Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation
We bless you, Lord God, that you have disclosed yourself to us so richly and wonderfully in your most Holy Word. Here we find things to encourage us when we are discouraged, to rebuke us when we are haughty, to instruct us when we are ignorant, to abase us when we are proud, and to build us up when we are crumbling.
We thank you that here we discover in matchless terms the dimensions of your love. Here we find the Lord Christ, the very epitome of your self-disclosure to us, the ground of our hope, the object of our faith. The one who bore our sins in his own body on the tree that we might be declared the righteousness of God in him.
We thank you, Lord God, that even the angels of heaven cover their faces with their wings as they approach the throne and cry, “Holy, holy, holy.” Grant, therefore, that as we study this book our response might be similar. For to us has been given the ineffable privilege of being children of the living God, a privilege unknown by angels.
Grant, Lord God, that we may be so drawn to the risen Christ, the one who as your agent made us, the one who redeemed us, the one who has become one of us, a human being, and yet is even now exalted to the right hand of the majesty on high. Grant that this might not only be 10 weeks of instruction, but 10 weeks of worship, 10 weeks of reverence, 10 weeks of faith-building that stabilizes us and prepares us not only for this life, but for the life to come. We ask for Jesus’ sake, amen.
Let me begin with some general comments about the book of Revelation, at least. F.F. Bruce tells the story of a keen Christian at a British university who was passing out free copies of a modern English New Testament to undergraduates as part of his evangelistic endeavors on the condition that these students would read them. He gave one particular one away and, lo and behold, he bumped into the student two or three months later and said, “Did you read that book I gave you?”
The student said, “Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.” “Well, what did you make of it?” This undergraduate was completely unfamiliar with anything biblical, had never been to church, just one of the great unwashed people in most Western nations nowadays without any sort of biblical or theological training whatsoever. “What did you make of it?” “Well,” he said, “It was all right. A bit repetitious at the front end where they sort of tell the same story four times, but I sure liked that bit of science fiction at the end.”
Isn’t that revealing? Here you find a fairly bright student who realizes intuitively, however well or poorly it’s put, that at the end of the day the interpretation of literature requires some kind of recognition of genre. You don’t interpret all texts the same way. They’re not all chronicles. They’re not all parables. They’re not all poems. They’re not all history.
The Bible is made up of many different genres. Judges. You even have Jotham’s fable. That is, you have nature creatures … in this case trees … representing human beings, like in Aesop’s fables, certain categories of people. Do you see? Then you also have parables that Jesus tells. Then you have these beatitudes or macarisms. (If you’re brought up in a Catholic tradition they’re called macarisms instead of beatitudes.)
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It’s not case law. It’s not telling you to build a ledge around your rooftop so that nobody falls off, as Leviticus does. Part of the interpretation of any text involves some kind recognition of genre, doesn’t it? Most such recognitions for us are intuitive.
Even if you’ve never had a course in English literature beyond high school, most things that you read, you intuitively make adjustments. You don’t take advert copy, for example, in exactly the same way that you take the funnies, the comics on the weekend. You don’t take those exactly the same way that you take the editorial page. You don’t take the editorial page exactly the same way that you take a circular announcing a police clamp-down on speeders in your district or whatever. You make the adjustments.
But supposing you’re exposed to a genre of literature that you’ve never faced before. Because all kinds of cultures develop kinds of literature that we’ve never had. Then, what do you make of it? Clearly this undergraduate student was trying to make sense of the apocalypse. The closest thing in his experience was science fiction.
The first thing to recognize about the book of Revelation is that it belongs to a category, a genre, of literature that was not uncommon from about the second century BC to toward the end of the second century AD in both Jewish and Christian circles. Today that genre is labeled apocalyptic.
It has certain characteristics. Like most literary genres, you can’t draw tight boundaries. It’s hard to draw tight boundaries, for example, around something like poetry. You move far enough out and you’re slipping off into prose, aren’t you? There are some genres that are very tightly defined, like a sonnet, but what’s a short story? How short is a short story? Could a short story be history? Could a short story be satire? Could a short story be a fable?
Well, yes, to all of those questions, because short story is not so tightly defined a genre that once you’ve got that genre, you don’t have any other. So likewise, apocalyptic gets fuzzy around the edges. It overlaps with prophecy. It overlaps also with what’s called paraenesis, words of exhortation to other people.
