The Power and Purpose of Apocalyptic Preaching

Don Carson: My brief in this first address is to say something about apocalyptic precisely because it is something of an alien genre. A friend of mine a few years ago was passing out free New Testaments on a university campus on condition that people who took them promised to read them. This particular bloke took one, and then my friend didn’t see him again for some weeks. He bumped into him sometime later and said, “Did you read that book I gave you?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did, right through.” Well that doesn’t happen every day. People take free books and never crack them, but in this case, someone read it right through. “And what did you make of it?” he said to this university student who was, in fact, completely biblically illiterate before he had opened up this New Testament for the first time.

He said, “Well, it was a bit of a strange book. The first bit was repetitive; it went over the same stuff again and again, three or four times. But boy, I sure liked that science fiction at the end!” In one remark this tells us a couple of things.

First, it bespeaks how alien this genre is. The fact of the matter is, despite Flannery O’Connor, nobody writes apocalyptic anymore. Some try, some try to give apocalyptic interpretations of apocalyptic, but nobody writes it anymore. It is a dead genre. That’s the truth. Therefore, it is something that we have to understand within the first-century setting, in fact, within the setting of approximately 300 BC to approximately AD 300, when people did write a lot of this material.

If I were teaching an ideal course on the book of Revelation (I don’t, but if I would, if I could) I would begin by assigning approximately 500 pages of Second Temple Judaism apocalyptic. Begin with 4 Ezra, 2 Esdras, for example.

After you’ve read about 400 or 500 pages of this material, in which your eyes will glaze over, the symbolism will be obscure, and so on, you come to a book like Revelation. Not only does it not seem quite so alien, but it actually seems quite mild compared with some of these others. It is actually more coherent. It is a genre; it is a form of literature. We have to come to grips with that.

Secondly, contemporary young people are not turned off by it. I think that’s very interesting. I suspect one of the reasons for it is that it is full of graphic symbols. It’s a word equivalent of film, movies, pictures, and impressions. A postmodern in-your-face, with lots and lots and lots and lots of input, and then you have to figure it out. It’s a word equivalent of that.

Increasingly in my university missions over the last 35 years, increasingly in the last 10 years or so, I often take chunks of the book of Revelation and expound them in evangelistic settings on university campuses. Now I have to be careful of the Christians who are there for exactly the same reasons that I have to be careful of the Christians who are present when I preach from the first three chapters of Genesis on a university campus, which I often do as well.

You have to lay some foundations. I don’t have any problem with the non-Christians who are there. They don’t know enough to ask the tough questions. However, no matter how much I try to warn the Christians in advance, if I preach on Genesis 1, 2, and 3, and I tell the Christians to keep their mouths shut in the Q&A and let the non-Christians ask, inevitably there will be some bright lad who will say, “Sir, are you in for lapsarian or supralapsarian?”

I think, “What planet are you on in an evangelistic setting? If you want to come and ask me that privately, I’ll be glad to discuss it, but this is not the time or the place.” Likewise, inevitably when I preach on the Apocalypse, there are some who only want to have me pegged. “What do you think of the preterist view?” or whatever.

In an evangelistic setting, that’s not my first concern, but the reason I tell you the story is so that you will not view this book as essentially alien, something that is only for advanced Christians, something to be tackled only after you have preached through the rest of the New Testament about three times. This is an evangelistic book as much as any other New Testament book. In fact, it has some appeals to people under the age of 35 that we should cherish and make use of.

Let me say something briefly about literary genre before I turn to apocalyptic per se. Most of us, in our seminary training, were taught principles of exegesis, whether Greek or Hebrew, that focused on short books that were easily manageable in the course of a semester. That meant that in Greek, almost all of us have studied Philippians and/or Colossians and/or 1 Peter. Has anybody studied those three books in Greek in seminary? I see quite a lot of hands.

You can add maybe a Galatians, or if it’s an easy course, 1 John. Throw those ones in, but probably not many have done an apocalyptic section like, let’s say, Revelation 12–14, which is approximately the same length. Likewise, in the Old Testament, an awful lot of Old Testament exegesis courses do Jonah, which doesn’t quite prepare you for the so-called Isaiahnic apocalypse of Isaiah 24–27.

We’ve learned our principles of exegesis in material that is primarily didactic, that follows a kind of logical, coherent discourse style. We’re looking not only at the syntax, the word studies, and so on, but a certain kind of logical flow. Therefore, material like Wisdom Literature, which works on very different principles; lament, which works on very different principles; or apocalyptic, which works on very different principles, is still perhaps somewhat alien to us.

