Personal revelations about Revelation

• Channel-flipping last night, I caught a National Geo­graphic pro­gram propos­ing to delve into the mys­ter­ies of the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. It reminded me that I’ve been mean­ing to blog about the same thing. And I’m uniquely qual­i­fied because I’ve now read through it about three times in my lifetime.

  That may not sound like much, but I’m not sure the guys at National Geo­graphic have read it all the way through even once.

  And it takes about three times before Rev­e­la­tion stops mak­ing you weird out. Maybe that’s the rea­son that, as the Ortho­dox Study Bible (OSB) points out, it’s the only New Tes­ta­ment book not pub­licly read in the ser­vices of the Ortho­dox Church. I had actu­ally skirted it a time or two in read­ing through the Bible, but that doesn’t seem like the right answer either. Per­haps it’s unavoid­able, but it’s hard not to start try­ing to solve it like it’s your own pri­vate jig­saw puz­zle (“Oho! ‘The shape of the locusts was like horses pre­pared for bat­tle … They had tails like scor­pi­ons, and there were stings in their tails.’ That could SO be like the AIDS virus or some­thing! I’m a genius!”). But when you’ve worn your­self out with that — which doesn’t take long given that absolutely noth­ing is lin­ear or totally cohe­sive — you get to some of the things that would break hearts over both at the National Geo­graphic Soci­ety and, unfor­tu­nately, at many Protes­tant churches.

  What it says, what it doesn’t say

  Like so many books of the Bible, it’s amaz­ing how much doesn’t get quoted. How many times have we heard about the Num­ber of the Beast or the Whore of Baby­lon? Does any­body bother to men­tion that the book starts with three chap­ters con­cern­ing the encour­age­ment and admo­ni­tion of the seven churches under John’s care? Or that the chap­ter before the Num­ber of the Beast bit is quite obvi­ously a vision of Christ’s advent on earth and the incep­tion of His Church?

  By my quick count, 11 of the 22 chap­ters of Rev­e­la­tion con­cern the Church. Per­haps that’s why the OSB lists the theme for this book not as prophecy or warn­ings, but as “Faith­ful­ness in tribu­la­tion.” Does it just ruin all the fun if it turns out that the biggest sin­gle rea­son for the Book of Rev­e­la­tion was not to give tip-offs about the future, but as a help for the faith­ful through­out the Church Age to remain steadfast?

  Well, non-Christian read­ers would def­i­nitely say that it did (ruin the fun, that is). Sym­bol­ogy from Rev­e­la­tion has been lifted by every­thing from “Ghost­busters” to “The Omen” and at no time is there a hint of shame for pre­sum­ing to grab sound-bytes from the New Tes­ta­ment while hav­ing con­tempt for its gospel mes­sage. But per­haps non-Christians aren’t alone in this. In read­ing through the epis­tles, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to miss the fact that the main rea­son for writ­ing them was to edu­cate, exhort and admon­ish churches, not indi­vid­u­als. For every verse that can get lifted from Eph­esians or Gala­tians and become a Hall­mark card, there are chap­ters that tell how bish­ops should be picked, how heretics should be ostra­cized, how spe­cific peo­ple at spe­cific times should be lauded or given mes­sages or dis­ci­plined — in short, these are the begin­nings of the Church. As much as a per­son can and should read them for their per­sonal growth, to try and read every pas­sage as if it must apply to you and you alone is not only unprof­itable but narcissistic.

  The Num­ber of the Beast equals …

  Per­haps the best exam­ple of this is the pas­sage about The Beast and False Prophet that is about where the Church-challenged (both Chris­t­ian and non– like) like to start read­ing. It starts at chap­ter 13 — mind you, we’re more than halfway through the book at this point. Com­ing just after the chap­ter cor­re­spond­ing to Christ’s com­ing (Chap­ter 12, which the OSB titles “The Woman, Her Child and the Dragon”), we hear of a beast which rises out of the sea, utters blas­phemies, earns the wor­ship of the world and makes war with the saints. After that comes The False Prophet which: has the author­ity of the Beast; makes the world wor­ship the Beast; per­forms signs through magic; has his mark put on all with­out which they can’t buy or sell.

  And here’s everyone’s favorite bit — “Here is wis­dom. Let him who has under­stand­ing cal­cu­late the num­ber of the Beast, for it is the num­ber of a man: His num­ber is 666.”

  Do enough Ortho­dox know that there is a plau­si­ble case to be made that we can fig­ure out from that exactly who John was refer­ring to? Maybe it’s just me and I was igno­rant of this, but the first time I read the foot­note to this verse in the OSB, it blew my lit­tle mind. Here it is in its entirety:

  The let­ters of the alpha­bet were used as num­bers in ancient times (as in “Roman numer­als”). thus the numer­i­cal value of names could eas­ily be cal­cu­lated. “The name of the Beast” (v.17) is the numer­i­cal equiv­a­lent to the let­ters of the name of a man (some texts read “616″ instead of the well-known 666). John may be pur­pose­fully enig­matic, using a secret code to pro­tect against a charge of sedition.

