1. Historical Setting of the Book of Revelation

all right well this store this class had its germ in 1993 when my lovely wife and I candy were on that boat called the three-tone in a little cruise of the Greek Isles we had just visited Santorini some of you I'm sure been there beautiful stunning place the next day we were going to be visiting Patmos not so beautiful not so stunning it was in the ancient world something like Alcatraz a prison island is a little bigger well better better populated but same idea I was sending on the deck of the boat that evening waiting for candy we were going to go to dinner a little bit later and I was just reflecting on the island of Patmos by this is 1993 by that time I'd been teaching the Bible here and there sometimes professionally for about 20 years about ten of those years here at first press and I have to say if I'm perfectly honest with you I've was possessed at that point of some mixed feelings about going to Patmos because to be even more honest with you I was a little bit resentful of the book of Revelation you know it's it was in my mind at that time kind of the outlier you know what I mean in the Bible the whole Bible sort of made sense I mean not that there weren't a lot of things to learn a lot of things to study a lot of mysteries to resolve but it seemed like in the great scheme of things most of it hung together except for Revelation that one just left me mystified what do you do with that book you go through it's just wild crazy images strange apocalyptic visions of this and that and I have I'd read the book multiple times never really felt like I was left anywhere but in a lot of deep weeds then of course I grown up as many of you have through the late 60s early 70s and I'd been treated to how Lindsay and the late great planet Earth and all kinds of geopolitical interpretation and for a time believed it and taught it and now by 1993 I realized that Lindsay was fundamentally mistaken most of the important things he tried to say in his great book and so I didn't know what to do with that I just resented it I thought maybe Luther was right we should have dropped the book from the Canon you know simplify things but the church and its wisdom had determined not to do that and so here I was on the deck of the boat you can always see me there puzzling this is true and a thought I tell you came through my mind while I was standing on the deck of that boat that evening and the thought was this the only way I'm ever going to figure that book out is to teach it I never taught it I read it I'd always been afraid of it I decided I was going to teach revelation at First Presbyterian Church not that fall but a year from that coming fall this was June when we were there so the fall of 94 and then I thought to myself maybe the best way to get my brain wrapped around this book would simply be to memorize it start to finish and I memorized the first verse of Revelation on the deck of that boat that evening in June of 1993 the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place that's the first I probably turn that verse over in my head a hundred and fifty times that evening next day we got to Patmos bigger than Alcatraz but not much prettier as I say it was kind of a prison Island in the ancient world John of course you know tells us in John chapter one he was on the island of Patmos because of the Word of God and the testimony of Christ he was there presumably under the persecution launched by Nero against Christians I'll talk more about the date of Revelation in just a moment the island of Patmos surprised me for a lot of different reasons one of which is that this island which is under the dominance of the Eastern Orthodox Church the Greek Orthodox Church is proud of Revelation and they never heard of Hal Lindsey they had a rich heritage and joy in the wonderful imagery of the book it fit very nicely in their whole sort of style of practice which of course is much more given to art and icons and so on and to them revelation fit nicely they didn't worry too much about the details they just let the great significance of its feel reach them inspire worship in them and the whole island is filled with various expressions of artwork celebrating the apocalypse here's a portrayal of John in the prison cave where presumably he was being held visited by this angel who was now showing him these visions that are part of the apocalypse and that began to change my whole view of it a little bit and realize that maybe I've been somewhat too provincial in appreciating the content of this book so that's where it started indeed the following fall 1994 I did teach revelation I'm not sure it was kind of wild and crazy for me at that time I was still putting pieces together but it did seem like it was a great moment in my own excursion I don't know if any of you were there at the time but it was a good moment and I've sort of cherished that to this time well let's talk about a little bit of the historical setting you're familiar with some of this or you may not be but this is simply a little spadework a little homework that we must do in fairness to the biblical discipline of hermeneutics what was the setting what was going on in the world at the time I take the view that revelation was written about the year 65 not my private view there's a whole body of scholars who take this view there's only two views in town really one that it was written in 65 one that it was written in 95 95 would put revelation under a rather severe but brief persecution by a Roman Caesar named omission 95 I Rheneas the second century church father makes a somewhat ambiguous statement in his writings against heresies in