(11) S1E11 Rebuttal: The Violent Book of Revelation
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. The last two episodes, we took a look at violence in the bible and how those who adhere to nonviolence can deal with violence in the bible. We took a look at the authoritative model, which said that since God is the author and sustainer of life, if he chooses to take life, that's kind of in his domain. He's able to do that. It's in his jurisdiction, and it is not immoral for him to take life or to permit others or command others to take life.
Derek:We also took a look at the progressive revelation model, and that model says that now some of the authors, especially of the old testament, were a bit mistaken about some of the attributions of violence to God. They might have been right about some things, but it wasn't really until Jesus Christ that he revealed some of the flaws that those individuals had. The God of the Old Testament wasn't really violent. That's just what individuals in the ancient Near East thought that God would like attributed to him. In this episode, we're moving on to take a look at the book of Revelation.
Derek:Now, why would we do that if we already have 2 models which cover pretty much all of the ideas of nonviolence? Why would we look at the book of Revelation? Well, one of the main reasons we would do that is because it's post resurrection. And that is going to be specifically a problem if you adhere to the second model, to explain away violence in the Bible. And if you adhere to progressive revelation, and you believe that Jesus Christ was the pure revelation of God, and then all of a sudden, post resurrection, you have John writing a book of revelation that just seems utterly violent, just filled with violence, then that's gonna be a problem for you.
Derek:Because you're gonna think that if God was never violent and then he truly revealed himself in Jesus Christ as nonviolent, then the book of Revelation, written the the last book of the bible, that really shouldn't be filled with with this, with this violence or this seeming approval from God for all the violence that is done there. A second reason I wanna take a look at the book of Revelation is because I think it's going to be a a good case study that helps us to see how there is often there are often many things that we're missing when we read a book of the Bible. And I think, in particular, the book of Revelation will help you to see how you probably, most people, eisegete rather than exegete. And what does that mean? So eisegesis is taking your presuppositions, taking your culture, taking, your tradition, and imposing those on the bible and pulling things out that that you that make sense to you.
Derek:For example, the the, like, left behind series or or this common understanding of Revelation. When you have, like, these flying locusts really represent, you know, hind attack helicopters and all that kind of stuff, it gets kinda crazy. And the the New Testament church would not have thought anything about that. But we kinda put that into the text because it makes sense to us, and and that's a metaphor that we understand. We we would understand that analogy or that connection.
Derek:Exegesis, on the other hand, is taking out of the text, and that's trying to understand what the author intended, who the audience was, and just really doing a lot of homework to to figure out, what the text says, not what your culture says about the text. And Revelation, as you unpack it, is going to, I think, really really show you a lot about how much we isogete into the text. And finally, I, you know, I the Old Testament is still very hard for me in terms of in terms of nonviolence. If you take the authoritative model, it's it's kind of easy to brush under the rug more so, but that's not the case with Revelation. The amazing thing about the book of Revelation is that not only do does the nonviolent position have good answers, but once you take a a deep look at Revelation and exegete instead of eisegete, all of a sudden you have this beautiful, beautiful book that means pretty much the opposite of what everybody is trying to tell you it means today.
Derek:And I never got that. For me, revelation was just never on my radar. It wasn't something that interested me one bit, and that's that's for a lot of reasons. The first reason is that everyone interpreted it differently. Even in my own community, you just had people interpreting the book of Revelation, the symbolism, in a 1,000 different ways.
Derek:And that said to me right there that nobody knows what the heck they're talking about. Maybe maybe somebody's a better guesser than somebody else, but nobody knows what they're talking about when they're talking about Revelation. And maybe maybe the locusts are helicopters, and maybe they're not. But all of these these crazy, crazy things just, I mean, you could look at the spectrum of of all of the symbolism and revelation and find countless examples of of interpretations. But why would I want to listen to anybody who thinks they have any clue about what Revelation says, since so many respectable people not only disagree, but are are just vastly, vastly different ideas and symbols.
