Speaker 1: We need to have an eschatology that is as beautiful and disgraceful and as nonviolent as the Jesus that we follow. Alright. So my next book, The Upside Down Apocalypse, is coming out soon. It's coming out 07/05/2022, regardless of when you're watching this video. But in the next months here, as a lead up to the launch, what I wanted to do was put together a series of videos talking about some of the ideas in the book.
First of all, why I wrote it, but then also working through some of the major ideas of how I have interpreted the book of Revelation through the nonviolent lens of Jesus. And if you're interested in the book, hopefully this is a bit of a teaser to get you interested, to get you to preorder, to get you buy the thing and actually read it. But even if you don't, I think we can talk through and we can talk about some of the major misconceptions in the book of Revelation, and maybe you'll find that interesting or helpful in your own journey as you follow the way of Christ through the world. So today, I want to look at just the first couple ideas in the first couple chapters. And then later in this series, we'll dig into some of the more exotic images in Revelation and the ways that I think are most appropriate to interpret those in the light of Jesus that is revealed in the Gospels.
But that statement in itself is sort of the foundation for this book. This idea that one of the ways that we have really gotten revelation wrong in the Christian tradition is because we have imagined a Jesus in the book of Revelation that is very different from the Jesus that we encounter in the Gospels. And one of my presuppositions in not just writing this book, but in my faith in general, is that the Christ is where we see the revealed God. That all of scripture, all of creation, all of these different ways God is revealing God's self to us, and we can encounter the divine all around us and the people that we meet in the church and primarily in the scriptures, but it's actually in the person of Jesus, the logos of God where God is finally fully revealed. Now that doesn't mean in Jesus we know everything about who God is, but it does mean that God is revealing everything that we need to know about God.
Everything that we need to understand about who God is, all of that is shown to us in the person of Jesus. Everything else is like looking through a glass darkly. But when we look at Jesus, we see everything that God has ever wanted to say, the logos or the idea behind all the ways that God has revealed God's self to us. And so because of that, any imagination of Jesus that we may have in the future, in our eschatology we would call that, that looks different from the Jesus that is revealed to us in the Gospels is already a fundamental mistake. I've heard people talk about Jesus as if, oh, Jesus was graceful and peaceful and nonviolent and loving, but that was back then.
One day Jesus will return and things will be very different. That no more mister nice guy. This is Jesus who is fed up with humanity, fed up with us, fed up with sin, and he is coming back in a very different way. And the problem is if the Jesus of our future hope bears very little resemblance to the Jesus who is the divine logos revealed in the Gospels, then we've got a major disconnect. And in fact, I would argue we have created a different religion of our own making.
We have taken, I would argue, a misinterpretation of a particular lens and image of Jesus presented to us by John the Revelator, and we have allowed that to supersede the revealed person of Jesus who walked through ancient Palestine. And so the central premise behind my book, behind all of my interpretation of Revelation, is that every image that we see, every apocalyptic moment that we encounter, as difficult as it can be to sift through all of the cultural baggage and the language games that are being played as those images are communicated to us, our priority always has to be in to interpret through the lens of the Jesus of the Gospels. When we come up against something that we don't understand, when we find an image that doesn't make sense in our modern world, there's a lot of work that we can do to go back to understand the apocalyptic genre, to understand the cultural implications of the images that are being used, and why they're being employed in that particular story. But we're always looking back to the Jesus of the Gospels to see is there precedent in a parable of Jesus in an encounter with Jesus that can give us insight into how this image is being used by John and what it points us back to in the Gospels.
The Jesus that is revealed in scripture including Revelation is the Jesus who walked through ancient Palestine, is the Jesus who gave his life in the pursuit of nonviolence and reconciliation between both people and humanity with God. And if we use that as our foundation, I think there are all kinds of ways that we can interpret the imagery in Revelation. And so that's the basic thing that I'm gonna be arguing from, not just in this series, but through the whole book. That Jesus is the lens through which we interpret, not just revelation, but everything that we encounter in our politics, in our economics, in the ways that we read Paul, and certainly in the ways that we read a unique genre like the Apocalypse of John. The second thing that I think we need to get on the table even before we begin to look at any of the particular imagery that's in the book of Revelation is the structure of this book.
I think one of the real mistakes that has been made by Christians through over the last, you know, thousands of years has been trying to map Revelation out as if it is a chronology or a prediction of future events. And that's not a new phenomenon. That that goes back all the way to Sir Isaac Newton, you know, the guy who discovered gravity and invented calculus. I mean, was looking at Revelation, trying to find moments in history that he saw that he could map this all out as if it was a a road map for future events. So we've been doing this for a very long time, but that's not actually, I think, the best way or even the oldest way to read Revelation.
