Thoughts on Teaching Revelation
The Life Group for which I share teaching duties wanted to study Revelation.
Hoh boy! Not my first choice, but I got us all John MacArthur's study booklets (which I highly recommend, by the way) and today we started.
The main thing: It is not titled "The Revelation of the future and crazy stuff that's gonna happen."
It's titled "The Revelation of Jesus Christ."
Keep that in mind when you get stuck in the middle with the whore of Babylon and stars falling out of the sky.
Second, it's written by John. I don't think it makes sense to study Revelation until one has had lots of study in John and immerse yourself in his worldview, which is intense and partly what makes his gospel distinct from the Synoptics. I wrote about this in my book, The Gospel According to Lazarus. John is a Jew but living with and writing to Gentiles (in all five of his books). He is a rebel against the Jewish authorities that plotted and killed Jesus; his descriptions of them and their intrigues and machinations in the gospel are pretty scathing and condemning.
Third, John's symbols don't come out of thin air. I would venture that almost all of them are used elsewhere and thus explained already in the Bible; others are explained in context. The symbolism is important but not beyond study.
One of the women in my group was going on about how untrained she was in studying the Scripture, but it was written to uneducated people in the first place, so we shouldn't excuse ourselves from study because we lack a seminary degree.
Sadly, another woman in the group is very ill and even more anxious about it, which will only serve to make the condition worse. She is afraid the condition will kill her (it's not fatal), but I was concerned that after years of sitting in a church she was so anxious about dying. Not that we need to jump for joy about impending death, but death is a relief in some ways. If we fear we must be in control of everyone around us, then death definitely gets in the way of that (although lots of people have tried to control family after the grave).
I have to wonder how many of us default to our "lizard brains" of self-defense in time of anxiety rather than remembering what we have been taught for years and know to be true?
Hoh boy! Not my first choice, but I got us all John MacArthur's study booklets (which I highly recommend, by the way) and today we started.
The main thing: It is not titled "The Revelation of the future and crazy stuff that's gonna happen."
It's titled "The Revelation of Jesus Christ."
Keep that in mind when you get stuck in the middle with the whore of Babylon and stars falling out of the sky.
Second, it's written by John. I don't think it makes sense to study Revelation until one has had lots of study in John and immerse yourself in his worldview, which is intense and partly what makes his gospel distinct from the Synoptics. I wrote about this in my book, The Gospel According to Lazarus. John is a Jew but living with and writing to Gentiles (in all five of his books). He is a rebel against the Jewish authorities that plotted and killed Jesus; his descriptions of them and their intrigues and machinations in the gospel are pretty scathing and condemning.
Third, John's symbols don't come out of thin air. I would venture that almost all of them are used elsewhere and thus explained already in the Bible; others are explained in context. The symbolism is important but not beyond study.
One of the women in my group was going on about how untrained she was in studying the Scripture, but it was written to uneducated people in the first place, so we shouldn't excuse ourselves from study because we lack a seminary degree.
Sadly, another woman in the group is very ill and even more anxious about it, which will only serve to make the condition worse. She is afraid the condition will kill her (it's not fatal), but I was concerned that after years of sitting in a church she was so anxious about dying. Not that we need to jump for joy about impending death, but death is a relief in some ways. If we fear we must be in control of everyone around us, then death definitely gets in the way of that (although lots of people have tried to control family after the grave).
I have to wonder how many of us default to our "lizard brains" of self-defense in time of anxiety rather than remembering what we have been taught for years and know to be true?
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