Revelation for the Rest of Us Quotes

“Dissidents pause with these words as a motto: “Not so with you!” Power for Jesus was power for the other and not power over the other. The way of the dragon aches for power over, and the wild things wield the dragon’s power over and climb their way into high places where they exert power over others.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“This entire book—don’t forget this please—is for each of those seven churches. Every vision, every interlude, every song is for each of them.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“John does not adjudicate how to engage in politics. Instead, John instructs Christians how to discern the moral character of governments and politicians and policies and laws.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Imagination ignites the mundane. Think of the bush where Moses witnesses the holy presence of God. Imagination invites us into a world that transcends our world so we can return to our world transformed by the conversion of our thinking.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“We are either thermometers reflecting the temperature of the world or thermostats adjusting that temperature.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Here is the only secret you need to reading Revelation: this book is about the Lamb’s final, complete defeat of the dragon and its Babylons and the establishment of new Jerusalem.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The book is not about finding joy in unbelievers getting their comeuppance, but about the defeat of the dragon and the systemic evils in Babylon. The celebration is not personal vengeance but cosmic justice.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“the Revelation is a gift—a work of intense imagination that pulls its reader into a world of sky battles between angels and beasts, lurid punishments and glorious salvations, kaleidoscopic vision and cosmic song. It is a world in which children are instinctively at home and in which adults, by becoming as little children, recapture an elemental involvement in the basic conflicts and struggles that permeate moral existence, and then go on to discover again the soaring adoration and primal affirmations for which God made us.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“What dispensationalism is known for even more is its belief in the imminent rapture that occurs before a future seven-year tribulation. Sometime near the end of that tribulation, Jesus will come back (the “second coming”), establish a literal one-thousand-year reign on earth, and then at the end of that millennium comes eternity. For dispensationalists the book of Revelation, at least from chapter four on, is entirely about that tribulation.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Revelation “is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Our mission is to declare the glories of Christ, to preach the gospel, to teach the Word, to administer the sacraments, and to live in fellowship with one another as a signpost of the new Jerusalem”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“No wonder the rulers of this age want to stop the singing, or pollute it with ideology and managed slogans!”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The book of Revelation reveals to us that the way to counter the government’s overreach is to begin with worship of the One on the throne, the Lamb in the middle of the throne, and the Seven Spirits around the throne.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Instead of doing good as witnesses, we grabbed for power. Instead of witnessing to Jesus, we have become known for political allegiances, so much so that our politics are reshaping our witness into a corrupted witness.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Heresy lurks when the pastor appeals to and exerts power and authority, when the pastor sees leadership as imposing his will on the congregation. There is but one Lord and one authority: Jesus, the Lamb, the Lord.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“In our local context, the pastors and elders and deacons are disciples of Jesus, called to submit first to him and to nurture others into serving one another as Jesus himself served his disciples. The strangest words in the church ought to be the words “authority” and “power.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Our churches have not discipled people in the last forty years in Christoform power but have instead discipled them into playing Babylon’s power games. They have decided who might be their next king, only to realize that kings become wild things. Instead of giving more and more power to presidents, to senators, to representatives, to Washington DC and states and cities and villages and towns, we need to search again for Christoform power.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Babylon has seized the church’s heart. Its grip is so tight many can no longer distinguish their politics from the gospel.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Fawning over Babylon’s leaders divides the church. Nearly half of the American church votes one way as one half votes the other. If one’s allegiance is to a party, if one thinks one’s party is truly Christian, one has cut off one’s sisters and brothers.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Babylon will never be the new Jerusalem; it cannot be Christianized.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The book of Revelation requires us to take a stand for the Lamb in this world. To read it well we must learn to think “theo-politically,” or to say this another way, the entire book of Revelation is about public discipleship.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“They have failed to understand the timelessness of Babylon, that Babylon is always with us. One careful reading of the major chapters about Babylon is all one needs to form a Babylonian hermeneutic that provides discernment of Babylon in America and in its churches. Yet repeated failed readings of Revelation have today led to a failure to discern Babylon.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“There’s evidence of this move from the theological to the political. In 2008, 59% of evangelicals said that they attended church at least once a week. Just 16% said that they attended services “seldom” or “never.” By 2019, those percentages had shifted significantly. The share who were weekly attenders declined a full seven percentage points, to 52%. On the bottom end of the spectrum, nearly a quarter of self-identified evangelicals said that they attended church “seldom” or “never” (24.2%).”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The weapon of choice for Jesus was the cross. The Lamb of Revelation slays with the sword that proceeds from his mouth. Christian realism compromises the way of the Lamb because true realism is a deep reality that sees God on the throne and the Lamb in its center.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The power of military might is a Babylonian reality, not a new Jerusalem one. The Lamb was slaughtered because he refused to use Babylon’s weapons, and the way of the Lamb is to conquer by the “sword from his mouth,” not a sword drawn from a scabbard. The Word of God is the weapon of choice for those walking in the way of the Lamb.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The might that made Rome an empire will bow to the might that makes God God and the Lamb the Lamb. Brian Blount sums it up best: Babylons will be “sLambed.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“This is an empire called “narcissism.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The heart of Babylon will always be arrogant self-sufficiency that has no need for God, no care for the people of God, and no commitment to the ways of God.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“Babylon was and is a timeless trope for empires and nations and powers that systematize injustices, oppress the people of God, and suppress the truths of liberation. Babylon is no more a city of the future than it is a city of the here and now.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple