We come this morning to the first of three sermons on the book
of Revelation, concluding our series on the books of the Bible. It
is the only example we have in the New Testament of a form of
writing called 'apocalyptic literature' which the people of Jesus'
day were very familiar with. We sometimes call Revelation 'The
Apocalypse' in the same way that, if 'The Maltese Falcon' was the
only story we knew of its kind, we might call it 'The Detective
Story.' I hope that, by the end of the third sermon, most of you
will feel much more familiar and comfortable with this type of book.
- Introduction
- Why read this book?
I do not promise to explain every detail to you, or to give you
the date of the Second Coming, but I do promise that if you are
willing to lay aside your expectations and come with an open mind
and an expectant heart, you will hear God speaking to you clearly
and powerfully through this extraordinary book.
I have been a Christian for a little over 25 years, and for
most of this time I have been talking, and possibly on occasions
arguing with people about the book of Revelation. Perhaps it is
the case that people with strange ideas and weird beliefs get
ttracted to me, but it seems when I look back, that the book of
Revelation, along with some bits of Daniel, arouses more interest
and matters more to most people I have met than the rest of the
Bible put together.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying it is more important
than other parts of the Bible. But when I talk with people
outside the Church about the things they believe and the questions
which matter to them, time and time again I find it is the book of
Revelation which speaks to them, or which they refer to in support
of some strange idea.
- Strange ideas
If you allow people to tell you what they believe about the
book of Revelation, you will hear over and over again the most
incredible beliefs coming from the mouths of people who appear to
be relatively sane and normal. People today do believe the most
amazing things. The same person who mocks your gullibility in
believing a man can come back from the dead, may well sit in a
cardboard pyramid and recite a meaningless chant for hours on end.
And if you give them a chance, folk will tell you what they believe.
This is why I wanted to ask Monica Mills how she interpreted
the book of Revelation and what she understood to be its relevance
to us today. I didn't think she was a crackpot, but for a
Christian, that question is often a very good way to discover
oddities in a person's beliefs, and I wanted to ask it just in case.
With Monica, I would have been very happy to hear she had
studied the book very little, and didn't know what to make of most
of it. I would have been quite worried if she had some pat answer
ready to hand, and especially if she offered to explain it in more
details if we decided to call her.
- My personal motivation
Years of listening to people explaining their pet theories have
taught me to be very careful of people who want to speak about the
book of Revelation, and to tell you what it means.
Having said that, I must admit that I asked to be given this
book to preach on. I even asked to be allowed a seven week
series, but this was before we knew a certain David Bedford was
interested in coming. So, instead of a seven week series, you
have a three week series spread over five weeks. There is no way
we can explore this book in three weeks, but what we can do is to
begin to reclaim it from the cranks and the cults.
I believe that doing this is important for at least three reasons.
- This book is relevant to us
'The time is near' We will come back to this point. But for
us, in one sense at least, the time is most certainly near. As
people approach the turn of a new century, there is always a
renewed interest in prophecy, in secret knowledge, and we can
expect this to be even more the case as we look to the dawn not
only of a new century but of a new millennium.
I want to help you understand something of this by giving you
an example. It could have been the X Files or the Turin Shroud. It
could have been the Freemasons and the Knights Templar. But the
best example at the moment is probably this book: the Bible Code.
How many of you have read this book? Parts of it? Who has
heard about it? For some time now, a book about the Bible has
been a best seller in this country and in the United States.
Non-christians are buying and reading it. Don't you think that we
as Christians have a responsibility to understand something of
what it says and have some way of answering the questions it raises?
This is not a book plug. I am not asking you to buy it, just to
be aware of some of the information it contains. The words of
the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament - the Bible Jesus
used - are made up of 304,805 letters. You could write them in a
single line, missing out the blanks, 304,805 characters long. You
could write them in five lines, each 60,906 characters long. As
you can imagine, there are thousands of ways you could fit the
letters of the Old Testament into a grid. And in each of these
grids, you get the words of the Bible text when you read across,
and sometimes other words are formed when you read down, like in a
crossword.
