The Book of Revelation: It’s Not What You Thought.

Tired of scrutinizing the text in an attempt to predict the end times? Here's help.

Most Christians are aware of the Book of Revelation, but it is rare that one reads it and gains a way to live today. When Revelation is not—like every book of the Bible—seen as for today, it is because we think we are supposed to read it in order to predict the future, namely the rapture and/or Second Coming of Jesus.

I’m no stranger to this approach. My youth was immersed in guessing who the antiChrist was, the Whore of Babylon, the Beast, etc. Every time there was a geo-political shift or when a world politician died, we had to make new guesses. Many a meal or hang-out time was given to making predictions. 

In addition, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was published in 1970—the era I was converted. The worldview and teachings of that book were in the spiritual air we breathed. As a Methodist youth pastor, I got in big trouble for showing the apocalyptic movie A Thief in the Night to the youth group. Who knew that movie could get a young leader in hot water? I thought I was just doing evangelism! Right in the middle of all this, Chuck Smith, Pat Robertson and others were naming the year in the near future that Jesus would return.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

For people like me, the great gift of authors Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett is that they give us a new way of reading Revelation. This approach is not new in the sense that “no one has ever thought about it on these terms.” It is new because it takes into account both modern scholarship and the evangelical, apocalyptic era I have been describing. Scot and Cody don’t just tear down that history in their book; they critique it to give us not just a better way to read and understand Revelation, but a way to live today according to the imaginative and evocative revelations that John sees on the island of Patmos. 

My co-host Mickey Lowe and I recently interviewed Scot for The C4SO Podcast [Scot’s episode coming 6/27!]. Scot explained that John, as a pastor, was trying to help followers of Jesus be dissidents—to see power, “the powers,” principalities and empire for what they are, penultimate at best. And then to live as if that were true: to have a vision, values and priorities that match and make manifest in daily living the insights gained about the relative “power of the powers” and the ultimate kingdom rule and reign of the Lamb. 

In the podcast interview, I asked Scot: “Regarding the Lamb, is there a vision here that is meant to shape our followership of Jesus?” Yes, he said, it is precisely the cruciform and Christoform implications of the Lamb that are meant to both inform our worship and guide our work in the world, being dissidents ourselves and working on behalf of those oppressed by the powers [my paraphrase].

Noticing the emphasis and care Scot gave the Lamb, I thought I would see how much the motif of Lamb is used in Revelation. The answer: John talks about Jesus as Lamb 31 times. In one famous and compelling moment in Chapter 5, John sees a vision of a Lamb who is found worthy to take the scroll of human history and bring it to its divine telos or end. 

Scot and Cody’s new way of reading Revelation will be a deliverance of sorts for many people. They will be delivered from predictive impulses, delivered from fear of the book of Revelation, delivered from hopelessness about ever grasping its mysterious prose.   

Toward the end of our podcast interview, Scot concluded by saying that Revelation, rightly read, gives disciples of Jesus in any era wisdom for discernment, a witness (testimony) to what our lives are all about, and a spark to worship. And through wisdom, witness and worship, we will no longer be co-opted by various social and political powers, but will be Jesus-following dissidents, agents of kingdom-good, active for the sake of others while we wait for the end of God’s story.  

To learn more, check out Scot and Cody’s book, Revelation for the Rest of Us.