Revelation.

1 Revelation 1:1–5, 9

The Call to Keep What Is Written

G. K. Chesterton said of Revelation that though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators (Chesterton, 29). In joining the company of those commentators, at least one goal is not to join Chesterton’s wild bunch, whose number are legion. Recent history might include David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and Hal Lindsey, whose book The Late Great Planet Earth was the best-selling American book of nonfiction in the 1970s and who wrote subsequent, widely read books with titles such as The Last and Future World and The Terminal Generation (see Collins, 232).

For centuries, the book of Revelation has been the supposed source of much turmoil in the church—supposed because the turmoil is foisted upon the book rather than the book instigating the turmoil. For example, in the standoff between law enforcement negotiators and David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, one of the negotiating items was giving Koresh time to finish his interpretation of Revelation. However, it was not the encounter with the book of Revelation that drove David Koresh over the edge. His own tormented vision hooked into the book, twisting its meaning and intention. The church’s greatest difficulty with the book of Revelation has been with those who have misused the text.

One of the many unhelpful myths that abound with regard to Revelation is that through the centuries everyone has arbitrarily interpreted the book in his or her own way, resulting in an endless variety of interpretations, a trackless jungle.—Boring, Revelation, Interpretation, 47.

As a result, the frequent strategy has been to give up on Revelation, either by conscious choice or by neglect. For example, the Common Lectionary includes only a few passages from Revelation. The historical precedent for this cursory use of Revelation reaches back to the Reformation and earlier. The reformers Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli basically gave up on the book of Revelation. John Calvin wrote a commentary on every other book of the New Testament, but conveniently left out Revelation. And, in fact, the objections to the use of Revelation go back to the earliest centuries of the church.

The task in this first unit and the succeeding units of this study is to see how we can benefit from the serious reading of Revelation as part of scripture, a part of that document which in a variety of ways is the Word of God to us. The task is to claim the blessing of Revelation: Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near (1:3).

Blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it.—Revelation 1:3

Literary Genre

With the exception of the latter half of the book of Daniel, the book of Revelation is unique among the sixty-six books that make up our scripture. Because there is so little quite like it in our Bible, modern readers often fail to note that it is part of a large body of literature that was produced by Jews, Christians, Greeks, and Romans. This kind of work, this genre, is often called apocalyptic literature.

I can pull off my bookshelf a volume titled The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. It contains 995 pages of small print, excluding the 36-page introduction (it makes a very nice bookend to hold up other books!). It is a collection of literary documents and fragments that were relatively contemporaneous with Revelation. Although often strange to our sensibilities and thoughts, the book of Revelation stands within a whole series of literary works that share many of the same set pieces. These set pieces in apocalyptic literature include such things as conversations with angels, trips to heaven, judgment scenes, earthquakes, the sun turning black, fascination with numbers, and so forth.

In some ways, it is like the television commercial for a particular brand of spaghetti sauce, where the Italian mother is suspicious of the off-the-shelf spaghetti sauce. What about the basil? is the question the mother asks of the daughter. It’s in there, comes the response. What about the garlic? says the wary mother. It’s in there, repeats the daughter. What about oregano? a still-worried mother queries. It’s in there, says the daughter once again. When it comes to spaghetti sauce, implies the commercial, there are certain items that are expected be in there.

When it comes to apocalyptic literature, there are some things that one expects to see. For most modern readers, unfamiliar with the corpus of apocalyptic literature, the great and fantastic variety of Revelation strikes us as unique. But much that we find here is what was expected in this sort of literature. The fantastic visions are the means of expression.

[A professor] used to tell his classes of a student who complained, ‘I don’t understand Revelation, but every time I read it, I feel like singing.’ ‘That is understanding it!’ was the reply.—William R. Ramsay, The Westminster Guide to the Books of the Bible (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 513.

Biblical Context

We need to see the book of Revelation in its literary context. We also need to see it in relation to the rest of our Bible. In some ways, it would be fair to say the book of Revelation says nothing that has not already been said in the previous sixty-five books of scripture. What is new in the book of Revelation is a new way to say it. What is new is not the content, but the means of saying it.

For example, in the 404 verses of the book of Revelation, there are more than 500 allusions to the Old Testament. These Old Testament references are allusions, because there are never any direct quotes, only phrases and images.