which he implies that that's when revelation was written and that has become a view held by many based largely on irony as testimony I want to consider IRA næss next week because he is one of those commentators that we need to include in our survey so I'm not going to say more about him now at the same time I do want to say that there are a very robust and significant number of scholars who take the earlier view and I think with very good reason based both on internal and external testimony many of you know the name Earl Palmer longtime pastor of University Press he wrote a commentary on revelation makes a powerful case for this earlier date as have many many others it's a persuasive argument to me it's going to be my working assumption so we'll just leave it at that we're going to put a revelation under the reign of Nero and the persecution launched by him only the prior year so that will at least give us a little bit of a an approach to the book what are the primary concerns in Revelation it's a book celebrating transition it's a transition from Moses and the Exodus commit that took place with Moses to a greater Exodus and a greater Moses you may recall chapter 14 a vast multitude is standing beside a Great Sea singing the song of Moses the Moses song is the Exodus song chapter eighteen come out of her my people so you do not share in her plagues that's an exodus motif the whole book is filled with that sort of Exodus idea God's people escaping from a place where God's wrath is going to fall but because they follow his instruction they escape that wrath the Exodus motif has shot through the book of Revelation it's a book of transition from an old Jerusalem to a new Jerusalem you know the end of the book celebrates the New Jerusalem by the nature of the case it implies that there must be an old Jerusalem you see the old Jerusalem is called however the harlot City why because that old Jew Selam had committed treason against her covenant husband it had crucified his own son it had murdered the prophets Jesus says it's impossible for a prophet to die except in Jerusalem Jerusalem was the city that had turned its back we have no king but Caesar was the cry of the crowd when they stood there at the trial of Jesus of Nazareth and this is a book that celebrates the transition from the old to the new it celebrates a transition from the old creation to the new creation behold I make all things new is the announcement of the voice from the throne in chapter 20 and that motif runs through the book again and again a time of new creation these are sub-themes all right footnote pause button I have homework for you if you want to pass this class your homework is to read the book of Revelation straight through start to finish at least once this coming week it'll take you about an hour I suggest you do it two or three times you'll find every time you do it that the book hangs together in an almost unbelievably coherent fashion in spite of the the wonderfully colorful images it's a tightly knit tightly organized book but sometimes you don't appreciate it unless you kind of swallow the whole thing whole and so I'm going to encourage you to do that I will give you that suggestion again in the future but now I'll leave it at that the back story of this book is the mounting campaign against the city of Jerusalem that culminated in 70 AD when the city was wiped out by the Romans under Titus the son of Vespasian who eventually became a Caesar himself we don't quite appreciate the cataclysmic proportions of that but if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and read the paper and hear that the city of Hong Kong or the City of London or the city of New York or some other great city that belongs to the world had just been wiped out overnight can you imagine the shock wave that would go around I mean they imagine the shock waves that took place after 9/11 how much more if the whole city had just been destroyed and that's precisely the proportions of what happened when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 this was a major centre of the world huge wealth was in that city it was a central a venue for commerce for trade for travel for tourism all of these things Jerusalem was a major evident important Center and it was wiped out overnight and that together with a comparable Cataclysm that was happening in Rome made many people think it was the end of the world Tacitus the Roman historian thought this is it he tells us later he thought the whole thing was collapsing right here right now this was unbelievable in the time we of course have forgotten that because we don't know that much about history but at the time this is one of the most cataclysmic events we can imagine that's the back story of what's happening in this book the destruction of Jerusalem radically reshaped the Jewish religion as you know it had always been a religion tied to a temple now it had to redefine itself as a religion without a central sanctuary the Old Testament presupposes a temple that is now gone and so the Jewish religion looked very different from this point on but by the same token the Christian religion did as well because it had also been tied to the temple read the New Testament you see again and again allusions to the temple and Christian people resorting to the temple and all of a sudden the temples gone and that made the Christian movement also untethered freed from a geographic venue for worship the New Testament tells us there is now a living temp Christ is its cornerstone we are as Peter says living stones constituting comprising this temple and instead of making a pilgrimage now to the temple the temple is making a pilgrimage to the