It overlaps also with various kinds of hortatory, rebuke. That is, passages that tell you what not to do in a sort of exhorting sort of way. In the purest forms you can say, “Yes, this is apocalyptic and this is not,” but around the edges, people will dispute a little bit what belongs in the genre or not.
If this were an ideal course, we had unlimited time, we didn’t have 10 weeks, there were no restraints like that, and you really wanted to probe the book of Revelation, the smart thing to do would be to get you to read first about 500 pages of intertestamental Jewish apocalyptic. If you read First Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, The Apocalypse of Abraham, things like that, (which were all documents written between about 200 BC and about AD 100–150) then you’d come back to the book of Revelation and you’d think, “Oh, this isn’t so strange after all.” Or you might think, “Well, it’s all pretty strange, but at least it’s got the same kind of strangeness.”
Obviously, we don’t have time to do all of that, but it is important to recognize that there are standard symbols in apocalyptic, standard kinds of things. A first-century reader would read it with that kind of pre-understanding because they would recognize the genre, even if we don’t. In that kind of apocalyptic, for example, horns on beasts are almost always a symbol for kings or kingdoms.
Almost always in that kind of literature, you have, I don’t know what else to call it, a heaven’s perspective, a God’s-eye view on history and what’s going on. It’s not looking at things from below. It’s looking at things from above. The seer, the prophet, the apocalyptist is caught up into heaven in order to see things and they’re looked at from God’s perspective. Heavy symbolism, often very sharp, black-and-white sorts of issues.
There are parts of the Bible that don’t deal with things quite in black-and-white. Abraham is presented as a good man and then he goes and lies. David is presented as a man after God’s own heart and yet he goes and sins in the matter of Bathsheba … both adultery and murder. There are nuances in all kinds of biblical passages, but in apocalyptic, it’s black-and-white. These are the people of God. These are the people of Satan.
You’re dealing at a principle level who’s in, who’s out, why, what they look like, what they’re categorized by. We will stumble across more and more of these characteristics of apocalyptic as we read the book. I will list some of them somewhere along the line when you begin to get a feel for some of this material inductively. So the first general thing then is this comment about this being a kind of literature, genre of literature, that God in his great mercy has given to the church. The Bible is full of different genres, and that’s part of the wisdom of God.
The second thing I would like to say is that historically, amongst genuine believers, that is amongst Christians who really do hold this as the Word of God and aren’t trying to fudge on that basic point, there have been basically five or six fundamental interpretations of the book of Revelation. Now there have been all kinds of footnotes, subdivisions, and so on within that framework, but let me list four principle orientations to the book of Revelation.
First, the futuristic interpretations. Futuristic interpretations hold that much of what the Bible in the book of Revelation is talking about describes events that are still future to us … not just future to John’s day, but future to us. The most common of these is still called dispensational premillennialism or dispensational pretribulational premillennialism. I’ll explain those categories later … don’t worry about them.
It most commonly holds that everything from Revelation 4:1 on refers to events still future to us, which means (if this interpretation is correct) that there is nothing in the book of Revelation from Revelation 4:1 on that refers directly to us. Now there could be all kinds of moral implications for us, just as there is nothing in Leviticus that refers directly to us in terms of case law, but there are all kinds of implications for us.
So also if this interpretation is correct, you cannot read this book and say, “Oh this beast is referring to the kind of evils that are going on today in place X.” or something like that. No, it’s referring to specific events still future to us under the futurist interpretation. Now we’ll have reason to debate some of the various positions as we go along in due course, but one of the biggest problems with this view, in my opinion, is that there are too many passages in the book of Revelation which would have been read by the first readers as referring to events in the first century.
For example, the great whore sitting on the seven hills. For any Christian living in the Roman Empire, what would that mean? For any Christian toward the end of the first century when persecution is either breaking out or being threatened, the great whore sitting on the seven hills.… What are the seven hills? Anybody in Europe would know. They’re the Seven Hills of Rome.
The great whore has to be the Roman Empire, which is now kicking in with the worst kind of persecution. So to argue that in the first instance, the first generation of Christians completely misunderstood that point, and it was really referring to some reconstituted Roman Empire at the end of the age or the like, they just misunderstood, has me a little nervous.
In other words, it is going to be read in the first instance and understood in the first instance, it seems to me, much in line with the way the first readers understood it and interpreted it. Let me tell you quite frankly there are all kinds of Christians that will dispute that point. Fine, take their courses sometime, but it’s not what I’m going to teach here.