Increasingly, seminaries are introducing courses now on different literary genres. That’s a pretty recent development. If you graduated from seminary more than 10 years ago, some seminaries more than five years ago, and some seminaries last year, you have never taken a course on literary genre.

However, increasingly seminaries are doing that sort of thing, and it is worth reading some materials along these lines. If you’ve never read anything along these lines, maybe begin with Fee and Stuart’s, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. It’s a low-level sort of thing, but it begins to expose you to some of the characteristics of literary genre.

When I first introduce pastors to some of these things, I’m inclined to invite them to handle a chunk of Jeremiah in a narrowly literary, critical, historical, and theological sort of way. Jeremiah 20: “You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!

Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’ May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”

They would first conclude Jeremiah wants his mother to be eternally pregnant and also that he wants the poor bloke who told his father the news to be overthrown like the towns that the Lord destroyed without pity. You can see how ridiculous it is; nevertheless, there is a fair bit of interpretation of apocalyptic literature that works approximately at that level in the popular mind. So now let me dare to turn to apocalyptic itself.

In the last three or four decades there has been extensive debate on the nature of apocalyptic by specialists. That already bespeaks lots of trouble, because specialists tend to focus so narrowly they lose bigger pictures. Some have questioned whether apocalyptic is a genre at all, and then they debate about its essential characteristics.

Others today spend much more time thinking of the book of Revelation in political terms. Very large numbers of commentaries are concerned with how Revelation seems to be anti-Rome. Therefore, who is Rome today? Obviously that’s America, so this is a manual on how to be anti-American or something like that. Large numbers of books written along those lines.

When you read commentaries, not least on a book like the book of Revelation, never simply dip into them. Never, never. Because commentaries themselves are written out of a frame of reference, out of an author’s stance. All books are, but a commentary that is focusing on a genre as complicated as this one, as ancient and as unknown as ours, it really does become important in such cases to get to know the stance, the interpretive grid, the priorities, and the frame of reference of the author.

You have to read enough of the introduction and dip into it in enough places to begin to make allowances for who the author is and to understand what kind of position he or she is coming from. One of the reasons why there is so much debate, however, is people sometimes treat literary genre as if it is a collection of bounded sets.

That is, here you have one literary genre, and everything is either in it or outside it. Then you have another literary genre, and everything is either inside that one or outside it. Then you have another literary genre, and everything is either inside that grid or outside it. That is, each genre is a bounded set, and you can tell to which genre something belongs.

However, genre is very messy. It’s very messy, even for something simple like letter. What are the characteristics of a letter? Well, if you went on purely formal grounds, then when I was in high school, you had to raise questions like, “A business letter or a friendly letter?” There were different ways in which you set out the address, for example. And, “What is the appropriate salutation at the end?” If you’re applying for a job interview you don’t say, “Love, Don.”

You had rules for all of these things, but nowadays, does the genre of letter include emails? How about a general posting on Facebook to be read by all your “friends”? Genre after a while begins to overlap into all kinds of other things. At what point does a letter become an email message? At what point does an email not become a letter? And so forth.

The same with apocalyptic. In a few moments, I’m going to give you a number of characteristics of apocalyptic. I haven’t counted them. It’s seven, eight, or nine. It doesn’t really matter. Supposing I take one away. Then is this no longer apocalyptic? Supposing I take two away. Supposing I add in something from another genre.

Suddenly you realize that some of our hesitations even about talking about these things is, again, we’re being a bit too rigid. However, almost all of our literary genres overlap with other literary genres, sometimes completely, because we’re looking at slightly different characteristics. Form versus content. You have a lament. Is it poetry? What kind of poetry? Can you have a lament in prose? One is focusing on content; the other is focusing on form.

Those sorts of things need to be taken into account when you start considering what any literary genre is. Let me begin then by listing some characteristics of the book of Revelation in particular, although most of what I say will be true for apocalyptic literature more generically. I will distinguish between the two as I proceed.

1. As a book of apocalyptic literature, Revelation embraces a narrative framework and presents God, Christ, an angel, or an elder communicating revelation to a human intermediary (in this case, John) to pass on to others.

Now that’s intrinsic to almost all apocalyptic, but to more than apocalyptic; nevertheless, let me repeat that, because it is very important.

As apocalyptic literature, the book of Revelation embraces a narrative framework. Now it’s not just a straight-line narrative (we’ll come to that in due course), but there is a narrative framework. There is tension, drama, a conclusion, and maybe even adumbrations of the conclusion, but there is a narrative framework. It is not merely impressionistic. It is not structured like the book of Proverbs, for example.

