Revelation: A Mid-Tribulation View

REVELATION: A MID-TRIBULATION VIEW

By Tan Geok Hock

Copyright © 2014 by Tan Geok Hock

Email: tangeokhock@yahoo.com

All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

In memory of my mother

Chew Shui Phin

whom I look forward to see again

in the new heaven and new earth.

Contents

Preface

Ch 1: Near or Distant Future?

Ch 2: Text Says Historical Churches

Ch 3: Some Think Church Ages

Ch 4: One God, One Lord

Ch 5: An Odd Reaction

Ch 6: Preliminaries or Judgment Proper?

Ch 7: A Defining Moment

Ch 8: The Calm and the Storm

Ch 9: One Demon Too Many

Ch 10: God’s Next Move

Ch 11: Meanwhile, in Israel

Ch 12: The Second Cycle Begins

Ch 13: The Beasts behind the Seals

Ch 14: Clarifications

Ch 15: Different Vision, Same Event

Ch 16: Spot the Difference

Ch 17: Beauty and the Beast

Ch 18: How the Mighty Fall

Ch 19: At Last

Ch 20: Continuation or Flashback?

Ch 21: New World Order

Ch 22: Final Instructions

Useful Reading

About the Author

Preface

It will be obvious to readers that this book is not intended as a detailed exposition of the letter of Revelation. Instead, its original purpose was to show how John organised and developed his thoughts in the letter. Using this structure allowed me to follow his argument and I hope it will do the same for readers. Along the way, I discovered simple explanations for some of the difficult passages in the letter. The project grew to what it is today.

One thing I noticed when I began was that many writers use other parts of the bible, especially Old Testament prophecies, to dictate the way we should read Revelation. Some also bring in extra-biblical literature. While these are no doubt relevant, they often contributed to my earlier difficulty in making sense of Revelation. It was only when I tried to understand the letter as a self-contained and internally consistent work that I began to appreciate its meaning.

Therefore, readers will find my interpretation is guided more often by the natural reading of the text than by similar terms or images in other bible passages. Context and structure take priority over theological presuppositions about the end time. This approach seems logical to me—the only bible book devoted to the end time should form the basis of our understanding of that period and in turn be used to clarify other prophecies about the last days. I provide some examples in the book. It works for me.

Inevitably, the process of interpreting Revelation will lead one to adopt a certain view regarding the type of message it is trying to convey. My opinion is that the visions in the core of the letter relate to the time of the end, just before the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus. This is commonly called the Great Tribulation period. I also conclude that the church will be removed from the earth during the tribulation, hence the title of this book. This is not a new view but, surprisingly, it is not well-represented in terms of Revelation commentaries.

Whether or not readers agree with my approach or my conclusion, it is my sincere wish that this short commentary will encourage at least some to spend more time with this wonderful letter at the end of the bible and to mine it for all the blessings it holds.

I like to thank all the students in my Revelation classes for making my job easier. Their comments have helped me correct and fine-tune my reading of the text. A special thanks to Elaine Cheong who produced the cover image.

Glory to Him who overcame.

Kuala Lumpur,

September 2014.

Chapter 1: Near or Distant Future?

Back to ToC

The book of Revelation can be outlined as follows:

Ch. 1: Vision of Jesus

Ch. 2-3: Messages to the Seven Churches

Ch. 4-19: Prophetic Visions

Ch. 20: Millennium

Ch. 21-22: New Heaven and New Earth

There is broad agreement that chapters 1-3 relate to people and events in the first century when John wrote. The majority also agree chapters 20-22 refer to the end of history when Jesus will return to establish his kingdom. It is where chapters 4-19 fit into this timeline which differentiates the various interpretive views of the book.

A simple literal reading of chapters 4-19 suggests the prophetic visions relate to the future, because what they seem to describe have not occurred in history. Most readers therefore assume the visions depict events to take place in the run-up to Jesus’s Second Coming.

The above is called a Futurist reading of the text as it expects the visions to be fulfilled by future events. However, this reading is not without difficulty and the very first verse presents us with one.

PROLOGUE

Although Revelation is often thought of as a book, it is in fact a letter. This is evident from the greeting in verse 4. Most NT epistles begin with a greeting. That John adds a prologue suggests he feels some form of introduction or clarification is necessary.

John probably realizes the visions in this book are so fantastic that they will surely raise concerns over authenticity. To allay such doubts, he makes it clear that what he writes was shown to him. He traces its passage from God to Jesus to an angel and then to him. He testifies these are what he saw and not products of his own imagination. Lastly, he pronounces a blessing on those who would take the contents seriously and not dismiss them.

The main problem for the futurist view is that John says what was shown to him must soon take place. Assuming he refers to the visions in the rest of the book, how are we to reconcile John’s expectation with the fact that two thousand years have passed and those prophecies remain largely unfulfilled? Did his original readers understand him to mean those events could still be a long way off? Or was John simply mistaken?

This apparent contradiction has given rise to other approaches to interpret the book which attempt to resolve the difficulty. There are three major alternatives.

PRETERIST

This approach treats the phrase must soon take place literally and claims John must have expected the prophecies to be fulfilled within his generation or soon after. Only then would they serve to comfort and give hope to first-century readers who were facing persecution as implied in the text. Otherwise, John would be misleading his readers.

What first-century event could have fulfilled these prophecies? Proponents point to the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. To support their case, they say records by the Jewish historian Josephus of the fighting between the advancing Roman army and the Jewish defenders provide several tantalizing matches with John’s prophecies.

If the prophecies in chapters 4-19 depict events leading up to AD70, they refer to the past from our modern standpoint. Hence this view is called the Preterist view. The term is taken from the Latin word praeter which means past. Most proponents nevertheless agree chapters 21-22 relate to the future. They therefore place the modern period somewhere in chapters 19-20.

