Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Apocalyptic Preaching and Teaching in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
… to outdo the faculty member who had done it the last time, so I was approaching apostolic status. The third night was so embarrassing. It was approaching the positively corrupt, so I said, “I don’t know who the bigger sinner is here: this chap for telling all these lies or me for enjoying them,” whereupon the remaining nights of the conference I was introduced only with insults, and the most capable insulter in that august institution is Phillip Jensen. I have told him so.
Then I knew I had arrived. You’re not accepted in Australia until you’re introduced by only insults, so I want to tell you I feel very welcome here, Peter. In America, all the humor puffs you up. In Britain, all the humor puffs you down. In Australia, all the humor puffs the other chap down.
In the last two or three decades there have been extensive debates as to whether apocalyptic literature can be rightly called genre as the case may be. If so, what are its essential characteristics, and if that is proper procedure, does the book of Revelation belong to the category when, after all, it is called in the opening verses a prophecy?
The volume of literature just on that subject is, quite frankly, huge. This is not the place to trace out those debates. Nevertheless, I would argue the word apocalyptic is a useful category to refer to a body of literature with more or less common form, content, and function. Those are the three axes on which genres are usually defined. Form, content, and function.
There is a body of literature with enough similarities in form, content, and function to use the term apocalyptic usefully as a designation for a genre. On the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that genre analysis is messy. That is to say there are all kinds of overlapping genres. We’ve seen that in principle elsewhere.
The Gospels are at one level biographies, but they’re not quite like ordinary biographies. They’re really quite extraordinary in certain respects. Paul has letters, but some of his letters really break the forms of all the letters we know about in the first century. So also the book of Revelation, we shall see, has many dominant features very much like the apocalyptic that runs throughout the Middle East from about 200 BC to about AD 200 with tentacles running back to the sixth century BC and running on a couple of centuries beyond that.
It also has some similarities to letters, some similarities to prophecy, some similarities to autobiography, and a few other things as well. Granted these subtleties, these messy realities, let met alert you then to some features of the book of Revelation and suggest some strategies for the preacher. First, some characteristics of the book of Revelation and then, briefly, some of the major interpretive approaches to the Apocalypse. I’m going to fly here. Then, finally, some suggestions for preachers. Those are my three principle points.
1. Characteristics of the book of Revelation.
First, as apocalyptic literature, it embraces a narrative framework and presents God or Christ or an angel communicating revelatory truth to a human intermediary genre to pass on to others. What I’ve really done is given you a thumbnail definition of apocalyptic. Let me repeat it. As apocalyptic literature, it embraces a narrative framework and presents God or Christ or an angel communicating revelation from heaven’s vantage point to a human intermediary, genre, to pass on to others.
That’s the way apocalyptic works, whether you’re talking about 2 Enoch or parts of Jubilees or The Apocalypse of Adam, another book you can find in a good library and read for your amusement. This means, because it presents something from the divine perspective, what you have here is the peculiarly immediate divine perspective. You have things overtly from the throne-room of God.
Thus, a Pauline letter, though it is undoubtedly God’s word to us, is profoundly Paul’s word to us. It is bound up immediately with Paul’s thinking, Paul’s reflection, and so on very immediately. Thus, when Paul gets to his room at the end of a busy day or when he’s lying down on his prison pallet and wants to go to sleep, it’s not as if he suddenly hears a voice saying to him, “Not yet, Paul. Get out your quill pen. There’s a bit of work here to do.”
“What? Again?”
“Yes, again. Here we go. Paul …”
“Paul …”
“… an apostle …”
“… an apostle …”
“… with Silas …”
“… with Silas …”
“… to the bishops and deacons …”
“… to the bishops and deacons …”
“… which are at Philippi …”
“… which are at Philippi …” It’s not that kind of thing. Do you see? It is profoundly bound up with Paul and who he is. God has so superintended it that it is simultaneously Paul’s word, Paul’s feelings, Paul’s thoughts, Paul’s reflections, Paul’s analysis, Paul’s theology, Paul’s vocabulary and God’s, but apocalyptic is more immediate. The outsider looks in and God speaks. God mediates things through an angel or through his Son.
As a literary genre outside genuine revelation, I would argue it is an artificial structure. Just as when John and I wrote the book, Letters Along the Way, they’re not real letters. It’s a structure. But God in his wisdom has used a structure of common genre to be a medium by which God does reveal things with standard symbols in the day in which the living God does reveal certain things by an angel or by his Son through an intermediary genre in categories that would be understood.