There is a narrative framework, but it’s a narrative framework in which God, Christ, an angel, or an elder communicates revelation to a human intermediary (in this case, John) to pass on to others. That’s why one of the better books on apocalyptic is titled The Open Heaven. What the author means by that is that essential to apocalyptic is the sense of immediate self-disclosure from God through some sort of visionary, mediated revelation, normally with angels or other heavenly beings of some sort mediating things through a human being.

You find other kinds of allusions to those experiences in other kinds of material. For example, the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy, chapter 2, talking about how he was caught up into the third heaven. He received some special revelation, but in that case, he was not authorized to pass it on to others.

However, the notion of receiving special visionary revelation as a human agent, either directly from God or through some mediated being, that goes back to Daniel. It goes back to Ezekiel. In some part, it goes back to Isaiah. The rudiments of what became a literary genre are eighth century in Isaiah, sixth century in Daniel and Ezekiel, then flourish powerfully as a literary genre from about 300 BC in Jewish circles to about AD 300 in Jewish and Christian circles.

That means that apocalyptic, not least the Apocalypse, the book of Revelation, gives us a kind of (I don’t know what else to call it, though it’s inadequate) God’s-eye view of sweeping history. Now in one sense, the whole Bible gives us a God’s-eye view. That’s why it’s not a particularly helpful category. I just can’t think of a better one.

Nevertheless, it’s not a God’s-eye view mediated through an apostle who’s reflecting on his life and times and the nature of the gospel as he writes his final testaments to Timothy and Titus. It’s a God’s-eye view directly in visionary and highly symbol-laden terms, through human intermediary, to the entire church. It is a spectacular from-heaven point of view.

That’s very different, for example, from a David saying, “The Lord is my shepherd. I will lack nothing.” Now at one level, Psalm 23 is equally a God’s-eye view. God has given us Scripture, and thus there are some things to learn about who God is, what a shepherd is, why God should be compared to a shepherd, and how we are his sheep. There are lots of things to be learned about God. In one sense, all of Scripture is a God’s-eye view, yet in the very structure of the material, Psalm 23 is looking at it from the perspective of the sheep.

Revelation openly, bald-facedly, in-your-face looks at it from God’s point of view in a revelation coming down. Within that framework, then, what characterizes this God’s-eye view is not just a God’s-eye view of a particular crisis, although usually in apocalyptic literature there are particular historical crises that are hidden in the symbolism, but a God’s-eye view that finally runs toward the end and climaxes either in hell or in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness.

It’s not a God’s-eye view simply of an individual crisis or an individual historical crisis, though it is often precipitated by historical crisis, humanly speaking. However, that crisis and this God’s-eye-view vision of things that includes individuals, suffering, terror, victory, drama, symbolism, and all the rest, it is moving somewhere. It’s a narrative that finally climaxes either in hell or in the new heaven and the new earth.

In that sense, it is literature of astonishingly great importance. That is, it is dealing with ultimate things. It is not exactly dealing with the characteristics of eldership in the New Testament, as important as that subject may be, or exactly how you should sort out church discipline, as in Matthew 18 or 1 Corinthians 5, perhaps. As important as those subjects are, you’re talking about heaven and hell! No wonder you can use the material evangelistically.

If instead you’re using this material merely to figure out whether you’re pre-mill/pre-trib or pre-mill/mid-trib or whatever.… There is a place for talking about those things too, but if that is the burden of your exposition, you’re missing the point of this kind of literature as literature.

The very genre itself is driving you towards a God’s-eye view of absolutely everything, climaxing in the most important division that will ever take place. Don’t ever trivialize this material, and don’t get stuck on some symbol where you can’t quite figure out what’s going on. Keep the big picture in mind.

Now that sort of literature then does include many, many symbols, and some of them are standard. Some of them are standard, derived from the Old Testament; some of them are standard, derived from the surrounding culture; and some of them are, as far as attestation is concerned, idiolectic. That is, they’re bound up with the individual author. You find them only in one particular book.

They’re the hardest ones to interpret, because there’s not a whole lot of parallel material. Usually you can get it down to a fair degree of certainty that it’s in this domain, this is roughly what it means, or the author may have used something several times, and you begin to see what he’s doing with it. For example, horn, without exception, means either king or kingdom in a dynamic sense, king dominion. Without exception.

If there is a beast with seven horns, inevitably it’s talking about something like the perfection of kingly power, if it’s in a more abstract context, or conceivably a whole sequence, a full sequence, of kings. That’s the domain, however, in which it is going to operate. In that case, the Old Testament rootage is plain, and it does get mediated right through Second Temple Judaism. That sort of symbol would have been obvious to any first-century biblically informed reader.

On the other hand, there is also sometimes a deeply symbol-laden appeal to things with minimal Old Testament connection that is, nevertheless, anchored in the life of the people at the time. For example, consider the reference of water of various temperatures in the brief letter to the church in Laodicea.