  This is a pre­dictably mis­un­der­stood pas­sage, for the text itself says it requires wis­dom and under­stand­ing. In the Bible, the num­ber six stands for falling short, incom­plete­ness, imper­fec­tion; seven, for per­fec­tion, full­ness, com­ple­tion; eight, for escha­to­log­i­cal per­fec­tion, a super­abun­dance of full­ness. The sixth day, Fri­day, is the day of prepa­ra­tion; the sev­enth, the Sab­bath, Sat­ur­day, a pic­ture of the rest to come; the eighth day, Sun­day, the day of the Res­ur­rec­tion, the final estab­lish­ment of God’s King­dom. The numer­i­cal equiv­a­lent of “Jesus” in Greek is 888. The numer­i­cal equiv­a­lent of “Nero Cae­sar” translit­er­ated from Greek into Hebrew is 666, mean­ing the epit­ome of cre­ated inad­e­quacy. The numer­i­cal equiv­a­lent of “Nero Cae­sar” translit­er­ated from Latin into Hebrew is 616. If John were refer­ring to Domit­ian, whom some con­sid­ered to be Nero rein­car­nated, it would be safer to refer not to the present per­se­cu­tor but to the one long gone.

  Now, that’s not to say that that has to be the cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion of the pas­sage. OSB’s foot­note goes on to say, “Some believe that ’666′ is a sym­bol rather than a cryp­togram, falling short of per­fec­tion in each of its dig­its, fail­ure upon fail­ure upon fail­ure. … Many have attempted to iden­tify ’666′, but writ­ing only one hun­dred years after John, St. Ire­naeus had no idea to whom John was referring!”

  But given the widely and wildly spec­u­la­tive guesses about inter­pre­ta­tion of this sym­bol and so many oth­ers in Rev­e­la­tion, isn’t there at least a lit­tle room to con­sider that the answer could be hid­den in plain sight? If you can stand to turn loose of the idea of Rev­e­la­tion as a book of clues for us clever 21st cen­tury types and think of it as a book writ­ten by a shep­herd to strengthen his flock dur­ing a time of ter­ri­ble per­se­cu­tion, does it even make sense to think he would have been so cruel as to hand them numero­log­i­cal head-scratchers? Isn’t it sim­pler and more rea­son­able to pos­tu­late that he only spoke in code where absolutely nec­es­sary to pre­vent any­one found with the text of being brought up on charges of sedi­tion against the emperor?

  Beau­ti­ful Mystery

  That’s not to say that there isn’t still a lot of mys­tery to be pon­dered in Rev­e­la­tion. For one thing, just as it would be ridicu­lous to say (as the “Left Behind” crowd tend to say) that one inter­pre­ta­tion MUST be right, it’s just as ridicu­lous to say that it CAN’T be right. The prob­lem seems to be with the very-human, very-fallen ten­dency to claim to know The Truth when­ever we hap­pen to glimpse it out of the cor­ner of our eye. For another thing, once you shear away all the por­tions of Rev­e­la­tion that could have the most applic­a­bil­ity in ear­lier cen­turies, you’re still left with the the por­tions deal­ing with the fall of Baby­lon, the final bat­tle, the last judg­ment and the New Jerusalem that take you from chap­ter 18 to the end of Rev­e­la­tion at chap­ter 22.

  But mostly, it’s the sure knowl­edge that if we believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, it doesn’t fol­low that one of the longest books in the New Tes­ta­ment is just a throw-away. We’re meant to read it; we’re meant to pon­der it. I real­ized on the last go-round that I could do a lot worse that try to mem­o­rize the signs from the begin­ning of the seven seals onward, just as I would mem­o­rize the Beat­i­tudes or a psalm. If we’re not meant to obsess on them, it doesn’t seem that we’re meant to for­get about them either, judg­ing from Christ’s chid­ing of the apos­tles to know the signs of the end times as sim­ply and nat­u­rally as they pre­dict the weather.

  Old Tes­ta­ment prophecy and New

  In think­ing about Rev­e­la­tion as a gen­uinely prophetic book, it turned out to be most help­ful to think about the prophetic pas­sages of the Old Tes­ta­ment. There were a scads of prophe­cies about the com­ing of the Lord’s Anointed One, but how could any­one know which ones to apply lit­er­ally and which ones were meant sym­bol­i­cally? How could the com­ing Mes­siah be both “a man acquainted with sor­rows” and “Prince of Peace”? If Isa­iah and oth­ers pointed to an even­tual tri­umph of Israel, can the Jews be blamed for not know­ing that that wouldn’t mean a tri­umph in the earthly sense of the word?

