Govern Yourself Accordingly

The book of Revelation has been on my mind lately. Immanuel Can and I were talking about it yesterday, as he’s been preaching from it all year. I haven’t been studying it in depth, but it keeps coming up in connection with other things, like our Mining the Minors instalments on Zechariah, which inevitably lead you into Revelation. The similarities of theme and language are impossible to ignore.

Then there’s this Gaza business in the news, which makes all the dispensationalists go “Uh oh” and a fairly sizable chunk of the Reformers start writing about how there will never be a national restoration of Israel. One’s view of Revelation plays into how Christians respond to that too.

Fine Details and the Bigger Picture

I’ve pretty much given up on successfully unpacking all Revelation’s symbolism in this lifetime. I made two lengthy runs through the book with successive generations of Sunday School classes in the eighties and nineties, doing my best to compare scripture with scripture and paint a picture of the biblical vision of the future understandable to teens with limited knowledge of the word of God. One of the things that impressed me then, as now, is the difficulty of being dogmatic about symbolic language. Some symbols are more obvious than others. Some continue to puzzle me to this day. If I ever thought I was the only one having difficulty with the book, a quick trip through the commentators cured me forever. Interpretations of Revelation, both micro and macro, are all over the map. We can often eliminate the more ridiculous ideas through careful study, but rarely can we say with conviction that we have all the answers, and those who think they do are most likely wrong.

Still, while it may be difficult to be dogmatic about the meaning of many of Revelation’s finer details, there is greater agreement about the broader picture of this world’s future that John presents to us. Someone has blithely summed up the book in two words: “We win.” That’s an oversimplification, but it’s not fundamentally incorrect. Revelation reveals the delayed impact of the death and resurrection of Christ. God has highly exalted him, and in Revelation we finally get to see him enthroned, victorious and judging the world in righteousness. All the Bible’s great ongoing themes are resolved here. The serpent of Genesis 3 finally gets his comeuppance, and all who have believed his lies and spread his wickedness in the world will get theirs too. The curse is lifted. Death and hell go into the lake of fire. The glories of the New Jerusalem are described as clearly as we’re ever going to get them until we are looking at them with our own eyes. And even if Covenant Theologians don’t see it, in Revelation God fulfills his covenant promises literally as well as spiritually.

Love and Blessedness

IC tells me that when he preached on the first four chapters of Revelation, his emphasis was love. That’s not the way I’ve generally heard the book presented — most people associate Revelation with wrath and judgment — but I can’t deny there’s something to what he’s saying. Perhaps we can talk him into making his case for that in this space if there is sufficient interest.

What I notice about the first few verses of Revelation is along similar lines. In 1:3, John writes, “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.” I hope it is not too trivial an observation to note that “blessed” often simply means “happy”. I believe that’s what it means in this context. To bless someone is to wish them well or to improve their condition. To be blessed is to enjoy the benefit of that goodwill.

So then, the public reading and discussion of John’s visions of the end of our present world order were not intended to distress Christians, make us fret about our readiness for the rapture, or mourn for this doomed age of wickedness as Lot’s wife mourned for Sodom, turning back and sharing its fate.

The End of the Story

Every good story has an ending. If you doubt that, check out some of the reader comments on the “resolution” of Stephen King’s 4,250-page seven-volume Dark Tower fantasy series, which has the main character going back to the beginning and starting his quest all over again, effectively nullifying everything that has occurred to date and all the time invested by the reader in absorbing it. To call the ending controversial is an understatement. I call it bad writing, a copout and a cheat, Ouroboros pointlessly gnawing on his own tail, unsatisfying in every way, shape and form. A world in which God failed to publicly exalt the once-rejected Christ, declined to undo the damage to our world caused by the fall of man, or allowed evil to carry on unrestrained and unavenged indefinitely would be a horror and a travesty not even Stephen King could imagine.

In the context of Revelation, we find the question of endings coming up in chapter 5, in which the scroll of God’s judgments on the world is sealed, and a mighty angel calls for a man worthy to open it and execute its judgments. When initially no one worthy to unseal the scroll is found, John begins to weep loudly. Why might that be? Because there is something in the human heart that hates the thought that wickedness and malice might go unpunished or good unrewarded; that rejects randomness and craves the sanity and order of the wisdom of God’s authorial design. Happily, John is comforted to find out that Jesus Christ is worthy to judge the world in righteousness. The Lamb will unseal the scroll.

“Keeping” a Prophecy

John says a second group of people will be made happy, and that is those who “hear, and who keep what is written in it”, that is to say in the words of Revelation’s prophecy. I call that a single group rather than two groups for obvious reasons: those who hear and don’t keep it will have eternity to regret their foolishness. But those who do are like travelers on a dark highway who see the warning that the bridge has collapsed up ahead, and turn back to find safety while others ignore the warning and perish. God is giving his children the inside story concerning the ending he has written for history, and in doing so he is giving us one of the greatest compliments and privileges ever bestowed on finite beings.

But it brings up a good question: How does one “keep” the words of a prophecy? (By the way, this instruction is repeated in the last chapter of Revelation, so it’s obviously significant.) It certainly doesn’t mean we are required to fulfill it. That is very much above our pay grade. Those occasional cultists in the news who try to “immanentize the eschaton” are engaged in a fool’s errand, and those who accuse Christians more generally of trying to do it comprehensively misunderstand our mission. Make no mistake, the Lamb will unseal the scroll. We’re just here to watch and cheer.

Loving Sodom and Washing Your Robes

In fact, the Greek word translated “keep” means to watch carefully, to observe attentively, and to govern oneself accordingly.

For the Christian, that means to live as if these things are true. How foolish it is to love Sodom! I do not mean, of course, that it’s wrong for Christians to love unbelievers and seek their good so long as we have opportunity. Not at all. They are why we are still here, because our God is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance”. But for believers to become enraptured by this present world, with all its pretty lies, glitter and rot, is to behave inconsistently with a hope in Christ that begins with the resurrection and ends in the New Jerusalem. Govern yourself accordingly.

For the unbeliever who hears the words of this prophecy, the message is in verse 14 of Revelation’s final chapter: wash your robes, so that you may have the right to the tree of life and that you may enter the New Jerusalem by its gates. If washing your robes sounds a little obscure, chapter 7 explains the symbolism, referring to those who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb”. Trust Christ for your salvation. What is the work that God requires? “That you believe in him whom he has sent.” Govern yourself accordingly.

Revelation was intended to be a blessing. Happy is the man or woman who reads it and governs themselves accordingly.