That symbol, water, is found everywhere, but that’s what makes it difficult to understand sometimes, because it can function in so many different ways. Water can function to talk about birth, it can talk about cleansing, it can talk about life, it can talk about satisfaction (satisfying one’s thirst), and so forth.

However, in this particular context we’re told that Jesus wants us to be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm, which has often been taken to mean God prefers the absolute rebel who confronts him than somebody who is spiritually tepid. I don’t know how many sermons have been preached in spiritually-tepid churches to lambaste the people and try to divide them toward either rebellion and leaving (blessed subtractions!) or genuine conversion, repentance, and faith.

However, it has been shown repeatedly, by archeologists and others who know first-century Asia Minor well, that there is no way on God’s green earth that’s the way anybody in Laodicea would have interpreted that in the first century. Laodicea is located in a nest of three cities. Colossae, which has never been excavated (you can still see the mound there. I have photographs of it, but it’s never been excavated), was known for its fresh, cool water. You can still see the springs there.

Hieropolis, just a few miles away, was known for its hot springs, lots of hot springs, chemical water. You can still see all the encrustations that are there. You can still go and bathe there. You can go and “take the cure” in what remains of ancient Hierapolis.

As for Laodicea, it was known for disgusting water. Cicero comments on it. When he travels east, he goes through Laodicea, and he comments somewhere in his journals that Laodicea has the most disgusting water in the empire. In fact, it was piped in. You can see the stone pipes, now all encrusted with the calcium deposits. You can see the stone pipes, and they’re not coming in from Hierapolis. They’re coming in from another direction, but it’s piped in because Laodicea has no supply of water of its own.

“I wish you were useful like the water in Colossae; I wish you were useful like the water in Hierapolis; but in fact, you’re just nauseating, you’re disgusting, you just make me sick, and I want to throw up.” That’s what the exalted Jesus says. He’s not recommending lukewarmness as a virtue, even a relative virtue.

Now I don’t think you would necessarily get that simply by meditating a long time on the text. As soon as I say this, I can hear and feel the vibes raising questions about the sufficiency of Scripture, but God in his mercy has given us Scripture in space-time history. The very fact that we study words and do word studies and syntax studies is part of the recognition that this is a study of words, syntax, and so forth at a particular time and place.

If you’re going to study Hebrew words, you don’t begin with Modern Hebrew. You don’t even begin with Mishnaic Hebrew. You begin with Biblical Hebrew, because you’re studying biblical texts. That is a way of saying it’s disclosed in space-time history. In this case, you’re talking about the referentiality of words, what words refer to, and that too is locked in space-time history.

One of the glories of the Bible is that it is God’s gracious self-disclosure, from his inhabiting of eternity, in space-time history where we live. That is one of the reasons why we do have to do a bit of background to understand how these words worked, how they were understood in the first century, and to what they referred. Nowadays there are some stellar commentaries that help us on these sorts of fronts. I still think the best treatment of the letters to the seven churches is by Colin J. Hemer, simply called Letters to the Seven Churches, astonishingly well researched.

Colin was a great fellow, had a massive heart for students, and died prematurely at the age of 57. He did more to introduce international students to Christ in Cambridge during my years there than any other man. No preacher himself; he just organized all the Bible studies, and the rest of us did the teaching and preaching. However, he knew them all by name and was a quiet, faithful exegete and scholar.

He spent several trips working away in western Turkey and could tell you many stories of how he testified to Christ in Turkish, which he learned reasonably well. In my view, that is still the best book. It went out of print and has come back into print. It may have gone out again, but you can probably get it on AbeBooks or something like that.

2. Like apocalyptic elsewhere, Revelation schematizes history and usually deploys numbers symbolically.

It schematizes history; that is, it’s not simply a chronological one thing after another, nor is it attempting a kind of neutral evaluation, as if neutrality were possible, of a whole lot of events that take place. It schematizes history demonstrably, and in schematizing history, it often uses numbers symbolically.

Now be suspicious of commentaries and preachers who tell you that numbers are always used in symbol-laden ways in the Bible. That is a genre consideration. Because I have a perverse temperament, I keep files on perverse interpretations of certain passages of Scripture. I have a thick file, for example, on the 153 fish in John 21. I have one even thicker on 666. I could give you a long and very funny lecture on 666. I could do that. It wouldn’t be edifying, but it would be funny.

You want to know when numbers are symbol-laden and when they’re not. For example, did you know that 153 is the triangular number of 17? For those of you who are not mathematicians by training, to say that it’s the triangular number.… The easiest way to visualize it is if you have one, the next line two, then three, then four, and so on until you make an equilateral triangle with 17 dots on each side, you have 153 dots there. Isn’t that impressive? That was very important in the Pythagorean world.

