Home	Our Hope
Article		November 21, 2015
Seeing Things God's Way

One way I would summarize this book is that we need to see things from God's perspective. That's especially true of the prophetic Bible books that require interpretation but it's also true of the other books and of our own lives.

If God spoke of a coming great disaster it would be natural for us to think of earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis, destroyed cities, and heaving continents. We would be much less likely to think of millions of people turning away from God, but that's at the top of God's list of disasters.

One of the rules we use to interpret the Bible is "to assume it's literal unless you have good reason to believe it is allegorical, symbolic, hyperbole, etc." This is really Occam's Razor from the sciences applied to Bible interpretation.

Especially in the Book of Revelation I think we need to throw that out. From chapter 1, verse 1, we are told as much "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."

This says the entire book has been converted to a symbolized form. There is no reason to assume any part of it is literal.

Using the literal rule, when Revelation describes trees and rivers, we would recognize these as familiar objects and expect them to be literal. Even the idea of a burning mountain crashing into the sea is not foreign to us because science tells us that's how the dinosaurs died. When Revelation talks about 7 headed beasts, on the other hand, we quickly determine that to be symbolic.

But we can't throw out literality entirely in Revelation. References to Heaven, God, and others are plainly not symbolic. This makes it difficult to create a general rule that can be used to separate the literal references from the symbolic.

That's what comes from following the symbolic sea as the book does. It quickly becomes apparent that there are groups of items, like trees and rivers. By appearing with other items in the events described we can link them into these groups. Therefore by knowing just one item is symbolic we can separate out all of its associates as symbolic.

Instead of a top-down rule we can impose on the text of Revelation, which we would dearly love to have, with the right starting point the text reveals itself from the bottom up.

Given that, we can separate the symbolic from the literal and begin to see from God's perspective.