Robert Lowery

I met with Kathryn on the last Wednesday afternoon of September. She had read the first four chapters of my book, and she was eager to share with me some dots that she had connected. As a student of Scripture for many years, she said that even though she knew the importance of placing a book within its historical setting, she confessed that she had consistently failed to do so with the book of Revelation. She shared with me that every book she had read on Revelation had always started with “us” rather than with the “them” of Bible days. Well put, I told her.

It may be a surprise to many college and seminary professors as well as preachers and Bible teachers, but many students of God’s Word often do not place the various books within their original setting. In the case of the writings found in the New Testament, many bypass the first century and jump to the twenty-first! And of course this happens not just with Revelation. Some teachers think the battle to be sensitive to what a book meant to the original audience has been fought and won. Perhaps this is the case in some college or seminary classrooms, but the victory has not been announced or appreciated, at least from my perspective, in the trenches in local congregations.

I have developed a series of lessons entitled “Reading Between the Lines: Understanding Life in New Testament Times.” Whenever and wherever I present the material, people are initially stunned, and then they get excited. By describing real people in real places experiencing real challenges who lived in ancient times, today’s readers of Scripture are stirred to focus first on “the meant-ness” of the Word before they reflect on the mean-ing for them. And they come to realize that the latter is enriched and deepened when we read between the lines.

But Kathryn became even more explicit. She told me that one of the reasons why she had failed to consider life in John’s day at the end of the first century was that she had misunderstood the nature of prophetic literature, an issue I address in the fourth chapter that deals with the style of the book. To interpret John’s prophetic word, we must start with the “them,” John’s audience, and not with us. To focus on us is an act of interpretative narcissism, I told her. We mistakenly think that God is prophetically speaking only to us in America and not to the early disciples. How self-centered!

Our hearts beat rapidly when we are told that something is prophetic, believing that at its core, it provides for us a detailed blueprint of the future. We think we will have insider information: We will know the future in great detail as we read this work by John. We are eager to adjust our prophetic charts in light of today’s headlines on CNN or the local newspaper. But as I attempt to show in my book, while prophetic material may contain visions of the future, its passion is to show how we must live in light of the future.

The conversation that Wednesday afternoon illustrates the mistake that is made when we fail to realize that the kind of book John wrote–a prophetic work which describes the future in general terms while focusing especially on how the followers of Jesus are to live in light of a God-assured future where evil will be vanquished and God’s people victorious—first spoke in images that John’s recipients would have understood. Many of us are sensitive to this when we study a letter by Paul, but because we have been taught to seek out specific prophecies that are “being fulfilled” in our day, we fail to read the last book of the New Testament accurately.

Surely the close-out bins in Christian bookstore or the close-out sections in publishers’ catalogs–bins and sections overflowing with books that used Revelation (abused Revelation?) to be a detailed roadmap to contemporary events–should be a caution to us to spend our time and our money more wisely.

Do you have a question about this or some other aspect of Revelation or Dr. Bob’s book? Use the form on the Contact page to submit your question. Dr. Bob will sort through them and respond to selected questions on the blog. Please note that comments to blog posts on this site are moderated and not all will be published.

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1. A Wednesday Afternoon Chat