That is nothing less than revelation, so, as a result, you have very little of biography in this or very little of personal feeling or John’s council of the church. What he records is this immediacy of revelation in heavily symbol-laden terms. Moreover, such material is presented, not only as a divine perspective on the divine and human relationships and on human affairs, but in all of apocalyptic literature there is an immediacy of implication for human conduct, not usually cast as a whole ethics.
They’re not lists of household duties. There are no so-called house cables here. There’s no long list you sometimes get of do’s and don’ts at the end of a Pauline letter. Yet, there are massive implications for human conduct in an Apocalypse, usually along the line of perseverance, preparedness, worship, being holy, or the like.
Also in this literature there are many colorful symbols, some of which are standard in apocalyptic literature (Horne is all over the place) and some of which are idiosyncratic. That is, they are peculiar to the particular book. Then you have to decipher them within the framework of that book. Some of them, in the case of John, are heavily bound up with the history and circumstances and literature and geography of the area to which the book was sent. That’s why a study of the seven churches is quite useful.
A friend of mine died a few years ago, but he finished first his very important book, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting, by Colin Hemer. He spent many trips in what is now Western Turkey, the area of Asia Minor where the seven churches are. He took photographs, did archaeological work, and examined all the old inscriptions, and so on and so on and so on.
It’s a scholarly book. It’s not the sort of book to read before dinner, but on the other hand, if you’re serious about understanding something of the background, at least of chapters two and three, some of which symbolisms then recur throughout the rest of the book, that’s a very good place to start, which is another way of saying the first readers (the first recipients) would have understood more of the symbolism automatically than we do, which returns us again through the back door to the scandal of historical particularity.
Just as we are obligated in understanding Isaiah to understand something about how Hebrew works seven centuries before Christ, so we’re also obligated to understand something of how symbols and culture and language and literature work in the first century when you’re dealing with apocalyptic.
Secondly, like apocalyptic, Revelation schematizes history and usually uses numbers symbolically. It schematizes history and usually deploys numbers symbolically. You should not think every use of numbers in Scripture is symbol-laden. It’s not. Despite the fact I have maybe 30 or 40 articles at home on the symbolic value of the 153 fish in John 21, I confess I remain somewhat skeptical.
Do you know what those 153 fish mean? Well, for you mathematicians, 153 is the triangular number of 17. That is to say, 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 plus 5, all the way to 17, adds up to 153, and 17 equals 10 plus 7. Ten is the number of the Ten Commandments; seven is the number of perfection. Seven equals three plus four. Three is the number of the Trinity. Four is the number of the church built foursquare.
Therefore, the 153 fish represent the world mission to bring in the fish (we’re to be fishers of men, you see), to bring in the people of God in the name of the Trinity teaching the Ten Commandments, the moral Law of God, and thus build up the church built foursquare. Preach it, brother. Let me tell you, you could away with that kind of sermon in most of our churches and nobody would blink an eye. They’d go out saying, “Wasn’t that profound?” We need another cullet. May the Lord have mercy on our hermeneutic experts.
The point is there are rules to the interpretation of numbers. There have to be reasons from the context for thinking they should be taken in a symbol-laden way. Numbers are so regularly symbol-laden you should assume they have symbolic value. That’s the assumption. Hence, you have endless threes and tens and fours and sevens and so on. With a little experience, I think you can see how they line up pretty quickly.
Seven regularly, regularly, regularly refers to the totality of something, the fullness of something or other. Twelve is, as far as I can see without exception, bound up with the twelve tribes, the twelve apostles, or in multiplications, the wholeness of the people of God: 144,000 is 12 times 12 times 10 times 10 times 10. That’s not an accident. There are two possible interpretations out of that point, but you still have to start from that point. Do you see?
Thirdly, unlike any other apocalyptic literature that has come down to us … At this point you see the revelation is a little different. Unlike any other apocalyptic literature that has come down to us, three things. First, revelation is enclosed in a letter framework. Thus, on the one hand, at the front end, chapter 1, verses 4 to 8, “John, To the seven churches in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you from him who was …” and so on and so on.
Then a word of thanksgiving. “To him who loves us …” and so on. See? In terms of form, it’s like the Pauline letters. Do you see? At the other end (Revelation, chapter 22, verses 8 to 21), “I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard them …” and so on and so on.
Then there are some blessings and so on. “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.” Then toward the end, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with God’s people. Amen.”
