8
Mill Creek
Some of my best childhood memories were made on Wimpole Drive, the street where I spent several of my most formative years. Our house was in the perfect location. The neighborhood was less than ten minutes from downtown Nashville and the church we attended. The main road running outside our neighborhood was lined with restaurants that everyone from church seemed to eat at on Sunday afternoons after church let out. Best of all for me, my grandparents, who liked to spoil me rotten, lived in the neighborhood right next to ours.
The neighborhood itself was rather quiet. A blue-collar community, its streets were lined with modest, ranch-style brick houses. We lived in one, and my best friend, Chad, and his family lived next door. Behind both our houses ran the peaceful waters of Mill Creek.
Mill Creek was bigger than your typical creek, more like a small river. I can’t even begin to count how many hours Chad and I spent exploring its waters and the surrounding woods. We’d fish for what seemed like days, catching mostly small brim, although to us they might as well have been giant marlin. All the bait we needed was right there in the creek, waiting for us in the form of what was then an abundant supply of crayfish. In college I learned it was actually an endangered species called the Nashville crayfish that’s indigenous to Mill Creek. I can’t help but think we bear no small amount of blame for its endangered species status. I’m really sorry about that one, Planet Earth.
But for as much fun as we had exploring and playing in its peaceful waters, Mill Creek had a darker side. It flooded. A lot. Whenever the forecast called for rain, we made sure to keep a close eye on the creek. And whenever the forecast called for a lot of rain, we made sure to pack a suitcase. Our fears weren’t unfounded. When it poured, Mill Creek very quickly turned into a raging torrent. And when it did, my mother always told me the story of two guys she knew in college who tried to kayak the creek while it was at flood stage. They were never seen again. As a kid, I always thought it was nothing more than a boogeyman story meant to scare us into behaving. But it wasn’t. One visit to Mill Creek during flood stage should have told me that.
Even though my backyard sat a good ten feet up from the creek, it was little protection. A day or two of rain was enough to raise Mill Creek to the level of our backyard, which was even worse for Chad because his yard sat a foot or two lower than ours. A small drainage ditch that diverted neighborhood runoff into the creek also ran next to his house, which meant their garage and most of his backyard flooded constantly.
When it did flood, it happened in the blink of an eye. That’s why we always had to have our bags packed. If the creek rose even a little bit over its banks, our tabletop flat backyards ensured our houses would quickly flood. Yet despite the constant flooding and near misses, my family managed to avoid the worst of it. The same can’t be said for Chad’s grandparents, who moved into his house when he and his parents moved to Oklahoma, and witnessed devastating destruction to their home during the great Nashville flood of 2010. I was living in Memphis at the time, but I watched it all play out on the news and through constant updates from my family, who still lived in the area, having moved into my grandparents’ house in the adjoining neighborhood when my grandmother moved out.
The local meteorologists called it a thousand-year flood. It was unlike anything Nashville had ever seen and probably will ever see again, at least in my lifetime. More than a foot of rain fell in the Nashville area in just forty-eight hours. The Cumberland River that runs through downtown Nashville burst its banks and flooded several blocks of downtown, including a storage facility used by several Nashville musicians, who saw their guitars and equipment, for some their entire livelihood, destroyed.
Further upriver, the Cumberland flooded a popular mall and the luxury Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center that stands next door. Water rose at least two feet high in the mall, and rumors spread that the aquariums in the aptly named Aquarium Restaurant had burst and that sharks were swimming the corridors where shoppers once roamed. Water got high enough in the hotel that its occupants had to be evacuated and ended up spending the night in the gym of a nearby high school.
Mill Creek, of course, flooded too. Worse than it ever had before. I’ll never forget the picture of Interstate 24 where it crosses Mill Creek just outside downtown Nashville. The water was so high all you could see were the tops of cars that had been trapped in the rising water. A portable classroom from a local school had been lifted off its foundations and was floating down the interstate.
The flooding on Wimpole Drive was just as catastrophic. My parents, along with several of our friends and family, rushed over to help Chad’s grandparents evacuate from their house. They worked to save as much as they could, but there was little they could do. Chad’s grandparents made it out okay, but the creek that usually just soaked the backyard and floor of the garage nearly covered their entire house that day. The floodwaters rose all the way up to the roof. Remember how I told you how we packed our bags whenever there was the threat of heavy rain in case we had to flee quickly? That wasn’t hyperbole. The water rose so fast that day that my mom’s car was completely flooded even though it was parked on the other side of Wimpole Drive, a good distance away from the creek. She and several others who were helping Chad’s grandparents evacuate had parked there thinking their cars would be safe because the creek had never come anywhere close to rising that high before. But it did that day.
More than two dozen lives were lost as the result of the flood. Countless homes and businesses were destroyed. The city of Nashville eventually dried out, but the memory of those days are seared into the town’s collective memory for generations to come.