As well, 17 equals 10 plus 7, and 10 is the number of the Ten Commandments, and 7 is the number of perfection, made up of 3 plus 4. Then 3 is the number of the Trinity, and 4 is the number of the church, the city built foursquare. Therefore, the 153 fish clearly indicate that those who caught the fish, now that they’re called to be fishers of men, must go out and preach the law of God in the name of the Holy Trinity to the city built foursquare.

Now I guarantee I could preach that with a straight face in most of our churches, and people would come out saying, “Deep, brother, deep.” However, it is (I regret to tell you) unmitigated bilgewater, because I could actually tell you 10 or 12 such interpretations of 153, and none of them has any sort of rank. It has no justification. However, when you come to apocalyptic, numbers are regularly used in a symbol-laden way. I’ll pick up on more of that with some illustrations later.

3. In line with most apocalyptic, Revelation deploys many horrible beasts, many wonderful beasts, and vast amounts of nature symbolism.

Some beast swishes its tail, and a third of the stars fall from the heavens, that sort of thing. Frogs, ugly frogs. Beasts, wonderful beasts. Today we prefer to call them “living creatures” in Revelation 4, than “beasts,” as in the King James Version, because “beasts” has a slightly different connotation today. In that case, the living creatures really come from two Old Testament sources. We’ll come to that in a moment.

Then when you come to Revelation 12, 13, and 14, for example, you have the Devil himself, then the first beast, and then the second beast. So intertwined are these beasts that you can show, without any difficulty at all, that in some way the first creature, the Dragon (who is identified for us as Satan), then the first beast who comes out of the land, and then the second beast who comes out of the sea …

The three actually begin to function in phrases that are drawn directly or indirectly from John’s gospel, so that this triumvirate of beasts becomes a kind of aping of the Trinity, as presented in the Farewell Discourse in John’s gospel. It’s one of those little subtle things that once it’s pointed out to you, you can’t help but see it.

This incidentally becomes, through the back door, another slightly helpful hint that the John of the Apocalypse is probably the John of the fourth gospel. The text doesn’t explicitly say so, but it’s reasonable enough. There’s a certain kind of theological commonness on such themes, even though the literary genre is very different.

Now then, these beasts have to be understood in symbol-laden ways. I will give one or two examples of this in a later talk. Let me press on instead to the fourth one, which helps to unpack what we are to make of these beasts.

4. Revelation has a peculiarly loose and a particularly tight connection with the Old Testament.

Now, this is not so of all apocalyptic, but it is so of this book. By loose, I mean it really doesn’t have any extended Old Testament quotations. The closest it has to an Old Testament quotation at all is in the vision of chapters 4 and 5, “Holy, holy, holy,” clearly drawn from Isaiah 6. However, it has the highest proportion of Old Testament biblical allusions of any New Testament book.

I’m so glad my friend Greg Beale is coming in to talk about this Thursday night. He has written not only a major commentary on the book but has written on the books borrowing from Daniel, Zechariah, and elsewhere. He’s thought about these things a great deal. What you must see, however, is that sometimes these Old Testament pickups are of highly diverse nature. Sometimes it’s just the language that is being picked up, but the referentiality, what is being referred to, is quite different.

Moreover, many of the instances of these Old Testament pickups actually are almost interbreeding. Consider the four beasts in Revelation 4, for example. Immediately you think, “Four beasts supporting the throne in some way.… That has to come from Ezekiel 1.” In some ways, that works. The four living creatures are clearly related in some sense to the four living creatures that support the mobile throne of God in Ezekiel 1 and Ezekiel 10. I wish I had time to unpack them.

Nevertheless, when you look at the four living creatures in great detail in Revelation 4 and Revelation 5, they also have quite a lot of symbols drawn from the seraphim of Isaiah 6. That is typical. If you tried to decide, “Well, are they cherubim or are they seraphim? Is that a different order of angels? Maybe we should have a 10-minute excursus on biblical witness to angelic orders” then you’re missing the nature of apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic loves to pick up symbolism in highly diverse ways, and you are not asked to integrate it. Each little bit of symbolism makes its own symbolic contribution, but you are not asked to take all the symbols, and in the symbol world itself, to integrate them. You integrate the theology that comes out of what those symbol bits are doing in the theology of the book, but you don’t try to get the bits in the symbol world itself to come together.

If you ask that sort of question of the text, you will always come out with silliness. Apocalyptic loves to mix the metaphors. It mixes the metaphors. Perhaps the best example of that, one that all of us are familiar with, is in that great vision of Revelation, chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 is to chapter 5 what a setting is to a drama.