It is not surprising that you can find words in this way. What
is surprising is the number of words you find this way, and the
way they link to each other. When you do this exercise on the
text of War and Peace, you get the occasional random word on its
own. When you do it on the Bible, you find meaningful
combinations over and over again.
Some of the combinations are about significant events in
history: 'Newton' is paired with 'gravity', 'Shakespeare' with
'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet', and 'Napoleon' with 'France', 'Waterloo'
and 'Elba'. The date of the first Moon landing is combined with
'Moon', 'Apollo 11' and the phrase, 'Done by mankind, done by a
man'. The name 'Kennedy' is combined with 'to die' and 'Dallas'.
This cannot be explained by chance. The effect is highly
significant in a statistical sense, and only occurs with the text
of the Hebrew Bible. This number of words and combinations could
only be found once computers were available to do the brute force
work of searching and pattern matching.
But people have known about these patterns in the Bible for
some time. Earlier this century in Prague, a Rabbi called
Weissmandel noticed that if you take each 50th letter at the start
of the book of Genesis, it spells the word 'Torah'. This was a bit
surprising, especially when he realised that the same thing
happened in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
And how many of you have come across the ancient subject of
Biblical Numerology? Every word in the original Hebrew and Greek
text has a numerical value, and if you start looking at these
numbers, you get some very strange results. If you count the
number of times important words occur in the original text, you
find over and over again the answer is a multiple of 7. These
unlikely effects, numbers and patterns are there in the text,
especially in the first chapter of Genesis.
So these results in the Bible should not be surprising: we have
known there is something very special about the sacred text for a
long time, and computers have now given us the ability to uncover
the hidden pattern and content much faster and more reliably than
ever before.
People have always been interested in the uncovering of secret
or hidden knowledge, and they are becoming increasingly open about
this desire. It is, if you like, part of the 'spirit of the age'
in which we live. What does this mean for us as Christians? We
cannot simply ignore it. On the other hand, it is not a tool for
use in evangelism: nobody is going to get saved because they are
convinced by the statistical improbability of the Bible. But it
may open a few doors in peoples' minds, and give us a few more
opportunities for conversations.
If you are like me, you have probably tried to keep
conversations to areas you are familiar with and comfortable
talking about. And if, like I did for years, you have avoided
studying the book of Revelation, then you are simply not as
available to God as you could be in this area.
- Why ignore this book?
Why do we spend so little time studying this book? I would
like to suggest six possible reasons.
- It is difficult to understand - it is full of strange
creatures, and symbols and numbers with strange meanings.
- It can be frightening. It boggles and overwhelms the mind
and emotions with too many vivid images for us to be comfortable
with it.
- Christians fight like anything over the correct
interpretation, and make the wrong interpretation sound totally
disastrous. If getting the meaning wrong is so dangerous, I feel
I am better off staying out of that battle.
- Perhaps we fear we don't have the spiritual maturity to
reliably discern the truth among all the competing claims and
interpretations.
- If the only people who spend time studying this book are
nutters and cult members, we donąt particularly want to follow
their example. If the Christians we admire stay away from it,
we probably will too.
- And finally, I suspect Satan keeps us away: the spiritual
battle which operates over all scripture seems to be more
intense over this book.
Are these valid reasons to avoid the book? Only in part. They
are certainly valid reasons to make us treat it with care.
It is more difficult for us to understand than most of the rest
of the Bible. But we do not have to understand all the details in
order to receive the blessing God intends for us through this
book. We do not have to be spiritual giants to gain benefit from
this book, any more than we do with the rest of scripture.
It may appear frightening, but God does not intend us to be
frightened by it, and I believe as we hear the message over the
next few weeks, this will no longer be a barrier.
- Reading it Right
- Allowing God to speak
Getting the meaning wrong is only a problem if we are trying to
work it all out - to treat the book as puzzle to be solved, to
read it as a future history in coded form. We are not supposed to
work it out - we are supposed to allow God to speak to us through
it, which is completely different. The distinction is not between
using our mind to puzzle it out and using our spirit to listen, it
is between using the talents He has given us to get what we want,
and using our mind and spirit to discern what He wants us to get
out of it.