There are elements there that are very parallel to Pauline letters. One of the effects of this is to superimpose on the Apocalypse some of the flavor of a letter including the immediacy of contact, the occasional nature we talked about last day, what is sometimes called the apostolic parousia. This is how he presences himself with people by a letter. It is not that it takes away, it seems to me, from the apocalyptic nature of the document, but it adds to it another dimension as well.
The second element … There are also letters so called within the book (chapters 2 and 3) that don’t look like letters, so you have rights to the seven churches. When you look at those letters to the seven churches as they’re regularly called, in fact, they have structure unlike any letter that has come down to us from the ancient Near East.
This means, although there is enormous immediacy in each of them to the particular seven churches at stake, already in its very form there is a flag going up saying, “But this is not merely occasional. This is part of the structure of the whole book. This is part of this apocalyptic structure, and there are things here to be learned within that kind of framework.”
I wish I could tease that out with illustrations, but I’ll pass by. Colin Hemer took many, many photographs of that whole area. I swiped them and copied 85 or 90 of the best of them, and when I preach through those letters now I sometimes show them up on a screen to illustrate certain points. I swiped with his full knowledge and approbation, I should say. Do you want a story about Colin Hemer?
Colin was a great chap. He wasn’t a preacher. He would never be a preacher. He had three speeds of speech: slow, dead slow, and stop. He was terrific with international students because he spoke slowly. He started an international students’ Bible study on Sunday afternoons at Tyndale House in the early 70s when I was doing my PhD there. He never led it (it just wasn’t his style), but he invited everybody.
We got 60 to 70 a week going and some of us in the house led it. He once threw a barbeque out on one of the greens for international students. He had 200 people out. He’d never speak at it. He wasn’t a public speaker. I spoke at it, but he invited them all and knew them all by name. I didn’t know them all by name.
He would talk like this … when he … told … a … joke. You didn’t … know … when he … had finished, so … you … didn’t … know … when … to … laugh, but he was a great chap. He was a great quiet evangelist and witness, and his scholarship was impeccable in the Greco-Roman world. It was immense. Great, great learning!
He was one of those chaps … He was a bachelor. At one level it was his massive mind; on the other level he was the sort of chap who stood there like this holding his tea at Levinson’s and dribbling down his front. I never saw him without tea stains dribbled down his front. He could talk to a Turkish general and a maid in a hotel with the same kind of attention and reverence, which is a very Christ-like virtue. Most of us are committed to talking respectfully to those up and rather disdainfully to those down. Not Colin. Not once. Not ever!
When he was on his deathbed … He died prematurely of cancer in my arms. When he was on his deathbed, he would say things like, “Grace.” Then he’d say the word grace in about 17 languages, and I lost him after about the first dozen or so. “Do you know … what grace … is … in … Turkish?” On his deathbed!
That was Colin Hemer. A great man, which is another way of saying there are different gifts in the church, but one of his gifts to the church (one of the gifts of God to the church mediated through him) was a better understanding of the Apocalypse, so read his book published by Sheffield University Press, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting, not for light reading and not if you don’t know any Greek, but if you can overcome those two barriers, it’s a great book.
There’s a third element in which it’s quite different. There are more prophetic notes in the book of Revelation. It does have more parallels to Old Testament prophecy than any other apocalyptic book of the entire intertestamental corpus which I think I have read. That is why some scholars like George Eldon Ladd call this prophetic apocalyptic, which isn’t bad. That’s my third sub-point.
Fourthly, Revelation has peculiarly loose and peculiarly tight connections with the Old Testament. Here I would love to spend three or four hours with you giving you illustrations (I think it would unpack the whole book for you), but I have time only to explain what I mean, and then you can look for it yourself.
It has peculiarly loose connections in two respects. First, there is no instance where the Apocalypse actually quotes the Old Testament in a verbatim, at-length quotation. A few words or a few clips again and again and again, but no fulfillment formula (“Thus saith the Lord through the prophet Isaiah saying …” or something like that). There’s none of them in this book!
Moreover, when it does cite the Old Testament, when it does elude to the Old Testament, quite frankly, it often rips things right out of context. Very often, but not maliciously. Not so as to say, “What that text really means is this,” and then say something else. It’s not that. It’s that it picks up the language of the Old Testament, the vocabulary of the Old Testament.
Humanly speaking, the author is someone whose mind is steeped in the Old Testament, and those sorts of verbal outcroppings then just show up in almost every verse. It is astonishing! When you start looking for it, if you really are familiar with the Old Testament, it shows up again and again and again.
Some of these outcroppings are just part of these verbal connections, but then on the other hand, and now we come to the tight connections, many, many, many of them are bound up with profound typologies that tie the whole canon together. May I take just one example? In the next chapter after the chapter we considered today, chapter 13, the first beast is the beast coming out of the sea. He has ten horns and seven heads and so forth. A blasphemous name.
Verse 2: “He resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power …” This is direct description of things from Daniel where Daniel analyzes the beasts that are coming. They’re tied up with the Medo-Persian Empire, the Greek Empire, and the Roman Empire.
Yet, one of the features of the book of Revelation to which I’ll draw attention to in a moment is that sometimes a symbol gets in there or a metaphor gets in there or a spectacle gets in there which is extraordinarily mysterious, and then it’s explained some time later in the same chapter sometimes, sometimes much later.
In the first chapter, for example, the seven golden candlesticks … You’re not going to sort that out when they are first introduced, but it’s all right. They’re explained to you in the last three verses (chapter 1, verses 18 to 20), so you know what the candlesticks are. Otherwise, you might have got it wrong. Do you see?
So also this beast … To be quite frank, if you restrict yourself to chapter 13, you’re going to have a hard job sorting this one out, but if you go on to chapter 17, the same beast recurs. Then you discover, for example, this beast is sitting on another woman. “The woman … MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”
This beast is connected with this woman, so chapter 17, verse 7: “Then the angel said to me: “Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and of the beast she rides …” It becomes very clear it’s the same beast. This is the beast with seven heads and ten horns. The only beast in the whole book that has seven heads and ten horns is this one introduced in chapter 13. Do you see?
“This beast, which you saw, once was, now is not …” That’s formula that comes out of chapter 13 as well, describing this beast. “… which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss … The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast.”
“This calls for a mind with wisdom.” Well, I should say so. “The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. They are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come …” So you have these seven, and then … bang! Verse 8: “The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king.” Your head is going around and around and around in circles. “This math doesn’t add up,” and so on.
It would take too long now to unpack it all. If I were preaching from chapter 13, I would try to do so, but one of the things that quickly becomes very clear is that this beast is tied through the symbolism to the beasts from the Old Testament, and yet, it is now tied also through the seven hills to the Roman Empire.
You have these seven kings, and beyond the seven kings, there’s an eighth king. You’ve got the totality, and then beyond the totality is an eighth. What is the eighth doing there? I would argue very strongly John sees the beast keeps recurring. He recurred in the Medo-Persian Empire. He’s recurring now in the Roman Empire.
Right now he’s not persecuting the church. He is not, but there is still the totality of the Roman Empire, the whole seven hills, and yet there’s an eighth that is coming. Beyond the Roman Empire, there is still more beast! This beast is one who dies and then comes back to life. That’s what chapter 13 says. That’s what chapter 17 says. He receives a fatal wound and comes back to life.
“Wait a minute. That’s not a fatal wound. If you have a fatal wound you don’t come back to life. If it’s a fatal wound you don’t come back to life. That’s what makes it a fatal wound.” But in point of fact, it is a fatal wound because the beast dies and then he comes back to life. You start sorting out the miscellany of symbolism and you see pretty clearly what happens, do you not?
Evil rears its head and becomes more and more and more powerful and becomes totalitarian and assumes all authority. This life will last 1,000 years, and the beast dies, but the beast comes back, and every time everybody is surprised because the beast comes back. George Bush gets up and declares, “The Cold War is over!” Scholars in America write books. “History is dead!” Oh, rubbish. Don’t they read their Bibles?
I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. The beast is going to come back. That’s what’s going to happen. The beast keeps coming back. The beast is bound up with the leopard and all of that, and then the beast comes back in the Roman Empire, and after the Roman Empire the beast comes back! Do you see?
You won’t catch those connections unless you understand how the various animal-language symbols work in Daniel. There’s profound reflection, you see, on how the Bible is working out a kind of (this sounds too esoteric) philosophy of history, a kind of way of visioning history under the sovereignty of God. In that sense, Revelation regularly has a peculiarly tight connection with the Old Testament. Many of its dominant themes connected with temple and other things are tied up that way.
I’ll say one more thing about the nature of the genre before I press on to other points. Apocalyptic symbolism is peculiarly appropriate for describing divine realities. An illustration I often use here is from my sister who was a missionary for some years in PNG. This goes back more than 25 years. She was there for one extended period of time. They weren’t there as career missionaries; they were there for just under five year.
