Home	Our Hope
Article		January 12, 2017
Naming the Book

How did the book get its name? Isn't that a dumb name? Everyone knows that all rivers lead to the sea and the sea leads nowhere.

The answer comes from something I've mentioned before, that some of the verses in Revelation bothered me for a long time. One of these was Revelation 21:1:

And I saw new Heavens and a new Earth, for the former Heavens and the former Earth had departed, and the Sea was no more. (Revelation 21:1)

I kept asking myself, why would the new Earth not have a Sea? What is so bad about the Sea that it would be banished from the new Earth?

Another verse that bothered me was Revelation 20:13:

And the Sea yielded the dead which were in it (Revelation 20:13)

Why are there dead people in the sea? Aren't they supposed to be in Heaven or Hell?

Another group of events bothered me, all those things that fall on the earth, the sea, and the rivers and springs. The worst of them may be Revelation 8:10.

[…] a great burning star fell from the sky like a blaze and it fell on a third of the rivers and upon the springs of water (Revelation 8:10)

Even given that "star" means "meteor" or "comet", how exactly does it only fall on rivers and springs? You can't say that the author of Revelation chose not to mention that it also fell on the earth and sea because the previous three verses mention things that only fell on them.

The answer, unfortunately, is that Revelation is even more symbolic than most people think. All the odd descriptions mentioned above are symbolic descriptions, not descriptions of literal events.

When a text becomes so symbolized, how can anyone hope to understand it? If there are no references to things we do understand how can we figure out the things we don't understand?

It turns out you only need to understand one symbol in Revelation, the Sea, and that will lead you to understanding a large part of Revelation and assist you in understanding other parts. That's how the book got its name.