Understanding the Book of Revelation, Part 1
The Christian Gospels and Epistles do not tell the whole story; this book finishes God's revelation to the world in its fulness. The Hebrew Bible began the revealing, a Great and Terrible Love Story.
There is much wackiness put forth concerning Revelation – also called the Apocalypse, which in the Greek means uncovering, revealing – along with different theories of interpretation, leading many to give up in frustration and confusion when they seek to understand it.
Which is a shame as it is the one piece of literature that is pure gold as to visionary accuracy concerning what is going on in the world, and what is coming down the pike toward us in, I believe, the not too distant future.
There was a similar piece of literature in the Hebrew Tanakh (Old Testament) that gave the Jews understanding during a searing crisis moment in their history – the brutal invasion of Antiochus Epiphanes a little more than a century and a half B.C. – which gave them discernment and courage to endure, and, eventually, overcome.
We in 2022 and the years coming will need like discernment and courage to face what awaits us – and now is at the doorstep – such as the perils the Great Awokening shall bring on us and our families, and more brutal agendas that are on the way.
All this to say, although we have seers with keen insight into geopolitical and cultural developments – I have written on this topic of our contemporary seers – there is but one source of vision that will enable us both to see and to avoid the destruction that’s coming.
Which is not to say that seers with limited vision – spoken of in Without Divine Perspective seers fail – have no worth, for we may have the broadest picture but without details, leaving us unable to see the present clearly, depriving us of crucial understanding and wisdom for the moment we are in. We need each other! Or at least I need them!
A sound understanding of Revelation, with an appropriate hermeneutical (interpretive) approach, will afford the seer a perspective that cannot be matched. And, if taken to heart, an encounter with the One who gave the vision to John, and is Gatekeeper to the New Earth of the age to come and its community, and who gives the gift of forgiveness for sins and eternal life to those who love and trust Him.
Part 2 will go a little further into a sane approach to the Apocalypse.