Please Press the Button to PanicO Book of Revelation, what woes thou hast wrought! First of all, your title is in the singular, but you boast a multiplicity of visions, with the result that English-speakers keep on calling you by the plural “Revelations.” I hate that. It’s like saying, “Our reading today is from Psalms 23.” Yet even worse than a misassigned suffix—and that’s pretty bad—is the historically robust habit of using you, dear Revelation, and your imaginative numerology to predict the end of the world. As soon as it became clear that Jesus was probably not returning within the lifetime of the apostles, it became good sport to try and nail down the date of the Last Day. And there you were at hand to help. Justin Martyr kicked off the game with his anticipation of a millennial kingdom. The otherwise lovable Irenaeus had some fun with your sixes and your thousands, setting a most unfortunate precedent for those who would scry in the glass of your prophesies while ignoring his warning: “It is therefore more certain and less hazardous to await the fulfillment of the prophecy than to be making surmises and casting about for any names that may present themselves, inasmuch as many names can be found possessing the number mentioned; and the same question will, after all, remain unsolved” (Against Heresies V.30.3. My italics because they didn’t have italics back then). Despite a few mild efforts to calculate the end every century or so, and the big scare at the turn of the year 1000, your reputation really soared after medieval Italian monk Joachim of Fiore gave a new lease on life to dispensationalism with his neat division of world history according to the three Persons of the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas refuted him, but Joachim proved more exciting than Thomas. Evidently exciting is better than correct. Jump ahead to the Reformation and you enjoyed a fresh surge of predictions of millennial reigns and/or final fire: Müntzer, Hut, Stifel, Hoffmann, Matthys… and, sigh, even some seriously stressed-out magisterial reformers on their worst days. By the time you got to the nineteenth century, end-time predictions were coming fast and thick, and they haven’t slowed down since. Even the secular-minded have gotten in on the action, unwilling to be left out of the fun. The Cold War was good for apocalyptic fears. So was Y2K. Climate change activism would not summon the energy it does without the recurring human need to panic about mass destruction. And yet, dear Revelation, as you and I both know: the world has still not come to an end. On the basis of the exhaustive research I undertook to ascertain that fact, I wish to share a statistic I just calculated off the top of my head: Predictions of the end of the world have had a 100% failure rate. But hey, you never know—the next doomsayer might get lucky. (For an impressive list of the ones who were “unlucky,” take a gander over here.) It’s about Christ, StupidLet’s face it, Revelation, you and I got off to a rocky start. I never even noticed you until a certain series of novels, subsequently made into movies, captivated the public’s attention. You can’t exactly blame me for thinking you were more trouble than you were worth. Nor was I the first to draw that conclusion. The early Christians intuited your trouble-making potential, with the result that you were one of the last books to be recognized as holy Scripture. (And you’re still disputed in some churches. Sorry about that, but you brought it on yourself.) What finally won over the faithful centuries ago, and me much more recently, was not your neat closure to the story that began in Genesis—though that’s a pretty good bonus feature—but your extraordinary christology. Your witness to Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, is without parallel. Here are some of the extravagant names, titles, and adjectives you assign to Jesus: faithful witness
firstborn of the dead
ruler of the kings of the earth
the first and the last
the living one
alive forevermore
Son of God
the Amen
Lion of the tribe of Judah
root of David
Lamb who was slain
Word of God
King of kings and Lord of lords
the beginning and the end
bright morning star I’m charmed by the thought of Christ as “the Amen”; thanks especially for that one. But I’m most moved by your apposition of Christ the Lion with Christ the Lamb. In ch. 5, your narrator John weeps that no one has been found worthy to open the seven-sealed scroll, until an elder comforts him with the words, “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” I therefore expected that a lion would come bounding forth like Aslan in all his glory, ferocious and magnificent. But you surprised me. When the Lion appears, he’s actually a Lamb! Not only that, but a Lamb “standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and seven eyes.” Your Lion-Lamb-Christ does not win by killing. He wins by being killed. That takes my breath away every time. This truth echoes across your pages all the way to ch. 19, when Christ finally appears in human form. In righteousness he “judges and makes war,” like a good Lion should. And yet, he is “clothed in a robe dipped in blood”: his own blood. And “the name by which he is called is The Word of God,” which is the only sword he will use to strike down the nations. It is by speaking the true things of God—God’s judgment on everything evil and sinful, and God’s desire to have mercy and win back His creation—that Christ fights. That is why and how he is the King of kings and Lord of lords. You illustrate the point magnificently. A Good Story, but the Special Effects Were DisappointingWhen I finally got around to paying you the attention you deserve, dear Revelation, I discovered that you are fixated on Jesus, not on signs, portents, omens, or bloody battles. Those things are a side