Derek:Secondly, I never really cared about Revelation because it was so future oriented, and and it wasn't applicable at all. The book of Revelation, nobody's gonna understand it until it's either happening at this very moment or it's already happened. So, really, the book of Revelation is something that that is only useful pretty much in retrospect. And right now, it seems pretty clear we're not in in, you know, that that crazy end time tribulation, post rapture, whatever. And, so, to me, it was it was very clear.
Derek:Like, it it wasn't applicable. Book of Revelation might be interesting to people who who like to guess, but it's not applicable. So what's the point? And that's something that you really don't see in other books, not even the prophetic books. Take Isaiah, for example.
Derek:Isaiah has a a very famous passage on the the Messiah, the suffering servant, Isaiah 53. And, in that prophecy, we we get a glimpse of Jesus. And, okay, that's future oriented for the readers of Isaiah's time. But, the whole book of Isaiah, by and large, is applicable to those individuals in the day. There might be some future oriented things, but the scope and and the the tone and the general message of Isaiah is not just all this ambiguous prophetic stuff, even though there might be some of that.
Derek:It's it's a book that's written to a specific people for a specific purpose, and and it means that they're largely going to understand. And, that just didn't seem to be the case for Revelation, at least growing up in the groups that I did, the the dispensational groups. It just didn't really matter. As I got older, I recognized that there were some other major issues to the book of Revelation too. Most of the Revelation interpretations that I heard were based on very new ideas, like John Darby's idea of the rapture.
Derek:That only came around in the 1800. There wasn't this notion, particularly of a of a pre trib rapture where Jesus has a second coming, he comes back, he takes all of us back up to heaven, and then he has a third coming and he comes back down. You just you don't see that until somebody like Darby comes along and popularizes or creates it and popularizes it. And so, the a lot of revelation just seemed like this modern interpretation and not something that that may would have made sense to the church historical. My community in particular, another reason that I I really didn't like the book of Revelation, was because it led my community to be escapist in nature.
Derek:And so we kind of we would have never said this, but we took the idea of being a city on a hill, not as we are this, like, beacon that shines out light into the darkness and and pushes the darkness back. No. It was more like, we're this compound up on a hill that kinda has this this light there, and, you know, hopefully other people make it to this compound before the world goes to hell in a handbasket. Sort of, I guess, the, Noah's Ark philosophy. You know, the world's being destroyed, and we're trying to get as many people to come in and be safe as possible.
Derek:It's taking Christ's words that, you know, the the gates of hell, where Jesus says says this. It's really the gates of hell will not withstand the church. But the way we viewed it as escapists, and the way we used Revelation was really meant as like, well, the gates of hell won't beat down the church. So we took the church as being on the defensive, and we're just trying to get in this lifeboat, trying to get out of here. Hopefully Jesus comes back and takes me out of here before something too bad happens, before the tribulation.
Derek:And that's our philosophy. That's that's what Revelation kind of helped us out with. It helped us to see how bad it was gonna be for the people who weren't in the compound when Jesus came back to rescue us. That's what it did for us. It gave us this this comfort to be in our community, knowing that we were gonna get out of here, and we saw what the rest of the world was gonna deal with.
Derek:It was kind of a pre consolation for us. Finally, I I really had a huge issue. I began to have a huge issue as I I understood the kingdom more and more, that this I this idea of revelation that I grew up on did not lead at all to living as though Christ actually brought his kingdom. Christ actually reigns in power. It dismissed this kingdom idea that you see in the gospels.
Derek:Dismissed this idea that you see where Jesus says, hey, the son of man, you're gonna see him lifted up and sitting at the right hand of the throne of God. Just a little bit, you're gonna see it. You watch. It it dismisses it when Stephen says, hey, look. I see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the throne of God.
Derek:It's dismissive of Ephesians that says we have all heavenly gifts given to us, and that that Jesus Christ is making the nations His footstool, that that we're His ambassadors, that are not just in some compound awaiting, escape, but that we are ambassadors, and we are soldiers who fight against not flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and we are going into the world to reclaim the nations for Christ. The book of Revelation didn't give me those chill bumps that I just got talking about the kingdom of God. It didn't do that for me. It was just this passive, escapist book that nobody knew anything about because everybody had just as good of a guess as anybody else. Because everybody eisegeted rather than exegeted.
