It seems that the most common understanding of the book of Revelation on the popular level in the United States is a dispensational reading. This is the understanding of Revelation portrayed in the popular book series “Left Behind,” or the movie of the same name. It is the understanding taught by many popular “prophecy” teachers. It is almost like it was a history book written in advance. That may be the way that you have learned or heard about the book of Revelation yourself. In fact, you may not even be aware that many Christians have not understood the book of Revelation or “End Times Prophecy” quite the same as the dispensationalists. Furthermore, you may not even have considered that this would be an issue. If that is the case, then this book study may stretch you a little bit, because I do not believe that the dispensational reading of Revelation is the way scripture is meant to be read. That is the issue after all, isn’t it? How is this book supposed to be read? Almost everyone agrees that it is a difficult and foreign book. Most of us have not read anything like it before or after, but here it is in the Bible and we have to figure out not only what to do with it, but how is God speaking to his church through it.
My first understanding of Revelation was dispensational. I learned that there would be a rapture that would take Christians away into heaven and then that would be followed by seven really terrible years called, “the Tribulation.” There are many other parts to this teaching that you may be familiar with. The outcome of this teaching was that we were to look for signs that the world was entering into these last days. When political movements happened in Europe or the Middle East, then they could be the beginnings of the end. Perhaps the leader that was going to falsely unite the world was already alive and we were just years away from Armageddon?
I began to wonder though, is this the way Revelation was meant to be read? Is this what God had in mind? That’s an important question, isn’t it? What exactly does God intend to communicate to us through Revelation? The thing that really became the key issue in my reading Revelation in a new way was my becoming convinced that this book, Revelation, was written to Christians in seven churches almost 2,000 years ago and on the other side of the world and it must have meant something to them. I wasn’t sure how visions of Russia uniting with the European Union under the guidance of a Czechoslovakian born leader who utilized Apache helicopters, computer systems, and nuclear war would have made any sense or have been of any use to people in Asia Minor living under Roman rule in the first century. Wasn’t God speaking a word to his people then? Wasn’t he speaking a word to his people in 500 AD? And 1,000 AD? Isn’t Revelation more than a word to 20th and 21st Century Western Christians? That bothered me.
What exactly I do mean by this new way of reading Revelation will be best explained as we study the text together, but I will ask you to begin by considering this. Perhaps we should first take Revelation, specifically chapters 4-22 as a series of visions. The order that we read about the visions is the order that John gives them to us. The order of the visions is not necessarily telling us anything at all about the chronological order of events at the end of time. When we read, “After this I saw,” or “After this I heard,” then we should understand that we are reading about the next vision, not necessarily the next event on the world’s timeline. What we do have are visions that are telling us something about God, Jesus Christ, God’s people, God’s judgment, God’s enemies, God’s redeeming work, and God’s ultimate plan for his creation. We must consider the possibility that people come to scripture with questions that the text is not addressing. Perhaps we are asking questions such as, “when will the end come,” and “how will the end come,” when God is answering questions of “Who is the center of history,” and “what is he up to?”
I will close this section by stating two things. First, I am not proposing a reading of Revelation that takes us outside of the orthodox Christian faith by any means. In fact, I would suggest that this understanding of Revelation is at the heart of orthodoxy. Second, while I may believe that the dispensational reading of Revelation is incorrect, I am not at all questioning whether dispensational believers are Christian. Because of this, while this study may touch on a few points of the dispensationalist interpretation, the main thrust of the study will be our interpreting the text together. This is not a point by point comparative study. Rather it is simply an attempt to better understand this book of the Bible. It is a study of the apocalypse.