More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The speculation readings of Revelation teach escapism and fail to disciple the church in the moral dissidence that shapes everything in the amazing book of Revelation. Escapism is as far from Revelation as Babylon is from new Jerusalem.
Revelation has become a “paradise of fanatics and sectarians”!
Perceiving the United States as besieged by satanic forces—communism and secularism, family break-down and government encroachment—Billy Sunday, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, and many others took to the pulpit and airwaves to explain how biblical end-times prophecy made sense of a world ravaged by global wars, genocide, and the threat of nuclear extinction. Rather than withdraw from their communities to wait for Armageddon, they used what little time was left to warn of the coming Antichrist, save souls, and prepare the United States for God’s final judgment.
this is not how the church throughout its history has read the apocalyptic texts of the Bible. What was apocalyptic and metaphorical and fictional over time became rigidly literal for too many readers.
“First, it leads to hubris. It seduces its followers into claiming to know things that no human being can possibly know.”
“leads to demonization of others. Our [the USA’s] enemies become physical embodiments of evil. Third, it leads to fatalism, suggesting that wars and other calamities are beyond human control. Finally, and most fatefully, it suggests that the ultimate solution to all problems is a violent one involving the annihilation of one’s enemies.”
believing in order to escape the Tribulation, • evangelizing to help others escape, • connecting current events to prophecies, • and being ready to die for faith in Jesus.
That is, the reading leads to either withdrawal from society or resignation to the evil arc of history.
“We” (America with Israel) win and “they” (usually Russia or the European Union) lose. Dispensationalism’s reading of Revelation breeds confidence in America and not dissidence about Babylon
Revelation connected to speculation leads to excitation, and excitations lead to expectations, and expectations unfulfilled lead to frustrations. Frustrations lead to realizations that have led many to say, “There’s something big-time wrong with these speculations.”
Speculation eventually leads to stupefaction.
The book is for all times because it is about all time. The flexibility of the book to give Christians a sense of direction and meaning throughout church history is the big clue to a different approach. The clue is that Revelation is timeless theology not specific prediction, and the moment it turns to specific predictions it loses its timeless message.
the book’s proclamation of how to be discerning, dissident disciples in the face of Babylon in our world.
The Apocalypse is not about prediction of the future but perception and interrogation of the present. It provides readers with a new lens to view our contemporary world.
“The last book of the Bible is not a catalog of predictions about events that would take place two thousand years later. Rather, it is a projector that casts archetypal images of good and evil onto a cosmic screen.”
A dissident is someone who takes a stand against official policy in church or state or both, who dissents from the status quo with a different vision for society. We need a generation of dissident disciples who confront and resist corruption and systemic abuses in whatever locations they are found: • corruption in the countries of the world, • our churches’ complicities in these corruptions, • and the reading of Revelation as speculation, which blunts our prophetic voice.
The book of Revelation is for modern-day disciples who have eyes to see the power of the empire in our world and in our churches and in our lives and yours.
The book of Revelation, when read well, forms us into dissident disciples who discern corruptions in the world and church. Conformity to the world is the problem. Discipleship requires dissidence when one lives in Babylon.
The powers of that time lived in suspicion and fear, even fearful of this pocket of house churches. Their songs were subversive, pointing to a different hope, and their witness announced a different Lord.
Revelation, was written, but it likely happened sometime after Rome’s heartless, cruel destruction of the city of Jerusalem in 70 CE. As a consequence of that destruction, Rome became for Jews what Martin Goodman calls the “epitome of evil.”
In the book of Revelation John instructs the seven churches of western Asia Minor on how to live as Christian dissidents in an empire racked by violence, power, exploitation, and arrogance. “Follow the Way of the Lamb” thumps the drumbeat of this book.
Revelation “is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world.”
This is a book that calls us to civil disobedience.
A dissident is a person of hope, someone who imagines a better, future world, and then begins to embody that world. It’s someone who speaks to promote that better, future vision and against what is wrong in the present.
