself.
In the third year of King Belshazzar’s reign, I, Daniel, had a vision, after the one that had already appeared to me. 2 In my vision I saw myself in the citadel of Susa in the province of Elam; in the vision I was beside the Ulai Canal.
Daniel's description of what he sees in the vision from that point on loses the reference point. For example, when he says, "I saw" does that mean that he saw it or that he saw himself see it. When he describes interacting with the characters in the vision, he is obviously describing what he is seeing being done by the Daniel in the vision.
God frequently employs an anonymous 3rd person in prophecies to deliver the prophecy through the dialog between that person and God. A fine example of this is the questioner in Habakkuk. Because most people don't understand, they think the person asking questions of God is Habakkuk. If that were true, the lack of faith exhibited by this un-named questioner would make Habakkuk unfit to be a prophet. But that isn't the case. The un-named questioner is a composite character representing those Jews who beliweve they have remained righteous, while the others have turned away.
Sometimes the 3rd person acts as a foil in prophecies. A character foil is a person whose purpose is to highlight another character. In Revelation, we see the "inside John" interacting with the symbolic characters of the prophecy in this way. They ask him questions and mostly his answers are: "You tell me."
Like Daniel, in Daniel's prophecies, in Revelation, this foil character is not anonymous. He is clearly John and the "outside John recognizes him as himself.
There is a different "Who is John" question, one that arose early in Christianity. Is the John of Revelation also the John of the gospel and epistles or is he another John? From Revelation 1:1 it seems he is the John of the Gospels and epistles. This isn't perfectly clear but there are some who dispute it. It is no more important to us than a trivia question. The prophecy, which is the word of God, is all that matters.
Structure and Timeline
The message comes in two parts, the letters to the seven churches and the scrolls, one with seven seals and the "little" scroll.
Most people who interpret prophecy misunderstand parts of it and that makes them think that the seals and trumpets are not sequential, that they overlap, at least. Many people twist Revelation into a pretzel to get a timeline from it. God is not perverse that he would give us a hopelessly tangled mess to sort out. In fact, they are exactly what they appear to be, sequential. The second comes after the first and the third comes after that, and so on. The first trumpet begins after the seventh seal. Together they form a time-ordered series of events that end with the Second Coming at the seventh trumpet.
After that scroll comes the little scroll. It's structure is completely different from the first scroll. Just as the end of the end times was prophesied to be like a woman giving birth, so many things are happening at the end that they need to be told as a series of over-lapping events. These are the seven bowls. They have in common that they end at the Second Coming, or within a hair of it, but each starts at a different time.
The little scroll also includes the 10 day period of God's wrath, which begins when Jesus arrives in the clouds and ends when he (and we) descend to rule the world.
What everyone wants to know though is how this links up to Daniel's 70th week, also called the tribulation period, which seems to be the universal reference for the end-times. An angel describes this to Daniel in Daniel 9:26-27.
The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. 27 He will confirm a covenant with many for one 'seven.' In the middle of the 'seven' he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.
In Daniel 12 there is also this additional information
From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days. 12 Blessed is the one who waits for and reaches the end of the 1,335 days. (Daniel 12:11-12)
That isn't much to work from but it does have some important elements. Because we are only working toward a timeline, I'll only mention the ones that are related to that.
Matthew 24:15 provides another piece in this puzzle
But whenever you will see the desecrated sign of desolation that was spoken by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place, (he who reads should consider). 16 Then those who are in Judea should flee to the mountains. 17 And the one who is on the roof should not come down to take what is in his house.
This is part of what is called the Olivet Discourse which also appears in Mark 13, Luke 21. From these we also learn that an army will encircle Jerusalem at the time of the desolation.
From these descriptions it's safe to say that this event matches Israel's escape as described in Revelation 12. That is the only point we have to link them together. Being in the middle of the 7 years of Daniel's 70th week gives us quite a bit when we mix it with the time periods described in Revelation. Those are:
One thing becomes immediately obvious. The Sixth Trumpet must come at least 1260 days before the Seventh Trumpet. Most likely it is exactly 1260 days because of the prophetic significance of 42 prophetic months. It seems reasonable to make the assumption that the trumpets are all equally spaced in time, because the seven trumpets that end with the Feast of trumpets are also equally space, being 30 days apart. Given that, the time from the First Trumpet to the Seventh Trumpet is 6 x 1260 days, which is 21 prophetic years, or 20.7 real years.
If we think back to the Seventh Seal and its reference to "in Heaven for about a half an hour" and the calculation showing that to be 20.8 years on Earth, we can't be less than shocked at the closeness. We have to accept that the trumpets mark out an end-times period that is larger than Daniel's 70th week but includes that week as its last seven years.
Therefore the Sixth Trumpet falls in the middle of the 70th week. The Fifth Trumpet falls at the start of the 70th week. That means the three woes come at the start, middle and end of the 70th week.
I've created a drawing to show all of this.
The drawing has some limitations and contains some estimates. For example the period of the Beasts can't be known because we don't know when they start. We do know the first beast exists before the tribulation period because it has sufficient authority to sign the seven year agreement that begins that period.