The key question is our purpose in studying the book. We have a
natural human desire to know what will happen and when. This is
why since the dawn of history people have used astrology and
visited oracles, mediums, soothsayers and fortune tellers.
As with everything good God gives us, from physical health to
spiritual gifts, God gives them to us for good use, but Satan
first tempts us to mis-use, and then so scares us with the
consequences that we end up with dis-use. The answer, as always,
is firstly a right understanding of the gift and how it is to be
used, and then a willingness to be obedient and use it the way our
Father intends. So, over the next few weeks we will be trying to
learn how to use this book our Father has given to us.
- Understanding the form of literature
Our main problem in understanding the book of Revelation comes
from the fact that we do not read or write apocalyptic literature
any more. You see, we interpret what we read very differently
depending on what we are reading. We do not read an advert like a
news report, or a spy story like a biography.
Most of the rest of the Bible may be strange to us in many
ways, but we are familiar with the type of literature. We are
familiar with history books. We read poetry. We still write
letters. But we do not write this type of book, just like the
people of Jesus' time did not write adventure stories or romances.
Imagine the problems you would have if you read a detective
story as if it were a factual record. You might have difficulty
believing the faithful side-kick is really as thick as he
sometimes sounds. When, near the end of the final chapter, he
says, "There's just one thing I don't understand" you won't
recognise the tradition embodied in that phrase.
- Understanding the motivation
And then there is the question of motivation. By the end of the
book, you know what all the bad guys did and why they did it. But
you may struggle like crazy to work out what motivated the hero to
stand in the rhododendron bushes in the middle of the night - his
excuse for being there is so thin and implausible. You worry about
it because you don't understand that the hero's motive for being
there does not matter: it is simply part of the plot, an excuse to
enable him to overhear the vital conversation.
God does not seek to trick or fool us. Nothing in the Bible is
intended to be misleading. The book of Revelation only seems
strange to us because we are not familiar with apocalyptic
literature. The people John wrote it down for would have been as
familiar with this type of book as we are with detective stories
and political satire. They did not expect to read any of it
literally. Almost all the places, people, objects, events and
numbers have a meaning, they point to something else. What they
point to is sometimes vague and ambiguous, but it is always clear
enough for the revelation to communicate what God intended.
So, because we are not familiar with this type of literature,
we worry about aspects of the book which the original readers
would never have thought twice about, and so we end up missing
the simple, clear message.
- Understanding the purpose
Revelation addresses the question: who is in control? It is not
a subject which troubles us much, these days. We think we live in
a predictable world. We have insurance, medicine and hospitals.
If something goes wrong, we can call in someone to fix it.
But think about the people to whom it was written. If we had
lived then, we would all have worked in the fields. I have just
turned forty, and can reasonably expect to see another forty
years. I may have had eight or ten children, but most of
them would already be dead. We would be starting to arrange
marriages for the eldest grandchildren. If we get ill, we either
die or recover. If the crops do not grow well, or people come and
raid our fields, we go hungry, and the weakest starve. We cannot
control our health, the weather, the crops, or the armies.
We work hard, but our work does not guarantee success,
happiness or comfort. It does not even guarantee survival. Life
is difficult and dangerous, the future is very uncertain.
In that situation, we would desperately need to understand that
there is a God who is in control, whom we can trust despite our
difficulties. You and I today need to understand that we live in
that same world. Our future is uncertain. We may get our food
from Sainsbury's, but it is still God's provision for us. We do
not know how long we will retain our health or our jobs.
Insurance may cushion us financially, but it does not prevent the
unexpected from changing our lives.
Our lives are in God's hands, and we need to understand that
and believe it just as much as the people of Jesus' day. We need
to learn what it means to believe that God is in control, and His
will shall be done. I believe we shall do that, with the help of
this book, in the next few weeks.
- What is Revelation?
- Revelation and prophecy
This is the second of a three part series on the book of
Revelation. The purpose of this series is not to explain every
detail of the book, but to give you the ammunition you need to
read it and benefit from it yourself.