Chapter 4 sets the scene. It’s the great throne room of God, and the thrust of almost all the symbolism in chapter 4 is to make God transcendent. He is terrifying, he is other, and he alone is the Creator. Even the highest order of angels cannot gaze on him. They hide their faces with their wings and cry, like the seraphim of Isaiah, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

Once the setting is laid, once it is established that he is the Creator, and all things exist by his will, then in chapter 5 the drama begins to unfold. We’re told that in the right hand of him who sits on the throne is a scroll sealed with seven seals. As you work through the options of what this scroll is, I think most interpreters are rightly driven to the conclusion that this is the scroll in God’s right hand that has within it all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing for the entire universe. That’s what the scroll has.

In the symbolism of the time, taking the scroll and slitting the seals means bringing to pass all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing for the entire universe. That’s what it means. Now the question goes out, voiced by an angel with a very loud voice (because he doesn’t have a PA system, and he has to be heard by the entire universe), “Who is worthy to take the scroll and break the seals?” and so forth.

Who is worthy in the light of the setting of chapter 4, granted that it’s this kind of God where even the highest order of angels cannot gaze on God? Who is going to saunter up to this God and say, “Oh, God, I’ll do that for you.” What you’re not supposed to ask is, “Why doesn’t God just do it himself?” Don’t make the symbolism run on all fours, although there is a back-door answer to that, as we’ll see in a moment. Don’t make the symbols answer questions that were not designed for the symbols.

We’re told no one is found, no one in heaven. None of those angels that are mentioned, none of the elders, none of this high order of the four beasts (the four living creatures), no one on the earth, and no one under the earth (that is, in the abode of the dead, no necromancer). No one is found who is worthy, and John weeps, not because he’s a nosey parker who is frustrated because he can’t get all of his eschatological questions sorted out.

He weeps because under the symbolism, if God’s purposes for justice, blessing, and judgment are not brought to pass, then all the suffering of the church is just stupid. It’s meaningless, we’ve lost the meaning of history, it’s not going anywhere, and we’re just damned. That’s why he weeps. Then you recall the interpreting elder taps him on the shoulder and says, “Stop your crying, John. Look, look! The lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed to open the scroll.”

He is identified as coming from the throne. He doesn’t have to come through the serried ranks of all of the other angelic beings and approach this terrifying God. He actually comes from there. It’s a way of affirming the deity of the Lion. However, he’s the lion of the tribe of Judah, which shows that he’s in the line of the Davidic promise from 2 Samuel 7 on. He’s a Davidic king, but he comes from the throne, and he has prevailed to open the scroll. That presupposes a vast struggle. He didn’t just do it; he prevailed in a struggle so as to open the scroll.

John says, “So I looked, and I saw a lamb.” We are not to think now of two animals parked side by side, a lion and a lamb. The point is it’s apocalyptic. You can mix your metaphors. The lion is the lamb, and all of us are familiar with that one. There are dozens of similarly mixed metaphors in in the book of Revelation, and a fair bit of false interpretation has occurred because people are trying somehow to integrate them.

Sometimes you can go into cathedrals in Europe and see funny-looking pictures on the glass of a lion-lamb melded together. I know what they’re trying to do, but this is one of the places where logocentrism helps. You can’t draw a lion-lamb that doesn’t look stupid, but with words you can paint both and show that both are essential; that is, the lion is the lamb.

He is the conquering King, he does come from the throne, but yet he is a slaughtered lamb, he is a sacrificial animal, and he has been slaughtered. The language is brutal. Then to flip it again before our heads get too soft, we’re told that this lamb has seven horns on his head. He has the perfection of all kingly authority. He’s a lion after all!

That’s what apocalyptic can do. It will pummel you with image after image after image, and the more you are familiar with the Old Testament usage of those things, the more you absorb them to build a word-centered picture that depicts glorious reality. I’m supposed to be teaching this stuff, but I can’t teach it very long before I start preaching, in any case, because it is so colorful, it is so vivacious. There are dozens of such mixed metaphors in the Apocalypse itself, and part of the preacher’s job is to find out what they are and preach them appropriately.

5. Unlike any other apocalyptic literature that has come down to us, the book of Revelation is enclosed in something like a letter form.

It’s not a letter form, but the introduction of the book, Revelation 1:4–8, and the ending, Revelation 22:6–21, have no parallel in any of my experience of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic.

Moreover, it includes these so-called letters in chapters 2 and 3. I don’t know any other apocalyptic literature that does exactly that. Yet these letters aren’t quite letters either, in terms of standard form. It includes many, many, many traditionally prophetic notes, which 35 years ago caused George Ladd to call this book not apocalyptic but prophetic-apocalyptic.