Chaotic waters
Flood stories tragically play themselves out around the world every year, as they have throughout human history. From the yearly monsoon rains in India to the annual flooding of the Mississippi, from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to the mythical global flood of Noah’s day, the devastating force of water has played a powerful role in the lives and imaginations of people of all places, times, and beliefs.
This was certainly true for people living along the Mediterranean Sea in the first century, and for the apostle John when he was exiled on an island there when he had his famous revelation. The people living along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea two thousand years ago knew just how deceptive and dangerous its sparkling blue waters could be. The countless wrecks that now litter its seabed are an eternal testament to how easily the waters of the Mediterranean Sea can turn dark and stormy, destroying lives and livelihoods.
The same was true of the Black Sea, the great body of water not too far north of Patmos, where some scholars think the story of Noah might have originated. Whether the story of Noah has its roots there or not, similar stories of destruction could be told about any major body of water anywhere in the ancient world. From the Jordan to the Nile and everywhere in between, storms, floodwaters, and even pirates were a constant threat to life on the rivers or open sea.
It should come as no surprise, then, that water became a powerful image in ancient literature, including the Bible and the book of Revelation. The sea, in particular, became an iconic image of power, destruction, and chaos throughout the entire Old and New Testaments. The story of creation begins with God hovering over the dark chaotic waters at the dawn of time. Just a few chapters later, the world is covered in a catastrophic global flood. As the children of Israel flee Egypt, they find themselves trapped between Pharaoh’s army on one side and a foreboding sea on the other. Forty years later, another body of water, the Jordan River, stands between them and the Promised Land. In Job, the power of God is displayed in God’s control over the raging seas and the terrifying monsters that dwell in their waters. Jonah is famously cast overboard in the midst of a storm, in hopes of calming the chaotic waters. In the Gospels, Jesus and his terrified disciples find themselves adrift in stormy seas. And while on one of his many mission trips, Paul encountered a storm that left him shipwrecked.
Water gives life. But in the ancient world, water in the form of oceans and seas, rivers and lakes was also a symbol of chaos and destruction. It’s no accident, then, to see that image appear over and over again in the pages of the Bible. But it’s not there to simply reinforce the fear of stormy seas and raging rivers. The people of God already knew that fear well. The biblical writers also used water to confront that fear with hope.
The disciples were terrified, alone in a storm on the Sea of Galilee, until Jesus walked across the water, conquering the chaos and calming the storm. Jonah was cast overboard into the tempest only to be rescued by God in the most unlikely of ways. Job stood awestruck at the mighty power of God, but found peace in God’s healing grace. The Jordan River raged before the children of Israel until God intervened to let them cross into the Promised Land on dry ground. Before Joshua parted the river, Moses parted the sea, giving Israel not only a way to escape but a path to their future. The floodwaters of Noah’s day covered the entire earth, but God protected Noah and his family from death and destruction. The waters at the dawn of creation were dark and chaotic, but God ordered the chaos and brought from it life and everything we see around us.
And at the end of all things, when there is a new heaven and a new earth because the former order has passed away and there is no more sea (Revelation 21:1), it’s not the beach we’re losing. It’s the pain and destruction, the loss and heartbreak that come from the chaotic waters. Chaotic water is an apocalyptic metaphor that John’s original audience would have easily understood. If we can understand that simple image too, we can begin to unlock the mystery of Revelation and rediscover the apocalyptic roots of the Christian faith.
Deciphering the meaning of images like “no more sea” in Revelation is not an easy task. Revelation’s symbolism is so radically foreign to us today that it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to see some folks look at that imagery as a hidden code to be deciphered. But to approach it as a hidden code to be deciphered is to read Revelation as a literal text. To stay at the literal level of the text—to say, for example, that Revelation 21 claims that God is going to get rid of the ocean—is to completely miss the deeper spiritual truth that John is trying to reveal. That truth is wrapped up in apocalyptic imagery, symbolic language that functioned both to protect John from the power structures and authorities he was criticizing and to open up Revelation and allow it to become a text that can speak to the church throughout the ages, regardless of time or place. To accomplish both these tasks at the same time, John utilized the transcendent power of myth.
Myth, history, and truth
Myth has become something of a dirty word in the church, particularly in fundamentalist and dispensationalist circles that insist on reading every page of Scripture literally. But myth plays an important role throughout the Bible, and especially in Revelation. The problem we have today is that we have been conditioned to think of myth and history in contrasting terms. We’ve been taught to believe that in order for something to be true, it must be literal history. We say that myth, therefore, is not true because it did not take place literally in history. As a result, myth has become a synonym for “not true.” Dispensationalism, then, with its roots in fundamentalism, can’t embrace myth, because it is convinced that for something to be true, it must literally take place in history.
You can see this conundrum in the evolution versus creation debate. While a literal six-day creationism has become de facto orthodoxy throughout much of American Christianity, the insistence on a literal reading of Genesis is a fairly new phenomenon. The insistence that Genesis had to be read literally arose in direct response to the perceived threats of Darwinism, which in the minds of many of Darwin’s day and many more still today, juxtaposed Genesis to science because in order for Genesis to be true it had to be literally and historically true. There was no space for the truth found in myth.