We said two weeks ago that Revelation is an example of a type of book the people of Jesus' day were very familiar with. We call it 'apocalyptic literature'. The word 'apocalypse' makes us think of disasters, cataclysmic events and the end of the world. Actually, it is simply a transliteration of the Greek word for 'revelation', just as 'baptism' is a transliteration of the Greek work for 'soaking' or 'immersion'.
We also said that God does not play games with us: the book of Revelation is not a puzzle with one correct answer, one solution. It has not been given to us as an intellectual challenge. God reveals what he wants us to know: there is no hidden, secret truth waiting to be unearthed. As with all scripture, there are riches for anyone to pick up. There are also other riches which require a little work to obtain, and the more you seek the more spiritual food you will find, but all God's truth is like that.
By the way, we need to remember that revelation, in the Bible, is one of the important ways in which God communicates with us. In prophecy, God gives words; in revelation He gives visions. The two often go together: the prophet will see visions, the seer will hear words. Whether we call it 'prophecy' or 'revelation' often depends on whether we find the words or the pictures more important.
The essential point to remember about Biblical revelation and prophecy is that they are both essentially the self-revelation of God. Prophecy is not primarily fore-telling but forth-telling: telling forth God's word; and God's word is, in essence, His nature, His character. In the ultimate self-revelation of God, His word becomes The Word, incarnate in the person of Jesus the Christ. The visions of Revelation, then, are to be understood primarily as God revealing Himself.
- Assumptions
I don't want to leave you with my interpretation of this book, but on the other hand, it is only fair to let you know my starting point, the assumptions I bring to the book. You can then decide whether you think they are helpful.
Firstly, and we have already mentioned this point, the book is a revelation of Jesus. There is more we need to say about that.
Secondly, I assume that the book was written for first century Christians. It was written in their language, it was expressed in concepts and images they were familiar with. I cannot believe that God would give them this book if it was impossible for them to understand.
Thirdly, I assume that this book was written for us. The early Christians may have expected Jesus to come back within their lifetime, but God knew when it was written that we would be here two thousand years later, reading it and seeking to get to know Him better through its pages.
And finally, I assume that the central message of this book and the most important truths are communicated simply and clearly. I believe you do not need a degree in theology, or four years of New Testament Greek to understand the main points. Spirit and truth - sensitivity to God's spirit, and a willingness to accept his truth are all we require.
- Schools of interpretation
The book of Revelation has been understood in many ways over the centuries. While everybody disagrees about the details, there are four main schools of interpretation.
- Pretarists place the Revelation in its first century setting and believe most of the events referred to in the book have already taken place.
- Historicists believe the Revelation describes the main events in world history from the time it was written to the end.
- Futurists place the events of Revelation primarily in the end times and believe most of the events described are still in the future.
- Idealists understand the events described in Revelation to be symbolic pictures of eternal truths.
I suspect that all four schools are right. Like every work of systematic theology - now I know this is a terrible piece of over-simplification, but I will say it anyway - like every work of systematic theology, they are right in what they affirm, but wrong in what they deny. They are true, but not the whole truth.
- What to look for
What truth should we be looking for in this book?
God did not write a book which most of His children would be unable to understand. God does not waste His words, or His visions. If He reveals, it is because He wants us to understand. If He wants us to understand, it is because He wants us to act. The action may be prayer, it may be to do nothing, but it will be different from what we would have done without the understanding granted by the revelation.
The Wise Men took a different route home because of the revelation they were given; Joseph took Mary and Jesus to Egypt. Most revelation in the Bible has a less immediate application because it is of more general relevance, but the basic principle is exactly the same.
God does not reveal things simply to satisfy our curiosity. When He reveals things about the future, it is to enable us to understand how to act. We cannot predict what will happen from prophecy or revelation: they enable us to recognise the events when they happen, and respond accordingly. We have many question which God has not seen fit to answer: God is not obliged to provide an answer just because we can think of a question. He answers the ones which show us how to live, and the rest will just have to wait.