Secondly, another major line of interpretation in the history of the church is the so-called preterist view. In this view, virtually everything that takes place in the book of Revelation, with the possible exception of the last couple of chapters, is already in the past, in fact, was already in the past in John’s day.
Most of the events are understood to refer to the catastrophic fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, including perhaps imperial persecution in the Roman era under Nero in the mid-60s. All of these events are heavily symbolized sorts of descriptions of historical events that for John and his readers in the 90s are already past tense.
Therefore, the relevance of the book to us is much the same relevance that a book of history in the Bible is to us: the story of Daniel or the book of Acts. There are all kinds of spiritual lessons to be learned from it, but at the end of the day it’s not referring to events in our day or in an age still to come.
Now the first interpretation that I gave you has been common in a lot of evangelical life in America during this century until fairly recently (it’s dying down a bit) but you cannot find it full-blown in the history of the church before about 1830. There have been different periods of the church, in other words, where these different interpretations have taken place.
The second interpretation was extremely common in mid-century in this country last century. It was not uncommon at all, and it is still found in many pockets to this day. That’s the second view, the preterist view. It has a wrinkle. There are some people who argue that the book of Revelation was written before AD 70 and was looking forward to the events of AD 70 but that they’re all past to us now.
In other words, instead of seeing the book of Revelation as being written in AD 90 looking back on events about AD 70, they say it was written before AD 70 looking forward to events in AD 70, although they’re all past to us. It’s a subset of that second interpretation. It still is a preterist interpretation.
Thirdly is what might be called the historical interpretation or the history of the church interpretation. Under this view, the book of Revelation lays out in symbolic terms, a great deal of the history of the church from the first century until the end. Under this view, if you put yourself in Reformation times and you find references to the great whore sitting on the seven hills, to what do you think it will refer?
Is there any doubt? Amongst Protestant interpreters then at the time of the Reformation? Isn’t it obvious, plain as a pikestaff? She’s drunk with the blood of the saints, she presumes to take on herself the rights of God and on and on and on. It was the Catholic church, pure and simple. That’s what Luther thought, that’s what most of the Anabaptists thought, it’s what Beza thought, so on and so on.
That was standard Protestant interpretation in much of the Western church. That’s what the Puritans thought. That’s what Whitefield and Wesley thought. We don’t know that it’s what Calvin thought for a very simple reason. Calvin wrote commentaries on every book of the New Testament except the apocalypse and on many books of the Old Testament, as well.
The only book of the New Testament in which he did not write a commentary was Revelation. He preached on it, but he never wrote on it. Some people have actually suggested that the reason he didn’t write a commentary on the book of Revelation is because he was too good an exegete to think that the book really is referring to the papacy, but he didn’t want to let down the side granted the current struggle. Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not. All I know is that I don’t know what Calvin thought in this regard.
Clearly, the dominance of that interpretation during the time of the Reformation warns us about the possibility of reading our own times and culture into the text just so quickly that we lose a certain kind of historical perspective. Not enough people were asking the question, “Yes, but how would the first readers have read it?” The medieval papacy did not exist in the first century! That is an important question to ask.
A fourth general interpretation is the view that this book does not refer to things still future to us, nor to things all past (all in the first century), nor to a rolling history across time but rather this book refers to principles of God’s administration. In other words, it’s not referring to any particular persecution or any particular beast or any particular whore on seven hills or anything like that.
What it’s doing instead is talking in symbolic terms to give us a kind of Christian philosophy of history, a kind of way of looking at the struggles of good and evil as they recur in the cycle of the church. You can’t plot anything from them in terms of time. That interpretation has cycled around a number of times, as well. Now that has some merits. The difficulty with it is again the difficulty we’ve seen for two or three of these views.
Namely, it discounts too quickly how the first readers would’ve read something. The genre apocalyptic schematizes history but it doesn’t dehistoricize history. Do you see what I’m saying? In other words it might schematize history and put it into sevens and threes and tens and twelves, we’ll come to those numbers. It schematizes things. It makes things neat and absolute and cut-and-dried. Yes, it does, but apocalyptic does not just give you abstract philosophy in colorful terms.
So the question still becomes.… How would first century readers who are familiar with the genre read this stuff? I don’t think they would’ve read it as abstract philosophy. In the same way, when they come in the first century to reading the whore on the seven hills, they’re not going to say, “Aha! This is a general principle of evil that recurs.” They’re going to say, “This is Rome!” That’s what they’re going to say.