world go into the world temple and preach the gospel make disciples of the nation's so that the whole world becomes the temple we're in where two or three are gathered there I'm in your midst you don't need to go somewhere to find me I'm with you wherever you go it's the temple with wheels on it and this new paradigm you see for God's people was really only possible once the old temple was removed so what happened well you recall in chapter 17 we have this little hint this calls for a mind with wisdom the angel says the seven heads are seven hills all right the city of Seven Hills is white Rome that was a common nickname for that city in the first century continues to be a common nickname for it to this day they are also the angel continued continues seven kings five have fallen one is the other has not yet come but when he does come he will remain for only a little while well if the city is Rome then the five kings by ordinary estimates would be the five Caesars that had ruled up until this moment a little bit of quick history all right just hang on who's the first Julius Caesar some people don't want to include him because he was never quite a king but in the first century it was commonly assumed he was the first Caesar Suetonius writes in the early 2nd century a book called the twelve Caesars he starts with Julius Caesar this was the way people saw it and so we shouldn't be surprised that the book of Revelation takes that view so Julius Caesar what is he transform Rome from a republic to an empire he's the catalyst the defining moment in 49 when he crossed the route Hakan and said famously the die is cast and launched his campaign against Pompeii in the Senate which would essentially remove the Senate from its power and make it more just kind of an honorary or titular sort of title he was assassinated those you know on the Ides of March 44 BC his nephew Octavian took over a few years later after an interest of an intervening period a triumvirate period and he beginning as Octavian was given the name Augustus we read of him in the New Testament of course Augustus Caesar sent out a decree that all the world should be taxed he's the one that's ruling at the time that Jesus is born he defeated Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC he reigned from 31 to 14 ad he's probably the greatest most talented of the Caesars he's the one that created what's commonly called the pox Romana he says famously he found Rome stone he left it marble the face of Rome in Israel at the time was Herod not just Herod the Great but Herod and the six descendants of its a beast with seven heads and ten horns Rome was constituted by ten provinces cobbled together in a great Empire but in Israel it was a seven headed monster known as Herod and so this Herod who was a friend of Augustus Caesar plays a role in the book of Revelation especially chapter 12 which will talk about not today but eventually Jesus was born under Augustus Caesar about the year 4 BC third five of fallen third of those Tiberius Caesar Tiberius Caesar was the nephew an adopted son of Augustus Augustus never had a son of his own he reigned from 14 to 37 he wasn't as showy as Augustus he was a more pensive man some regarded him as kind of dark and brooding but he was more or less a quieter ah fellow but it's in his 15th year Luke tells us that John the Baptist came on the scene and began preaching a message of repentance to the people of God that's recorded in Luke chapter 3 Jesus ministry began about that time and went until the Year 30 so it's under Tiberius that Jesus is active in Israel the resurrection the passion the ascension of all of all of this takes place in the spring of 30 ad the first nine chapters of Acts take place under Tiberius including the conversion of the Apostle Paul interestingly and not very well-known Tiberius apparently believed that Jesus was deity I'm not saying he was a Christian believer any such thing but he had enough evidence at his disposal to have made an interesting proposition to the Senate this is recorded for us by Tertullian in the year 1 in the year 180 about a little over a hundred years later Tertullian an early church scholar apologists father writing a defense of the Christian faith called the apologia the apology writes these words this is Tertullian now describing Tiberius quote unless the gods give satisfaction to men there will be no deification for them the God will have to pro propitiate the man Tiberius accordingly in whose days the Christian name made its entry into the world having himself received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ's divinity brought the matter before the Senate with his own decision in favor of Christ the Senate because it had not given the approval itself rejected the proposal Caesar held to his opinion threatening wrath against all the accusers of the Christians consult your histories this is Tertullian writing to the politicians of his day to go back and look at the archives and convince themselves that Tiberius himself was some kind of believer a commentator on this named Cleveland Cox noted great stresses to be placed on the fact that Julian was a Roman lawyer familiar wit should be with the Roman archives and influenced by them in his own acceptance of divine truth it is not supposable that such a man would have hazarded his bold appeal to the records in remonstrating with the senate and in the very faces of the emperor and his colleagues had he not known that his evidence was irrefutable Roman lawyer be so stupid as to appeal to an archive that didn't exist so we have this interesting little picture of Tiberius is at least a sort of distant or quasi believer in Christ that may be alluded to in Revelation although it's somewhat it's a little bit more tentative the fourth of the Caesars five have fallen the fourth of them Gaius Caesar otherwise known as Caligula Little Boots the nickname given to him by the troops serving under his father Germanicus was young took the throne at 37 was quite competent for the first six months he was a protege of Tiberius and then he got some kind of fever that was called brain fever doesn't sound good to me and he came out of it a whack job and so for the next three years his behavior was over-the-top bizarre and destructive and finally his own bodyguards took his life in the year 41 he reigned for three and a half years bringing us to the fifth of the five Caesars that has fallen and that is Claudius the conversion of Cornelius in the new testament took place under Caligula Claudius the fifth of these reign from fifty are from 41 to 54 most famous for conquering Britain where Roman had a Roman presence held for about 300 years he was poisoned however because he began to distance himself from his stepson Nero who had become his stepson by virtue of his marriage to Agra Pina his fourth wife and so the lovely and charming Agra Pina poisoned him of course what else would you do and during his reign Paul engaged in his fur second missionary journeys and the Council of Jerusalem took place in 50 ad recorded in Acts chapter 15 alright five have fallen one is so presumably we are now at a time during the reign of Nero when this particular document is written Nero is the sixth of these he reigned from 54 to 68 his early career was benign because he was only a teenager and all he wanted to do was go out and vandalize Rome you know so what's wrong with that he's a teenager he was until he was more or less dominated by three characters who were very sensible managers of the state Seneca the stoic philosopher Burris the head of the Praetorians and Agra Pina his mother however when well let me add this paul's third journey and his imprisonment in caesarea not in under Nero now this was Jerusalem mob and really led to his arrest so Paul is in jail in Caesarea for two years during the entire during the end of this particular period Nero began to repudiate saying council II at all three of these councilors executed including his mother Paul was transported to Rome and was held there for a couple of years from 61 to 63 Nero has still not turned his guns on Christians but he's clearly some of the mortar is pretty much coming loose and his psyche by this time however in 64 there's a great fire in Rome the fire destroyed about a third of the city about two days later Nero trotted out blueprints that had already been prepared as to how to rebuild that part of the city and he was going to rename it near a palace near a palace and I'd say that Nero's City you know the Roman people were not really ready for that and all of a sudden Nero realized he was in huge trouble and in the moment of distress he blamed the Christians well the Christians started that fire and thus in the summer of 64 this huge persecution is launched against Christian people it is an imperial assault that begins and continues for about the next seven years it starts in 64 Paul was probably in Spain I don't want to say that too aggressively but there's at least some evidence he was there and escaped some of the early pressure of this persecution however he was eventually arrested along with Peter they were executed in Rome in 66 or 67 John was exiled to the Isle of Patmos in about the same time so people in Rome tended to be killed Christian leaders especially throughout the empire tended to be imprisoned or exiled and that's what happened to John the Jewish Wars broke out so what began as a campaign against Christians morphed into a campaign against Jewish people especially in Jerusalem Jerome didn't have a good you know didn't make good distinctions at that point between Christian people and Jewish people and so it kind of transformed itself Nero himself was executed by the Roman military in 68 the Jewish wars there have been rising tension in Israel for some 20 years Israel was becoming increasingly divided between liberals who wanted to find common cause with the Romans represented by the Sadducee class and conservatives represented more by the Pharisees but even more by the zealots who were beginning to appeal for a radical revolution against Rome the abuses of Rome were only exacerbating the situation corrupt procurator's that is governors Pontius Pilate was one of these procurator's others came later who were even more corrupt more doubtful in their tactics led to even further division in Jerusalem the last of those procurator's was a man by the name of gaseous Flores he ruled from 64 to 66 he pushed Israel to the boiling point he stole money from the temple treasury he gratuitously killed about 3,600 peaceful citizens in a five month reign of terror most of this information comes to us from Roman historians especially Tacitus these actions inspired a revolutionary response from the zealots who had already had a kind of violent penchant going on the revolt broke out in 66 it forced a grip of the second the man before whom Paul that appeared you recall given a speech before him and Bernice to flee to Rome this brought cestia scalos now if you've been sleeping up till this point please wake up now he was the governor of Syria he came down and laid siege to Jerusalem in 66 trying to put down the revolt for reasons that remain completely mysterious to this day he left after six days he had bottled up Jerusalem and he left the zealots capitalized on that as a show of weakness and chased out after him and