You can certainly find literal readings of Genesis throughout the history of the church, but that’s not how it has always been read or how the Jewish tradition that wrote the story of creation demands it be read. In fact, the Jewish tradition that gave birth to Genesis has long read the creation account as myth. Likewise, as we saw before, the great church father Saint Augustine said way back in the fourth century that anyone who reads the creation account in Genesis literally is foolish for doing so. And yet both Augustine and the Jewish tradition regard Genesis as true. How can that be? The answer lies in liberating ourselves from the need for something to be literally or historically true in order for it to convey or contain truth. Myths can be true, whether or not they literally happened. Take the tale—or myth—of Chicken Little. Talking chickens don’t exist, but the truth of the story—that constant paranoia and overreaction can destroy your credibility, and that loss can have serious consequences—is true nonetheless.
Not everything in the Bible is myth, of course. The Bible is made up of all sorts of genres of literature—from poetry to history to gospel to apocalyptic. But the Bible also takes advantage of the power of myth. Why? Because myths can convey transcendent truths that can be shaped and contextualized over time to better fit a particular context and yet still contain the same basic truth. Myths have a power to convey truth that literal events don’t always have. That’s what we see in the book of Genesis, both in the creation account and later on in the story of Noah. Both myths are borrowed from older stories in other cultures and have been shaped and contextualized to meet the needs of the biblical writers. Nevertheless, they are true, and true in the truest sense of the word. They are true in the sense of the message they convey: that God is at work in the world, creating and caring for God’s people.
Revelation is a book of myth. Dragons and plagues and multiheaded beasts populate the book. That doesn’t make it any less true, nor does it mean the things it speaks about won’t happen. It is, and they will. But it’s the truth behind those events that Revelation is trying to convey, not their literal happening in history.
The myths of Revelation also play another important role: they subvert the myths of those in power, in this case, Rome. Much like the early church appropriated “Caesar is Lord” by saying instead “Jesus is Lord” in order to convey the truth, Revelation takes myths, sayings, and images known to its original audience and subverts them with new myths, sayings, and images. In doing so, Revelation sets up an alternative way of living, an alternative truth to that which was proclaimed by the empire.
Whereas the empire conquered through violence and power, Revelation tells of a slaughtered lamb who conquers with the power of his word (Revelation 5). Whereas Rome told the myth of an all-powerful, perfect empire, Revelation tells the story of a beast rising out of the sea who is utterly flawed and destined for destruction (Revelation 13). Whereas the empire tells the myth of the Pax Romana, Revelation tells of peace for all, not just the elite, who always find a way for others to fight their battles for them (Revelation 21–22).
Myth allows Revelation to tell the truth in proactive ways that capture the imagination. The drama in Revelation helps readers to not only remember the events of the book but also remain open to more than one dogmatic interpretation. The text of Revelation is alive, and is ever open to new interpretations in new contexts and historical settings. Such is the power of myth. It’s a power that apocalyptic literature like Revelation takes full advantage of, not just for the sake of dramatic storytelling or even to convey the truth but to serve as a call to action.
The unveiling
While Revelation may come at the end of the New Testament, apocalyptic theology was central to Christianity from the very beginning. The focus of Jesus’ ministry was the dawning of the kingdom of God and the unveiling, or revealing, of the truth about what that kingdom looked like. As I mentioned earlier, that is, after all, what apocalypse means: “an unveiling.” This is exactly what John is doing in his apocalypse: he’s unveiling the truth of the state of the world both now and in the soon-to-come future.
Jesus’ ministry was also apocalyptic, although his unveiling of the truth was directed toward the religious institutions of his day rather than the church, as it did not yet exist. But it is that calling to account, and Christ’s overall call for repentance, that has many scholars viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. He didn’t tell stories of dragons and talking scrolls like John did. Rather, he is seen by those scholars as an apocalyptic prophet because he believed the last days were at hand. He went around warning people about the end, preparing them for judgment day by calling on his followers to repent and promising justice for the oppressed.
The letters of the apostle Paul also reveal an apocalyptic worldview.1 His letters disclose a man convinced that Jesus was about to return any day and a theology thoroughly shaped by that conviction. One example of that conviction is his view of marriage. Paul didn’t seem to think marriage was all that important, and even advised people to stay single if they could (1 Corinthians 7:1-7). Paul wrote this not because he was opposed to the institution of marriage but because he wanted Christians to focus the entirety of their time and attention on preparing for what he thought was the imminent return of Jesus.
But once again, apocalypse doesn’t necessarily refer to the end of the world. Through modern movies, books, comics, and, ironically, even the church, we’ve become conditioned to equate apocalypse with the end. But again, translated literally, apocalypse simply means “an unveiling.” That’s the key point of Revelation. For all its talk about the end, its focus is on the unveiling of truth to the people of God. This truth had just as much to do with their present as it did with their future. In that sense, John isn’t just writing apocalyptic literature. He’s also following in the rich tradition of the Old Testament prophets.
Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Of course Revelation is Bible prophecy! It’s, like, the prophetic book of the Bible.” The thing is, it is and it isn’t. Revelation is definitely in the prophetic tradition of Scripture—just not in the way you’re probably thinking or folks like Jack Van Impe would have you believe.
Prophesying about the present
Unlike the colloquial use of the word prophecy today, biblical prophecy has very little to do with predicting the future. Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah did warn about the future, but not like Nostradamus. They were, on behalf of God, issuing warnings about what would happen if the people of God didn’t repent from their wicked ways and restore justice to the land. The prophets weren’t fortune-tellers. They were warning the people of God about what would happen in the future if they did or didn’t act a certain way in the present. Which is why biblical prophecy is about the present as much as or more than it is about the future.
This is exactly the dynamic we see in Revelation. John begins his apocalypse with a word from Jesus to seven then-present-day churches (Revelation 1–3). He’s not telling their fortune; he’s giving them instructions for how to live in the here and now. How they do that directly affects what is to come in the future. But the focus of John’s prophetic words from Jesus are on the present, just as they would be from any Old Testament prophet.
In fact, John explicitly declared himself to be a prophet in the final chapter of Revelation (see Revelation 22:9). Several times throughout his apocalypse, he draws from the language and imagery of the Old Testament prophets. The words of Isaiah are referenced repeatedly, most directly in Revelation 21, which draws from Isaiah 65:17: “See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind” (NIV). A command for John to eat the scroll is likely drawn directly from Ezekiel 2:8-10. There are echoes of Hosea marrying the prostitute Gomer in John’s invocation of a prostitute to describe the people’s idolatry (Revelation 17–18). And there are also echoes of Amos’s poignant cry to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24) when John describes the song of the 144,000 sealed servants of God as being like “the roar of rushing water” (Revelation 14:2 NIV).
Revelation also comes back, time and time again, to the contrast between true and false prophets. The warning against false prophets comes up repeatedly in the letters to the churches before becoming a key part of the apocalyptic imagery later on, when the false prophet of the beast appears. The reason for this concern about false prophets is because John’s task in writing Revelation was to reveal, or unveil, the truth. After all, that’s what an apocalypse is all about. False prophets lead people astray from the truth, but real prophets like John proclaim the truth about God. That truth is a call to repentance and justice lest the people of God suffer judgment.
So rather than being biblical versions of Nostradamus, the prophets were more like your mom when you were a teenager, warning you to get off your phone before you lose privileges to it forever. You may end up losing your phone, but it wasn’t because your mom was psychic. It was because she warned you what was going to happen if you didn’t listen, and because she had the power to ensure those consequences came to pass, they did. The same thing was true for Israel and the prophets—except that God, being God, could ensure that those consequences would come to pass no matter how smooth a talker you thought you were or how sneaky you thought you could be by stealing your phone back while your mom was sleeping. In other words, biblical prophecy isn’t about predicting a set-in-stone future. It’s about what will happen in the future if the words of the prophet are not heeded in the present. Nothing here is about the fortune-telling power of the prophet; everything is about the power of God.
The key to Revelation’s place in the tradition of biblical prophecy, then, is not in its ability to predict future events but in its often-overlooked call to repentance, and its promises of liberation and justice. Revelation is, if it is nothing else, a sustained critique of Rome, for which the ancient enemy of Israel, Babylon, plays the role of stand-in. Rome is Babylon, the great oppressor, not just of the people of God, but of anyone in the ancient world who stood in its way.
But Israel had another ancient oppressor: Egypt. For John’s first audience, the parallels between Revelation and Exodus also would have been striking, as both tell the tale of liberation from oppression by way of plagues that afflict the afflicters in order to set the afflicted free. But plagues aren’t the only invocation of Exodus in Revelation. In fact, the entire section on the seven trumpets and bowls of wrath can be seen as reimagining the story of Exodus when God besieged Egypt with plagues until the people of Israel were liberated.2 Exodus is also invoked in the opening chapter of Revelation, when God is described as “who is and who was and who is to come,” an echo of God’s name as revealed to Moses: “I am who I am” (Revelation 1:4; Exodus 3:14). The prayers of the people of God for deliverance in Revelation are just like the cries of the people of God in Exodus 2 and 3, as is the reference to “mourning and crying and pain” (Revelation 21:4), which likewise conjures up the cries of Israel in Egyptian bondage.
Retelling the story of God’s faithfulness, and reminding people that they follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who brought them out of Egypt, are recurring themes throughout the Old Testament in both the Prophets and elsewhere. But as an apocalyptic prophet, John goes even further. John doesn’t simply retell the story of the Exodus for the church; he takes on the mantle of Moses and attacks the system of oppression under which they were living. Calling out injustice was a key task of any Old Testament prophet, who didn’t just warn the people to repent of their sins but also offered hope in the form of a promise that God was already at work, breaking into their present to create a new future.