Moreover, so many of these sorts of interpretations, the one, for example, that runs through all of history, the third interpretation I gave you.… At the end of the day when you start trying to get the text and the history lined up, pretty soon you have to start abusing your history. History just doesn’t fit quite neatly enough. When you try to have the sort of philosophy of history approach, it just doesn’t work out well enough, either. There are subsets of those interpretations. Let me mention one of them. We’ll come to it more closely next week. It’s very interesting.
Some people see the letters to the seven churches in chapters 2 and 3 as a kind of mini rolling history of the church, a sort of mini version of what the whole book of Revelation does. After all, you end up with the letter to Laodicea, don’t you? What’s the letter to Laodicea all about? Well you’re fat cats. You think that you’re rich. You think that you see and you think that you understand, but you’re spiritually destitute and you’re blind and you’re arrogant, but you don’t see how you’re really naked.
I counsel you to repent and to buy from me water that will really satisfy you and so on. People say, “Doesn’t that describe the church today?” You think you’re rich and spiritually, you’re poor. You think you’re well-clothed. You think that you see, and you see so little. Doesn’t that describe the church today? It fits, doesn’t it? Well, does it?
Go and ask Christians in China if they’re fat cats. Go and ask Christians in the Sahel. It is an extremely Western interpretation, a Western materialist, prosperity-based interpretation, but it doesn’t fit the experience of most Christians in the world today. Most Christians in the world today now are not in the so-called first world; they’re in the so-called Third World. That’s the truth of the matter.
We have far more brothers and sisters in Christ in poverty today than we’ve ever had before in the last three centuries. Are they going to interpret the book of Revelation, chapters 2 and 3, that way? Not likely. So is only our interpretation correct because the Lord is only really concerned with the history of the West? Not likely.
Again you start taking sort of a longer view and you start realizing there are problems with some of these interpretations. So now we’ll come to the truth. In all fairness, one has to approach this kind of thing with a certain kind of humility, a certain kind of “Teach me. I could be snookered by my generation too.”
It’s important to recognize how many good people have been snookered, so where you don’t know, it’s best to say you don’t know. Where you’re not sure, it’s best to say you’re not sure. It’s important to come through the text at points and say, “These are the bits that I’m sure of, and these are the bits that I’m not sure of.” As you continue studying and reading, you’ll be sure of a lot more 20 years from now than you are now. Maybe you’ll be uncertain of a few things 20 years from now, too. That’s also sometimes a mark of growth.
Well, in my view, the book of Revelation has to be interpreted in the first instance against the historical background of the first century, the literary genre, the historical background of the first century. In that sense, the preterist view is at least on the right track in that it’s trying to nail things down to the way the book was read at first.
But the genre regularly schematizes things into the future. It schematizes history. It predicts. I think there are all kinds of hints in the book of Revelation that show that although the thing must be interpreted in the first instance against what is going on in the first century, those things themselves become a kind of prefigurement, a kind of announcement, a kind of foretaste of stuff still to come.
Let me give you an illustration of that from outside the book of Revelation so you’ll see what I mean. In 1 John 2, for example, John says, “My little children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard, the Antichrist is coming, even so also now are there already many antichrists.” Now to word it that way does not mean that there is no ultimate Antichrist, that all the antichrists are present.
To word it that way means, “Yes, there is an Antichrist at the end that the church has to confront, but meanwhile there are other antichrists that are sort of foretastes of the ultimate Antichrist. If you’re just going to sit on your haunches and say, ‘Well, we’re pretty safe at the moment, because after all the final Antichrist isn’t here,’ you are deceiving yourself. You’re not preparing for the evil that confronts generation after generation after generation.”
I think that the book of Revelation in that regard prepares first-generation Christians for first-generation assaults, but in categories and terms that prepares later-generation Christians for other assaults and ultimately for the final assault. In that sense, I think that there are elements of a futurist view here, too.
There are even elements of a kind of philosophy view. Not because it’s philosophy, but because it is teaching you how to think of God acting in history. In other words, I think that most of the interpretations that I have outlined have some element in them that does reflect something that you can find in the book of Revelation.
The problem is come when each of those interpretations has become the complete key to understanding everything and the text itself has been dehistoricized from first-century readers, first-century writers, and first-century literary genre. Now I hope that kind of thing will become clearer as we press on in the text, and now it’s time to begin the text itself.
“The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.”
