Lesson 1 - Revelation Introduction

[Music] [Music] John the writer of the book of Revelation sets out to tell his readers something vital about the the paradox of the days and the years ahead they will be the best of times and they will be the worst of times now some fellow named Dickens seems to have borrowed that theme several centuries later and the question that that we have to attempt to answer one of many were going to explore is this was John thinking in terms of what was immediately ahead possibly during his lifetime or what was far ahead well into an indefinite future and the answer determines if revelation will affect us or if it's predictions have already occurred in the past now I will confess that up until only a few months ago I didn't think that I would ever teach the book of Revelation it was for the simple reason that there's so many commentaries that have already been produced about it I couldn't imagine I could possibly offer anything that could add to what's already been said but so many people approached me and asked me if I would reconsider that I thought I'd at least explore the idea a little bit deeper and after some additional research I determined that perhaps I could approach this admittedly challenging but fascinating book from a little different angle than has typically been done and that angle is to better explore just where John got his ideas from why he used the language and symbols that he chose and then once determining his sources going to those same sources were possible to help establish the context for John's thinking with the result being a better understanding of what this book intends to tell us and I'm going to talk more about that later but first let's get some preliminaries and housekeeping out of the way now we're going to begin by identifying just who this John the Revelator is the truth is there's no way to know for certain all we have is a first name and no family name of course that likely means that this man was so well known to those of his time that no family name was needed the consensus of Bible scholars is that this is the same John that was one of the original twelve disciples that Yeshua chose and is the namesake of the Gospel of John as well as the three letters called 1st 2nd and 3rd John perhaps the most conclusive piece of hard evidence to identify the writer of Revelation as John the Apostle comes from the early church father I rainiest now Iranian disciple of Polycarp and Polycarp knew John personally he was one of John's students and Polycarp says it was John the Apostle who wrote revelation and then Iranian accorded that information further other early church fathers dating to the 2nd and 3rd centuries such as Justin Clement origin Tertullian Hippolyta's all attest it was John the Apostle who wrote revelation now while this may not qualify as ironclad laboratory proof it includes the testimony of an eyewitness and has the strongest circumstantial evidence therefore I'm going to proceed with the understanding that the John of Revelation is John son of Zebedee one of the original twelve Galilean disciples of Christ now while Christianity generally thinks of Paul is that apostle who held the soul or even the the ultimate authority over the believing congregations of the Jewish Diaspora in other words those that were outside of the Holy Land and this because Paul saw himself and is rightly described as the apostle to the Gentiles that was not entirely the case other named an unnamed evangelist of Christ as Savior almost all Jewish so far as we know had established their own congregations in Asia and or were at least received by believing congregations as having authority so too then was John well known to all the messianic congregations of Asia and as we're gonna see from the tone of his letters to the seven congregations in chapters 2 and 3 he had authority and he fully expected what he said to be taken seriously well especially during the first century the time when all the writers of the New Testament lived virtually all of the known believing congregations were Jewish synagogues and broadly speaking whatever Gentiles came to Christ attended those synagogues and they worshiped alongside believing Jews now please note I'm carefully avoiding using the word churches to label these messianic congregations mainly led by Jews that's because the mental picture that we draw when we think of a church is as a group of Gentile believers in Christ meeting in a building constructed or purchased for that purpose in Greek which is the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament that we possess they're written in Greek the word that our English Bibles translate into church is ecclesia and ecclesia a rather generic Greek word meaning assembly or in a religious context Congregation church is an English word so it came several centuries later and at one point it became substituted for the Greek ecclesia long after the Messianic movement had been taken over by Gentiles and Jews were excluded the facilities where Christians met became known by English speakers as churches and the overall body of Christians was then labeled the church thus by replacing the word ecclesia with church in our English Bibles an anachronism was created that is a concept that did not exist in the 1st century AD has been injected into that era by bible translators who came much later so the notion of an exclusively Gentile group of Christ believers called the church was now written into