Welcome to the first week of a sermon series on the mysterious last book in the Christian Bible, the Book of Revelation. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and today I want to lay a foundation for what follows by explaining how to crack the “prophetic code,” and suggesting why I think this book is relevant for Christians in 2025.
I want to begin by suggesting that our capacity for memory (past-oriented consciousness) and especially our capacity for prospection (future-oriented consciousness), are unique human abilities. If memory lets you say, “I bought milk on Friday,” prospection lets you say, “I will buy milk on Tuesday” – and begin making that possible. Uniquely among all sentient beings, we have the ability to integrate past, present, and possible futures into complex cultural narratives, moral reasoning, and long-term planning.
We find this past-awareness and future-awareness throughout Scripture in the form of memory and anticipation, gratitude and hope, thanksgiving and faith, testimony and prophecy. For example, Psalm 77:11 says, “I will remember the Lord’s works; yes, I will remember your ancient wonders.” And Romans 8:24 says, “Now in this hope we were saved, but hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees?”
Christian faith has always celebrated both anamnesis (remembering the saving acts of God, such as in the Lord’s Supper), and prolepsis (living now in the light of the reality of the future kingdom of God, such as ethical decision-making with future reward or punishment in mind). Today we are looking at the future aspects of our Christian faith, but as we shall see, what lies ahead is grounded in salvation history.
What we call the Book of Revelation was compiled by a man named John, and addressed to seven small Christian congregations in the Roman province of Asia – what we know as western Turkey. There are four clues about the purpose of this book in the first six verses:
- it is “the revelation of Jesus Christ,” showing dramatic future events that “must soon take place” (v. 1).
- it is a witness (v. 2), as though John is in a court room, testifying to what he has seen and heard.
- it is a prophecy (v. 3), drawing on and reinterpreting earlier biblical traditions, and revealing to us truth about the future of our world.
- it is a circular letter (vv. 4-6), read aloud during worship, and passed from church to church, edifying, challenging, comforting and inspiring its recipients.
As its significance began to dawn, the text was probably copied by scribes for local use and shared more and more widely. And so we have the same text, translated into English, in our hands today.
But we are not in the same situation those early Christians faced, and there are 20 centuries of reflection separating us from them. Especially since 1800, we have seen numerous attempts to “crack the prophetic code” and draw aside the veil of unknowing to reveal what the Book of Revelation is really about.[1] Many of those attempts, although well-meaning, have caused more harm than good.
Today, there are three main ways in which people encounter and respond to the Book of Revelation:
- wilful ignorance – they choose never to read it, or they read it once and never again because it’s too violent, or too confusing.
- fanatical obsession – endlessly re-reading, convinced that what they read explains what is happening now in world affairs.
- reading for key themes – this approach asks: What is the theological relevance of the text? What does it tell us about God? What can we learn that inspires hope, courage and wisdom? What does the text offer to strengthen our daily walk with Jesus?
In this sermon series, we are bypassing wilful ignorance, and dodging fanatical obsession, and settling for a better understanding of the key themes that will encourage us as we follow the Way of Jesus. To do this, we start with the situation faced by the original readers. Those early Christians were convinced that, in Jesus, the unique rule of God had come to our world in a new way.
But Jesus has returned to God the Father in the heavens, and poured out his Spirit, and life goes on. What is God doing now? What are God’s plans for the little churches springing up between the cracks of a military empire, among temples and synagogues? Why has Jesus not returned, as he promised? Should we resist Caesar? And if so, to what degree? Is the Hebrew Bible and its theology now obsolete? Should we further adapt and create our own shiny new beliefs and practices? And why does God allow followers of Jesus to suffer persecution – community shunning, torture, even death?
These and other similar questions occupied the hearts and minds of those Christians in western Turkey in the first century AD. The Book of Revelation does not answer these questions directly, but it does answer them definitively.