show, at best. I found, for example, that after the seven churches have received their seven letters in chs. 2 and 3, narrator John looks up and “behold, a door standing open in heaven!” By the power of the Spirit he finds himself in the throne room of God. I admit that I felt the frisson: aha, here’s where the real information will be disclosed! Now I’ll get to eavesdrop on all the secrets of God and decipher the key to the truth behind current and historical events! But precisely by luring me on in this way, you showed me how misplaced my priorities were. The business of heaven is not the Creator’s conspiracy against His creatures, but worship of the Creator by His creatures. Destruction, monsters, and enigmas are only secondary players in your story. Even after that, my heart may still have been set on slaughter. I may have fast-forwarded to ch. 12, equipped myself with popcorn and a refill, and settled down to watch the cataclysmic “war in heaven” montage: St. Michael the archangel facing off against the dragon and his minions in an orgy of carnage as only God’s enemies deserve. You sure disappointed my bloodlust. The bad guys got kicked out of heaven in about a verse and a half. No battle scene at all! In its place, the heavenly chorus singing Christ’s praises. Again. I still hadn’t learned my lesson. I skipped ahead again and landed in ch. 20, where I eagerly beheld Satan and Gog and Magog assembled on the battlefield, ready to make war on the saints. But they didn’t even get to fire a first volley. Instead, fire from heaven consumed them and they got locked up in the lake of fire. At least this time you allotted a whole four verses to dispense with the bad guys. And then another three to finish off Death and Hades. But this time, I got the point you were trying to make. It’s not just that your battle scenes are undeveloped. It’s that, although the dragon and the beast and their false prophet unleash malicious mischief on earth, and much of it bloody, their real project is deception. The beast looks a bit like the Lamb that is Christ. Evil is not original enough to come up with its own look! But that’s its best strategy. It wants to confuse people about the difference between the true God and false gods. (May I suggest that evil also wants to confuse people about the true and false use of your very words?) Later, the beast calls up the false prophet, which resembles it as well: you depict evil as an assembly line of fakes instead of precious originals. In perfect accord with their aping, unoriginal nature, the dragon-beast-false prophet trio speak lies, untruths, and fake news. Which means that salvation can only come not from swords but from words—God’s words. And God’s Word. Which is Jesus Christ. That’s what you’re all about. “Apocalypse”—our English transliteration of your Greek ἀποκάλυψις—does not mean “a gruesome bloodbath that gratifies my unholy desire to see bad guys suffer.” It simply means the same as your title, which it translates: “Revelation.” And all that means is taking the wrapping paper off a present or the lid off a pot to reveal what’s underneath. You are a revelation not of history’s secret meaning or timing, of disasters or of horrors. You are simply a “revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:1). Apocalypse ThenKnowing all this doesn’t make you any less weird, though. Nothing in your pages is quite what it seems, and I’m never sure if your characters are real or symbols or Nero. Or Gorbachev. The problem lies with me, though. I’m just not used to apocalypse as a genre. But I’ve come up with an analogy that helps me make sense of what you’re doing. Imagine I read a sci-fi novel about space travel to distant planets and, on completion, complained that the book was useless because it didn’t contain blueprints for the rocket ship. The correct response to my complaint would be scornful laughter and the counter-protest that I had read not a technical manual, but a story. In the same way, dear Revelation, I ought not complain that you are scant on advice for surviving the zombies, or that you keep your code too well encoded. You are not there to provide me with assembly instructions or a schedule of debacles. You are there to expand my vision. I see this in the way you struggle to express the inexpressible in your chains of awkwardly couched metaphors. Christ appears in ch. 1 “like a son of man… like wool… like snow…” The almighty God and Father, Who according to Old Testament strictures cannot be depicted as a human or an animal, you resort to portraying with mineralogical metaphors: “And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald” (4:3). Even sound defies one-to-one correspondence with earthly experience: “And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps” (14:2). So your curious symbols and images are not some kind of secret cipher or the PIN number to God’s bank account. You proffer them to help me make connections, to see the old in a new light, to correlate the ordinary-earthly with the extraordinary-divine. I have to take the symbols on your terms, not mine. To be honest, if I saw a lamb with seven heads, I wouldn’t think, “Oh! It’s Jesus my savior!” I’d think, “Ugh! Some mad scientist performed an experiment that went horribly wrong!” But in your symbolic language, the seven-headed Lamb is a powerful symbol of the victorious savior made perfect in death. Same thing with your numbers: they do not intend to provide algebraic or algorithmic clues to clever cryptographers so they can calculate the Last Day down to the hour, minute, and second. You have been manipulated into providing bogus timelines, but your actual purpose is to teach divine meaning, such as: 3 = God/Trinity, occurring 9 times, which is 3 squared
4 = created world, as in the 4 points of the compass
6 = imperfect number, being one short of 7 (so 666 is really imperfect)
