I would not count myself among those who have set their mind to study the Book of Revelation. Sure, I have read it, but it has left me just as confused as many of the church members I speak to about it. Therefore, the next two blog posts will be writings from scholars much more adept than I in the study of Revelation.
“Many people toady regard Revelation as the hardest book in the New Testament. (Many, if it comes to that, can’t even get its name right: it’s Revelation, singular, not ‘Revelations’, plural!) It is full of strange, lurid and sometimes bizarre and violent imagery. You might have thought that in a world of clever movies and DVDs, stuffed full of complex imaginative imagery, we would take to Revelation like ducks to water; but it doesn’t always seem to work that way. As a result, many people who are quite at home in the gospels, Acts and Paul find themselves tiptoeing around Revelation with a sense that they don’t really belong there. But they do! This book in fact offers one of the clearest and sharpest visions of God’s ultimate purpose for the whole of creation, and of the way in which the powerful forces of evil, at work in a thousand ways but not least in idolatrous and tyrannous political systems, can be and are being overthrown though the victory of Jesus the Messiah and the consequent costly victory of his followers. The world we live in today is no less complex and dangerous than the world of the late first century when this book was written, and we owe it to ourselves to get our heads and our hearts around John’s glorious pictures as we attempt to be faithful witnesses to God’s love in a world of violence, hatred and suspicion.” N.T. Wright