New Testament history and the presence of Jewish believers and leadership evaporated therefore only occasionally in our study of Revelation will I use the words church or churches as though simply are not there in the scriptures and it paints a less than accurate picture of what the New Testament expresses now one of the great unsettled questions about the book of Revelation is when John might have written it some argue for a date before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 AD now this argument is basically that John makes no mention of the destruction and therefore it must surely have not yet happened now pre tourists argue for this early date for another reason that we're going to talk about in a few minutes another point that is used to favor a pre destruction date is because persecution of Christians is discussed with John as a witness to it and a victim of it Nero is infamous for his persecution of believers during 64 65 ad so it's thought that this persecution is the one that affected John however the same early church father ireenie as' who reported that reported his teacher Polycarp again a disciple and a personal friend of John he said he was saying that John wrote revelation Polycarp says John wrote revelation but he also said that John received this apocalyptic vision during the reign of demission demission ruled from 81 to 96 ad other early Christian writers confirmed what Irena has claimed also it should be noted that Nero's persecutions tended to be sort of localized wired wild emissions were Empire wide the cause of doubt Domitian's persecutions against Christians why did he do that he demanded that they practice Emperor worship as this was required of all Roman citizens and many believers refused see the time of Domitian's persecutions coincide with the era when Gentiles were resting control of the Jewish messianic movement away from the Jews and up through the time of the destruction of the temple Gentiles who joined this Jewish led messianic movement were seen by Rome as having converted to a strange new sect of Judaism and thus they had become Jews special privileges had been given to Jews under a series of Roman emperors that had exempted them from Emperor worship provided they agreed to pray for the well-being of the Emperor and since for a long time the Gentile believers were seen by Rome as part of the Jewish messianic movement and thus were deemed Jews then they too had been been exempted from Emperor worship so they weren't subject to prosecution all that changed under Domitian because by that time Gentiles dominated the Messianic movement and they made it clear that despite their faith in a Jewish Messiah they were definitely not Jews ironically as Gentiles they had no government exemption from Emperor worship and so they were prosecuted when they refused while their Jewish brothers continued unaffected because they retained their exemption such as the confusion that occurs during times of transition as new forces arise and new agendas collide bringing unintended consequences now one other piece of evidence seems to put the time of the writing of Revelation well after the temple destruction of 70 AD as a result of the temple destruction Jews were were mentally emotionally and spiritually devastated they were also afraid so as Jewish historians and prophets and leaders began contemplating and and and writing about their experiences and their future they have course connected their catastrophe with what the Old Testament prophets had to say particularly those predictions of just such a destruction that mirrored that of the Babylonian exile now the Babylonian exile had never left the consciousness of Jews even 600 years after it happened any more than the massacres of Muslims by Christian Crusaders have never left the consciousness of modern-day Islam a thousand years after they've occurred so because of the Jews now feared the Roman government Jewish scribes began referring to Rome as Babylon to disguise their intent that is when they were prophesying against or criticising Rome they would not say Rome they'd say Babylon therefore since John evidently refers in several places to Rome by calling it Babylon not every instance but some it makes it probable that he wrote his apocalypse well after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD when doing that became a standard practice now while I didn't always think so the evidence now forces me to conclude that John wrote revelation around 90 AD give or take all right as a very old man around two decades after the temple was destroyed well it seemed that seems that John received his visions and he wrote his apocalypse while he was in exile on the island of Patmos now Patmos is an island located about 35 miles off of the west coast of present-day Turkey it is well attested that this island was at least partly used by the Roman government as a prison Island John clearly states in Chapter 1 of Revelation that he had been banished to this island because he was preaching the Word of God we can take that to mean both the gospel and the holy scriptures now we have no more information than that about where he was why it was there when God sent these amazing visions to him but it was common among biblical prophets that they received their Oracle's and their visions while from God while they were under duress now while some scholars mainly agnostic and atheist Bible scholars doubt the truth of John's circumstance history itself shows