Derek:What changed for me then? Well, a a lot of things. Understanding the kingdom more was was certainly one big component. But but one of hearing more from a lot of biblically, biblically minded scholars who are very good at exegeting scripture, that was helpful. Like, take Michael Heizer, for example.
Derek:One of of the individuals who I respect the most in terms of trusting that he's gonna tell me, accurate information, he's gonna tell me where he's guessing, he's gonna give me percentages, and he's really going to lay out the evidence for what it is. And, Heizer said something in particular that I think is extremely applicable for the book of Revelation. Heizer has has this saying, and it goes something like, Bible was written for me, but it was not written to me. And what he means by that is take the book of Revelation. When John wrote that, it was written to a particular group of people.
Derek:It was written to the church in, you know, 70 to 90 AD. That's who it was written to. Those are the individuals who are going to be the basis for the context of what was written. What was going on in their lives, what was going on in Rome, the persecution, the struggle, the difficulty, that's the context for the book of Revelation. My context is not the context for the book of Revelation.
Derek:And so while God wrote His word, so that 2000 years later, I could access it, and I could get a glimpse at how He worked with individuals in the past, and I could hear what He says, and I could apply that to my life, That is is written for me, but it was not written to me. And for me to understand what it means for me, I need to understand what it meant and what it said to the original audience. Revelation was written when the early church was in turmoil and persecution. They didn't know what was going to happen to the church. John's book, as we're gonna see, is all about Jesus.
Derek:It is the revelation of Jesus Christ, and it talks a lot about how He wages war and how believers should wage war as well. It's a book that encourages, especially, this faithful obedience to the way of Christ against the powers of the world that Babylon represents, particularly governments. And we we will take a look at that, and it it's just it's just powerful because we might not be experiencing the same persecution today. But when you're seeing John talk to people who are in the midst of extreme hardship, and on top of that, at a time when the Christian church is not very large, and they don't know what their future holds, when you see what He tells them to do, that is encouraging for us today, who are in a church that is is in a much better position in many ways. And it encourages us to be faithful and to fight the good fight the way that John and the other authors intended for us to fight.
Derek:Let's then just jump into the book of Revelation. So, at the beginning, John tells us that what he's writing is the revelation of Jesus Christ to His servants, to show them what must soon take place. And those people are blessed who hear and keep what is written. So, that right there tells us a couple very important things. It was written to the church.
Derek:It was a revelation, not particularly just of the of of the end times, though it does say, these things that were soon to take place. And if we take the Bible at its word, then that means that it it probably applied to the early Christians, and not specifically written to us 2000 years later, unless you consider that soon. And it it is primarily about Jesus Christ, and the people who are blessed who hear and keep what is written. Now, what strikes me about this this hear and keep what is written is that Revelation was never presented to me as this this book that is something that we can hear and keep. What is there to hear and keep if everything is future prophecy?
Derek:There's nothing to hear and keep. But, John tells us that we are blessed if we hear and keep what is written. So, what is he writing? What is he trying to tell us? And that's what we wanna look at at today.
Derek:Is is John really telling us that we have this vindictive savior who was peaceful just so he could die on a cross, and that would, that was, his MO, just, just so he could do this messianic thing, and then he's gonna come back and he's ticked, and he's just gonna start hacking people to pieces. That, that's the revelation of Jesus Christ? Well, let's take a look. When John first sees Jesus, Jesus is revealed as a lion, as the Lion of Judah. Now, a lion is a is a vicious creature.
Derek:He's something that is going to be extremely, somebody who's as in a creature who strikes fear into the hearts of individuals. And we see a 4 headed creature with the the face or head of a lion, and we also see a couple other examples of lion. Other than Jesus being the Lion of Judah here, and the creature with 4 heads having the head of a lion, the there's one other reference to Jesus, but all of the other references references of a lion are going to be referring to the beast. So the beast's, his his, like, teeth are likened to or or, are likened to the the teeth of a lion, or his head is like the head of a lion. So all of these examples are going to be of of judgments, and of the beast, and of of these bad things, are likened to lions, these vicious, powerful things.
