Revelation as Metaphor
Preparing for the Seven Seals
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“The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”
In seeking to understand Revelation for myself and for you readers and listeners, finitude is a word that comes to mind—my limited ability to both comprehend and communicate God’s word.
Though I personally get excited about each new insight, I also often despair—even fearfully—about how to convey the insight with words and sentences that make sense and are true.
The very nature of Revelation as divinely given visionary writing—outside of the more ordinary narratives of the Gospels and Acts or the reasoned theology and application of the letters—makes interpretation difficult, just as the visionary elements of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Zechariah have always been perplexing.
How do we deal with this type of writing?
This is a question I have constantly brought up since the beginning of In Plain Sight: Revelation Edition a year and a half ago.
Now as we get into the weeds of the visions from chapter 5 onward this issue is even more acute.
The array of interpretations diverges into many directions at this point.
My own approach is to prayerfully follow the logic of the text itself wherever that leads.
(continued)
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Part 1: Metaphor
One source of help is Scripture itself—we can draw examples from the Old Testament and in the parables of Jesus.
Joseph interpreted the dreams (aka visions) of Pharaoh and saw the significance of each element to his current situation (not to mention his own visions as a boy). Daniel likewise interpreted the dream of Nebuchadnezzar and had his own visions. Both Joseph and Daniel perceived the metaphorical relation between the “physical” elements of the dream and the signified meaning (famine in Egypt or successive kingdoms with Babylon). Ditto for the visions of the other prophets.
Jesus told parables—not visions, but stories—that conveyed spiritual reality through the use of everyday images. He usually gave some clue such as “the Kingdom of Heaven is like …” The meaning of the parable was conveyed through indirect means and he left it to his hearers to contemplate and discover his lesson.
Paul saw an allegorical connection between Hagar/Sarah and Jerusalem/New Jerusalem in Galatians 4.
Metaphors
In contemporary terms these symbolic correspondences are called “metaphors.”
Two different concepts from different realms are thrown together to generate meaning (that is also the meaning of “parable”).
In Galatians 4, Hagar is earthly Jerusalem (corresponding to the Jews of his day); Sarah is the Jerusalem above (corresponding to the Church freed in Christ).
So in Revelation:
Jesus is the Lion (of Judah).
Jesus is the Lamb (standing as slaughtered).
Both are metaphors that make us contemplate how Jesus fulfilled that image.
Jesus was/is not literally-physically either a lion or a lamb, but the metaphors demand we think about how Jesus is both.
He has the characteristics of “lambness” and “lionness.”
(And metaphors become metaphors: The Lion is the Lamb).
Just this basic insight applies to almost all of Revelation: the entirety is a metaphor composed of other metaphors that may or may not have the clues to interpret within the text—though there are many.
Later in Revelation, the Church is the bride of Christ and the Church is the New Jerusalem
But multitudes of people constitute the Church.
The Bride of Christ and the New Jerusalem are metaphors for the redeemed people of God.
Similes
Then there are similes using “like” or “as.”
Have you noticed how many times John used “like” in Revelation?
Just in the first four chapters he employed “like” 22 times and in the whole of Revelation this number is close to 90 times!
Phrases with “like” or “as” are called similes but are close to metaphors.
John himself perceived that what he saw represented other realities that he often could not adequately describe.
But to the point, in many places he explicitly stated symbolic correlations, such as “the seven lampstands are the seven churches” or “the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches” or the “seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God.”
With these similes and metaphors, John pointedly expressed the metaphoric nature of Revelation.
This insight also gives us pause when considering interpretations that attempt to literalize the text by confining an image to the image itself and not beyond.
If you look carefully, everybody says “this means this” (even the notion that the locusts are helicopters!).
They all know that the text is implicitly metaphorical, unless the “beast” is actually a Hydra-like ten-horned, seven-headed monster that a literal woman rides on with the literal words “Babylon mother of whores” emblazoned on her forehead.
No one argues that, nor that the four horses are literal horses that will roam the earth.
The riders must represent something other than a rider, each horse represents something other than a horse.
Every image as John saw it pointed to something beyond it.
The question is what.
Like Jesus gave clues for his parables, Revelation itself, as well as the Old Testament and the New Testament gives us the framework and clues as needed for the difficult work of interpretation.
One final thought on this topic before I give an example.
I want to quote Revelation 1:1 again:
“The Revelation of Jesus Messiah, which God gave him to show to his servants what must be soon, and signified by sending his angel to his servant John.
Imbedded in the term “signified (Greek semaino)” is the idea of “signs.”
In simple terms a sign points to something else.
That is what Revelation does.
All of the images point toward something else.
Our task, prayerfully and studiously, is to determine that something.
(cont.)
Part 2: An Example
Let’s take the first verse of chapter 5 as an example.