Some of those imprisoned form networks that work to bring the systems of power and oppression down. Some spend their time in prayer in God’s presence, not only speaking to God but hearing from God, while others dream prophetic dreams and envision prophetic visions, calling for change and confronting the status quo.
By imprisoning them, the powers in charge hoped to render these dissidents powerless, hoping to marginalize them and render them incapable of influencing others.
Dissidents tap into the mind of God and return with a vision that sees the powers of this world differently.
Christians as “transformed nonconformists”—
King spoke of Jesus as the “world’s most dedicated nonconformist,” adding that each of us “is either a molder of society or is molded by society.” We are either thermometers reflecting the temperature of the world or thermostats adjusting that temperature.
We might call John a double dissident because he had his eyes on the evil powers at work in the empire as well as those same powers at work in the church. He saw too much Rome in the church, and not enough church in Rome.
What’s important to understand is that John, too, was a dissident, a prophetic voice in a long line of dissident voices speaking about the negative influence of Rome in the church. Too many of the churches were floating along with cultural buoyancy, wrongly assuming that all was fine. They believed they could follow Jesus and still be 100% culturally respected. They thought they could live like Rome and enter the new Jerusalem.
John labels some in that church “Nicolaitans”—an insulting term similar to “grubs” for Nahum.
Forcing the woman of Revelation 12 into a single mold ruins the intentional morphing and ambiguity of the book. Instead, we should “take the time to feel the impact of the image and to adopt a receptive attitude in which feelings play as great a role as thinking.”
Reading Revelation means knowing for whom it was written. We answer that by saying it was written for dissidents.
The book of Revelation is written to shape a church surrounded by the swamping and creeping ways of Babylon.
This entire book—don’t forget this please—is for each of those seven churches.
Their sins are rooted in a struggle to walk in the way of the Lamb because Babylon was penetrating the churches and they were no longer focused on the face of the Lamb.
“It was the seduction of the Roman Empire from within a context of relative comfort, rather than terrifying persecution, that more accurately describes the situation of the original audience of the book of Revelation.”
you’re doing good, but your love is disordered. This is the anguished language of a divorcing couple: “You no longer love me. You used to love me but no longer do.” It’s the language of a worker saying to his coworker: “You’ve lost your passion, your focus, and your commitment.” Jesus sees Ephesus and he knows they no longer love him the way they did at one time.
reverberating echoes in the prophets, especially the visual images we find in Hosea 1–3.
Love of God and love of others are so integral to one another that John says it is impossible to have one without the other.
The Ephesians have released their love. It didn’t escape; they released it.
The assemblies in Ephesus are somehow doing the right things (2:2–3) but doing the right things apart from the right context—love of God, love of others—means what they are doing is ultimately disordered.
While they may be doing Christian things, they are loving Babylon, and because they are loving Babylon, even their good deeds are disordered.
The three disordered loves of 1 John are ours too: “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). The insatiable nature of undisciplined desire disorders the relationships of men and women in the workplace and of husbands and wives in the home. John instructs us to discern disordered love in the church and to rediscover our first love all over again.
The teachings of Balaam and Jezebel appear to be worship (whole body, whole life) of false gods.
These kinds of false worship and false sexual practices are integrated in the Greco-Roman world, so participation like this was participation in the ways of Babylon. And participation in the empire was the same as walking away from the Lamb.
Judaism and the Jesus movement distinguished themselves from the way of Rome in a profoundly important dimension, namely that God had revealed to his people over and over again how they should live. The gods of the Romans really had nothing to do with how to live day to day.
These false teachers and teachings also articulated a desire to belong by moving up the ladder of social status (called cursus honorum), but the eyes of the Colossus of Jesus saw corrupted worship and idolatry in these false teachings. Distorted teachings lead to corrupted worship.
These are words of judgment, and they reveal that Babylon is seducing the Laodiceans into lives of cheap grace.
