Revelation, Part 1: It Is All in the Symbols

There is no shortage of material on Revelation, and most of it offers to tell you the timing, the world players, and the geopolitics of the end. It's often entertaining and it always leaves us unsatisfied — Jesus himself said no one knows the timing of his return. So this four-part series takes a different approach: Revelation as great literature, and the literary challenges of studying it. Foreword and Introduction. Revelation means to unveil or disclose; the Greek behind it gives us "apocalypse," which we have since narrowed to mean the end of the world. John received the vision on Patmos around AD 96, exiled under Domitian, ninety miles from the coast of what is now Turkey — a date confirmed by Irenaeus, a second-generation disciple of John himself. Sixty-three years earlier, John had leaned against Jesus at the Last Supper. Now, an old man, he falls down as though dead. Chapter 1:19 sets the structure for everything that follows: the things you have seen, the things that are, and the things that are to take place after this. Chapters 2–3 are the things that are — Christ's messages to seven churches, six of them planted out from Ephesus. Chapters 4–22 are the things to come, opening with the throne room and the scroll that only the Lion of Judah, the Lamb who was slain, is worthy to open. Part 1 — The medium of communication. Scripture uses prose, poetry, types, and symbols. John uses symbols, and almost everything in Revelation is one. The other book that works this way is Daniel — Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, the four beasts — which is why the Old Testament is the best available key. When the sea appears, it stands for the Gentile nations; when the land appears, it points to Israel. That is how the two beasts of chapter 13 come into focus. Part 2 — Secondary gain. Borrowed from medicine, "secondary gain" names the hidden advantages a person gets from a condition. Scholars and churchmen carry their own, consciously or not, and nowhere do they show more than in Revelation. Andrew works through chapter 12 — the woman clothed with the sun, the dragon, the male child — and shows how Joseph's dream in Genesis identifies the woman as Israel, and how traditions committed to the view that God is finished with the Jews must read her as something else. The same pressure appears again over the 144,000 and the great multitude in chapter 7. The takeaway for the reader: know what biases you, and your church, bring to the table, because they will determine what you get out of this book. And one command to carry regardless of where you land on any of it: do not take the mark of the beast, and do not worship the beast. Next episode: the schools of interpretation. — The Bible in 3D is a Christ-centered Bible teaching podcast from Cogworks Media, hosted by Andrew. 🔗 More shows and ways to give: cogworksmedia.org Cogworks Media is a 501(c)(3) public charity — gifts are tax-deductible. Music: The Epic Hero by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/