And I saw in the right hand of The One Sitting On the Throne a scroll written on the inside, and on the outside sealed with seven seals. Revelation 5:1
With this scene we have three images before us: the One Sitting on the Throne, the right hand, and the scroll sealed with seven seals. I’ll divide into four, though:
John described it as:
1) In the right hand
2) of the One on the throne
3) A scroll written on the inside
4) On the outside sealed with seven seals
All four are representations of something more than the “physical” image that John saw in the vision.
1) The One Sitting on the Throne (in all the glory depicted in chapter 4) represents the indescribable Eternal, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and invisible to us God of the universe to whom all praise is due. In both the Old and New Testaments, God was often compared to or called a king and the throne was the image representative of that kingship—but only because these earthly images are what convey something of who God is as ruler of the universe.
One other thing to note is that Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel all had similar, but not exactly the same, visions of God. Their attempts to describe God, like John, were beyond their capacity to do so fully.
2) The “right hand” represents the power and authority of God—a common Old Testament phrase (for example Exodus 15:6 or Deuteronomy 33:2 or Psalm 20:6)—as well as the place of his representative, especially the Messiah (for example Psalm 110:1 or Acts 7:55-56). James and John asked Jesus to sit at his right and left hands in his kingdom!
These two symbolic images are fairly easy to equate with their eternal, non-physical counterparts.
3) Not so the scroll and the seals.
The nature of this visionary sealed scroll—what it represented and the nature of its contents—determines how we read the rest of Revelation.
But what it represents is not so evident.
Yet the hundreds of attempts to interpret the remainder of Revelation rise or fall on the nature of this scroll.
Did it contain future historical events like the end-times interpreters claim it does?
Did it simply interpret the historical events of John’s day and nothing else like the preterists claim?
Did it present the recurring tragedy of human existence on the one hand, and on the other the invisible, powerful Kingdom of God until Christ comes as the amillenial approach would argue? (I have long been in this camp).
And there are other views or combinations thereof.
But here is the skinny, so to speak: everyone takes the scroll as metaphoric or symbolic.
John saw the scroll in his vision, but its contents—arguably the rest of Revelation—represented something else.
John did not read the words of the scroll.
Instead, they came to life in a vibrant drama like some movies where the contents of a book come to life on the screen.
And the images in the drama themselves were metaphorical.
So for me to make a particular claim about the scroll may seem a shot in the dark, but no more than for many others.
Thus I am going to stick with my initial contention that Revelation as a whole is the Gospel of the Exalted Jesus, from Revelation 1:1–22:21 (here and here).
The first chapter of Revelation clearly laid out this view as my early posts showed.
The scroll and its contents were symbolic of this revealing of the gospel: Jesus, Son of God, incarnate as a man, died, rose again, and ascended to the right hand of God, where he currently reigns and sent the Holy Spirit to work through his Church to bring redemption and restoration to sinful humanity, and to return the world to God’s creational intention.
So unless there is a clear indication in the text pointing to another key character, such as Satan or the Beast in chapters 12-13, the default actor of the dramatic scroll is the exalted Jesus, aka the Lamb (and the Lion!).
One more thing.
God is the one holding the scroll. In this scene, God the Father will give the scroll to God the Son! The contents of the scroll are not secret to God, only to us.
Jesus the (worthy and authorized) Lamb will break the seals to reveal the contents, but the contents were already known!
And this is where it must be said again, that God’s primary characteristic in Revelation is eternality: “the One who is and was and is coming,” “the Alpha and the Omega,” “the First and the Last,” “the Beginning and the End.”
To say that the contents of the scroll were only about future events is to ignore the eternality of God.
The contents of the scroll were consistent with the eternal purposes of God, past/present/future in our way of conceiving things, but in God’s way our time-bound notions collapse into one “is” as God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.”
In John’s visions, the contents of the scroll became an actualized dramatization before his eyes.
That dramatization is a cosmic tale from the God of the universe encompassing time as we conceive it.
The scroll in John’s vision is thus a metaphor for the vast plan of God.
4) Finally a short word about the seals.
In John’s time, a seal was placed on the outside of a document to protect the contents until the authorized recipient opened it.
In this visionary case, the seals were not simply literal seals, but signifiers of hidden things to be revealed.
Further, in chapters 6-8, Jesus (as the Lamb) will open these seals in successive fashion. Chapters 6 to the beginning of 8 contain the visionary revelations for each seal that themselves contain metaphors that must be unpacked.
And as we will see, Jesus is the theme and primary character/actor of many metaphors in Revelation beginning with the first four seals.
This interpretive key will produce some surprising interpretations ahead, so buckle up.
As a consequence, not only do I believe Revelation will make sense, but, as I have said before, will show itself to be entirely consistent with the rest of the New Testament—Revelation is not theological “out there,” but fully consonant with the Gospels and all of the letters.
The revelation that John received actually ties up all the threads of the Old and New Testaments and showed the purpose of God to redeem his creation through Jesus Messiah.
Revelation accomplishes its task through the use of metaphoric images.
Observations on the Greek Text of Revelation
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