7 = completion or perfection (God’s Spirit is sevenfold)
10 = all of something
12 = the people of God, as in the 12 tribes of Israel and 12 apostles
24 = both the Old and New Testament people of God,
the double of 12
144,000 = 12 x 12 x 10 x 10 x 10 = all Israel and all apostles
and everything else three times over I was so relieved when I realized that 144,000 is the exact opposite of a literal and therefore restrictive signifier. Instead, symbolically, it is the most expansive number imaginable. And it’s better than, say, “infinity,” because the twelves relate directly to the history of salvation. In fact, right after the 144,000 are mentioned, your narrator John adds: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (7:9). I’ve learned your lesson: don’t try to number the saved! Parallel Lines Converge
at the HorizonSo far I’ve gotten a handle on Jesus the counterintuitive conqueror, the underwhelming fight scenes, and the symbols straining toward divine reality. But I intuit, dear Revelation, that you also possess something like a plot. It is not a conventional or linear plot, though. You begin at the beginning, but your beginning is before the beginning—in the eternal life of “him who is and who was and who is to come.” And your ending is both the end to end all endings and the conditionality of an end yet to arrive. In between, the progress through your middle is anything but straight. Your time in nonlinear, more like a spiral than an arrow. In chapters 6–11, you offer a front-row seat on the disasters taking place on earth as one scroll after another releases its plagues. But when you reach ch. 12, you don’t move past these plagues: instead, you broadcast them a second time, not from the ground up but from top down. You momentarily grant a God’s-eye view of the same disasters and their transmundane origin in the battle of satanic powers against God. Time does some funky gymnastics again when you introduce us to the woman clothed with the sun. She is beautiful, radiant, and crowned with twelve stars—a sign that she represents both Israel and the church, and especially the one person who is the hinge between them: Jesus’ mother Mary. But in your apocalyptic time warp, she is both pregnant with her miraculous child and at the same time giving birth to the child, who is immediately caught up to heaven out of the clutches of the dragon, thereby telescoping Jesus’ incarnation, birth, resurrection, and ascension all into one mega-moment. You consider it perfectly acceptable to mix up different and distanced historical events like that. It’s your apocalyptic prerogative. You are so intricate that you even boast a second type of narrative progress: not by plot events, but by cumulative disclosures of who and what Jesus Christ is. It goes something like this: chs. 1–3: the letter scroll
in which the seven churches are addressed and challenged by Jesus
Jesus = prophet chs. 4–11: the worship scroll
in which the heavenly worship of Jesus is made visible and audible,
alternating with earthly disasters
Jesus = priest chs. 12–20: the war scroll
in which Jesus conquers the dragon, beast, and false prophet,
along with Death and Hades, forever and ever
Jesus = king chs. 21–22: the wedding scroll
in which Jesus pledges his troth to his embattled people
and takes them on an everlasting honeymoon in the New Jerusalem
Jesus = bridegroom Even with my apocalyptically retrained eyes, though, I have to wonder: where exactly am I in this story? Where is my time? Your confused enthusiasts love to place their own time pretty near the end time, and no number of bad calls seems to deter their misguided efforts. Meanwhile, your doubling-back and looping storyline tempts me to the depressing conclusion that this story is never going to end, and that the martyrs are going to keep on being slain, with no vindication and no reward. To both of us, however, you declare: “You don’t know what moment you’re in, except that you’re embedded in God’s battle against evil. But this story will end. And like all good stories, this one ends with a wedding.” The Audiences of RevelationI grasp that your nonlinearity means you talk about things that have already happened in the past, especially during the Roman persecution of the early Christians; and about things that will happen at the end of all time; and about things happening now. But you don’t do that last bit in an obvious way that stacks up perfectly with the daily news. (Please take note of my sideways glare at The Late Great Planet Earth). Rather, you offer commentary on what habitually unfolds in human society. Babylon in ch. 18 is symbolic of Rome, but it is also a set of observations on civilization as such. All of which raises the question: who actually needs you? Whom do you intend to serve? Is it the people of the past, the present, or the future? As part of Scripture, you are—of course—for all who do or would believe in the lordship of Jesus Christ. But you were written by and for persecuted Christians. You are not a disclosure of ultimate vindication to those who sit in peace and idleness with enough time on their hands to compute comet trajectories. You are a book that has been misinterpreted most often from a position of security. And yet, as you make so painfully clear, even the persecuted are in danger of being poisoned by their persecution. You comfort and uphold Jesus’ faithful under fire, but you also make demands of them. Your first demand is that they confess that good and evil, God and evil, are not equal powers. However much the disciples are suffering, evil has not gained the upper hand over good or over God. The Lamb looks weak, but his conquest is a denial of the power of violence to overcome his self-sacrifice. The other demand you make of the faithful is to relinquish their revenge fantasies. The