it's entirely plausible that John was exiled to Patmos especially because this would have happened during the time of emperor Domitian now I'm going to take just a moment to remind you that while John's writings appear in the New Testament no such thought concept or document as a New Testament existed in John's day so while John would certainly have been aware of a and no doubt had read some of Paul's circulating letters and probably knew of at least some of the synoptic Gospels that's Matthew Mark and Luke by no means at that time were these writings seen as inspired of God let alone his Holy Scripture these documents indeed carried Authority but they were not placed on the level of Holy Scripture by believers the Bible that John and all the writers of the New Testament knew and accepted was the Tanakh the Hebrew Bible what Christians call the Old Testament and nothing else it would not be until the late 2nd century that even the thought of canonizing the writings of Paul and Peter and John and and the Gospel writers and making that into a Christian Bible was even brought up and this by a layman a wealthy shipping magnate named Marcion and even though Gentiles now outnumber Jews as followers of Yeshua by dozens to one and even though Gentiles were now the leadership of the Christ Movement with Jews being excluded marcin's idea of a Christian Bible was still seen by the Gentile leadership as heretical and he was promptly admonished for such an an outrageous idea it wouldn't be until early in the third century that the believing Gentile leadership was ready to consider it and to debate Marcia's proposition and then the first Christian Bible was created it contained most of the books that we have in our modern New Testaments but some like the book of Hebrews were controversial and not accepted by all interestingly revelation was one of the first books adopted into the New Testament canon the Old Testament was retained in its entirety now I wanted to broach that subject with you for a couple of reasons the first being that various eminent Bible scholars have taken very different views on how to interpret Revelation I'm gonna go into some depth on this matter because it might surprise some of you probably not most of you to know that many Bible scholars and modern evangelical denominations view revelation has completely standalone in other words it has no connection whatsoever to the Old Testament prophets or to anything presented in the old in fact while I haven't catalogued them all from an anecdotal standpoint my estimation is the majority of modern-day revelation commentaries take that view and second there are several approaches so let's examine the four main ones taken to interpret revelation now GK Beale has done a wonderful job of briefly in cogently describing each of these views that somebody's gonna borrow extensively from him first is what is called the pre turist view this word preacher astiz the inherent meaning of things that have happened in the past so the preachers position is that revelation speaks not of the future but two things that have happened in the past specifically then from for them from revelation revelation rather it from for them revelation revolves around the destruction of the temple in other words it is John either truly predicting the coming destruction of the temple that happened in 70 AD or he wrote his prediction after the destruction in a style that made it appear to be prophetic thus praedyth's insists that john wrote revelation during the time of nero in 64 65 ad pre Duras believed that all references to babylon and there are many in revelation do not actually refer to Babylon or Rome they refer to israel thus israel is painted in a very bad light as a nation and a people who are thoroughly rejected by god already judged for destruction thus israel becomes the great persecutor of the church not Rome and not Babylon pre turists inherently believed that God is through with Israel the God has completely and forever divorced his people Israel and that he has replaced Israel with the church meaning the Gentile Church so pre tourists are automatically replacement theology adherence and the emergence of the modern State of Israel is an unwelcome event now I don't intend to attack any of these viewpoints on the other hand I will say that the pre Dearest view is doctrine driven as opposed to Scripture driven in fact the praetor's view doesn't align very well with recorded history now the second method is called the historic view historicist they this view says that all the talk and revelation about seal and trumpet and bold judgments form a symbolic picture of various ages and stages of church development and further since this is a prevalent view in the Western Church but far less so in the Eastern Slavic Coptic other branches of the church then it is common for historicists to attach any specific Bible related historical event to some event within the Western Church as an example the corruption and power plays within the papacy of the Catholic Church that have occurred from time to time over the centuries or perhaps the Reformation begun by Martin Luther thus the signs and the symbols of Revelation relate only to events that somehow involve only the Western Church therefore over the centuries as each generation of his tourists sees events unfolding around them they connect them to signs and symbols and revelation and they find a reason to predict the imminent return of Christ in their day