Well, I don’t care what the label is; you have overlapping genres. In prophetic literature you have, much more commonly, an appeal to repent, an appeal to turn from sin, an appeal to follow God, and so on. Apocalyptic tends to lay out, like 4 Ezra, a massive dichotomy between good and evil that is rushing toward the end, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of moral appeal.

This book has a whole lot of moral appeal. That’s more typical of an Amos, for example, or an Isaiah. Because God is coming in judgment, whether or not there’s a whole lot of apocalyptic imagery or not, therefore repent, turn to the living God before judgment befalls you. Well in that sense, this book feels much more like an Old Testament prophet than like standard Jewish apocalyptic. Therefore, to think of it as prophetic-apocalyptic is not all bad, but you still have to come to terms with a lot of symbolism that isn’t quite standard.

6. This book often introduces a theme or symbol that is unpacked only later in the book.

It often does that. Now almost never should a preacher attempt to handle a book without reading through the book many times and having some feel for the whole. However, in short epistles and so on, we’ve had enough New Testament courses, maybe we’ve done them in exegesis courses as well, and so forth, we have a certain kind of feel, so we might well do Galatians 1:1–4 one Sunday and Galatians 1:5–10 the next Sunday.

We may have not yet made up our minds entirely about the allegory in chapter 4 yet. We’ll suss that out when we get there. However, the book of Revelation is so intertwined that a lot of your decisions really depend on what you make of later pieces, because some of the symbols, some of the expressions, and some of the categories are picked up and developed later, sometimes not very far on, sometimes within the same chapter.

The best example of that is in the very first chapter. In chapter 1, verse 12: “I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me. Then I turned and I saw seven golden lampstands,” and so on. Well, right off the bat, you might not know exactly what that is. “I know what lampstands are in the tabernacle, but how is that actually functioning?”

Then in the very same chapter, verses 19 and 20. “Write, therefore, what you have seen, both what is now and what will take place later. The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.” Well, we still might debate who the angels are; nevertheless, you are now narrowing it down to geographical referentiality in Western Asia at the end of the first century.

However, there are far, far, far more complex ones than this. For example, in Revelation 13, you must not try to decide what the first and second beasts are, what they refer to, without doing a lot of detailed study of Revelation 17, where the beasts come back and of Revelation 19 and 20, where not only do the beasts come back, but there’s a reference to the False Prophet, who is clearly picking up the symbolism from the second beast (that is, the third creature), and so forth.

In other words, the book is so integrated with some of its symbolism that you have to press on and do a fair bit of study first. If you’re planning a series on the book of Revelation, don’t make it your next one. Make it a year or two down the road, which gives you time to start filling in some serious reading before you get started.

7. The symbolism of the Apocalypse is, in my opinion, particularly appropriate for describing divine realities.

Forgive me if you’ve heard this illustration before. I’ve used it occasionally because I just don’t know of a better one. I have an older sister who, with her husband, served for a while in Papua New Guinea.

When they were there, it was 30 or 35 years ago, and the tribe that they were serving in was pre-Stone Age in its technology. For example, its arrowheads were made of hardwood, like teak or something like that, and the shafts were bamboo. They didn’t even have stone. It was, technologically speaking, a very primitive tribe.

Nowadays it’s not like that. I’ve been to Papua New Guinea myself more recently, and you go to these villages. Sometimes you have to walk in, take a chopper in, get in by four-wheel drive or something like that, but it’s not completely unknown to see satellite dishes and things like that in mud huts. It’s a strange world, mixed generations, a generation or so away from headhunters all the way to porn on a screen that’s brought in on a satellite dish fired by an electric generator. I mean, it’s a strange world.

However, if we take the world, as she knew it, consider one of these tribals. Let us suppose that this tribal, with no previous background of Western culture, were somehow transported out. You have a degree in linguistics, and this tribal now teaches you his or her language, one of the neo-Melanesian group. Because you’re trained in linguistics and you’ve had advanced phonology and all this sort of thing, you have an ear for it, you pick it up, and you work hard at it.

The language has never been reduced to writing. You can’t look it up in a book, but you keep talking with this person, and eventually, after three or four years, you become really, really, really fluent. Now your job is to go back into that tribe, still pre-Stone Age in technology, just to arrive and without any hand-held objects, any demonstrations, explain to the tribals there, in their language, what electricity is. What will you say in their language?

“I have come to explain to you something we call ‘electricity.’ This is a new word for your language. We’ll call it ‘electricity.’ Electricity is like a power; it’s like a spirit that runs very, very fast along vines. Well, they’re not really vines. We make our vines in very, very big mud huts that we call ‘factories.’

