In periods of great trouble in the world, the Church has instinctively turned to the book of Revelation, and it is doing so again in the troubles of our own day. And though the study of the book of Revelation, along with Daniel in particular, and the other prophetic books, has taken the Church to some strange places, both in the past and in our own day, to turn to it in trouble is the right instinct. For trouble wrests our attention from the temporal, and forces our focus on the eternal. And Revelation speaks loudest to those whose gaze is fixed on Eternity; those whom the troubles of this temporal life have driven to ask eternal questions: Is there a God? If so, what is he doing in the world? Why is there suffering? What is the purpose of life? And…how does it all end? God’s Answer to these eternal questions is Jesus Christ. And that is what (or perhaps Who) Revelation is chiefly about.

Both the name of the book and its fuller title, come from its opening words apokalypsis Iesou Christou… “The Revelation of Jesus Christ…”. The Greek word apokalypsis simply means ‘revelation’ or ‘unveiling’. And it is unfortunate that its English cognate Apocalypse has taken on a whole new (and a wholly different) meaning. And that brings us to the first, and perhaps the biggest problem with the book of Revelation. Why are people confused when they read it? Surely the result of reading a book called “Revelation” should lead to more rather than less clarity! For its title promises a “great unveiling”; the “big reveal.” This is the punchline of History, and it is going to be fully and finally understood. And yet if we are honest, we have to admit that the Church has been all over the place with the interpretation of this book. Many Christians simply gave up reading Revelation, not out of laziness, but out of a feeling that its meaning was hopelessly obscure. I know. I was one of them. And that is a great tragedy! The whole point of the book is that there is something, Someone, that God wants to reveal. This principle will calibrate us in our study of Revelation. If we find ourselves getting confused, or worse, if we find our way to a novel kind of clarity that nobody else shares, then we have missed the point (or perhaps the End or telos, the word that Revelation actually uses). And that is almost certainly because we are just asking the wrong questions.

So, a word about questions. The answers that we get from Scripture depend substantially on the questions that we ask. So it is important to be asking the right questions. This, I believe, is what trips so many of us up when we come to the book of Revelation in particular. For one reason or another, far too many have come to Revelation seeking, in the words of Tony Ling, a “coded message about the end of the world” rather than “the Revelation of Jesus Christ.” To treat Revelation this way is an insidious error for two reasons. The first is that, like the best deceptions, the error carries some truth. Revelation is at the End of the story and thus necessarily concerns the End of our story; indeed of our world as we know it. But the word telos in Greek has a double meaning, just as the word ‘end’ does in English. For the telos is not just the chronological end, but rather the point; the reason for and the meaning of everything. So that when Revelation shines a light on the End, all of a sudden, all of the means to that End can for the first time be understood. But this part of the message is not in code. The good news that God is putting it all back together in Christ, though once a mystery is now revealed. It is not hidden. Revelation spells it out. And this brings us to the second reason. The purpose of all of Scripture is surely to reveal God’s character, nature and purpose through Jesus Christ. In doing so, Scripture at times sheds some light on the Enemy and on what he is up to, but the Enemy is not the main character. We need to approach Revelation asking what it is that God is up to in the world, not what the Enemy is up to. Revelation will not tell us much about the World Bank or the UN (or the US!) or the WHO or Bitcoin or credit cards or the internet. It doesn’t mean to. To ask who the dragon is–John, seemingly anticipates this tendency and tells us almost in exasperation: “that ancient serpent called the devil or satan”–is to miss the Point, the Telos. And when we interrogate Revelation with questions of this nature we not only miss the Point, but we pervert the intent of Scripture as a whole.

I am tempted to say something like the message of Revelation has never been more needed than it is right now. But while that may well be true, its message was sorely needed by the Church at the end of the first century AD, the period when its words were penned. And of course, it has been appropriated in and applied to many other periods of the Church including the Fall of Rome, the Protestant Reformation, the world wars of the 20th century. Is this the hour of the Church’s greatest need? God alone knows, but the Churches of the First century, particularly the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, who were the original recipients of the Revelation undoubtedly thought that their own time was.