To understand the meaning of the text, it’s important to consider the seriousness of sin, and the lengths God must go to undo sin’s curse and restore the world and its people to harmony. It’s also important that we don’t mistake the rich symbols for everyday reality. The symbols in Revelation often draw us back to earlier biblical stories and themes – not to today’s news and opinion, as we too often hear from TV shows, popular books, and podcasts.
For example, in the plagues and bowls of wrath in Revelation 8-16, “we are seeing a rerun of the plagues with which God afflicted the Egyptians” in Exodus 7-12.[2] These symbols demonstrate God’s amazing power, and the means by which God provides salvation for his people in unexpected and indirect ways. It’s no coincidence that the Lamb who frequently appears in glory in the pages of Revelation is the true Passover Lamb.
What, then, is the relevance of this famous book for us today? I have ten brief points:[3]
First, the Book of Revelation shows that our world is essentially theocentric, not anthropocentric. God rules, and Caesar does not. God rules, and we do not. The end of history is the universal reign of God, not the perfection of socialist or capitalist humankind.
Second, the biblical doctrines of creation, redemption and eschatology are closely linked. In faithfulness to his creation of the universe, including humankind, God has acted in Christ, the Lamb of God, to redeem and renew the whole creation.
Third, the symbols and images in Revelation conform to the truth of God. They speak to the challenges that confront each generation – whether in ancient Rome or a crumbling 21st-century democracy. Revelation reminds us that the truth is “out there.” The word of God is reliable, and what God has promised will come to pass.
Fourth, Revelation’s presentation of God is profoundly trinitarian and transcendent. The book celebrates the absolute rule of Almighty God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But Revelation also shows that this divine rule “does not contradict human freedom but finds its fulfilment in the participation of people in God’s rule.”[4]
Fifth, Revelation resists the dominant ideology of the age by boldly showing an alternative future – the new creation, the New Jerusalem, the consummation of God’s kingdom. And this future is one of solidarity with the victims of empire and injustice and idolatry.
Sixth, if we let it, Revelation will speak powerfully to our emotions and imagination, not just our intellectual convictions which are often shaped by a dominant culture. It helps to purge and refurbish the Christian imagination, enabling a different way of seeing the world, calling us to adopt counter-cultural postures that bring hope and peace in place of despair and violence.
Seventh, rather than consoling us with millennial dreams while we withdraw into our sectarian enclaves, content to let the world go to hell, Revelation calls us to active participation in the kingdom of God as witnesses to God’s truth and justice.
Eighth, Revelation has hard things to say to the church – critiquing false religion, compromise with power, and betrayal of the truth of God entrusted to us. The church does not exist for itself but to pursue the mission of God which extends far beyond the church.
Ninth, as Michael Gorman observes, Revelation possesses a distinctive spirituality. Gorman warns us that
without attending to the apocalyptic-prophetic voice, we may not be prompted to ask the hard questions that no other biblical book poses so sharply, and we may not perceive things that no other book reveals so clearly. Moreover, seeing God and life through the eyes of Revelation will help us recover the message of the prophets, Jesus, and Paul in ways that our cultural blinders – whatever they may be – otherwise hinder or even prevent.[5]
Tenth, Revelation is in our Bibles because the Holy Spirit arranged it to be so. “Revelation concludes the canon; it completes God’s story.”[6] Thanks be to God (cf Rom 15:4; 2 Tim 3:16).
Above all, Revelation points us to Jesus, who has accomplished God’s saving work through his obedience, humiliation, and death. And the risen and glorified Jesus does not forget those for whom he died. Jesus will soon return to complete the task for which he came to our world the first time, establishing God’s rule on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
Sermon 821 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 10 August 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
References
[1] For a helpful summary of these attempts, see Timothy Weber’s introductory chapter in Craig L. Blomberg & Sun Wook Chung (eds), A Case for Historic Premillennialism: An Alternative to ‘Left Behind’ Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 4-14.
[2] Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2011), 82.
[3] These are adapted from Richard Bauckham’s eleven points in his The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 159-164; and Michael J. Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 176-190.
[4] Baulkham, Theology, 164.
[5] Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly, 186.
[6] Ibid., 190.
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