We actually cut down the trees and put them in the ground as straight posts. That’s too complicated. These vines are strung from tree to tree and come into our thatched roof. At one end, we pump in this electricity, something like a power or a spirit, and it comes through this vine into our thatched roof.

Inside, up in the thatch, is a little round thing that we also make in our mud huts called ‘factories.’ We call it a ‘bulb.’ In that bulb, the electricity goes round and round and round and round and round and round and round, really, really, really, really lickety-split.” (However you say lickety-split in neo-Melanesian language.)

“It goes around so fast it gets hot, and you can have a mini sun, a little light in your hut, so that you can stay up late at night.” Now, why you’d want to stay up at night I’m not sure. I mean, there is no TV, and you can’t read. Nevertheless, you can have a little sun there. “Or it goes into other things like that. We call them ‘stoves.’ That’s another word for your language. It goes around round things on top of these stoves so fast that you can actually boil water in your clay pots without having any smoke in your hut.”

How am I doing with my explanation of electricity? What’s the matter with these people? Are they stupid or something? No, of course not. Of course not. It’s the same human gene pool. Their kids, coming here, may beat our kids at school, because sometimes immigrant kids try harder. The problem is not stupidity; it’s want of experience. They’ve never seen any of this sort of thing, and I haven’t even begun to talk about the molecular-atomic nature of matter; power units, like voltage; current units, like amps; or resistance units, like ohms.

I haven’t talked about the difference between AC and DC, power generation, or storage. I haven’t introduced Boolean algebras, on which all of the digital world is based (all those 0’s and 1’s), and therefore, modern communications. Before that, as an introductory step, transistors, electronics, communication, and on and on. I haven’t explained anything. I’ve talked about vines. It’s their want of experience.

How now, brothers and sisters, shall we talk about the throne room of God apart from the odd prophet or apostle, like Paul, who is caught up to the third heaven and sees things that are not lawful to be uttered? That expression probably means not only that he’s not permitted to but also that he can’t, because we don’t have the categories. How shall we talk about God?

Well, we talk about rainbows, flashes of lightning, spectacular beasts, thrones, lions, and lambs. As Hebrews puts it, small wonder that the entire Old Testament sacrificial system is given to our poor befuddled, benighted, sin-darkened minds, because there is in it some kind of reflection of the heavenly tabernacle, the heavenly sacrifice. It rather misses the point to read Hebrews and somehow think that there is a literal veil in heaven that got torn. The veil that was torn was in Jerusalem, and we have access into the very throne room of God.

Apocalyptic is particularly powerful in dealing with transcendental realities where our spiritual ignorance, our blindness, and our death is so appalling that God, in his mercy, uses symbol-laden expressions and categories to take back the veil just a bit, that we begin to see, imagine, think, and dream.

“A new heaven and a new earth? There’s no more sea? Oh, what are the hydrological principles in the new heaven and the new earth?” Misses the point! The point in a Jewish environment is that the sea is bound up with chaos and muck. Like Isaiah 57: “The wicked are like the sea which churns up mud and dirt forevermore.” But in the new heaven and the new earth there’s no more sea.

“It’s like a city built foursquare. It’s built like a cube.” Even our skyrise cities aren’t built like cubes. There’s only one cube in the Old Testament. It’s the Most Holy Place. It’s a way of saying that all in the New Jerusalem are in the Most Holy Place forever. In other words, apocalyptic is particularly powerful at teaching us transcendental realities.

If I had more time, I would lay out for you briefly some of the major interpretive grids to the Apocalypse, but you can read that sort of material yourself in the introductions of most commentaries, and you’ll have a chance to go at me in Q&A later. Let me conclude with rapid-fire suggestions for preachers.

1. Do not make Revelation your first assignment, do not feel you have to preach all of it the first time, and do not promise more than you can deliver. I’ve heard many, many preachers start with verse 1 and say, “This is a revelation from Jesus Christ, so of course we can understand it.” Then they get to the end of chapter three and have a heart attack.
2. Read widely in commentaries and similar literature before you start.
3. Work hard at trying to understand how the book works in first-century terms, not in terms of later interpretative grids. Such understanding will eventually feed into one of these grids; nevertheless, you start with trying to understand it in first-century terms, with narrative structure, mixed symbolism, Old Testament background, Greco-Roman background, and so forth.
4. Watch closely for massive biblical theological structures culminating in the new heaven and the new earth. These massive themes that have to do with Christ, the cross, guilt, justification, conflict, ultimate victory, the new heaven, and the new earth. This is a book of massive ultimates. That’s why, once you’ve got some of the fundamentals in place, it is a book, in fact, that is great to preach.

God bless you.