The book of Revelation is thus a montage, a mosaic, a collection of Old Testament phrases that pile on top of each other. For an audience of the first century, steeped in the Hebrew scriptures (and their Greek translations), these allusions would ring loudly. By and large, we are somewhat deaf to them and need hearing aids—or study aids—so that we can see how the allusions pile up on each other.

The God who speaks here is not a different God from the one heard in the words of the biblical prophets.—Boring, Revelation, Interpretation, 64.

Consider this example. Suppose I wanted to make a movie about a woman named Scarlett. Scarlett, together with her dog Toto and her butler named Rhett, take in some children whose mother has died. Confronting the children’s grief, she tells them that tomorrow, and each day after that, is another day. Scarlett builds up the children’s faith so that they will be prepared to climb every mountain, to stay fixed on the few favorite things that make them happy. Somewhere—perhaps somewhere over the rainbow—Scarlett, her dog, and the butler will find happiness for these children, and there will be sounds of music.

Now, if you have seen Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and The Sound of Music, you catch the rather obvious borrowings that are going on. If you haven’t seen Gone with the Wind, then the name Scarlett and a butler named Rhett will mean no more than names taken at face value.

The book of Revelation is a montage of Old Testament allusions. It rings of the Old Testament. So, in some ways, it may be said that in compacting more than 500 Old Testament allusions in 404 verses, there is nothing new in the book of Revelation—only a new way to say it.

The Writer

We know his name is John; he tells us that. What he does not say is which John he is. John was as common a name in ancient times as it is today. He does not claim to be the apostle, the brother of James and the son of Zebedee; he gives no indication that he was a fisherman; he does not refer to particular aspects of Jesus’ earthly ministry beyond the fact that he was crucified and was resurrected by God. He is just John.

Within the next hundred and fifty years after the book was written, there was debate in the church about whether this John was the apostle John, the son of Zebedee. Some said it was; others said no. Frankly, it may not matter. What we have is a work of a man who was banished from his home because of his Christian faith. He became a refugee, unable to return home, living on the island of Patmos in the Mediterranean Sea. We know that social ostracism, economic oppression, and the beginnings of state persecution for Christians were already at hand and threatened to get much worse.

We may not get very far in saying much about the biography of this man named John, but we can say what he does in his work. We can speak of his vocation or his calling, evident through the book of Revelation. And it is threefold: theologian, poet, and pastor (Peterson, 4–8).

John the Theologian

Revelation 1:2 declares that he, John, bears witness to the word (which in Greek is logos) of God (which in Greek is theos). From these two words, theos (God) and logos (word), we get our word theology: the word about God, God-talk.

Why was John sent to Patmos?

Boring (81) writes that Patmos was a small island about seventy-five miles west of Ephesus. Archaeological evidence indicates that in John’s time Patmos was a fortified island belonging to Miletus, with a quality Greek school and shrines to Artemis and Apollos. There is no evidence of its being a ‘penal colony,’ but the island was used by the Romans as a place of banishment for troublemakers, real and potential.

There are pressures to reduce God to only that which we cannot explain or understand, to only those experiences where we are up against the limits (as in the old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes). God is pushed out to the periphery of our experience; few can say with much conviction that we have experienced God.

The theologian offers his mind in the service of saying God in such a way that God is not reduced or packaged or banalized, but known and contemplated and adored, with the consequence that our lives are not cramped into what we can explain but exalted by what we worship. (Peterson, 4)

We need theologians who keep us thinking about God, not ignoring God or making random guesses. We need persons like John who bring together logos (word) and theos (God). We are, in some sense, human because of our capacity to create and use words. To bring words together with God is to render some sense to the chaos around us. Otherwise the world is a madhouse of ecological disasters like oil spills and holes in ozone, of nuclear disasters about to happen (we can destroy the world if we use the accumulated might in our arsenal), of personal disasters of illness, suicide, addiction, failure, meanness of spirit. We need theologians to say a word about God that cuts through the chaos and brings us life. And John is a theologian.

John’s hope for the future is not based on some hidden discovery of exactly how or when the end will come, but on what was then, and is today, at the very heart of the Christian faith: that we need not fear the final outcome of history, for we have seen its face in Jesus Christ.—González and Gonázlez, Revelation, Westminster Bible Companion, 10.

John the Poet

John is also a poet.

A poet uses words not to explain something, and not to describe something, but to make something. Poet (poétés) means maker. Poetry is not the language of objective explanation but the language of imagination. We do not have more information after we read