actually defeated him in a surprise attack at the Battle of beth horon this discredited the moderates in Jerusalem the radicals took control of Jerusalem at that time Christians remembered what Jesus said we get this information from Eusebius the church historian who wrote it about the 3rd century 4th - actually 4th century Eusebius says that Christian people remembering Jesus words when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies flee to the hills these Christians looked out they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies and they said how do we flee to the hills there's armies out there you know and then for no apparent reason the armies left and the Christians every last one of them left town Jesus had said pray it's not on the Sabbath because then you're limited to a Sabbath day's journey pray that you're not with child at the time it needs to be a time when you can make a quick escape and they did to the southern Judean wilderness and they held up the they're the Christian people escaped the horrific savagery that was unleashed on Jerusalem over the next several years Nero appointed Vespasian to quell the sup rising Vespasian arrived in 67 with 60,000 elite troops it was a bloodbath scorched earth the Sea of Galilee was floating with bloated bodies I'm not trying to turn anyone stomachs but I believe me I'm giving youth kind of the benign description of this it was a horrific slaughter so that many thousands of Jewish people fled to Jerusalem for safety and the city was swelled with an overpopulated Jerusalem itself then became locked in civil war between the people who wanted to find peace with Rome and those who wanted to carry on the assault the campaign against Jerusalem was cut short by what's called the year of four Emperor's now remember what we said five have fallen one is the other is not yet come but when he does come he will remain for only a little while revelation 17 after Nero was executed in 68 his successor was a man by the name of Galba he reigned for less than two months he was executed or he was assassinated he was replaced by Otto Otto ruled for three months he was assassinated replaced by vitalii as' he ruled for about eight months he was assassinated he was replaced by Vespasian who had been at work in Israel the point is people looking at this can you imagine if we had rapid-fire assassinations in the United States what kind of turmoil it would create and that's exactly what was happening here people thought this is it it's the end of the line this place is going down anarchy is going to break out there was general despair across the entire world the known world at that point Jerusalem on the one hand Rome on the other both on a meltdown situation the fall of Jerusalem took place in 70 AD Vespasian went to Rome to take control he left Titus his son to handle the mop-up operation there in jerusalem jerusalem was put under siege in April it fell in starvation conditions only five months later the reason they ran out of food so quickly is that the zealots burned up all the food they could have survived several years instead they couldn't make it several months horrific unspeakable cannibalism the worst possible imaginable famine conditions were the experience of those who were in Jerusalem until finally the city fell in in late August the city was destroyed the temple was burned some of you visited Rome you've seen the arts of Titus which celebrates his destruction of the temple the artifacts from the temple are engraved in that arch of triumph that is there I'm going to leave our little discussion there sorry I had to move so rapidly but I hope that gives you a feel I think there's pretty good evidence that that is the historical background to the book of Revelation that doesn't answer all the questions but at least it gives us a foothold to work from as we start thinking about what's going on in this book you see as I say next week I want to sort of start leaping forward and I'm going we're going to be looking at text and revelation but more through the lens of what's happening historically and we'll return to the content of the book as I say at a later time I leave you with this image that we started with and I leave you with my brief Sunday School lesson this morning to what degree have you have I recreated Jesus in our own image we want Jesus to be what we want him to be but he is not easily domesticated and the Jesus that we actually know and love and worship is our King and our absolute and rightful authority and the only proper posture before this one is a complete relinquishment of any claim I might ever think of making to myself as I surrender all of my life and all of what I am and every interest that I have to his sovereign authority he promises to be a Christ a king of grace but let us never lose track of the other theme that runs through the scripture there's a strange phrase that's used in Revelation chapter 6 it is the phrase the wrath of the Lamb you don't think of lambs being filled with wrath very often do you but that's part of the theme and sometimes I'm afraid we sort of cook up an almost idolatrous picture of Jesus that's very comfortable but not very accurate so let's do everything we can I'm not saying this picture captures him perfectly I'm just saying it's a little bit of a wake-up call to us isn't it to think about the apocalypse the apocalypse Jesus you

Channel: Bruce Gore

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Keywords: Revelation, Apocalypse, Apostle, John, Patmos, Nero, Bruce, Gore, first, century, Christians, persecution

Id: rTqxCTu2OjM

Length: 34min 55sec (2095 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2015