She worked in a tribe in remote hill country that was pre-Stone Age in its technology. That is to say the arrowheads were made of hard wood like ebony or something like that. They weren’t even stone. I was in PNG last year. Nowadays, although there are 800 different language groups, in point of fact you can get to almost all of them by air. Helicopter, not light plane. No place in PNG is quite as remote as it was 25 years ago, but in those days many of those remote tribes were only half a generation away from cannibalism.
Suppose then, for argument’s sake, one of these tribals came out and you learned his or her language. You really worked hard at it, and you were linguistically trained, and you had basic phonetics and phonemics so you could figure things out in a big hurry, and you learned to speak the language fluently. Then for some strange reason, you were assigned by IBM to go into that tribe using only their language and without any visual aids and explain to them the mysteries of electricity. How would you proceed?
“I have come to tell you …” You’re talking your language now. “About … You don’t have a word for it, but we’ll invent a new word in your language and call it electricity. Electricity is like a powerful spirit that runs along hard things like vines. These hard things, however, do not grow; they are made by human beings.
What we do is we string them from tree to tree. Actually, we cut down the trees, take off all the branches, put the tree back … No. Forget that. We string them from tree to tree, and at one end we pump in this stuff, electricity, like a spirit. We pump it in, and at the other end, you connect this hard thing like a vine into your mud hut.
In your mud hut, in your thatched roof, you put another little thing people make, and as the spirit from the hard thing like a vine goes into this little round thing, it goes around really fast. Lickety-split.” I say that in any of the tribal languages of neo-Melanesian, but lickety-split. “It goes around so fast it’s hot like a small sun so you can stay up at night. I don’t know why you’d want to. I can’t imagine, but if you wanted to stay up at night, there’s a small sun in your thatched roof!
Or it can go into other square things people make, and there are other round things on top of that. The electricity goes lickety-split around there too, and it gets so hot you can actually boil water in your clay jars without having any smoke in your hut. Not bad, is it?” How am I doing as I explain electricity?
I mean, I haven’t mentioned anything about direct current and alternating current or power generation or power storage. I haven’t mentioned anything about resistors and semi-conductors or computers. I haven’t mentioned any of the units of measure (ohms and watts and volts), and I haven’t said anything at all about high voltage transfer.
I haven’t said anything at all about microwave, and I haven’t said anything about the electronic nature of matter. I haven’t introduced atomic values, electrons, or protons. I haven’t said anything at all about quanta, but how are we doing? What’s the matter with these people? Are they stupid? No, of course not. If they immigrate to Australia, the chances are pretty good their kids will beat your kids in school because children of immigrants often do. They try harder. They’re number two.
The problem is they have no categories for these things because they have no experience of them. We can talk about all these kinds of things because our children are brought up with them all around all the time. They have no categories. So how now will you talk about the throne-room of God?
Thus, in the great visions of Scripture, when the few who have had such visions come back and tell us of them, inevitably they are couched in symbol-laden language because, although they may have experienced something way beyond that, we just don’t have the categories. We haven’t been there.
Thus, you have Ezekiel, chapter 1, verse 28, after he’s finished with those wheels and whirling things and all that sort of thing. What does he say? “This was the likeness of the appearance of the glory of the Lord.” You’re not going to be able to draw a picture. What does Paul say in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12? “I saw things,” he said, “that cannot be uttered that are unlawful to be uttered.” I think the expression means both that he wasn’t allowed to and, quite frankly, that they’re unutterable in any case.
When things like that are unpacked, when they are permitted to be uttered, in fact, they are in symbol-laden language which is what Revelation 4 and Revelation 5 are all about. Even to begin to glimpse the glory of God in Revelation 4 and Revelation 5 demands you begin to understand something of this symbol-laden language but not to confuse the symbol with the reality. The symbol points to the reality, but at the same time, it points to the porosity of our experience of God that God should have to use such language to us because we know him so little. That’s the truth.
That’s my first point, badly truncated. I think I will skip the second point. I was going to briefly survey some of the major interpretive approaches to the apocalypse (preterits, futurist, philosophy of history approach, history of the church approach, and so on) and tell you what’s wrong with them, but we’ll skip that.
2. Suggestions for preachers.
Here I will do not much more than prime the pot as it were. First, do not make revelation your first assignment. There is a tendency in some preachers to look for the toughie texts. There are many young preachers who have never preached on John 3:16, but they are bound and determined to take every toughie in the entire New Testament. That is daft. It is daft beyond words. Preach the easy stuff. You’ll find it’s challenging enough and it’s not all that easy.