I would like to suggest that prophecy and revelation together are given in this book for four main reasons.
- Firstly, they reveal the character and nature of God.
- Secondly, they reveal the true nature of the world in which we live.
- Thirdly, they reveal how we, as God's people, are called to live in this world.
- Finally, they reveal all we need to know and understand about the future in order for us to live rightly today.
- Levels of Meaning
- Multiple fulfilment
We said last time that God does not seek to trick or fool us. So nothing in the book is intended to be misleading. But while nothing is intentionally misleading, sometimes there are several levels of meaning. A prophecy which fore-tells the future can be fulfilled in several ways: the initial interpretation or fulfilment is not wrong, it is simply incomplete. While it is helpful to discover what people in the first century would have understood by the words, we need not be limited by their understanding.
To take a simple example: 'Out of Egypt have I called My son' was, when written, a description of the time God brought the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land. It was also fulfilled when Joseph brought Mary and Jesus back to Israel. It is also fulfilled in each of our lives when we were brought out of slavery to sin and death by the blood of Jesus, and again when we are each called from somewhere familiar to the place where God wants us to grow and exercise our ministry. Because it is true history, it shows us how God behaves. It is, at the same time, the record of an historic event, a prophecy fulfilled in Jesus, and a description of the way in which God steps into human lives and experience.
- God's word for today
We have not been granted complete revelation and understanding, only the degree which we need today. It is possible some of the visions of Revelation will be fulfilled in a literal way - some of the plagues and disasters could happen very much as described.
Perhaps the Beast or False Prophet will be an individual who is instantly recognised, or perhaps they stand for groups of people, multinational corporations, advertising agencies, popular 'movements', or perhaps something completely different - maybe something we can not imagine because it has not yet been invented.
The question of the final fulfilment of these images does not make any difference to us. We - or those who come after us - will only need to identify them when the time arrives. We only need to find out what God is saying to us today.
- The revelation of Jesus
So we are not expected to understand everything the book says.
But some of the content - in my opinion, the most important part -
is very, very simple. We talk about 'The Revelation of Saint
John' but that is clearly wrong. According to John, it is the
revelation of Jesus Christ. This revelation of Jesus was given to
His servant John so that John could pass it on to us.
This phrase, 'the revelation of Jesus' is very important. It
can be understood in two distinct ways, and they are both right.
Jesus is revealing to us things we need to know and understand.
But also, it is fundamentally a revelation about Jesus, revealing
to us aspects of Jesus which we may otherwise miss or fail to
appreciate fully.
- The Symbols
As soon as we start to try to understand what God is saying to us through this book, we have to face up to the images and symbols which pour out of its pages in such quantity. It is actually not difficult, as long as we limit ourselves to what God wants to tell us. After all, it is His desire and intention to communicate with us. He always tells us what we need to know in a language we can understand.
Many of the symbols we find are explicitly explained; others relate to other passages of scripture; and yet others to well known aspects of the culture of the time. While these different types of symbols operate in slightly different ways, a good starting point is to ask if it is referred to in the rest of te Bible, and if so, how is it used? The Bible, as always, is the key to interpreting the Bible.
- Functional
Many of the symbols are functional: we know what many objects do, and what they are generally used for. It doesn't take any great intelligence to know that...
- A candlestick gives light.
- A beast devours, kills and destroys.
Of course, this does not exhaust the meaning of the symbol. But it does give us a good starting point.
- Biblical and Cultural
Many of the symbols are straight out of the earlier pages of
the Bible. A basic familiarity with the rest of scripture makes
many references clear.
- The lamb refers to Jesus: the 'paschal' (Easter) lamb slain for us.
- The sea refers to the gentile nations, the nations of the world.
- Babylon is the world system, man trying to build a life and achievements without God.
- Jerusalem is God's home, and so the home of all true believers.
- Water gives life and refreshes the weary.
Many of the cultural symbols used elsewhere in the Bible are
also found here. For example, horses were used in war, so they
refer to the military.
