Revelation for Everyone Quotes

“Many people want to serve God,’ said the sign outside the church, ‘but only in an advisory capacity.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“when that is done, we are left not with a new heaven only, but a new heaven and a new earth – and they are joined together completely and for ever. The word ‘dwell’ in verse 3 is crucial, because the word John uses conjures up the idea of God ‘dwelling’ in the Temple in Jerusalem, revealing his glory in the midst of his people. This is what John’s gospel says about Jesus: the Word became flesh and lived, ‘dwelt’, pitched his tent, ‘tabernacled’, in our midst, and we gazed upon his glory. What God did in Jesus, coming to an unknowing world and an unwelcoming people, he is doing on a cosmic scale. He is coming to live, for ever, in our midst, a healing, comforting, celebrating presence. And the idea of ‘incarnation’, so long a key topic in our thinking about Jesus, is revealed as the key topic in our thinking about God’s future for the world. Heaven and earth were joined together in Jesus; heaven and earth will one day be joined fully and for ever.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation For Everyone

“Like all mainline Jews of his day, he believed that human evil emerged from idolatry. You become like what you worship: so, if you worship that which is not God, you become something other than the image-bearing human being you were meant and made to be.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“To grasp all this requires faith. To live by it will take courage. But it is that faith, and that courage, which this book is written to evoke.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“a Jesus who is mind-blowing, dramatically powerful but also gentle and caring; a Jesus in and through whom we see his father, God the creator; a Jesus who has spoken, and still speaks, words which explain what is going on in the present, and warn of what will happen in the future (verse 19).”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“Love’, in the early Christian sense, is something you do, giving hospitality and practical help to those in need, particularly to other Christians who are poor, sick or hungry.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“They are to ‘conquer’, not by fighting back, but by following Jesus himself, who won the victory through his own patient suffering.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“Yes, fear is the natural reaction. But here, as so often, Jesus says, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ It’s all right. Yes, you are suffering, and your people are suffering (verse 9). Yes, the times are strange and hard, with harsh and severe rulers running the world and imposing their will on city after city. But the seven churches – seven is the number of perfection, and the churches listed in verse 11 thus stand for all churches in the world, all places and all times – need to know that Jesus himself is standing in their midst, and that the ‘angels’ who represent and look after each of them are held in his right hand.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“A great deal of this book is about ideas-made-visible, on the one hand, and scripture-made-real on the other.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“Perhaps one of the many reasons why Revelation has been literally a closed book for so many, and for so much of the church, is that it powerfully and dramatically contradicts this popular view. God’s kingdom is not simply designed for ‘heaven’, because God is the creator of the whole world, and his entire purpose is to reclaim that whole world as his own and to set it on the way to become the place he always intended it to be, before human rebellion pulled it so disastrously off track.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“Now, however, it is only seven thousand who are killed, and the great majority are to be rescued. Suddenly, out of the smoke and fire of the earlier chapters, a vision is emerging: a vision of the creator God as the God of mercy, grieving over the rebellion and corruption of the world but determined to rescue and restore it, and doing so through the faithful death of the lamb and, now, through the faithful death of the lamb’s prophetic followers. The way stands clear for the glorious celebration at the end of the chapter, which rounds off the first half of this very carefully structured book.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“God is indeed angry at everything that has so horribly spoiled his wonderful world. His gaze from the throne is a deep, inexpressible mixture of sorrow and anger. But the lamb’s anger is the utter rejection, by Love incarnate, of all that is unloving. The only people who should be afraid of it are those who are determined to resist the call of love.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“(like all answers to do with Revelation, it remains partial and puzzling: this is a book designed to go on making you ponder and pray, not one designed to answer everything to your satisfaction)”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“Many rest content to have Jesus around the place for particular ‘spiritual’ purposes, but continue to assign riches, power, glory and the rest to earthly forces and rulers.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“And there have been plenty of lamb-Christians. Yes, they think, Jesus may have been ‘the lion of Judah’, but that’s a political idea which we should reject because salvation consists in having our sins wiped away so that we can get out of this compromised world and go off to heaven instead. No, replies John; gaze at the lamb, but remember that it is the lion’s victory that he has won.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“There have been, down the years, plenty of lion-Christians. Yes, they think, Jesus died for us; but now God’s will is to be done in the lion-like fashion, through brute force and violence, to make the world come into line, to enforce God’s will. No, replies John; think of the lion, yes, but gaze at the lamb.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“For others, including some of today’s enthusiastic Christians, Jesus is the one with whom we can establish a personal relationship of loving intimacy. John would agree with the second of these, but he would warn against imagining that Jesus is therefore a cosy figure, one who merely makes us feel happy inside.”
― Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone

“Love’, in the early Christian sense, is something you do, giving hospitality and practical help to those in need, particularly to other Christians who are poor, sick or hungry.”
― N.T. Wright, Revelation for Everyone