Justice revealed
Nearly every apocalyptic image John uses in reference to Babylon (that is, Rome) is a direct attack on the imperial system of oppression and injustice of his day. The beast comes from Babylon not as a special, set-apart figure but as the embodiment of a system and empire that is fundamentally antithetical to the way of Christ. The way of Jesus is love of enemies, peace, plenty, and life eternal. The way of Rome, or Babylon, is “conquest, war, famine, and death.”3
In the kingdom of Jesus, everyone shares what they have and none go without, for all are equal (Acts 2:42-47). In the kingdom of Caesar, as John describes particularly with the third horse of the apocalypse, economic injustice reigns and the chasm between rich and poor is not only immense; it is unbridgeable. Likewise, when John describes the great whore of Babylon, he’s attacking not prostitution or women but the economic injustice of the Roman Empire, which got rich by preying on the weak and vulnerable throughout the empire.4
Like the story of Exodus, Revelation promises that justice and liberation are coming, that those Rome has oppressed and exploited will soon be liberated, healed, and welcomed into the promised kingdom of God. It’s that promise of justice that should further reshape our understanding of Revelation, moving it away from book of apocalyptic terror and toward a message of hope. Being able to see that promise of hope for justice in Revelation is a challenge for most of us. If this is the first time you’ve thought about the book of Revelation in terms of things like economic and social justice, you’re not alone. That was certainly the case for me, even long after I gave up my addiction to Jack Van Impe Presents. Back when I thought Revelation was a road map to the future, if someone had tried to tell me that it was actually a prophetic call to justice, I would have assumed they were on drugs or, worse, were a godless liberal.
As my old, rapture-loving self would have done, you may even consider such a reading to be eisegesis: that is, a reading of a text that projects one’s own presuppositions and biases onto it in order to find a meaning one wants to be there but isn’t actually supported by the text itself. If that’s the case, trust me; I get it. It’s hard to think about biblical prophecy, Revelation, and the apocalypse as anything other than gloom and doom about the future. But the reason we struggle to see such a prophetic call to justice isn’t the obscurity of the text itself, the graphic imagery, or even the dispensationalist conditioning many of us were raised with, although those things surely play a role. The reason most of us struggle to see Revelation as a prophetic call to justice is because we are blinded by our own privilege.
It’s hard to see the cry for liberation and justice when we have no need for liberation and justice in our own lives. That’s not to say that because we’re not dirt poor or from a developing country that we haven’t been wronged in life, haven’t had to struggle, and aren’t in need of some sort of justice. But if you’re anything like me and you grew up as a straight, white, middle-class conservative Christian in the United States, the idea that Revelation is about liberation, justice, and transformation in the here and now and not a secret road map to your mansion in heaven? Well, it can sound as bizarre as a ten-headed beast or a guy eating a scroll.
The royal life
The theologian Walter Brueggemann would call this life of privilege “the royal tradition.”5 Not because any of us are royalty, but because relative to our neighbors in other parts of the world or even just across town, our lives are more akin to the biblical kings than to their subjects, in whose shoes we typically place ourselves when we read the Bible. Brueggemann argues that when we read the Bible it actually takes less imagination than we might assume to see ourselves in the life of an Old Testament king like Saul or David even though, on the surface, their lives may seem radically foreign to our own.6 But if we live in North America, chances are our lives have a lot more in common with royalty like Saul and David than we realize. For example, where our next meal will come from, or if it will come at all, is not something most of us give much thought to. In the context of the world of the Old Testament, that fact puts us far closer to the life of Saul or David than to the lives of their subjects. The same is true for access to things like medicine and education. The degree of medical care and education we take for granted would have been reserved for royalty in Saul and David’s day.
We don’t have to search too hard to see how this sort of privilege of the royal tradition exhibits itself in our lives today. Countless Americans are inoculated against seeing the suffering of our neighbors and having basic empathy for them, not to mention the urge to serve. Take, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement. It arose out of a long, painful history of black men, women, and children being killed both at the hands of police officers and extrajudicial mobs, who were often white and often have not been held accountable in any meaningful way. Protests, including marches through the streets and sit-ins on the highway, have been held across the country. Those unaffected by the tragedies, including white people of varying degrees of socioeconomic standing, often dismiss the cries of the Black Lives Matter protesters as nothing more than complaining. Little credence is given to what the protesters are saying, because the lives of those dismissing their cries are so far removed from the life experience of the protesters, are so privileged in comparison, that the separation is almost as stark as that of King Saul and the people of Israel. Even the word protest seems almost dismissive of what is happening because they’re not simply expressing disapproval; they’re fighting for their lives.
