Prophecy in Revelation (again)

A theological faq from the oracles of Revelation 2–3 (Pt. 3)

Audio Version!

I had an interesting conversation earlier this week with a woman in the small group Lynn and I are a part of (we are currently going through Romans). We somehow got on the topic of how people view scripture in our culture and this member related how so many people she talks with come out with something like: “the Bible is just a bunch of stories or symbols.” Seemingly they downplay the authority of the Bible for our lives. She expressed her inability to respond and I suggested something like, “when God asks you about that what will you say?” I went on to give my opinion that most people—even church goers—often explain away Scripture to justify themselves.

How we view the Bible is crucial for how we relate to God and live our lives.

This post looks at the issue of the Bible from a slightly different perspective, but has some similar outcomes.

In the previous posts, I took up five questions that seemingly begged for some explanation to understand the theological frame for Jesus’s oracles in Revelation. 

There are several more, and in this post I will seek to address one of them as we prepare to move into the main body of Revelation. 

Here are the remaining ones:

• What is God’s wrath on sin? 

• How is the (seeming) triumphalistic language of the Kingdom an expression of God’s love?

• Why is Revelation so hard on the Jews?

• What about the fulfillment of Prophecy?

Today I take up:

What about the fulfillment of Prophecy?

Early on in this series, I spoke of Revelation as a combination of a letter, prophecy, and apocalypse.

Further, I spent an entire post on prophecy (I have yet to do an in-depth post on apocalypse).

But the topic is so important to understand at this juncture of our journey between the oracles and the main apocalyptic section of Revelation that I want to revisit the topic anew. 

The oracles to the seven churches are all pristine examples of prophecy. 

In fact, they form the main body of prophecy in Revelation.

What Prophecy is not

This may be surprising to some, because the typical understanding of prophecy in the Bible today is that prophetic texts predict the future a la Nostradamus or other famous prognosticators of the future.

It is the major current view among evangelical churches in the US. 

Preachers scour the Old Testament for predictions of Jesus’s coming (I’ve sat through numerous of these sitting on my hands!) or predictions of the Bible being fulfilled today.

In the predictive view of prophecy in Revelation, while there were connections with the churches Revelation was sent to, the visions did not concern them specifically but only people at the end of time, who would see the events unfold and understand them when they were happening. 

So many of the end-times pundits make a practice of saying this very thing: look at world events! We are seeing the beginning of the end!

(continued)

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Prophecy as the word of the Lord

Yet as I pointed out in those early posts, John’s understanding of what prophecy entailed was more in line with the Old Testament prophets, who spoke “the word of the Lord.”

Those words of the Lord (and the Old Testament) were not so much predictive but truth telling about the sinfulness of humanity and the goodness of God. 

What Jesus did was “fulfill” the scriptures; he was the focal point, end, and completion of all that God had been working in history to bring about the redemption of humanity.

The type of prophecy we see in Revelation is the Old Testament type, and the oracles to the churches are the preeminent example. 

Jesus spoke directly to the churches about the good and the bad, just as the Old Testament prophets spoke the good and the bad to Israel and Judah. 

Prophecy was about telling the truth to people about their relationship to God, not about predicting the future. 

The Old Testament prophets spoke straight to the conditions of the day and named the outcomes for continued rebellion against God (or repentance) and spoke of the eventual salvation of the Lord when repentance finally took place (summed up in the work of Jesus!).

A better description could not be written about the oracles. 

In the oracles, Jesus spoke to the true condition of each church with positive and negative outcomes depending on their response to Jesus’s words. 

John’s words in Revelation 1:3 bear repeating: “Blessed is the one who reads and those who listen to the words of this prophecy and keep the things written in them, for the time is near.” 

Prophecy in Revelation is not predictive but intended to be read, heard and kept, exactly what we see in the oracles to the seven churches.

What about the visions? 

Visions are exactly that: what John saw and experienced in his spirit-state on the Lord’s Day, not predictions. 

Jesus told John to write “what you saw, and what is, and what is about to come” (Revelation 1:19).

The visions of Revelation are visions of ongoing reality of the world from God’s heavenly perspective. 

“What you saw and what is and what is about to come” are the same thing.

What we are experiencing today has already happened in the past and will happen again in the future until the point that Jesus returns.

The visions were not prophecy in a predictive sense but a description of true reality that recurs, and John does not claim otherwise.

The many-faceted symbolism of Revelation supports this viewpoint: specific enough to detect the patterns in our worldly reality throughout history, but elastic enough to apply to any age.

Revelation explains the past and the present and the future.

Revelation as a whole is prophecy in the large sense only because God was the author, not because it predicted the future.

As we venture into the visions, I will point out again and again the recurring nature of the visions and of distinct signposts in the visions that (surprisingly to most) recount the gospel message of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

(cont.)

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Prophecy in Revelation

But back to prophecy proper.

When Jesus said “I know your works …,” that was prophecy. 

When Jesus exhorted the churches to repent, that was prophecy. 

When Jesus gave potential judgments, that was prophecy. 

When Jesus gave promises for perseverance, that was prophecy.

When Jesus said, “Let him who has an ear, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches,” that was prophecy.

In the remainder of Revelation, the prophetic voice appears a few more times:

One I quoted in the previous post is from Revelation 13:9–10: 

If anyone has an ear, let him hear:

If anyone is to be taken captive,

to captivity he goes;

if anyone is to be killed with the sword,

with the sword must he be killed. 

Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.

Just a few verses later in 13:18 we read:

This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.

Then Revelation 14:12:

Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.

Finally, Revelation 20:4 is also a prophetic insertion: Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

These prophetic insertions into the visions are intended to exhort and encourage the readers/hearers of Revelation to take heart, to trust, to persevere, and to know that all of the chaos going on around them (recounted in the visions) is known and allowed by God as his patience gives people the opportunity to repent and follow Jesus.

Prophecy in the New Testament

All of this talk of prophecy in Revelation being consistent with the Old Testament is also consistent with Acts and with Paul—he presents the gift of prophecy as a gift of communicating, not of prediction (see 1 Corinthians 12-14). 

The prophets of the New Testament proclaimed Jesus and the application of the gospel message to believers as the true word of the Lord to them.

This understanding of prophecy brings me back to that opening story.

Some people down-play the authority of Scripture by calling it “full of stories and symbols.”

But in a related way, some very conservative Christians view prophecy as just predictive of the future.

This view off-loads the message of the prophetic word to us.

One view even teaches that the demands of the Sermon on the Mount are only for the future kingdom of God, and so are the parables of the Kingdom. These teachings don’t apply to us now.

To the contrary! Most prophecy in the Bible spoke directly to those who were disregarding God and his word and called them to repent. Jesus spoke his words directly to his listeners and called them to “repent and believe the gospel.”

Paul’s words in his letters were applications of Jesus’s teaching directly to his readers.

No off-loading to the future there.

The book of Revelation, especially in the oracles, was a prophetic word directly to those churches (and inasmuch as we do the same, directly to us).

The visions of Revelation are prophetic in this same sense: they tell us exactly how the world works and exactly how God is working to bring his will, despite the evil in the world.