And that brings us to the secondary point of Revelation: “…which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.” Revelation does not only describe Jesus. There is no question that Revelation also describes events. And much of the argument over the meaning of Revelation concerns the interpretation of these events. Learning to read this genre of Scripture well reminds me of nostalgic memories in my childhood learning to watch cricket well with my Father. I say learning to watch it well, because believe it or not, like Revelation, cricket can be misunderstood if one does not understand the genre of sports broadcasting. Cricket is honestly a slow game. There is plenty of dead space between overs, and even between deliveries. And it has long been the practice of sports broadcasters to fill these gaps with analysis; with comparisons and with replays. When I was very young, this practice “caught me out” many times. I would be watching cricket with my Dad but was tuned out from the commentary. All of a sudden I would see a wicket fall but as I began to celebrate (“Dad! They’ve got another one!!”), my Dad, who was listening to the commentary but not watching the game would calmly say, “No son, that’s only a replay. That’s already happened.” So when I was learning to watch cricket, I got into the habit of asking my Father the following question: “Has this already happened, or is this happening now?” With biblical prophecy, we may do well to add to these two questions a third; “…or is this something that hasn’t happened yet?” Broadly speaking, these three questions correspond to three distinct approaches to Bible prophecy. Simplistically speaking, the belief that the events that Revelation refers to have already occurred is called preterism. The belief that the events describe the history of the world including the history of our own time–i.e. they are presently happening–is called historicism. The belief that Revelation describes future events is called futurism.

These descriptions are of course over-simplified but perhaps sufficient for a starting point. I need to say at the outset that I do not intend to select one of these approaches, or even to describe my reflections in these terms. The reason for this is that I do not believe that they are mutually exclusive. It seems to me self evident–and remember Revelation by definition deals with things that are, or at least are now, obvious–that Revelation describes the reality that the Church in the first century was facing. Even a cursory knowledge of early church history confirms this. But no knowledge outside of the New Testament is necessary. Revelation itself is addressed to actual churches in the First century and deals with, at least in chapters 2 and 3, the circumstances that those churches were facing in that time. So Preterism cannot be ruled out. However, Revelation describes the second coming of Christ and the coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth, which clearly has not happened yet. So Futurism must not be ruled out. And given the premise conceded by the vast majority of interpreters, that at least some of Revelation concerns events which have not yet occurred, historicism likewise cannot be ruled out, since ANY sequence of events detected means that even events future from the perspective if some readers will become present for other readers at some point. And surely it would be ridiculous to suggest that, when stretched taught over now nearly 2000 years, the (ever-problematic) designation “soon”, could not refer to ANY of the intervening events between the first century and our own.
There is one more “school of interpretation that sometimes vies for a place among the other three, and that is ‘idealism.’ The idealist view holds that Revelation describes neither exclusively what will happen, nor what is happening, or even indeed what has happened. Revelation describes in a general sense the sorts of things which tend continually to happen. As with the other views we find this approach to be at times self evident and at other times plain wrong. There are always churches that tend towards loveless legalism, just as there are always churches that are lukewarm that lull themselves into the false belief that they are spiritually alive when they are not. In the same way, what is good and of God is always opposed by what is evil and from the Enemy. But on the other hand, the Second Coming of Christ is not a metaphor, and the end of the world can happen by definition only once. Revelation of course teaches ‘ideally’ as does the rest of Scripture, but this is not the only way that it teaches. Allegories (or parables) are present in Scripture–more so I believe than we often realise–but as the Reformers taught us, we should never stray too far from the literal interpretation of the text. And so here again we find the desire for ‘neatness’ in our approach, which insists that these so-called schools of thought must be mutually exclusive, to be frustrated. They are all useful approaches

So much then to schools of interpretation, and to the division that they bring. Each approach is found to be useful, but only to a point. For when we slavishly adhere to any method, model, or approach to interpretation, we ascribe to method a place that only Scripture should hold and a value that only Scripture possesses. Humility demands that we should at least consider each of the approaches, just as faithfulness to the unique nature and claims of Scripture demands that method submit as servant, not rule as master.

As we approach each part of Revelation in turn then, we should be guided by questions like the following:

What does this passage reveal about the person of Christ? And thus,
What does this passage reveal about the character of God?
What does this passage reveal about the Church’s past? and thus,
What does this passage reveal about the Church’s present?
What might this passage reveal about the Church’s future?
How do the things revealed in this passage bring light to and make sense of other passages of Scripture?
How does this passage contribute to the overall message of the Revelation?