Somehow I doubt that whoever came up with the idea of reading your children Bible stories right before bed, ever considered the idea of reading the book of Revelation.
Bedtime Bible stories are happy and uplifting affairs that usually present the lie not included in the actual Bible they supposedly come from, that if you follow God and do the right thing, everything will be OK. The lions won't eat you, the furnace won't burn you, and God will provide you with a new husband to replace the dead one.
Somehow "a third of the grass burnt up, a third of the stars were darkened, and a third of all living things died" just doesn't have the same comforting ring as "And they all lived happily ever after."
But over the past four years as I've been reading Evangeline stories from an actual Bible and not just a children's Bible, we've left most of the safe stories behind. We've seen Joseph driven nearly to the point of fratricide when his brothers were unexpectedly in his power years after they had sold him into slavery. We've been stumped by the story of Zipporah at the Inn, and we've analyzed some of those parables Jesus is rightly famous for, to see what he really was saying.
We've read a lot of the Bible these past four years. We've covered such diverse books as Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Psalms, Proverbs, Qoheleth, Job, Daniel, Jonah, Habakkuk, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Jude, 1-3 John and probably a couple of other books I haven't mentioned.
I've skimped on the prophets and the books of the Law, and I've avoided most of the epistles, because they're some deep reading, but we've been pretty thorough.
And Revelation? That one is just too confusing.
Alas, confusing or not, Evangeline decided she wanted to read it. So, a few weeks ago, we cracked the book open and started to read.
Even if you don't have much of a church background, you probably still know that Revelation is intimidating to read. It's filled with bizarre and truly confusing image, like many-headed dragons that wear crowns. There are stars falling from the sky, the moon turns to blood, and one horrible thing happens after another. In their book "Good Omens," fantasy writers Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett suggest that the author had a thing for odd mushrooms.
Popular belief, made all the more popular by movies like "Omen" and wretched books like "The Late Great Planet Earth" (or, worse, really bad Christian comic books) has it that the book is about the end of the world. To those who subscribe to such a view, the book concerns a time some indeterminate point in the future, when God has removed the church from the earth through an event called the Rapture.
All the fantastic stuff contained in the book is a coded message about what will happen in this period as the world suffers God's judgment before the Second Coming and the final victory of Jesus in the Battle of Armageddon.
It's a view that's pretty big on schadenfreude.
The truth is, I stopped believing in the Rapture and in dispensationalism as a whole several years ago. And as a result, I've come to the conclusion that a lot of evangelical thinking on Revelation is just wrong: wrong in its focus, wrong in its approach, and wrong in its conclusions.
For starters, there's the nature of the term "Apocalypse." Nowadays we use the word to refer to the end of the world, and we'll even couple the word with an attributive noun to describe how the world is ending in this particular scenario. We have the robot apocalypse of the "Terminator" movies, the zombie apocalypse of "Night of the Living Dead," and even the gay apocalypse that awaits us all if same-sex marriage isn't stopped.
The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek apokalipsis, which means, ironically enough, Revelation. Not just any revelation, though; the word apokalipsis denotes a sudden, dramatic revelation, one that reorders everything and upends the status quo once and for all. And while that does lend some credibility to the popular practice of viewing Revelation through an eschatological lens, that's hardly the most reasonable approach to this book, in light of the nature of Jesus revealed in the gospels.
For one thing, the scenario popularized by men like Timothy LaHaye and Hal Lindsey sees the earth as winding down to a fiery end as years of sin take their toll, until God tosses the whole thing into the wastebasket and creates a new one. The church, too good and too spiritual for this evil world, is removed before things get really bad, and is set up in a new world, one untainted by sin.
That's a pretty sharp contrast to Jesus, who never said "God is going to create a new world to establish his kingdom" as much as he did "The kingdom of God has arrived." And instead of telling people to suck it up and deal Jesus healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, freed captives, and even raised the dead.
His entire life was a declaration that God had entered this world to redeem it. In a sense, the miracles of Jesus were not impositions of an outside force upon the world as much as they were a restoration of what this world was meant to have been.