martyrs under the altar, singing along with the Psalms of Israel, complain, “How long?” You don’t give them an answer; you only tell them to wait. Not for their own good—but for the good of their tormentors! God’s patience gives the evil a chance to repent. Which means: Christ’s martyrs have to be like Christ, waiting out however much time is needed. The evil have refused God’s language of grace and mercy, so God makes one last attempt to get their attention in the only language they can understand: horror. The result is that some turn to Him, though some still don’t. But even at their worst, the horrors sent by God intend, ultimately, mercy. In this way, you are also a book for the hard of heart. You present yourself in brutal imagery in order to catch the attention of the brutal. But not for the purpose of confirming them—or their victims—in brutality. Rather, you aim to draw all eyes to the Lamb who was slain. Repent, for the End Is
Probably Not NighYou begin, dear Revelation, with God the Father’s announcement of Himself: “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’” (1:8). He doesn’t speak again until the very end: “Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (22:12–13). God’s speech appearing only at the beginning and at the end is your structural paraphrase of the proclamation that He is the Alpha and the Omega, and that everything inside the universe is His. The culmination of His universe is the city with twelve foundations whose twelve gates stand open day and night. With Satan defeated forever, there’s no need for locked doors anymore. So despite all the Sturm-und-Drang of cataclysms and catastrophes, armageddons and annihilations, your message is primarily “grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth” (1:4–5): grace and peace from the holy Trinity, Lord of all. I get it now! And this has taught me a surprising lesson. You are not only, dear Revelation, not about timelines and codes; you are also a crash course in abandoning all pretense to knowledge of God’s ways apart from the grace and peace of Jesus Christ. You are a tirade against the false gnosis of conspiracy theories. You are a relentless exposure of false prophecies, cheaply made and quickly discarded, that cut down the faith of the faithful time and again. In other words, you are the boot camp of faith alone. And from your pages I have learned to be a radical amillennialist. In case, dear Revelation, you are unaware of the terminology you have inspired, allow me to bring you up to date: Postmillennialism is the optimistic philosophy of history that says every way, in every day, we’re getting better and better; and with our steady efforts we’ll gradually transform the world into such a good place that it will establish Christ’s thousand-year reign in advance of his actual return. Postmillennialism’s greatest popularity was among 19th and 20th century liberal Protestants and activists. Nowadays it has moved almost entirely into the secular realm, though most secular folks have no idea that they espouse it or where it came from (and, of course, omit the Christ part). Premillennialism is the one the bad novels and movies are based on: the belief that Christ will descend to the earth and establish his reign before the final end, possibly rapturing the faithful out of the way before the Great Tribulation. This notion fed the failed prophecies of Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, underlies the wacky theories of John Nelson Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible, and inspires a lot of foolhardy (to say the least) political proposals. And then there’s amillennialism. An amillennialist can recognize a symbol when she sees one, and thus proudly proclaims her radical ignorance of the timeline of history because, after all, it’s God’s job to know when the end is and God’s job to bring it about. But you won’t let me stop at confessing my ignorance about the end, dear Revelation. You urge on me the virtue, not of ignorance, but of acknowledgment my ignorance—of confessing all that I do not know and cannot know, but am daily tempted to pretend I do know. I pretend to know what I don’t know, in order to disguise my refusal to trust in God’s knowing all things without my help. I pretend to know what I don’t know, in order to hook other people with my panic and pressure them into the accomplishment of my religious agenda. But you, dear Revelation, don’t want me to trust in my manufactured insider knowledge or my half-cocked theories. You want me instead to be like Christ, who also acknowledged his own ignorance of the timing of the end (Mark 13:32). You want me, like Christ, to trust our Father in heaven. This is hard. I am humiliated by my ignorance. I am distrustful of God. So I along with so many others have tried to exploit you, dear Revelation, into securing me with secret knowledge that I can hang on to without needing to turn to God at all. I may not do this with trashy religious novels or date-and-time predictions. I may hide it under the guise of my pet cause or my personal crusade. I may proclaim decline and doom; or progress and prosperity; or even indulge in the vanity of thinking my time is super-special and juuuuuust-right. But you remind me that even making that judgment call is buying into a dispensationalist scheme, then trying to turn a profit by selling shares in it. You assure me that, yes, Jesus will come again in glory. But you also assure me, dear Revelation, that whether I see his return someday, or simply face my own personal apocalypse in the form of death, in either case it will be the same Jesus, who is always coming, coming soon, coming to my now. And who is always inviting me to his wedding feast. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (3:20).
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