This is a revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants the events that must soon take place. He sent an angel to present this revelation to his servant John, who faithfully reported everything he saw. This is his report of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. God blesses the one who reads the words of this prophecy to the church, and he blesses all who listen to its message and obey what it says, for the time is near. This letter is from John to the seven churches in the province of Asia. Grace and peace to you from the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come; from the sevenfold Spirit before his throne; . . .
Revelation 1:1-4
I left you at the end of Gem 2188 with a question, a task and a statement of fact.
Did you see the complication hidden in these three words I highlighted?
Have a think about these three words before the next Gem in the context of what I have written.
These three highlighted words hold the key as to why Revelation is so complex.
Before I tackle the issue of the complexity of Revelation I need to return to the matter of John being the author of Revelation. It has troubled some of you to the point of querying how a fisherman could produce such a complicated piece of literature. So let me address that question from the outset. I have no problem with John, the fisherman writing either Revelation or John’s Gospel, despite the differences between them. Why? Allow me to tell two Ian Stories to illustrate the point.
I have had the privilege of knowing Des Oatridge, a New Zealand plumber who was challenged to become a Bible Translator with Wycliffe. Des & Jenny’s story has been captured in the book Hidden People. Des was a plumber in Taranaki who attended a meeting one week night to hear a translator sharing his work as a Bible translator. During the course of the evening Des was taken with the thought that he should become involved. Des discovered that he had a hidden gift for this work. He had an incredible ear for sound and language. Des became one of Wycliffe Bible Translators most gifted phoneticians. The task of Bible translation is complicated. Each language in the world has complexity in some feature of the language. It may be hidden in the phonetics or the sounds of the language. It may be hidden in the complicated grammar governing how the language is structured. In order to communicate fullness of meaning, languages need to be complex.
At the beginning of their work with the Binumarien people in Papua New Guinea Des found that God had gifted him for this work by giving him a phonetician’s ear to pick up the subtle differences in speech. I remember sitting listening to Des pick up and put together the complexity of an unwritten language in a demonstration of how to go about his work. I was impressed and amazed. God’s call came with God’s enablement to do the work. Des and Jenny’s story is recorded by Lynette Oates in the book “Hidden People: How a Remote New Guinea Culture Was Brought Back from the Brink of Extinction” by a New Zealand plumber. How can it be? Anything is possible when God is in the equation. The Oatridges’ story is remarkable. Not only how a people group were saved from extinction, but also how God used the genealogy in Matthew 1 to capture the attention of this people group. Fisherman, plumber; it matters not when God is calling.
I have shared our story of how we joined Wycliffe because of God’s intervention on June 8th 1981. You can read various aspects of our story amidst the Ian Stories. But I will share now a part of the story I have not yet shared. I was put into the academic stream in high school and expected to learn Latin and French. However the way those languages were taught were so boring. We had to learn the grammar and were expected to memorise vocabulary lists. The thought didn’t grab me at all, yet that was the expectation. I ‘learned’ Latin until the end of Fourth Form when I had no interest in learning it anymore. I continued French until 7th Form because I was told you needed a language unit in your degree. But never once did we have a French conversation among ourselves or better yet with real French speaking people. No, we just learned the grammar, the syntax of French sentences and endless word lists. At the end of 7th Form (Upper Sixth actually) our French teacher took us to a French play at Auckland University. None of us understood anything beyond the odd word here and there. I did not think that I was in any way cut out for languages or linguistics.
At Uni I took Indonesian as my required language unit. But half way through the year the requirement of taking a language paper in your degree was abolished. So I didn’t bother with the lectures for the rest of the year. They just did not capture my attention. Needless to say my results in Latin, French and Indonesian were not good. The motivation was not there. But when God touched my button and I stepped out into the world of Linguistics after His Call I was turned on. I find it all so ironic now given the path I have travelled.
Another branch to the story of Ian and languages is that I realised I really do have a gift for learning languages which has been proved again and again. However when we went to Indonesia and I learned my Indonesian in the East in Ujung Pandang (Makassar), Sulawesi. I learned the Eastern dialect of Indonesian in order to teach at the University. When we went to Jakarta a number of years later I was told I spoke funny Indonesian. I was delighted a number of years later when I took a group of colleagues from Kartidaya to Palu to teach Deeper Bible where I had trained the Jakarta based team to teach the course. But the attendees in Sulawesi, pastors and linguists and others complained they couldn’t understand those teaching. “We can’t understand you; we want Ian to teach us. Him we understand.”
All that to say, I think I understand John as result of my life experience. Yes it may be that John’s Greek was not the educated, high-brow Greek of Athens. Yes he was a Hebrew speaker at heart, but had mastered the Greek language which was in fact the language of wider communication. God also had a purpose in the way John had been trained in order to communicate the message God wanted broadcast far and wide.