Derek:What's interesting, two interesting things, is that first of all, the only other time lion is mentioned for Jesus, The way in which Jesus is likened to a lion is not his teeth or his head or the other scary things for which the beast is likened to a lion, but rather his voice, the power that comes in his voice, is likened to a lion. The second interesting thing is that while Jesus is seen as the Lion of Judah initially by John, all of a sudden, when John kind of does a double take and he looks again, the Lion of Judah is no longer a lion, but he is the slain lamb. And from that point on, references to Jesus are not the Lion of Judah, but Lamb. So, it's almost as if John says, Oh yeah, we've got this really powerful lion. I see Jesus coming on the scene.
Derek:You know, He's He's strong, He's powerful, and He looks again, and it's a slain lamb. Well, that's not really what you're expecting about a book of Jesus Christ, the one who conquers and trying to learn how to wage war like our Savior. But, there it is. Jesus becomes a slain lamb. And, there are tons and tons of lamb references from here on out in the book.
Derek:As a slain lamb, another interesting aspect is that Jesus Christ, the slain lamb, shed His blood. And, Revelation seems like it's a a very bloody book. If you ask anybody, like, what's the bloodiest book in in the Bible? And they're gonna they're gonna tell you that it's probably the the book of Revelation, because Jesus goes to town on His enemies. And, what's interesting about this is that that Mackie, Tim Mackie, when he was talking about the wrath of God, and he was talking about the the book of Revelation, he said that there's there's far less violence than you think there is in the book of Revelation.
Derek:And when you look at it, the majority of the violence done by somebody to somebody else, the the individuals who take the brunt of the violence tend not to be the enemies. And that sounds really weird, but if you do a word study on the Book of Revelation, and I did, so I will I will link just a a really simple document for you here. But, if you look at the word blood in Revelation, I believe it occurs 19 times. And, of those 19 times, I believe 6 are like, you know, the blood the moon turns to blood, the the water turns to blood. These metaphorical things that you find in the in the Old Testament of just signs of judgment.
Derek:Nobody does it to anybody else. It's just kind of a a sign or an omen or whatever you wanna call it. When we do see somebody's blood, the 12 remaining times of the 12 remaining times, 11 of them are clearly, absolutely, undeniably the blood of Jesus or the blood of the martyrs or his servants. There's one remaining time, I believe it's in Revelation 19, where there's blood, and it's not completely clear who it whose it is. But it seems there's a very strong case that the blood is either Jesus's or the blood of the martyrs, just because for a number of reasons.
Derek:And and I think Mackie explains that, in one of his his podcasts, and I'll try to share that in a link below as well. So, definitely, of of the 19 times, that blood is blood is seen in the Book of Revelation, 12 of those times we have somebody's blood. And, undeniably, 11 of those 12 times, the blood is either the blood of martyrs or the blood of Jesus. And one of those times, it's somewhat ambiguous. So, when we talk about the blood of Revelation and and how bloody the book is, it is bloody, but the blood is from the slain lamb, and from those who do war, who do battle in like fashion.
Derek:And how did the Lion of Judah do battle? He laid down his life as the slain lamb. And, over and over and over again, the way that you see Jesus conquer in the Book of Revelation is, in reference to His being slain like a a lamb, but also when we do see him doing battle, it's not done with a sword in his hand. It's done with a sword in his mouth. And, time and time again, if you look at the word sword, or you look up the word mouth, or you, look up the word testimony, in the book of Revelation, you're gonna see that the way that Jesus Christ over and over and over and over again wages war is with His words.
Derek:And that goes back to this this idea of the the lion. The only other time we see Jesus referenced in in some respects to a lion, is later in the Book of Revelation, when his voice is likened to that of a lion. Not his figure, not not the way he does things, but the way that he speaks. His power is in His voice. And that makes a lot of sense, especially coming from a guy like John, who talks so much about the Word in John 1.