  It seems that no one, includ­ing the dis­ci­ples, knew what was going on. When Christ is about to ascend, the dis­ci­ples ask him “Lord, will You at this time restore the king­dom to Israel?” As the foot­note of the OSB reads, “The con­cern of the dis­ci­ples is still fixed on the idea of an earthly king­dom.”) The Jews had the had the Law, the Prophets and the call­ing to be God’s cho­sen peo­ple, but they never expected that the Mes­siah would come not to pro­claim their nation as the win­ner, but to repair the bro­ken­ness that began with the Fall.
  John Mark Reynolds makes the point in a talk (sorry, don’t remem­ber which one) that the clos­est any­one came to under­stand­ing what was needed wasn’t a Jew, but a Greek sophist liv­ing in the 4th cen­tury BC. It didn’t seem that the Jews con­sid­ered that it was need­ful for God to inter­cede — for Some­one out­side of the bro­ken­ness to come and fix it. But Plato writ­ing in the 7th book of “Repub­lic” gives us an alle­gory: that all of us are like peo­ple liv­ing out our lives in a dark­ened cave and wait­ing for some­one who has actu­ally seen the true sun­light to come and tell us about it. (Wikipedia syn­op­sis HERE.)

  So there you are. So often in the times of the First Advent, you see that the Jews and the Gen­tiles were both required to cre­ate the right envi­ron­ment. We needed those whom God had cho­sen to carry the Ark to meet up with those who had begun to truly love Wis­dom and Beauty. Those who had the answer but no ques­tion had to meet those that had the ques­tions but no answer.

  Don’t know if we’re in a sim­i­lar posi­tion now or not. But maybe to arrive at the best under­stand­ing of the prophe­cies of Rev­e­la­tion — when (if?) they do start to come true — per­haps we will need both ele­ments again. Maybe we will need both Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal schol­ars … and earnest, outside-the-box think­ing from the peo­ple who make doc­u­men­taries. Just a thought.

  What it is, what it’s not

  Going back to what the prophe­cies do say, and what they don’t, I get the clos­est to a real bal­ance by remem­ber­ing the wide gap in what the expec­ta­tions were of the Mes­siah and what the real­ity was.

  We would like it very much if the Book of Rev­e­la­tion had said some­thing like: “And after ten hun­dreds of years, the Bride will be divided, and then one half will be divided over and over into many pieces. There will be found a world beyond the sea, and it will be New. Many peo­ples will rise up against their kings, and men will fly in the heav­ens …” and so on and so on. Then we could map every­thing out and proudly point out things to our non-Christian friends.

  Yep, would’ve been nice. The ancient Jews wouldn’t have missed Christ if he had arrived turn­ing a wooden staff into a snake and repelling Roman armies by rais­ing his arms aloft. As C. S. Lewis says, the one thing God doesn’t do is the thing humans want the most — an encore.

  So you’re left hav­ing to take Rev­e­la­tion for what it is and all that it is. There is prophecy that we mostly can’t rec­og­nize, but there’s heav­enly liturgy that we should rec­og­nize all too well, because ancient Chris­tians bor­rowed from it to build the liturgy we cel­e­brate every Sunday.

  • When we sing in the Cheru­bic Hymn “Let us who mys­ti­cally rep­re­sent the cheru­bim, and who sing the thrice-holy hymn …” we are remem­ber­ing that we sing Holy, Holy, Holy as the angelic pow­ers do in Rev­e­la­tion 4:8 in prepa­ra­tion of worship.
  • For that mat­ter, when we hear the Hal­lelu­jah Cho­rus, we should real­ize that the lyrics apply not to the nativ­ity, but to Christ in the end times, as writ­ten in Revelation:

  • “The Lord Omnipo­tent reigns (Rev. 19:6)
  • “King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev. 19:16)
  • “The king­doms of this world have become the king­doms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign for­ever and ever (Rev. 11:15).”
  • and of course “Alleluia! (Rev. 193 for one)” The OSB calls this “an out­burst of celes­tial tri­umph” and notes that this is the only place in the New Tes­ta­ment this word is used.
• If you’re lucky enough to cel­e­brate in a church that has an icon of Christ in the dome, it’s worth reflect­ing that that icon is called “Pan­to­cra­tor” — Christ Omnipo­tent, again from Rev. 19:16.

So the imagery of Rev­e­la­tion is around us in church (and some­times out­side of it) even though we don’t claim to fully under­stand it. It’s as if the Church sim­ply accepts it as both incom­pre­hen­si­ble to the ratio­nal mind and some­how oddly com­pre­hen­si­ble to the part of us that loses itself in wor­ship. As if that book is one that you just take on faith, and con­sider that some­day we will grow into it.

Amen. Would that that would be so.




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