Reading Revelation, Part 1
I have been and will continue to teach for two more weeks the book of Revelation, based on John MacArthur's commentaries. It's been an interesting and intense ride. Not just the study, but trying to communicate it to my class.
In retrospect, it would have been easier to do the whole book rather than rotate with others; not that they did a poor job, but I could have had more continuity in my teaching.
So I'm going to write a series of reflections. This is the first, and there will probably be at least a dozen over the next two weeks.
#1: We are generally taught that Revelation stands alone, like some sort of ornament on a wedding cake. Commensurate with that misconception, we are taught that John is an old man, past 90, off on a deserted island getting all kinds of new visions that are unique to him. In reading about the creation of the canon, I learned that Revelation was one of the last books to be accepted into the canon and was often excluded by the early church, although I haven't looked into why that was the case. (Well, now I have, and this is a good source on that: https://www.michaeljkruger.com/the-book-of-revelation-how-difficult-was-its-journey-into-the-canon/)
Nothing could be further from the truth. If one were to put Revelation through Turnitin (an originality checker that college professors use to find cheaters and plagiarizers), and compare it to the rest of the Bible, there is a great deal of "copying here." Not plagiarism, of course, only that John is not really saying anything that Daniel, Moses, Zechariah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Jesus Christ in the gospels didn't predict. It is reframed for the first century audience (more on that later), but not really "new."
Now, don't get upset about that last paragraph--I think it's one of the most fascinating aspects of Revelation, and one of the themes MacArthur does best in his commentaries. Stop seeing Revelation as some weird hallucinatory visions of the aged apostle and see it as totally consonant with everything else in the Bible, and you will have a new appreciation for it.
In retrospect, it would have been easier to do the whole book rather than rotate with others; not that they did a poor job, but I could have had more continuity in my teaching.
So I'm going to write a series of reflections. This is the first, and there will probably be at least a dozen over the next two weeks.
#1: We are generally taught that Revelation stands alone, like some sort of ornament on a wedding cake. Commensurate with that misconception, we are taught that John is an old man, past 90, off on a deserted island getting all kinds of new visions that are unique to him. In reading about the creation of the canon, I learned that Revelation was one of the last books to be accepted into the canon and was often excluded by the early church, although I haven't looked into why that was the case. (Well, now I have, and this is a good source on that: https://www.michaeljkruger.com/the-book-of-revelation-how-difficult-was-its-journey-into-the-canon/)
Nothing could be further from the truth. If one were to put Revelation through Turnitin (an originality checker that college professors use to find cheaters and plagiarizers), and compare it to the rest of the Bible, there is a great deal of "copying here." Not plagiarism, of course, only that John is not really saying anything that Daniel, Moses, Zechariah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Jesus Christ in the gospels didn't predict. It is reframed for the first century audience (more on that later), but not really "new."
Now, don't get upset about that last paragraph--I think it's one of the most fascinating aspects of Revelation, and one of the themes MacArthur does best in his commentaries. Stop seeing Revelation as some weird hallucinatory visions of the aged apostle and see it as totally consonant with everything else in the Bible, and you will have a new appreciation for it.
Comments