Well, let’s just take that opening bit. “The revelation of Jesus Christ.” Everything turns in the interpretation of that phrase on how you understand in Greek the genitive “of Jesus Christ,” or in English how you understand the prepositional phrase “of Jesus Christ.” Is this the revelation whose content is Jesus Christ so that what this book does above all is reveal Jesus Christ? Or is it the revelation from Jesus Christ, which may well reveal a great deal about Christ, but it’s not got as its primary object Jesus Christ himself?
Although there are many people with great reverence for scripture who have argued for the former, I don’t think it fits the second line. Look what the text says, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show to his servants what must shortly take place.” If this is the revelation whose content is Jesus Christ, how does God give it to him? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Moreover, although some people dispute that the John who is the human author of this book is also the John who is the author of the fourth gospel, (in my view they’re one and the same and they are the apostle) it is very interesting to recognize that in the fourth gospel, Jesus is presented constantly as the one to whom the Father gives things, who in turn gives them to us. Thus, the Son only says the things that the Father gives him to say. Then he says them, thus they’re not less than the Word of God. He only does the things the Father gives him to do.
So also I think here you have the same kind of Johannine pattern, this pattern that is common in John. The Father gives something to Christ, who discloses these things to his servants through his servant John. Isn’t that what the structure of this first paragraph says? That means that the actual content of the book of Revelation is not simply Christ.
Although, inevitably, inasmuch as the whole New Testament, the whole Bible is profoundly Christocentric, and we shall see in due course that this whole book is profoundly Christocentric.… There’s a tremendous amount about Christ in the book, but what it says more specifically is, “The revelation …” Let’s now render it from Jesus Christ. “… which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.”
In other words, the content seems to be material that will help believers understand what’s going on, not simply satisfy their curiosity, as we’ll get on a little bit. It’s not, “Here’s a little bit of advanced history writing.” No, we’ll discover a little later on that the reason why God gives this material to his servants, this material that tells them what must soon take place, is so that they will learn how to live under the terrible conditions that will take place.
In other words, the book has as its goal edification, strengthening, building up. Not merely titillating your curiosity, giving you the infallible eschatological system to wow your friends with. That’s not what it’s primarily given for. That the material is mediated through an angel is rather important, as we’ll see in a couple of weeks.
It is common in apocalyptic literature for an angel to explain what’s going on. Again and again and again in the book, although occasionally it’s the exalted Christ who addresses John, again and again it’s an angel who addresses John and explains what’s going on, draws his attention to this element in the vision or that element in the vision. It’s quite common.
So this angelic being.… It’s part of the way things work in apocalyptic literature. It’s common already in Daniel, isn’t it? How an angel is sent to Daniel to tell him certain things and prepare him for certain things. The angel might even be delayed in going to Daniel. It’s not that God is surprised by this. God is still sovereign, but God is often a God of means, even angelic means.
In this kind of writing, this kind of revelation, this kind of disclosure, God sanctions Christ to give his servants a revelation which Jesus then passes on to John to give to the people by means of an angel. Isn’t that what the text is saying? This can be described in a variety of ways. It is nothing less than the word of God, thus it is to be reverenced. This is part of that word about which the prophets speak, God himself saying, “To this man will I look. He was of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my word.”
It can be seen as the testimony of Jesus. Now it’s the testimony of Jesus in that we’ll see right away in the very first chapter that the opening vision is about Jesus and that opening vision prepares the way for everything else that comes. It’s the testimony of Jesus. It is the exalted Christ who addresses John and gives his testimony as to what is going on.
The last verse of the paragraph, verse 3: “Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” Now it is a good thing to do that with respect to all of the Bible, clearly, but it’s also common phrasing in apocalyptic literature. You find similar sorts of things in First Enoch and things like that. It is a common sort of thing. “This book is so important that you really ought to read it. Blessed are you if you do.”
It’s not unsurprising that God, in disclosing himself in this form of literature, should also use the forms that encourage people to take the writing seriously. Likewise, at the very end of the book, you have this kind of warning. Chapter 22, verses 18 and following: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life,” and so on.
Those kinds of warnings you also find in apocalyptic literature. Yes, you do. In the context of genuine Christian revelation, it becomes a very important thing to think about. Not only here, but in principle, God does not like his words tampered with. You cannot stand in judgment over the Word of God. The aim is not so much to master it or to accept what you like from it or to choose tidbits from it but to be mastered by it, to learn to think God’s thoughts after him. Now, God says, “Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy.”
