Unlocking Revelation: 10 Keys to Unlocking the Bible's Final Words

Endnotes

Introduction

Imagine a movie set about to film the book of Revelation. The director ponders how to open the movie. He tries out two quite different approaches. The cameras roll.

Take One

It was one of those days: non-stop rain, teeming down. Nothing to do. John was going to be confined to his Patmos cave. How should he fill in his day? ‘I know what’, he thought,

I’ll take those weird pictures that came into my head a few weeks back and I’ll shape them into a narrative to send to some of the churches that I’m cut off from. Yes, the pictures will look strange and irrelevant to them. And not just the pictures. But also the underlying message, because it will have nothing to do with them in their first-century situation in western Turkey.

I’ll write the material to tell twenty-first-century people about their situation. A lot of the readers will be American. So I’ll put in a lot of stuff about nations they’re interested in: Russia, China, Israel and ­Europe (not to mention America itself). I’ll leave out anything about India, even though it will soon have the largest population in the world – not relevant. And I’ll leave out anything about Africa, South America and Pitcairn Island – they’re off the radar screen.

Take Two

John felt strangely restless. It was all those images that had come flooding into his imagination a few weeks back. He’d been in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. Then – beasts, angels, heaven itself. He hadn’t got the images out of his head ever since. He’d gone over and over them, noticing also their remarkable connectedness with the Scriptures that he already knew so well. Remarkable the way the images put the death of Jesus in a new light: ‘the Lamb who was slain has conquered’. Darkness, defeat and death were not the end. They were forerunners of victory. Death was not defeat, but a new dawn. Shafts of light penetrated the gloom. Forerunners of a supernatural, glorious light from God and the Lamb – a light so powerful that it would do away with the need for any other.

John’s heart ached for his beloved churches. How much they needed this message of light. Their situation was not hopeless. Just the opposite in fact: exceedingly hopeful. In the long view God always cared for his people. The Jesus-followers were now the people of God. The God of the Old Testament was their God. The one who had acted would act again. He had already brought them out of ‘Egypt’. He would soon bring them into the ‘Promised Land’. John knew now what he would do. He would set down his swirl of images, reflections and hopes – the heady brew of his visions and meditation. He would show them what God had already done, what he was doing even now in the apparent stony silence, and what he would do soon. God’s people were not crushed. They were more than conquerors. But they needed to know it.

Take Time to Reflect

Here are two quite different readings of Revelation. The first approach has had huge popular success. The second is the reading of most biblical scholars. How can we judge between the two? This book sets down ten keys to unlock this mysterious book. The first five keys provide interpretive principles. The ‘Take One’ interpreters typically don’t consider these keys. Yet they are crucial guides to sane interpretation. The second group of five keys look at major ideas in Revelation. They respond to the question, ‘What are the big themes of Revelation?’

I urge you to reflect on the ten keys as you read Revelation. And you will then have a firm basis for deciding whether you will be a ‘Take One’ or a ‘Take Two’ interpreter.

If the Book of Revelation seems dense and confusing, consider this scenario. A colleague of mine took her daughter to a movie, thinking they were going to see an in-depth and intriguing British drama. Initially, however, she found the screen material puzzling and confusing. The film did not match expectations. Her bewilderment increased. Eventually she realized this was an adult American ‘chick-flick’. But realization took a long time coming. Her expectations initially blinded her to what the film was really about.

A lot of us are in a state of confusion about Revelation. Gurus have told us what the book is about; but with the passage of time their explanations seem clearly wrong. Their lines of interpretation have the advantage of simplicity, clarity and immediacy; but they don’t make sense of all the material of Revelation. Their interpretations leave us confused and blinded. What really is the message of Revelation?

It is time to leave our pre-understandings behind and start to read Revelation for what it really is. The best thing to do is identify the key ideas that unlock Revelation. To use a body image, there are an enormous number of parts to a body. Yet they all depend ultimately on the skeleton on which they hang, even though that skeleton is invisible to the external viewer. Remove the skeleton and no coherent body remains, just a shapeless mass on the ground. There are hundreds of verses, lots of storylines and masses of details in Revelation. But what is crucial prior to entering in to the complexity of the book is to identify its key principles and themes. These ten points are the ‘skeleton keys’ that unlock revelation. They provide a well-founded framework to disperse the mental fog and see the rainbow in this wonderful book.

Section One

Five Interpretive Principles

As a high-school student I devoured books. I read and read and read. But I never thought much about the task of reading. There was text and I simply read it. Until I got to university, that is. Then I faced a reading crisis. Up to that point I’d read novels at around fifty pages an hour. I could skim-read American westerns faster still – up to one hundred pages an hour. But as a law student at university I encountered very different texts, particularly legal judgements and Acts of Parliament.

The words were written with precision. Each one mattered. I had to slow down – maybe only ten or fifteen pages an hour. And I had to read differently. Not all words were of equal weight in court decisions. What really mattered were the arguments, which were essential to the ultimate court decision. The technical term for the essential arguments was ratio decidendi (the reason for the decision). This ratio decidendi was binding on future court decisions (especially on courts of lower rank). All other words were influential but in no way binding on later decisions. They were simply obiter dicta (other sayings).