now this views major flaw of courses it's always been wrong in predicting the end of the world and the imminent coming of Yeshua today some scholars who criticize this view point of interpretation mock it as newspaper exegesis that is people pick up the newspaper and they see some terrible happening those today those happenings usually involve Muslims in the Middle East and attach those happenings to something John said in Revelation in other words these current events are seen as prophecy being fulfilled now although this view goes back centuries before World War one if one's interested one can go back to Christian writings leading up to and during and shortly following World War one that show how a large portion of Western Christians believed that the horrific events of those war-torn years were revelation prophecy being fulfilled and that both the end of the world and the return of Christ should be expected at any moment many Christians because of this belief committed suicide stopped having babies sold everything and went into isolation separated themselves from their communities and unbelieving members of their families and more in what they viewed as the proper preparation for Christ's return and based it all on symbols and signs they found in Revelation that seemed to a be aligning with current events well a third view of interpretation is called the futurist view now futures say that everything John had to say was for a time in the distant future to him except perhaps for the letters to the seven churches of Asia now the futurist view says that John's visions should be taken literally and chronologically in other words in the order that we find John presenting his visions and revelation along with the order of the content that's within them it will be the same order that these things will occur in history but at a time that is it was future to him and at least some of it's still future to us for example according to the chronological order of John's visions Israel will come back as a nation and then following that the church will experience the rapture then there will be a tribulation that lot will last seven years and afterwards the Antichrist will reveal himself and begin to rule and then finally the nations of the world will gang up to attack and destroy Israel then next Christ returns to fight those nations and destroy them the Millennium begins with Yeshua ruling later Satan for minutes a rebellion and God puts it down and then later on yet we enter the eternal around this time comes to an end now regarding the futurist view as bill says so correctly in short for them the Bible is interpreted by modern events first instead of by itself therefore in the futurist view signs and symbols and revelation will become real and literal objects and events and says what John and since what John says only has relevance to future in times then it pertains only to the Christians living in the end times Christians living at any other time in history have no connection then to the book of Revelation there's a modified type of futurist view that still claims that the church is the true Israel but that there will be no pre-tribulation rapture rather believers will remain on earth to suffer the 7-year tribulation there's other iterations futurism to change some more details we won't go into that today so the fourth predominant view now is called the redemptive historical idealist view or the idealist view for short and in this view revelation is not literal at all it but depicts a symbolic battle between the forces of good and evil so all is symbolism in allegory the seals the Bulls the trumpets they are merely emblematic of various generations of human history the letters to the seven churches apply to all churches worldwide at any time or they each to pick characteristics present in a certain era of church development modern higher critics well they tend to adopt this view because it avoids any supernatural or prophetic entanglements so many higher critics are agnostics or atheists and they don't believe in the supernatural or the prophetic so then this view allows them to circumvent the sticky subject of the involvement of a God or of divine predictions something their fellow academics find ignorant and primitive well we're gonna proceed without adopting or rejecting any of these named viewpoints for one reason scholars are so very fond of lumping a number of attributes together giving that collection a name and then fighting hammer and tong to keep it intact and pure I just don't accept that premises because otherwise that means a Bible student must accept one of these named viewpoints in full or reject it in full each has something to offer but none are a perfect representation of the truth further the instant one of these named view of how to interpret revelation is adopted prior to study then we find ourselves with a predetermined outcome now while there is no doubt that I will indeed be presenting our study of Revelation from a certain worldview my hope is to do my best to remain intellectually honest while being spiritually sensitive and accepting revelation as the inspired Word of God that it is and even when we conclude conclude probably well over a year from now there will still be mystery and unanswered questions it's our job to discover how to understand it as best we can with the information we have up to this point in human history and then to apply it to our lives as well as to our expectations without trying