Not every prophecy in Revelation has a close parallel to the fall of Jerusalem. Preterists need to read many texts figuratively to make them fit. Doing so is not wrong, since John obviously employs symbols, but it can be over-utilized to such an extent that the original meaning is lost. I prefer to use symbolic reading only when the literal is clearly not intended.

Another reservation with the preterist view has to do with dates. It requires us to believe John was active among the seven churches in the early AD60s before the Jewish rebellion started in AD66. Yet Paul did not greet John or mention him in his letter to the Ephesians or to the Colossians, or to Timothy who was in Ephesus. Neither did Peter in his epistles to recipients in the region. These letters were probably written in the early and mid AD60s. The silence is awkward for the preterist.

More likely, John went to the region after both Paul and Peter passed from the scene or at least after they were imprisoned in Rome during Nero’s persecution which began in AD64. But by then the Jewish uprising might have seemed inevitable or even under way. In that case, one wonders how much of Revelation qualifies as prophecy. Predicting the mighty Roman army would crush a Jewish rebellion would have impressed no one.

HISTORICIST

The futurist and preterist views may be regarded as extreme positions, arguing that the prophetic visions refer either to the distant future or to the past. The Historicist view strikes a compromise. It thinks chapters 4-19 span the whole of church history until the Second Coming.

Proponents say John did not expect all the prophecies to be fulfilled soon after he wrote but that they would begin to be fulfilled. They claim events transpired as John predicted. Therefore, he was right and there is no contradiction.

Obviously, not every prophecy has come to pass. Some still await fulfilment. Where is the modern church in this timeline? Opinions differ, but many historicists place us within the final few bowl judgments of chapter 16.

To make the scheme work, historicists must find events in history to fit most of the prophecies. Where the match is poor, symbolic reading is often employed to forge a link. The result is not always convincing.

A bigger problem for this view is its lack of constancy. Historicists periodically revise their reading of the text as the decades pass and more historical events are added to the pool. It weighs against the method that the result keeps changing.

IDEALIST

The idealist avoids the difficulty of linking prophecies to actual events by viewing them as symbols of the struggle between good and evil which is characteristic of human history. Evil abounds and causes suffering. God initially stays his hand so as to give evildoers time to repent, but at some point he sends punishment to warn them. When even that is ignored, he exercises judgment and pours his wrath upon them.

This pattern is repeated in history and hence the prophecies are grouped into several cycles. Meanwhile, God’s people should not be discouraged by what goes on but trust God to vindicate them. They can look forward to the new heaven and new earth which Jesus will bring when he comes again.

One benefit of the idealist view is it makes the book more down to earth and easier to apply. However, a major weakness is that prophecies in the bible—no matter how symbolic—usually describe real entities and actual events. This is especially true of the book of Daniel which shares many symbols with Revelation. There seems no reason for Revelation to be an exception.

Overall, the weaknesses of the alternative views are in my opinion more substantial than their attractions. The futurist view still seems the most plausible. I will therefore focus on this view with only occasional reference to the other views.

As for John’s statement that these prophecies must soon take place, the question to ask is whether his first readers were led to believe the prophecies would be fulfilled soon. If they did not think so, John cannot be accused of misleading them. And it would also imply John himself did not assume a near-term fulfilment.

How do we know what the first readers understood? I think it unlikely they would have jumped to any conclusion about timing based on one phrase alone. They would read the entire book first, looking for more clues. We should do likewise and the answer may present itself as we do.

GREETING

The greeting in NT epistles has several functions. First, it tells us who wrote the letter. Here it is John. Church tradition identifies him as John the apostle. We will assume this instead of getting into questions over whether it might have been a different John who penned this work.

Second, the greeting tells us to whom the letter was written. They were the seven churches in the province of Asia, part of modern-day Turkey. The churches are listed in verse 11 and each will receive a personal message in chapters 2-3.

Third, the greeting sometimes tells us where the letter was written. This information is found in verse 9. John was on Patmos, a small island located about 40 miles south-west of Ephesus. It was used by the Roman authority as a penal colony.

Fourth, the greeting can indicate when the letter was written. Verse 9 implies John was exiled for preaching the gospel. This suggests a time of persecution for the church. During the first century, there were two such periods—during the reigns of Nero (AD54-68) and of Domitian (AD81-96). The late date is the traditional, and still dominant, view. Only preterists argue for an early date. Domitian persecuted the church during the last two years of his reign. The letter was probably written during those years.

Fifth, the greeting may indicate why the letter was written. This was already stated in the prologue. God wanted to show his servants what must soon take place. We will later find that God also wanted to give specific warnings and instructions to each church.

Last and perhaps most important, the greeting often hints at the subject matter to be covered in the body of the letter. This is generally true of the greetings in Paul’s letters. Assuming it also applies to Revelation, the hint is most likely in verse 7.

Christian readers have been taught to look forward to the return of Jesus at the end of history. This was, and remains, an essential part of the church’s teaching. Readers would immediately recognise verse 7 to picture Jesus’s return at the close of history and understand this to be the focus of the book.

Preterists protest that coming with the clouds can refer to any coming in divine judgment. An OT example is Isaiah 19:1. Therefore, verse 7 on its own need not point to the Second Coming. Preterists can argue that when Jesus came spiritually to judge rebellious Jerusalem in AD70, people saw him experientially. They rightly point out that peoples of the earth can be translated as tribes of the land.

Nevertheless, the futurist reading is still the more likely when verse 7 is considered within its context. The greeting begins and ends with God being called the one who is, who was, and who is to come in verses 4 and 8. This label is also constantly on the lips of the four living creatures in 4:8. It must therefore be an important designation.

What does the