Or consider the Trump administration’s decision to separate immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Although the decision was met with horror and outrage across the United States and around the world, the response among the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump was noticeably different.7 Some have tepidly criticized the practice, conceding that there was probably a better way. But a life of ease has kept them from empathizing with the plight of the families involved, and endless opportunities in the States keep them from seeing that the reason so many entered the country improperly was not out of a disregard for law and order, but out of desperation and a willingness to do whatever they had to do to rescue themselves, or at least their children, from violence, oppression, and hopelessness.
Sadly, these are but two prominent examples of what is too often a daily way of life, a life of taken-for-granted, oblivious privilege that allows too many people—mostly white, American Christians like me—to go about thinking our lives are normative and that anyone who deviates from our sense of normalcy must be doing so for malicious and sinful reasons. This is why Revelation is so hard for so many of us to understand, particularly as a prophetic call to justice. As New Testament scholar Barbara Rossing explains, “Victims of injustice have a special window into these stories that affluent Christians cannot fathom. Like the plagues of Exodus, the stories of Revelation speak most clearly to people who struggle under oppression—to ‘God’s little people,’ as South African Allan Boesak calls them. For the rich and comfortable, the plagues sound vengeful and terrifying. But to people suffering under oppressions the plagues are good news because they herald the end of the oppression itself.”8
The Latin American theologian Pablo Richard goes even further:
Cosmic agonies of this kind, however, are not “natural” disasters but rather the direct consequences of the structure of domination and oppression: the poor die in floods because they are pushed out of safe places and forced to live alongside rivers; in earthquakes and hurricanes the poor lose their flimsy houses because they are poor and cannot build better ones; plagues, such as cholera and tuberculosis, fall primarily on the poor because they are malnourished. . . . Hence the plagues of the trumpets and bowls in Revelation refer not to “natural” disasters, but to the agonies of history that the empire itself causes and suffers; they are agonies of the beast caused by its very idolatry and lawlessness. Today the plagues of Revelation are rather the disastrous results of ecological destruction, the arms race, irrational consumerism, the idolatrous logic of the market, and the irrational use of technology and of natural resources.9
In other words, dispensationalists have one thing right. The book of Revelation is perhaps more relevant today than it ever has been—just not for the reasons they suggest.
Relevant Revelation
Revelation is relevant today but not because of events unfolding in Israel. Revelation is relevant today because the plagues it warns about are all around us. There are no winged beasts flying through the skies, or horsemen riding on pale horses, but the plagues they bring with them—famine, poverty, economic injustice, ecological disaster, death—are all very real today.
The reason some of us look for those beasts in the pages of the Left Behind series, rather than recognizing them in Revelation for what they are, is that they’re not a reality for most of us. Privileged people like me turn to the fictionalized version of struggle and pain because we can’t relate to the epic struggle to survive and the pain of oppression that gave birth to Revelation. Most of us don’t worry about where our next meal will come from, or whether our home will disappear because of rising ocean levels. The four horsemen who bring death and destruction (Revelation 6:1-8) are an apocalyptic fantasy for most of us living in places like the United States. For countless people around the world, they are a daily reality.
That’s what makes Revelation so hard for many of us to understand, yet so powerful for those to whom it speaks so clearly. You and I can still find hope and comfort in the idea of a new heaven and new earth—absolutely. But just imagine the overwhelming sense of joy that comes with the promise of peace from chaotic waters when you have had to watch your child drown in the sea as you fled a war zone. Imagine the joy that would come with rescue if rising sea levels meant the coastal village in which your family had lived for generations was about to be underwater. Imagine struggling with hunger for a lifetime but now getting to eat endlessly from the tree of life for all eternity. Or consider those unable to pay for a doctor, who have witnessed a never-ending stream of loved ones lost to disease and death—how they would rejoice at the promise that death and mourning and sorrow will soon be no more.
The reason I first turned to Jack Van Impe and folks like him is the same reason anybody first turns to people like that: Revelation is hard to understand, and these self-proclaimed experts promise to make it all clear and easy. And in their own, woefully incorrect way, that’s exactly what they do. They take mysterious images and give them not only a clear meaning but also a clear purpose. They make a foggy future clearer. Actual biblical scholars, of course, can do a far more accurate job of clarifying mysteries of Revelation. But the fundamental reason most of us struggle to understand Revelation isn’t our lack of fluency in biblical Greek or our lack of knowledge of specific apocalyptic imagery and tropes. The reason most of us struggle to understand Revelation is because it wasn’t written to us or with us in mind. And I don’t just mean readers in the twenty-first century. I mean any of us throughout history who were or are too privileged, too safe, or too comfortable to understand what John is trying to say. John is writing to real churches with real people who were suffering real injustice and persecution. And I don’t mean the kind of persecution that includes not hearing the cashier at Target tell you Merry Christmas.
John’s apocalypse is both a call for justice and a promise of liberation. On both counts, it is hard to fully appreciate or understand when we ourselves have little real need of justice or liberation. John could leave out the images of dragons and beasts and scrolls and replace them with bland, unimaginative, straightforward language, and it still wouldn’t fully resonate with most of us. He is simply speaking to a need we simply don’t have, or else don’t think we have.
