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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 at 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 breakdown for the book is shown here.
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 to 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 section 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 of the symbolization process is to hide the meaning until the time is right and God is ready to reveal it.
Downloading a message into a person's brain is nothing new. This was the way that the Old Testament prophets received their messages from God. It is a little unusual to have an angel deliver it, but that is not unique either. Moses received the Torah that way, and Daniel received at least some of his messages that way.
First we need to understand the sequence of events.
That isn't the order we see in Revelation. The order John uses to write it is chronological from his perspective. He writes the message into the Revelation text at the point in the chronology where the message was inserted into him.
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 Johns 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 8:1-2)
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 who is in the vision.
God frequently employs an anonymous 3rd person in prophecies to deliver the prophecy through the dialogue 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 unnamed questioner would make Habakkuk unfit to be a prophet. But that isn't the case. The unnamed questioner is a composite character representing those Jews who believe 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, and 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.
The message comes in two parts: the letters to the seven churches, and the scrolls, one with seven seals and the "little" scroll.
The letters to the seven churches are short messages to each of the seven churches in the region that is now called Turkey. These messages are definitely intended for churches in the time of John. There are many people who believe that the messages to those churches are also messages to:
It's an intriguing idea, but it is not built on anything in the Bible, it is only the ideas of men, but those are compelling. Why would God mix a message for the present with a message for the future? Why would God deliver a message to the present churches via an angel?
The scroll messages are definitely descriptions of people, organizations, and events in John's future, as well as ours.
Most people who interpret prophecy don't understand the symbolism of the 7-Sealed Scroll. They see event descriptions in different sections of Revelation and even event descriptions in other prophecies, and they say, "These sound the same, so they must be the same." That leads them to 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; in some cases, it's more like a ball of string.
God is not perverse that he would give us a hopelessly tangled mess that no one would ever be able 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.
We know this is correct because the symbolism of the 7-Sealed Scroll tells us so. Removing each seal symbolizes something happening. Once all of the 7 seals are removed, it becomes possible to see what's in the scroll, and it's the 7 trumpets. So the events of the seals clearly must come before the events of the trumpets.
After the 7-Sealed Scroll scroll comes the Little Scroll. Its 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 overlapping 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 Revelation 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 70th week 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 and 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 real trumpets that end with the Feast of Trumpets are also equally spaced, 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 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.
Some prophecy teachers understand the Message from God as judgments. They say the Seals are judgments, the Trumpets are judgments, and the Vials of Wrath are judgments. The Bible never refers to the Seals or Trumpets as judgments, but it does refer to the Vials of Wrath as judgments. So this idea is not from the Bible but rather a product of their own way of thinking.
In fact the following verse from Revelation contradicts that idea.
And they cried with a great voice, and they were saying, "How long, Lord Yahweh, holy and true, do you not judge and avenge our blood upon the inhabitants of Earth?" (Revelation 6:10)
This verse comes at the 5th Seal and shows people asking how long God will wait to judge the inhabitants of earth.
The next verse tells us when the judgment begins.
"And the nations were angry and your anger has come, and the time of the dead to be judged, and you shall give reward to your servants the prophets and to the holy ones and to those who reverence your name, to the small with the great, and you shall destroy those who have corrupted the Earth." (Revelation 11:18)
This verse comes at the 7th Trumpet, after all the seals have passed and all the trumpets, and only the vials of wrath remain.
The idea that everything in Revelation is judgment is not supported by the Bible, and it is wrong.
I've created a drawing to show all of this.
The Seals are opened, and the Trumpets are blown at the beginning of their time periods as shown here. Don't make too much of the periods. Revelation appears to only refer to the events that happen at the start of the periods. I've drawn them that way because they are a time-connected series and because some of the events continue into other time periods.
The vertical line marks the beginning of the Tribulation.
The drawing has a quirk. It seems sensible that the Seal periods should have the same end date as the Trumpet periods. There is no justification for believing that though. None-the-less there is a 7-year difference between them. This is likely the time that Jesus spoke about when he said:
For then there will be great suffering, which has not been from the beginning of the world even until now, neither will be. 22 If those days are not cut short no one would live, but because of the chosen ones, those days will be cut short. (Matthew 24:21-22)
If we understand that correctly, Jesus is saying that if the world were allowed to run itself for seven more years, effectively, no one would survive. God, however, wanted some Christians to be there at the Second Coming.