to fit it into a man-made pattern that is necessarily at least somewhat arbitrary so here's the worldview that I spoke of that will be the platform from which I'm going to teach revelation first and foremost the book of Revelation is divine truth second of all it's real the deven the events depicted are actual they have happened or will happen or both third the book of Revelation does not and cannot stand alone it is fully dependent on the Old Testament especially on the prophets ezekiel daniel and isaiah or the prophets as well but a little less so fourth the miracles spoken of and the divine power behind those miracles is real it's alive and it's active and if a fifth element to my revelation worldview it would be that we shall take revelation literally but I must explain what I mean by that literally does not mean that we are obligated to take what are clearly Hebrew expressions or metaphors or symbols word for word literally means for example that when a miracle is encounters encountered it's an authentic miracle when God gives a vision it's an actual divine vision and not the dream machination z' of an overwrought or unstable person nor is it the person in our case John claiming a vision but in fact it is coming from his own thoughts and plans when words and commands are ascribed as coming from God or his angelic servants they are true and actual but literal also demands that we understand what those words meant to John in that day at that place in his culture and in his language otherwise people who say oh we take it literally are not being truthful now this is a difficult task but we're going to endeavor to do the best we can now something that often gets overlooked when we study revelation is this we're getting this information fifth handed do you know that the opening verses explain bluntly that God gave this revelation to Yeshua then Joshua passed it on to one or more angelic messengers the angelic messengers and messengers in concert with Christ showed it to John in the form of visions and then John wrote it all down to give to us the fifth in a chain God to Christ to angelic messengers to John to all believers you don't believe me open the first chapter and take a look it's a very first sentence very first verse so it is truly a misnomer to call the book of Revelation the apocalypse of John as it is alternately known more truthfully this is Christ's or God's apocalypse it's not John's and if we're to understand it best that is how we must view it John's only duty was to write down faithfully what he was told to write down which by the way was completely typical of Old Testament prophets now revelation interestingly is a little one you can trick your friends with Christian friends revelation has not one quote from the Old Testament 0 Paul's letters on the other hand consist nearly 50% of Old Testament quotes why this significant discrepancy well first and foremost we must remember that Paul was an intellectual who had dedicated his early life to Torah study and attended perhaps the most prestigious religious school of his day the academy of gamma leo located in Jerusalem John on the other hand came from a family of common fishermen in the Galilee and then while John was fully literate whatever religious education he would have received would have come from the local synagogue and by the way very likely a Kafar in a home Capernaum which is located on the Sea of Galilee now naturally he also learned much from the three years maybe a little less of his personal association with schewe with yeshua now Paul had memorized much scripture clearly John had not nonetheless there are many allusions to the Old Testament Scriptures throughout the book of Revelation in fact for those scholars who do not discount the Old Testament completely in their assessment of Revelation the consensus is that John is included around 500 allusions to the Old Testament that include allusions to the Torah the Psalms Samuel Chronicles and other books but primarily to the prophets now these allusions are critical to understanding Revelation John did not create revelation in a vacuum and the Lord is so key to understand the Lord did not give John visions that had no concrete context for John to be able to understand and connect with in fact with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls it has become clear that at least a few of the allusions his allusions in Revelation are even to the writings of the essence petter borgin who's a renowned Bible historian says this since the Old Testament was the thought world of Jesus the disciples and the other first Christians and since the Old Testament was woven into the very fabric of Jewish institutions and Jewish ways of life it therefore determined the theological issues raised to a large extent either negatively or positively now unfortunately relatively few Bible scholars acknowledge this fact even fewer pastors seem to be aware of this reality the interpreting of the New Testament in general depends upon the reader knowing about what the Old Testament prophets proclaim what the Torah teaches about knowing about the history of Israel that we find in the progress of the Old Testament beginning with Abraham you know it might surprise you to know that while some of the lesser-known early church fathers such as Andrew of Caesarea and a prince of Asia and anastasius and a few others while they commented on Revelation the first scholarly book ever written on John's use of the Old Testament