So while books like the Left Behind series and the accompanying movies play up the fear and terror that can be mined from the pages of Revelation, that fear and terror is fundamentally misplaced. John did not write the book of Revelation to strike fear and terror into his readers. He wrote it to inspire hope. If anyone should be terrified of what John has to say, it is those in places of power and privilege who use their power to oppress the weak.
Revelation promises that the fears of the oppressed will soon cease as their oppressors finally face the justice of God. Those who have spent their entire lives living on the underside of history will finally move from fear to hope when the Lord returns.
But that hope isn’t a passive promise, an excuse to sit by idly waiting for God to act.
It’s a call to action.
The present kairos
The task of any biblical prophet, including John, is not simply to reassure readers that everything will be taken care of in the future, but to call them to action and repentance in the present. That way they will be ready for that future day, because it is coming soon. That future does ultimately depend on God. But, as Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, we have a role in bringing that future about in the present by living out God’s will and incarnating God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
The terrifying imagery of Revelation itself plays a role in that work. Like any prophetic warning, it’s intended, as my grandmother would say, to shake some sense into folks—in this case, the authorities it was criticizing and the people it was calling to repentance. Jesus was on his way back, and he was coming with swift justice. The message of Revelation isn’t that all hope is lost, but rather “There’s still time, but repent before it’s too late!” This is true both for the powers that be and for the laity, as we see in the open letters to the various churches, particularly Laodicea, who is warned to shape up lest Jesus vomit them out of his mouth (Revelation 3:16).
But this effort to call the people to repentance and conversion isn’t about simply getting them to say “I’m sorry.” Nor is it exhausted by the sort of intellectual assent to a list of ideas or beliefs that we often associate with repentance and conversion today. The sort of repentance and conversion that John the Revelator and the rest of the biblical prophets are concerned with is a call to justice, a call to love the least of these and to welcome and care for the marginalized and oppressed. It’s a call echoed in Isaiah 1, when God tries to rattle the people of God into repentance by telling them he’s disgusted by their offerings and will listen to their prayers no more—or at least not until they wash themselves clean by seeking justice, rescuing the oppressed, defending the orphaned, and pleading the case of the widow (Isaiah 1:16-17).
The biblical prophets weren’t just trying to shake sense into people. They were trying to teach people how to live the way God intended. That’s why, along with apocalypse and prophecy, Revelation also falls into another biblical category. This genre is often overlooked, but when it is understood, it helps to unveil not just the full meaning of Revelation but its call for the people of God. You see, while the book of Revelation is filled with all sorts of apocalyptic imagery, that imagery is wrapped up in the form of a letter. In the beginning of Revelation, we see seven real letters to seven real churches. John’s apocalypse begins the same way you would begin any letter: with a salutation. John greets the seven churches, giving them his regards before conveying the message, or revelation, that Jesus has given to him for each of them. John also ends his apocalypse like a letter, with a personal closing that gives further instructions.
Why does it matter that Revelation is written as a letter? Because it sets the framework for understanding the entire book of Revelation. Aside from being an apocalypse, Revelation also functions like an epistle. Epistles, like Paul’s letters to other churches of the time, gave practical advice for how churches should function and how their people were to live their lives as followers of Jesus. That’s exactly what John is doing at both the beginning and end of Revelation. He’s telling people in the seven congregations how to live in the end times. Just like Paul, John was convinced that the return of Jesus was imminent, and he shaped his guidance for the church with that in mind.
Revelation’s identity as an epistle can completely transform how we read and understand its apocalyptic imagery. Like the letters that frame the book, the Apocalypse of John is a story for the people of God now, not in some distant future. John is preparing the church for what is about to happen. He is calling them to repentance and transformation now, not later, because the apocalypse is already starting to unfold. John’s audience is already living in the last days because Jesus had been raised from the dead, ushering in the dawn of all things being made new.
The central focus of Revelation is the resurrection of Jesus, and like Paul, John understood the resurrection as more than a onetime event. It was this sense of ultimate deliverance that drove Paul’s apocalyptic imagination. In his theology, the resurrection of Jesus was only the beginning. For both John and Paul, Jesus was the “first fruits” of a new creation (1 Corinthians 15:20-23). His resurrection was but the beginning of resurrection for everyone. In keeping with their Jewish roots, Paul and John understood resurrection to be something that happened to everyone at the same time, much like the valley of dry bones the prophet Ezekiel watched come back to life individually, but all together (Ezekiel 37). Therefore, if Jesus had been raised from the dead, it had to mean the resurrection of everyone else and the end of the present age were right around the corner.10 Resurrection as John and Paul understood it was a communal, not individual, experience.