And Acts of Parliament should not be read in a literally wooden manner (the so-called ‘literal rule’). Rather they should be read by the ‘mischief rule’. What ‘mischief’ was the Act seeking to regulate? The Interpretation Act of the New Zealand Parliament sets this out explicitly: ‘The meaning of an enactment must be ascertained from its text and in the light of its purpose.’ So as a law student I had to learn new reading skills, new ways of reading text. For a time I felt uneasy and insecure as I gradually adjusted to a different way of reading. Eventually I got there and it became natural to read legal texts in an appropriate manner. However, without this new way of reading I would have remained a confused struggler.

How should we read Revelation? Often reading can be unreflective, failing to realize that Revelation is not to be read in the same way that we read Luke or Romans or Joshua. A reading which fails to realize this is a naïve reading, and it will commonly lead to unfounded, even unwise, conclusions. Before we engage with the text of Revelation we need to think about how the text should be read. Consider these questions.

•   Do we read Revelation as a systematically logical and rational argument, or do we read it with imagination, creativity and flair?

•   What type of writing is Revelation and how does this affect interpretation (see the chapter on genre)?

•   What would the text have meant to its first recipients (see the chapter on context)?

•   Why are there repetitive elements in the Revelation text and how does this affect the way we read the text?

•   What is the significance of all the Old Testament echoes in Revelation? How does this affect interpretation?

The next five chapters on interpretive principles are vital to a sound interpretation of Revelation. They bring us much closer to the mind of the original author and to the mind that inspired that author.

1

Imagination

The book of Revelation is unique in the Bible. No other book is so consistently full of images from start to finish. These images affect us powerfully. But they are not as clear-cut in their meaning as mundane prose. That in essence is the riddle of Revelation – a book with powerful but apparently unclear language.

In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. The high level of images in Revelation struck a publisher of an early illustrated version of Luther’s Bible. This publisher provided woodcuts, etc. throughout his printed version of the Bible in order to illuminate the text. He utilized roughly one image per book of the Bible. When, however, he came to Revelation he inserted twenty-six pictorial woodcuts for that one book alone. This highlights the difference between Revelation and other parts of the Bible. The imagery of Revelation demanded a different approach to his normal woodcut frequency. It points to the fact that Revelation is very significantly a picture-book. And this may suggest that Revelation needs a different reading strategy compared with other books of the Bible.

A crucial point is to recognize that Revelation was written with a remarkably imaginative mindset. The colours, animals, numbers and other imaginative aspects of Revelation are all testimony to this. It is crystal-clear that much of Revelation is not intended as literal description. There will not be a beast that literally has seven heads and ten horns (13:1) – though there may well be horrific evil. The heavenly battle was not literally between Michael and a dragon (12:7). It was rather between Christ and Satan (12:9,11). There will not be a physical army of 200 million (9:16). Logistics make this impossible – even though the world may face and has faced horrendous warfare. There will not be a falling of all the stars to earth (6:13). After all, there are apparently something like 30 sextillion to a septillion stars in 80 billion galaxies – and I can’t even begin to imagine what one septillion is. If they all fell towards the earth, their mass would produce gridlock way out in the near-infinite distances of space as they converged together. All the stars of the universe are not literally going to land here, even though there may be cosmic upheaval. And if one day I encounter Christ in glory and encounter him in all his glory, I will not feel cheated or deceived if his eyes don’t literally look like a flame of fire or his voice doesn’t actually sound like a waterfall (1:15–16). This is because I recognize that Revelation was written imaginatively.

The Need for Imaginative Reading

This imaginative book must be read in the same way – with an imaginative mindset. I cringe at the excessive literalism of some of the fantastic and goofy interpretations of today that are so wooden in their approach. Do they not sense the imaginative and picturesque dimensions of Revelation? Has there been a lobotomy of their mind, or a total deadening of the imagination they once had as children, that stops them being caught up in the thrill and awe of Revelation, without feeling that it has to be literally and exactly ‘like this’? Don’t they realize the need to penetrate beyond the surface clothing of the message to the deeper and grander message that lies within? As Revelation is written with the imagination, so it must be read with the imagination.

Communication takes many forms. Prose and poetry, for example, are very different forms of communication – and need to be read with different mindsets. Much prose is essentially descriptive. It seeks to give its message in a straightforward, clear and matter-of-fact manner. Most people intuitively recognize that Revelation is not straightforward, clear, or matter-of-fact. In many cases they abandon any attempt to understand Revelation beyond a reading of the most straightforward passages (perhaps chapters 2 and 3, or chapters 1 to 5). The alternative to abandonment is commonly to embrace the interpretation of some populist guru who treats the book as literal description, yet wrapped up in coded language. The guru, through some mysterious and arcane juggling, then apparently cracks the code to show that Revelation is actually about the world of the guru’s followers.

This is a misguided, immature and self-centred reading of the book, rather like attending someone else’s