Trying to Keep Your Balance: Preaching the Revelation—Some Reflections (Part 2 of 5)
In part one we considered the historical setting of the book. The book must have meant something to the original recipients, and we must seek to know what it meant before we can know what it means. Part 2 focuses on the fact that the book must have been written in a style that would have been understood by those recipients.
II. CONSIDER THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
I am talking about genre. What kind of book is this? We have gospels, history, and letters, but what about this book? Where would Barnes and Noble shelve this book? It would have to create a new category. A genre mistake is made by many preachers. They read Revelation like a “Book of Acts” with a twist, a kind of “Book of Future Acts.” Revelation tells us in great detail what is going to happen, so we are told. And we can draw up our charts and we distribute our videos. But remember this: Every single person or school of thought or church group who has done this have been consistent…consistently wrong, from the Millerites in the 1840s to the LaHaye-ites in the twenty-first century.
A genre mistake is made because we ask the wrong questions and therefore we don’t get the right answers because we impose our agenda on this book. We don’t allow God to set the agenda with the literary form that he has chosen to reveal himself. The bottom line is this: A book must be interpreted naturally in light of its genre.
Revelation is a hybrid work, combining three well-known ancient genres. It is a Christian apocalyptic-prophetic-circular letter. As an apocalypse, it was written in tough times to make a tough people and used symbolism considerably; as a circular letter, it was meant to be shared with the church throughout the ancient world to speak to their needs like other NT letters; and especially as a prophecy, it was a call to arms, a call to obedience
There are three areas where we need to keep the balance.
A. We need to keep the balance between foretelling and forthtelling. Listen to Revelation 1:3—“Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy and blessed are those who hear it and obey it . . .” Prophecy is both foretelling and forthtelling. It certainly proclaims the future in the most general way: Christ has come and he is coming again so be prepared. There will be reward and punishment.
But most prophecy in the Bible is not concerned with predicting the future. The heart of prophecy is forthtelling, declaring God’s Word and Will for a people who are tempted to compromise or who are discouraged because of the rejection and outright suffering they may be experiencing. I will say more about this below, but I always encourage my students in seminary to ask of any passage in Revelation: Is there a word of comfort or a word of challenge in this verse? Or perhaps is there a combination of both comfort and challenge.
The book tells us not only what God intends to do in the most general way, it tells us what God expects us to be and do in specific ways and it offers comfort through the images of hope that we worship a reigning Lord and a redeeming Lamb.
As a prophet, John strips away the scales from our eyes and forces us to see the church in all of its strengths and weaknesses as well as this world with devils filled. The prophet warns us to beware of listening to the spirit of the age rather than to the Spirit of the God of the ages. The pastoral and the prophetic, the encouragement and the exhortation, foretelling and forthtelling, the visionary and the hortatory are intertwined. What God has brought together, let not preachers separate.
B. We need to keep the balance between the present and the future. Here I am talking about typology. John sees persons, things, or events in the OT as foreshadowings or patterns of persons, things or events in the NT or even in the future of the world—Babylon, Egypt, Moses and Elijah, Nero, the city of Rome, the practice of worshipping the Roman emperor as a god. I am talking about type and antitype.
We find it often in the New Testament. “As Jonah was in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of Man be in the earth” . . . “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be at the coming of the Son of Man.” Jonah and Noah were the types or models, and Jesus was the anti-type or fulfillment (See also the use of typology in Hebrews.).
For John, Babylon was the type, Rome the antitype. For us, Rome is the type and some other godless or seductive or oppressive culture is the antitype, perhaps even the USA! Hence, in describing for his readers the downfall of Rome, Rome is a type for the destruction of all godless cultures leading up even to the destruction of the world when Christ comes in glory.
C. We need to keep the balance between prediction and promise. This point complements the above. The book not only predicts Jesus’ final coming it also declares the promises which Jesus’ first and final comings fulfill.
A prediction is a fairly flat affair. Either it comes true or it doesn’t. But in predictions we often find detailed promises. And a promise is much more than a prediction. It is one thing to predict the end of the world, which is what John does in a general way.
Again, in using Rome as a model, John is saying as Rome was judged by God and came to an end, so will any culture which opposes God, so indeed the whole world. But in making predictions, often promises are made. John predicted the fall of the Roman Empire but stars did not fall from the sky nor did the moon turn to blood. But a promise is different. It has a dynamic quality that goes beyond the external details involved.
For example, there are many promises made to believers (see the end of each of the messages in chapters two and three as well as promises made in others chapters like 7, 21—22). The promises were made in terms that would have been understood by the original recipients. But the promises may well be kept in deeper and fuller ways. In other words, all of the promises about future reward will be enriched and enhanced when kept. On the other hand, if we are not in Christ, all of the horrible promises about punishment will be enriched and enhanced when kept.
We must not fail to see the living and “transformable” quality of promises which were probably understood quite literally at the time of their giving. But just because the promises exceed our hopes or fears does not mean that the promises were not kept. Changed circumstances and the end of the world may well enable the promises to be kept in a different way, without emptying the promises of their purpose. To insist on literal fulfillment of prophecies means we may well overlook their actual nature within the category of promise, with the potential different and progressively superior levels of fulfillment. When someone insists that a prediction or promise must be interpreted literally, that person is overlooking the actual nature of a promise found in the prediction, a promise that may have superior levels of fulfillment.
Let me illustrate this way. Let’s say it is 1985 and a seven year old boy sees his dad’s typewriter and he is captivated by it. He desperately wants one. And he asks his father if he can have one someday. Yes says the Father, when you finish high school so that you can use it when you are in college. Ten years pass and at the graduation party the parents give the teenager a computer with word processing, internet capability—the works. And a color laser printer. Has the promise been kept? Yes and no. No, the boy did not receive a typewriter but yes in the sense that the father (who in 1985 knew about computers but had not yet bought one) fulfilled the promise in a much richer and more beautiful way. So the promises in the Revelation.
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