Gradually, you’ll build up a body of biblical theology that will sustain you when you move into the more difficult material. I knew an Australian lecturer a number of years ago when I was a student who vowed he wouldn’t preach on Canticle Song of Songs until he was 60. He preached through much of the rest of the Bible. He told us this, and he said, “I’m 59 and can hardly wait!” Well, it might have been a slightly legalistic approach, but there was some wisdom there just the same.
Moreover, when you do start preaching on the Apocalypse, do not feel you have to preach the whole thing the first time. Many is the preacher who started off saying, “All of the Bible is profitable for instruction, for correction, for reproof, for rebuke, so the book of Revelation which is a revelation of Jesus Christ is for our profit as well, so we’re plunging in.”
They manage to get through chapter 1 and chapter 2 and chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 are beginning to slow down. At chapter 6 they quit. Then they feel defeated and a failure. They don’t go back to it for 30 years. You don’t have to preach the whole thing the first time! Do some of the bits you can manage. If you can do the first three chapters, it’s better than none. Add 4 and 5. They’re not too bad. If you get the basic guidelines straight there, you’re okay. Handle 20 and 21 and forget 6 to 19 for a wee bit.
Secondly, read widely in the commentaries and the literature before you start on anything between chapters 4 and 20. The reason is because there are both structural questions at stake and interpretive grids at stake so that you must have some idea of where the whole is going before you can make sense of any of the parts.
That’s not true for all kinds of literature, but it is powerfully true for the book of Revelation. Unless you have some conclusion in your mind about how the whole thing works, you will make mincemeat of the parts, which means you have to do a fair bit of study on the whole before you start tackling any of the parts, which is another reason for not announcing you’re going to do the whole until you’ve spent quite a bit of time at it giving yourself a few years of studying on the side.
Thirdly, remember the characteristics of the literature that I’ve just elucidated and others. That includes, then, how the literature would first be understood by others. Any interpretation of the book of Revelation that would be fundamentally idiotic or incomprehensible or silly or distant or alien to the first century readers is, de facto, mistaken.
After all, it was sent to readers in a certain part of what is now Turkey. It was sent to first-century readers. You must ask how it would be understood by them first before you try to work out anything else. If your interpretation is so esoteric that your local Christian, Ephesian deacon couldn’t possibly understand what you’re saying, you’re wrong! It’s as simple as that.
That includes, then, understanding narrative structures. Also, mixed symbolism which is a feature of apocalyptic. Let me give you one instance of mixed symbolism. You recall in chapter 5, God is the one who is seated on the throne with all of his power and glory, and in his right hand is a scroll. The cry goes out from a mighty angel who is capable of approaching this terrifying, transcendent God and opening the scroll.
What it means in the symbolism is who can bring God’s purposes to pass for judgment and blessing? No one is capable of doing so. Then John is crying and in deep despair because no one can bring to pass God’s purposes for judgment and blessing, and an angel says, “Stop crying. Look. The Lion of the tribe of Judah. He has prevailed to open the scroll.”
So John stops his blubbering and turns around and says, “I saw a Lamb …” Now it’s not as if there is a lion and a lamb. The whole point is the Lion is a Lamb. The Lion is announced, and John looks and sees a Lamb. That’s mixed metaphor, but the Apocalypse is doing that constantly. In most forms of literature that is a foolish way of proceeding. In apocalyptic literature it is the common way of proceeding. There are many, many, many mixed metaphors.
The point is the one who brings all of God’s purposes to pass for judgment and blessing is simultaneously the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and the apocalyptic Lamb, who has seven horns (the perfection of kingly power), yet he’s a slaughtered Lamb and he has eyes everywhere, which is a symbol for omniscience. Do you see? All of the different metaphors and symbols coming together in the one person of Christ. You won’t see those things unless you understand how apocalyptic works.
Fourthly, watch closely for massive structures, for biblical theology culminating finally in massive themes: judgment, hell, the cross, heaven. There are massive themes in this kind of literature, and they need to be portrayed and pictured with glory and strength.
Finally, if you observed anything from the sermon I tried to preach on Revelation 12, understand the book of Revelation is a gospel book. It is full of the gospel. At the end of the day, it is not given primarily to titillate our intellectual curiosities about exactly what the fourth horn from the right is. It’s a gospel book, and you will be handling the book best when you understand how its structures and symbolisms bring you back again and again and again to the triumph of the Lamb. That’s what the book is about: the triumph of the Lamb.
To quote Billy Graham, “May the Lord bless y’all real good.”