- Numerical
Possible our greatest difficulty is with the symbolism of the many numbers we find in this book. But again, if you look through the Bible, time and time again, number are given more meaning than their arithmetical value.
- Three: God. The trinity, the three-in-one.
- Four: creation, mankind, the earth. The four winds, the four corners of the globe.
- Seven: perfection. Three plus four, God plus man.
- Six: sin, failure. One less than seven, less than perfect.
- Twelve: completeness. Three times four. God and man multiplied or 'filled out' by each other. The twelve tribes - all the tribes of Israel, all God's people.
- Ten: a round number.
- One thousand: a very large round number.
One final thing to point out before we move on is that many number are present but not explicitly mentioned in the book. If we look at the structure of the book, it is clear that it is not intended to be read as a simple history of the future, any more than a panel game on TV is intended to teach us about current affairs.
The main part of the book consists of seven distinct chunks. As you always find in a letter, this is sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion, giving us nine major sections in all. Each of these main sections can be divided into seven parts, and some of them divide into seven parts in two distinct ways.
- An Outline of the Book
- Prologue (1:1-20)
- Introduction (1:1-2)
- Blessing (1:3)
- Greeting (1:4-6)
- Theme (1:7-8)
- Testimony (1:9)
- Revelation (1:10-18)
- Instruction (1:19-20)
- Seven Letters (2:1-3:22)
- Ephesus (2:1-7)
- Smyrna (2:8-11)
- Pergamum (2:12-17)
- Thyatira (2:18-29)
- Sardis (3:1-6)
- Philadelphia (3:7-13)
- Laodicea (3:14-22)
- Seven Seals (4:1-8:1)
- The scene in heaven (4:1-5:14)
- 1-4. The first four seals: the four horsemen (6:1-8)
- 5. The fifth seal: martyrs (6:9-11)
- 6. The sixth seal: earthquake (6:12-17)
- God's servants will be preserved (7:1-8)
- The saints rewarded (7:9-17)
- 7. The seventh seal: silence (8:1)
- Seven Trumpets (8:2-11:19)
- The prayers of the Saints (8:2-5)
- 1-4. The first four trumpets: plagues (8:6-13)
- 5. The fifth trumpet: locusts (9:1-12)
- 6. The sixth trumpet: four angels (9:13-21)
- The little scroll (10:1-11)
- The two Witnesses (11:1-14)
- 7. The seventh trumpet: judgements and rewards (11:15-19)
- Seven People (12:1-15:4)
- The Woman and the Dragon (12:1-17)
- The Beast (13:1-10)
- The False Prophet (13:11-18)
- The companions of the Lamb (14:1-5)
- The Angels (14:6-13)
- The Gentiles (14:14-20)
- Moses and the Lamb (15:1-4)
- Seven Bowls (15:5-16:21)
- Introduction (15:5-8)
- 1-4. The first four bowls: pain and death (16:1-9)
- 5. The fifth bowl: darkness (16:10-11)
- 6. The sixth bowl: demons (16:12-14)
- Warning (16:15)
- Preparation for battle (16:16)
- 7. The seventh bowl: earthquake and hailstones (16:17-21)
- The Defeat of Babylon (17:1-19:21)
- The great Prostitute (17:1-7)
- Symbolism of the Beast and the Prostitute (17:8-18)
- An Angel announces the fall of Babylon (18:1-3)
- The people of God summoned to flee (18:4-8)
- The people of the world mourn for Babylon (18:9-24)
- Songs of victory in Heaven (19:1-10)
- The Beast and False Prophet defeated (19:11-21)
- The Victory of the Lamb (20:1-22:5)
- The reign of a thousand years (20:1-6)
- Satan defeated (20:7-10)
- The last judgement (20:11-15)
- The new heaven and earth (21:1-8)
- The new Jerusalem (21:9-21)
- Holiness (21:22-27
- Restoration and healing (22:1-5)
- Epilogue (22:6-21)
- The Angel (22:6)
- Jesus (22:7)
- John (22:8-11)
- Jesus (22:12-16)
- The Spirit and Bride(22:17)
- John(22:18)
- Conclusion(22:20-21)