So, if Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of the end times, then Revelation isn’t dealing with events in the distant future, though those events are there at the end of the book. Revelation is preparing the church for the present. John calls this present time a kairos, or an opportunity for grace and conversion, because, for all the graphic apocalyptic imagery, Revelation is calling the church to repentance so that through the redemptive grace of God, the church can avoid the punishment of the beast and his followers.
It’s this present kairos that Jesus is talking about when he addresses the seven churches at the beginning of Revelation. He isn’t telling them to wait to get things squared away. He’s calling them to repent and transform now because he is coming soon. In fact, he is already standing at the door knocking, waiting for them to let him in to complete the work of resurrection and re-creation. Ironically, that image undermines our idea of the second coming as the return of Jesus to be with his people. But it makes perfect sense when we think back to Jesus’ promise to his disciples at the end of Matthew’s gospel. Jesus promised his disciples that he would be with them always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). The cry of the church in Revelation isn’t as much a cry for Jesus to come back in the future as it is for Jesus to act in the present.
As we’ve seen, modern anticipation of the rapture has dispensationalists feeling free to ignore pressing problems like creation care and poverty, because Jesus will be back any day to make it all better. But for John, Paul, and the early church, imminent judgment didn’t mean abandonment of discipleship. Rather, it meant doubling down in earnest, because final judgment was at hand. They recognized that the time for repentance was almost gone, because the end of the age was at hand. The end of the age, not of the world or of history. Even in its promise of a new heaven and a new earth, Revelation is not describing the end of this world. Rather, as Paul puts it, the form of this world is passing away and being renewed, re-created (1 Corinthians 7:31).
This is why Martin Luther is said to have declared that if he knew the world were to end tomorrow, he would still plant a tree. He knew how invested God is in the here and now, and he knew that, as a Christian, he was called to that same sort of investment. Luther recognized that the promise of a new heaven and a new earth doesn’t absolve us from caring for the present one. Why? Because God’s promise is one of renewal, not starting over from scratch. As Paul said, it is the form of the world that is passing, not the world itself. We have a responsibility, a calling, to help usher in that new form now as it is promised in Revelation.
In Revelation, heaven is not so much a destination as it is a source of hope and inspiration. The New Jerusalem isn’t a goal as much as it is a way of life that is about to dawn on earth. It’s effectively an answer to the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In Revelation, Jerusalem is portrayed as a city “coming down” to earth. It is the job of the church to prepare the way of the coming kingdom: the new heaven here on the new earth. This is why Revelation shouldn’t be understood as an invitation to passivity. Revelation isn’t an excuse to sit around and wait for God to act. It’s a call to action and a guide for how to live in the last days, in preparation for the dawning of the New Jerusalem.
Revelation isn’t a road map to the future. It’s a model for how to live in the present. The transcendent utopia of its final chapters isn’t just a far-off promise. It’s something akin to the Lord’s Prayer. John isn’t just revealing what will happen one day. He—or more accurately, Jesus—is calling the people of God to live out that kingdom now on earth as in heaven. This is why it is so important that we not miss the role Revelation plays as a guide for life in the present, not just the future. This is, after all, why John’s apocalypse begins with letters to churches in the present, with instructions on how to live in the here and now. The apocalyptic life isn’t defined by sitting around and patiently waiting for God to act. It’s defined by living out the promised kingdom of God on earth as it is in the final chapters of Revelation.
This is what makes the book of Revelation not just an apocalypse but also gospel. It is truly good news to the poor, good news for the oppressed, good news for the hungry, good news for the lost, the least, and the dying. It promises that the dead will live, the broken will be healed, the first made last, the hungry fed, the oppressed liberated, and the poor crowned as royalty in a new kingdom. To understand the apocalyptic gospel better, we need to put down the dispensational charts and predictions, get out of our theological bubbles, and start serving and listening to those people we would otherwise ignore—the kind of people to whom John wrote his revelation. They weren’t the elite, the wealthy, or the privileged. They were the outcast, the marginalized, and the oppressed. They were outsiders in an empire where their faith made them a target for persecution. Their way of life ensured hardship, ridicule, and even the prospect of martyrdom. And yet they loved their neighbors and enemies in the empire anyway.
The key to understanding Revelation isn’t hidden in a secret code. It’s found in love for our neighbors. It’s found in loving the neighbors we forget even exist or, worse, blame for their struggles. It’s found in listening to the cries of Black Lives Matters activists instead of dismissing them as thugs and hooligans. It’s found in listening to the survival stories of immigrants instead of portraying them as rapists, murderers, gang members, and dangerous criminals. It’s in opening our doors to refugees in desperate need of saving instead of turning them away because we’re worried they might be terrorists.
It’s in imagining new and creative ways to bring justice to the poor and liberation to the oppressed that we will find a meaning in Revelation that’s worthy of God. The true wonder of Revelation is found not in the apocalyptic imagery but in its proclamation that God is already at work in the world. God is already healing, liberating, and reconciling everything in creation back to our Creator. And God invites us to do these things with him so that one day all these things will be made new on earth as it is in heaven.