There was in the third century a guy named Saint Victorinus who recognized that Revelation was not meant to be read in a linear fashion, but that it cycled back on itself telling the same story from a different perspective over and over again. And as a modern scholar, Elizabeth Schusler Fliorenza, who's probably one of the preeminent scholars of Revelation today, argues that the book is ordered thematically, not chronologically. And what she's arguing here is that is the same thing that Saint Victorinus has is that John is so fascinated with the idea of Jesus' victory over sin and death and evil and brokenness that he feels like the story needs to be told multiple times from different perspectives. That's why you see things like seven seals and then seven trumpets and then seven vials or bowls. These are not 21 linear events that we should be looking for in history.
These are retellings of the same themes over and over again with a slightly different perspective that's gonna illuminate something new to us each time we read. And what's fascinating about that is that is very much something that is grounded in the Hebrew tradition of prophecy. Now the Hebrew prophetic tradition was not all about telling the future. It was about speaking to the future in an attempt to to change the future. Hebrew prophecy was very much about saying, look, if you continue down this path, these are the consequences that are going to befall you.
But the whole idea behind that kind of prophetic voice that speaking truth to power was about giving people in power the opportunity to see the dead end that they were on, to make changes, and then to have the future end up in going in a different direction. That that's the whole point of Hebrew prophecy is nothing is written in stone and truth spoken in the right moment to the right person with a fearless conviction about the goodness of God and the opportunity to repent that that can actually change the direction of history. That that's what Hebrew prophecy is all about. John, the Revelator, believed that very much, that speaking truth to power, speaking truth to the Christian community, and allowing them to understand the direction that God is taking, the sovereignty of God over the world, that we can actually play a part in shifting and shaping our future into new and better directions, that we can be part of the redemption of the world that Jesus started and that Jesus has actually already won on the cross. And so what John does is he actually takes a pattern or a structure from one of the most famous Hebrew prophets that we have read all all of us probably in our Bible, that is Isaiah.
Now, the prophet Isaiah is not actually a prophet. Isaiah is written over a long period of time, and so most scholars think there are two, if not three, different writers. Those different writers have been compiled together into the the the the canonical Isaiah that we read in the scriptures. But in that, you get these sort of different movements that are happening in Isaiah. The first is really all about the way that the revelation of God, the day of the Lord, changes our interactions with the people around us.
So you get this idea of Isaiah calling out and saying, look, our leaders, our religious leaders, our political leaders are taking advantage of the poor, and that needs to stop. All of us need to turn toward those around us with more compassion, more grace, more empathy, but also with our finances, with our politics. We we need to help the people around us. That is salvation. When the message of God sinks somewhere deep into our hearts as individuals, and it changes the way we interact with our neighbor.
But then the story starts all over again, and we get a second challenge from Isaiah. And this time it's all about politics, so you get this sort of rising up of nations against the people of God. And and in the end, there's sort of this conflict between those two ideas happening. And then this time on the day of the Lord, there's this idea that the judgment of God falls on the nations of the world. They call out in fear, but then there's this this transformation that happens.
And God says that nation will no longer take up war against nation, and they will turn their weapons into products of produce and food and sharing with each other that the world will be transformed because the same salvation that took root in our hearts will inevitably take room in our empires and our politics, and it will transform the way that we interact not just with our neighbor beside us, but with the country that neighbors us, with those that we think are different and separate and other from us. The day of the Lord that changes our hearts will also change the way we think about nation and empire, so our politics transforms. But it's the same story told again. The salvation that changes our heart also changes the way we interact with our place in the world. But the story is not done because Isaiah comes back around in the third part of the book one more time to tell the story from a cosmic scale.
This is the version of Isaiah we get where no longer are we talking about individuals being kinder and more gentler with their neighbor. No longer are we talking about nations no longer warring. But now Isaiah pulls in this language of death being swallowed up forever. This idea that the effects of sin and brokenness in the world will forever be swallowed up and transformed. And not only will our actions that are broken be transformed, but the very impacts, the effects of sin in the world, the very concept of evil and death, all of that will be ultimately transformed by the salvation of God.
And what's fascinating to understand in Isaiah is that these are not three separate victories of God. This is one story of transformation, one story of salvation, one story of God's goodness told at all of the levels of how that story impacts God's creation. John sees this and loves it and applies it verbatim in the book of Revelation. Book of Revelation starts with the seven letters to the seven churches. And one of the really interesting things about Revelation is that for a book that concerns itself with the ultimate victory of good over the power of evil in the cosmos, it starts with some advice to local churches.