Derek:And it makes a lot of sense for Jesus, who through His spoken Word brought into existence all things. And, it makes sense that God's Word would be likened to a sword, because we also see in Hebrews 4 that the Word of God is sharper than a 2 edged sword, and it and it divides truth, and it, it is powerful. And in Revelation, we see this over and over and over again, that the way Christ wages war is with His words and with the laying down of His life. And in Revelation 12, unless there's any doubt, if we want to say, well, that's the way that Jesus does things, it says in Revelation 12 that we will conquer in like fashion. And what do we mean in like fashion?
Derek:Well, John says that his book of Revelation is the revelation of Jesus Christ. And if we hear and keep what John is writing right here, then we are blessed. And what John is doing is he's saying, this Lion of Judah is a lamb. He laid down his life. And through the word of truth, that is our power, and that is how we fight Babylon or the government or the powers or whatever you want to, to call that.
Derek:But that is how we wage war, and that's who we wage war against. We are not greater than our master, and as Jesus Christ has laid down His life, and through the Word of Truth and His example, has conquered, so we conquer. When you when you read the book of Revelation with with these themes, with this understanding of it being about Christ, that it's written to for us, right, but but to a specific set of servants and a specific set of circumstances. And that we are blessed if we hear and keep what John is writing, that it is applicable for us now, it's not just some future prophecy. And if you are are willing to do the studies and go back and, cross reference Old Testament references and see what John means as he's pulling things out.
Derek:And, if you see the slain lamb, and if you see whose blood is being shed, and if you see how war is being waged, the book of Revelation becomes an absolutely transformative book for our lives today. And, and perhaps one of the most transformative books, to know that that John is writing to a group of people who are experiencing the greatest hardship that that most of us could possibly imagine, especially in the West. This this horrendous persecution, and, the pessimism that they must have had seeing just small numbers of Christians in house churches and and people getting taken away. I mean, the book of Revelation is just amazing if you, if you understand what John is saying. It's an encouragement for us to persist, to to hear and keep what is written.
Derek:And that is a a far, far, far different picture than the book of Revelation that I got when when I was growing up, and even into my adult years. That's one thing that I do like about, my reformed faith, after I I left more of the dispensational background. You know, being reformed, it we tend to be more amillennial, or or postmillennial. And so, we do have somewhat of a notion of of Christ's kingdom and how it's, it it's coming in the world and how we're advancing that. But, nevertheless, even though it's not not nearly as bad as I feel most dispensational theologies are when coming to the book of Revelation, there's still a lot of a lot of reformed individuals, most, who are not nonviolent and so really can't do justice to what the book of Revelation is is, bringing about, what it's trying to say.
Derek:Preston Sprinkle is is one author author of the book Fight, who is Reformed and nonviolent as well. And so, I've found that encouraging, because you don't see too many nonviolent Reformed individuals. But nevertheless, there there are certainly degrees of how badly people misunderstand Revelation. And it's so unfortunate because Revelation is such a powerful book. So, in conclusion, I guess there's there's not much else to say, but do do the legwork to figure out what Revelation is really saying.
Derek:Do do the legwork to to put your presuppositions, your traditions, all of those things to the side, and kind of start from scratch. And take a look and see what is the purpose of the book? Who is it written to? Does it make sense that it wouldn't be applicable to the people of of that day? Does it make sense, some of the things that that we we read in the text?
Derek:Are we putting things into the text, or are we taking out of? What about what I said with the the word blood? Like, what what does that mean when all of the blood that we see shed is either the martyrs or Jesus? What does what does all of that mean? What makes the most sense of the book of Revelation, and what makes the most sense of of God, having a purpose for for that book?
Derek:Is it just for people in retrospect to survive the Tribulation who knows how many years from now? Or is it something that His church could have used and been encouraged by for all time? So, take a look, let me know what you think. For the moment, that's all, so peace, and because I'm a pacifist, and I say it, I mean it.