I am sure you have picked up on the reason for the complexity of the Book of Revelation or the Letter of Revelation. John has told us in his preamble that:
- This is a revelation, an apocalypse from Jesus Christ. [1:1]
- This is also a prophecy to the church. [1:3]
- This is a letter from John to the seven churches in the province of Asia. [1:4]
- John was told to write what he saw [and heard] in a book. [1:11]
As result we have a letter or a book which is epistolary, prophetic and apocalyptic by nature. All of which makes Revelation complicated. Some of you have asked me, “Is Revelation a letter or is it only the first three chapters that are the letter and the rest is a book.” I have told you already of the leader in JPCC who decided he would apply the Deeper Bible approach to a book as I had suggested; so he and his group chose the Book of Revelation. It wasn’t until I added the schema showing which genre of writing was hard and which was easier that they understood why the Book of Revelation or the Letter of Revelation represented the most difficult writing style in the Bible.
Revelation is blend of apocalypse, prophecy and letter. All of which contain some complexity and unique elements. I have told you before that John was writing an Hebraic style of Greek. The letters or epistles were written at a particular point of time in history and were written to address things relevant and topical for the recipients. The prophets were not primarily writers but spokesmen. Hebrew prophecy is not linear or sequential in time, nor was it applied for one time in history and no other. Hebrew prophecy is cyclic and can apply at different times in history and often becomes more intense with each application in time. Prophetic writings are not always predicting something that will happen in the future. Most often the Hebrew prophets called the people to believe and act on the Word of God already spoken to them. In prophetic writing there is often a confusion of tense. Especially when a future event is written in the prophetic perfect, i.e. an event yet to happen written as though it has already happened. Yes it is complicated.
Apocalyptic writing flourished between 200 BC and 200 AD with the roots deeply embedded in the OT prophets. Apocalyptic writers primarily wrote carefully structured subversive literature – which was inspired by dreams and visions. The language was imagery, highly cryptic and symbolic. Structured and timed and divided into neat numerical packages. The symbolism was known to the recipients but we are disadvantaged to the degree we are not necessarily aware of the encoding in the words used. The words were written in such a way as to encode them to keep a potentially subversive message hidden from prying eyes.
This is the challenge before us as we seek to understand John’s Revelation. The next question to ask – is the book or the letter John’s Revelation or Jesus’ Revelation, the Revelation of Jesus Christ?
Oh we are not finished yet. The complicated things are growing in complexity. Hang on to your hat.
A wise man simplifies complicated things while the fool makes simple things complicated.
Jeffrey Rachmat
Don’t make simple things complicated in the effort to preserve your theology.
Ian
If you can catch a glimpse of how much confidence God has in you, you will never again shrink back into an inferiority complex.
Joel Osteen
John has not made mistakes. Rather it is highly possible his eccentricities were possibly due to thinking in a Semitic language, (which only hide a greater complexity).
Archbishop Benson
prompted by your “subversive message”remark:
A few years after coming to know the Lord, (early ’70s) I went through a time of trying to make sense of Revelation.
I read The Late Great Planet Earth, which was entertaining, but didn’t help. Then I went looking for commentaries, and found a few.
I read all I could of William Barclay, and came to both love and hate the guy – loved his exegesis, and hated that he’d give me 5 versions of what a passage meant, and not a HINT of which he preferred! A truly wise man.
In the end, I gave up on commentary, and read Revelation end to end, several times over. In a couple of versions (JB is still my favourite).
And here’s the promised blessing I received then:
It’s a word of encouragement to the children of the Father, especially when things are rough out there.
So I accepted that, and made peace with the mysteries.
And even then, that rapid reading exercise made it clear that the encouragement was targeted by all the symbolism.
Unbelievers, and unwilling believers too, will go round in it forever, and come out confused. Definitely subversive!
I appreciate your comment DesD on the website. But I need to apologise for a lack of explanation in reference to my ‘subversive comment’ in the paragraph beginning “Apocalyptic writing flourished between 200 BC and 200 AD with the roots deeply embedded in the OT prophets. Apocalyptic writers primarily wrote carefully structured SUBVERSIVE literature – which was inspired by dreams and visions.” I had been reading a number of references from the experts who comment on Apocalyptic writing being subversive. The term subversive is used by Gordon Fee, a Bible scholar I greatly admire. But I need to add further explanation. Gordon fee and others use the term subversive to describe the tension between the Roman authorities and the community of Christians i.e the Kingdom of God. Because the Christians refused to bow the notion of any of the Caesars being God, their action could be seen as being subversive. It is not that what John wrote was deliberately subversive, but it was likely perceived that way by the authorities. Hence the apocalyptic writings were couched in symbolism and code to cover the underlying message.
No apology needed, Ian, unless it’s from me for forgetting that my comment is public.
My last two sentences may have added confusion, not explanation.
It was clear to me back then, that one aspect of the apocalyptic style and context was indeed protection for its original readers, because a suspicious Roman finding the document would pretty quickly dismiss it as another Jewish fable, imho, and dismiss the owner as a harmless simpleton.
And without disrespect to scholars in general, it appears that the same characteristic has been used by the Father to confuse many learned people in order to ensure that the visions given to Daniel have in fact remained sealed until the time of the end. Pre-trib rapture, anyone?
Subversive just seemed like a perfect description!
I wasn’t expecting to have complications from the get go… but I guess it was a lapse in my memory… I should know better when Ian is teaching!