Now, John is clearly using those churches in representative ways. He he thinks that those seven churches seven is a big deal in Revelation. He thinks that those seven churches can represent the Christian experience. So you and I should absolutely see ourselves in those churches. But those were originally seven communities that the writer of Revelation knew and interacted with, and he begins the story with localized advice for those churches.
We'll talk about that a little later in this series. The very specific and local advice he gives them. That is modeled after the book of Isaiah. Salvation starts when it changes you from the inside out, when it changes the way that you love your neighbor. Next, the book, you know, cycles out into another story.
And it begins all over again, but this time, we're sort of in a new vision. John actually says that, again, I was caught up in another vision. And this time, we're in the throne room, and we're getting all of these images of the Roman Empire and imperial politics and the emperor cult. And they're being juxtaposed against the way of Jesus. And we're seeing John compare the politics of the world, the politics of empire, the way we war against each other, with the peaceful way of Jesus that conquers through nonviolence and self giving.
And again, the story is told, it comes to a conclusion, and Christ is enthroned in the world about halfway through the book of Revelation. Literally in chapter 11, we read about the God who is and who has come to reign in the world. The story ends. Christ reigns in the world, and we're halfway through the book. But that's because we have one more telling to do, and so the story starts all over again.
This time the images scale up even more. We sort of go from the seven churches and pretty reasonable localized expressions of the salvation of God. Then we move to images of the Roman Empire and images of the way God transforms and saves our politics and empires. This time we're into beasts and dragons and conceptual images of Satan and the adversary and evil and death and Hades and all of these things that are now, just like Isaiah, going to be swallowed up by the victory of Jesus. And so the story begins again and it ends again.
This time, it's telling the story from the perspective of the destruction of all that which destroys God's creation. One of the real misreadings of Revelation is this idea that God intends to either destroy the world or to allow the world to be destroyed. That is antithetical to everything that Revelation is trying to say. The Revelation is about the end of that which destroys. That's what is going to be thrown into the lake of fire.
That's what will be inevitably burned up so that God's creation can be healed and redeemed and repaired the way that God has always been invested in God's good creation. God intends to heal all things. That starts with you and your neighbor and the way that your heart is transformed. It extends into the story of your politics and empire and countries that you are a part of, the economics that you participate in, and the way that you participate in systems. Paul would call them principalities and powers that surround us all the time.
But then the story expands one final time into the very idea of the cosmos being redeemed. Evil will be overcome, that brokenness will be healed, that all that destroys and tears at God's creation will inevitably be swallowed up in God's goodness. But all of that happens in the cross all of that happens in the story of Jesus all of that is the fulfillment of that same day of the Lord that Isaiah imagined thousands and thousands of years ago So this is our first thing that we need to get in our minds as we approach the book of Revelation. Yes, we'll continue this series. Yes, the book will come out and we will deal with all of those crazy images and how we interpret them.
But first, understand two things: that the Jesus of Revelation is entirely consistent with the Jesus of the Gospels. Nonviolent, self giving, the Jesus who would rather give his life than ever enact violence against his enemies, And how that Jesus shows us ultimately who God is, that God will be shown to be present and active and healing the world in the book of Revelation. And then second, understand the structure that John is using. That John is deeply influenced by the Hebrew tradition of prophecy. Not fortune telling, not future telling, but truth telling.
Speaking truth to power, telling the story of Christ's victory in the world with absolute conviction that that cannot be undone or overcome. And yet doing that in these concentric circles, expanding our imagination of all the ways that Christ influences, transforms, and heals not just us as individuals, but everything that we encounter in this world. Once we get that as a foundation for us, we can now begin to look at those specific images, the troubling ones that we're going to find in some of the ways that Revelation names the violence of the world, specifically to subvert it and point us back to Jesus. So, I actually think this is an important conversation, not just if you are fascinated by Revelation, but for all of us who want to walk the way of Jesus in the world. We need to have an eschatology that is as beautiful and disgraceful and as nonviolent as the Jesus that we follow.
And once we allow that to be our foundation, then we are going to find that there are incredibly compelling images all through the book of Revelation. They're gonna keep bringing us back to this nonviolent sacrifice of Jesus and how that will change the world. Now, if you're interested, subscribe here. Hit the bell notification. That way you can get some notifications when we post new videos.
But I'll be posting a few videos as we make our way toward the July launch. And hopefully, that's a teaser for you. But even if not, hopefully, you'll learn something as we journey our way through this book together.