in the writing of Revelation did not even occur until Adolf Slater's work in 1912 barely over a hundred years ago only after another seven decades past that another book a second book approaching the direct connection between the Tanakh and revelation finally appear in 1984 this is how estranged the Christian world is from the Old Testament despite many who would try to deny it the evidence is overwhelming and it is why most study and preaching on the New Testament is allegorical because it has to be there's no foundation or context for it without the Old Testament revelation especially is very nearly only several chapters of frustrating gibberish that allows virtually open-ended interpretations by creative commentators but now a warning because Revelation relies so heavily on the Old Testament prophets doing so by mate by means of allusions rather than quotes tasks of understanding and interpreting becomes even larger now so that we're all together let me define the term illusion an illusion is meant to call something to mind without expressing it directly in my lessons on Acts and Romans I told you then that it was the Jewish literary norm in the New Testament era for a writer to quote an Old Testament passage and then comment about it but what that writer intended was to use that very brief scripture quotation as just a reference to the entire context of where that quotation appeared in the Bible the quotation was meant to call to mind an entire section of Scripture it was not intended that only those few quoted words were the point why did they do it that way because there was no other method of leading a reader to a certain script section of Scripture without it I mean think about it there were no chapter and verse numbers in that era such a thing wouldn't happen for another nearly fifteen hundred years so today while I can write or speak about let's say the Book of Ezekiel and I say to you well the context is Ezekiel 37 verses 1 through 28 no such the luxury of brevity of brevity was available to New Testament writers instead they'd have to say and as the prophet Ezekiel says therefore prophesy say to them Adonai Elohim says my people I will open your graves make you get up out of your graves I'll bring you into the Land of Israel and then you'll know that I ma I am Adonai and when I've opened your graves and made you get out of your graves my people so then after hearing this a here or a reader would recognize what part of ezekiel of the ezekiel scroll that the writer was referring to and remember it or look up all of it not just those few words all of it and that would be the broader context around which the author was actually writing you get that however john does not use word-for-word Old Testament quotations likely for the reasons I told you about earlier he wasn't a trained scholar he was a fisherman now although he clearly knew his Bible he would use rather easily recognizable allusions to point his readers towards certain Old Testament books and passages rather than use memorised quotes now I say easily recognizable because while the Old Testament is nearly banished from many branches of modern Christianity it was the only Bible that existed in his day and in Jewish society learning about the Hebrew Tanakh the Old Testament began at a very early age for nearly every child so what does this all mean for us means we are going to have to take a few extensive detours to look at the books and the chapters that John alludes to we're going to especially spend time in Ezekiel Daniel and Isaiah because what they prophesied forms the background in the context for for what John was shown in his visions and for what he wrote down Revelation is largely God showing John how the prophecies of the various told Testament prophets fit together this also means that what we learn in Revelation may will not be exactly what you heard from more popular scholars and preachers and book writers what they claim is John's meaning now my goal is not to create controversy but it's probably unavoidable in some areas I also want to mention that I hope that you who are about to study Revelation with us have also studied the Torah with us because John has a Torah mindset even if it might be entirely subconscious because he was raised in it it's the world he knew I mean such a mindset is woven into Revelation you can't separate it out so if you've not studied the Torah you're going to be at a disadvantage on the other hand I am going to assume that many of you have not and so will endeavor to briefly explain things that most tourists students already know now I'm going to conclude our introduction to revelation today with this thought this book is the only book in the Bible that promises a divine blessing to any believer who reads it and studies it think about that but if when reading it you can't understand it does that bring you the promise the promise blessing of course not mechanical reading of words without comprehension is of no earthly or heavenly value neither is reading revelation in which allegory rules and the entire premise for interpretation is faulty does that bring cause for God to issue that blessing to the reader the idea is that you do understand it correctly that is our goal in this class and with the Lord's guidance we shall accomplish it next week we will begin Revelation chapter 1 [Music] you see [Music] you

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Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018