And in the person of Jesus, we saw the full apokalipsis of the kingdom of God, as he discarded all social conventions meant to separate people according to class, race, learning, sex and health, and treated everyone with shocking equality.
We forget, because we have domesticated him and trained him to fit our own agendas, that Jesus is actually a pretty disturbing fellow. He is someone who, by faith, we understand to be the full revelation of what God wants our world to be, and in whom all the systems of our entire world are gloriously upended.
The book of Revelation isn't a book about the end of the world. It's a book about Jesus. It's quite a bit more than that, of course, but that provided a useful frame of reference as Evangeline and I worked our way through this book.
And work through it did. These weren't Golden Book Bible stories. We read a chapter a night, and our discussion of the night's reading easily lasted thirty minutes or more each night.
The first section of the book is a collection of letters that Jesus dictated to St. John of Patmos - probably not the same John who wrote the Johannine epistles, nor the other John who wrote the gospel, and probably not the Apostle John, either - with each letter addressed to a different church in Asia Minor.
The letters tell the churches how well they measure up to the divine apokalipsis, and they can be a little disturbing if we bother to read them. Like the letter to Ephesus, for instance. Jesus warns the church in Ephesus that he might take their lamp away if they don't reawaken their first love; and, from what history tells us, that's what happened. The church in Ephesus failed epically; by the end of the second century, there is virtually no mention of any Christian presence in Ephesus.
But the book moves on from there. Chapter 4 describes the heavenly court, and if the reader was paying attention to the Hebrew Scriptures, she'll realize that John is describing the Temple, only this isn't the one that stood in Jerusalem. It's the Real Thing of which the one in Jerusalem was a shadow, from the basin of the sea to the throne that the Most High sits upon.
John describes that throne as surrounded by twenty-four other thrones, presumably for the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. The implication is that the church and Israel - I am not speaking of the modern nation-state here, as much as of the covenant-state - have authority, but their authority flows from and is subject to the authority of God. And he notes that the twenty-four elders worship God day and night.
Chapter 5 introduces the scroll that no one is worthy to open. Well, almost no one. The Lamb is worthy to open the scroll and to look upon what it contains, and as John makes it pretty clear, the Lamb is Jesus. He now notes that the twenty-four elders also sing a song in praise of the Lamb.
Evangeline and I talked a fair amount about this scroll. John notes that the scroll is sealed, so we discussed the ancient practice of sealing a scroll with wax, and how if anyone who wasn't worthy (i.e., the person of presumably equal stature to whom it was addressed) opened the scroll, they could be executed. And what did such a scroll contain? Nothing less than the will of the one who sealed it. Execute the messenger bearing this scroll, raise the taxes, no more merciful beheading, end kitchen scraps for the poor, and cancel Christmas. That sort of thing.
So in Chapter 6, the Lamb begins opening the scroll and we see some unsettling things: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death (... "and hell followed with him"), the four fabled horsemen of the Apocalypse. What's the message here, that all those nasty people are going to be destroyed in nasty ways? Not at all! Instead, it's that while terrible things may happen, we can rest assured that they happen only under the authority of God.
John goes on from there, and relates a lot of other things, many of which I have to confess I lack the understanding to follow entirely. But I have to say that reading the book in this way did a lot to remove the mystery and confusion that have dogged the book in my understanding the past 22 years or more.
Instead of being a book all about the last seven tortured years of the planet's existence, the book of Revelation is an amazing book of hope: that the wicked and the powerful who demand adulation and wealth, that those who live by persecution and off the suffering of others, will fail. Epically.
John refers to Babylon because his audience knew of Babylon as an evil empire that had scattered the Jewish people throughout the world. He imbues it with Roman qualities like the seven hills, because at the time Rome was the brutal world power that was doing what world powers always do. His message was simple: The mighty and the proud will fall. God will not abide them forever.
And you know, all things considered, that's not a bad Bible story for bedtime.
Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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