Why we need the message of the Book of Revelation

The book of the Revelation to John has with good reason been called the most revealing book of the Bible. Its message is a call to relentless persistence in the work of witnessing to God’s way to run the world, which was lived and taught by Jesus.

And it is an ear-splitting proclamation that the ways of greed, consumption and homicidal violence will fail miserably, while those who practice love and generosity will endure forever.

It is sad, at the same time, that no book of the Bible has suffered more at the hands of its interpreters.

Revelation is, by its own account, a prophetic book by a prophet. But the word “prophecy” has misled many people, and it’s likely that most people assume either that Revelation is about future events or that the book can be safely ignored because it has long since been proven mistaken about future events.

Both assumptions are wrong, though not quite equally wrong. The first is wrong because the book is primarily about the writer John and his readers’ present, not about the distant future. The second assumption is wrong in supposing that Christians can ignore the book at no loss to themselves, but it is right in saying the book does not present a blueprint of events at the end of history.

There is one profoundly important thing the book does say about the future, namely that God and good will triumph in the end. That is significant, and whoever says we can do without that message is either richly endowed in ways I don’t understand or benighted in ways that leave me dazzled with awe and trembling with curiosity. I would like to meet the rare people who are awake to what’s going on in our world and say they don’t need assurances that good is overcoming evil and obviously destined to triumph in the end.

By all evidence, John the Revelator wrote precisely to assure mere mortals like you and me that no good deed goes unrewarded and that unbridled greed, organized fraud and homicidal state violence will ultimately fail, abjectly and absolutely. I ask you sincerely, Do we need to hear that message today?

The theme and message of the book is summed up in 3:10: “Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.” When we put ourselves on the side of creation’s truth and loving relationships, we have God’s promise that we will prevail in the struggle between good and evil that marks the life of the individual and humanity as a collective organism.

Revelation is a book to answer the question, “What is happening to our world?” And that is not just the world of my lost job or your lost retirement savings, although those things matter, but our world of air and water and food and shelter, and wars and mindless destruction of the environment on which life itself depends. The large themes of the first and second testaments, and of Jesus’ teaching, are the major themes of Revelation. That is how I read Revelation.

At the outset, we will help ourselves greatly to understand John’s message if we permit him, like ourselves, to know less than everything about everything. That is, we must allow him to get some things more right than others, some things really right and others demonstrably wrong.

For example, John knows, or at least says, less than he should about the power of love to transform lives and situations. And in his enthusiasm to assure us that evil will not triumph in the end, he portrays God’s hand as destroying evildoers rather than, as he might, show God working through Jesus in humans to transform people in ways that begin to strangle evil itself—in Paul’s words, overcoming evil with good.

As a prophet hearing a word from God, John speaks to the situation of immense struggle in which he and the churches and people to whom he wrote found themselves.

His readers had already seen too many of their brothers and sisters die at the hands of imperial and financial powers. They were greatly tempted to give up the struggle to live against the tide of pressure to join the powers of commerce, consumption and imperial force—to just go along to get along (see those forces especially in chapters 17 and 18).

Into this situation, John brings all the powerful sights and sounds and smells of the gigantic drama he portrays in cumulative layers, overflowing cauldrons, torrential winds, rain and hail, fire and light and water and green trees and life, and relentless persistence in goodness and community and peace.

The central image of victory in this prophetic letter to churches looks small and helpless, a mere lamb. But the claim is that the lamb has conquered. And linked with the lamb image is that of a rider on a white horse, out of whose mouth comes a sword—yes, indeed, but a sword of the word. Watch for that sword and that word throughout this prophecy; see it destroy evil and create good over against the swords of the imperial powers that slay humanity and decimate the earth. The lamb and the rider on the white horse, of course, are both Jesus.

John believes in the power of words and the word, which is nothing other than the power of truth, ranged over against all the lies and riches and blandishments and swords of kings and merchants and magnates and great men (6:15). He calls on the angels (spirits, animating visions) of seven churches to call those churches to “repent”: that is, change your mind, away from all your inclinations to believe the promises of the red horseman of war, the black horseman of capitalism, and the pale horseman with all its powers of death. John’s call is to stay with the white horseman of life, who conquers with the sword of his mouth/word/truth (chapters 1, 6 and 19). Sometimes a lamb, sometimes a rider on a white horse, but always the word. A word to the churches, which we need to hear today as much as then.

We need to hear Revelation’s naming of the church as the community that, over against the empire, will prevail at the end of history. The saints, the redeemed of the church, already share with John “the kingdom” as well as the persecution and the relentless persistence (1:6, 9) and will eat “the marriage supper of the Lamb” when history reaches its fulfillment. Who among us today takes the church as seriously as John the Revelator took it? Who expects as much of it? Can it be doubted that we should all expect more of the church and give more to it than we do?

And what should we expect of the church? We should expect what the voice is giving to the seven stars of the seven churches: wise critique and strong encouragement, using the standard of “patient endurance” or “steadfast resistance” (1:9; 2:1,19; 3:10), which is the “work” (2:2,19,23; 3:1,2,8,15) by which the churches and saints make their “faithful witness” (1:5). It must not escape us that the churches are judged by their “works”: “I know your works,” the angel says time after time (a major theme of the Bible, see e.g., Ephesians 2:10).

We must inevitably ask: Is my church, is your church, giving us guidance and nurture in making a faithful witness to the “faithfulness of Jesus” (1:5; 14:12)? Jesus maintained faith in God and God’s way of tending creation and loving enemies right to the cross. Are we doing this?

First, is the church helping us see through the lies that corporations, the government and their media mouthpieces are telling us, each playing the role of the beast that arises out of the earth (chapter 13)? Or are we believing the lies, like the Monsanto lies about caring for the earth and sustainable agriculture?

Second, is the church renewing for us the vision of the triumph of the way of nonviolence, the Lamb’s way? Do we believe that the nations will be judged and found wanting, or do we expect the great United States of America to prevail and save us? At the same time, do we believe those nations will be transformed by the life symbolized in the leaves of trees that grow by the river of the water of life (chapter 22)? Is the church’s worship, are our lives as worship, helping us live the life of restorative justice and active peacemaking that demonstrates the bankruptcy of the world’s trust in war “against terrorism”?

We need Revelation’s celebration of the Creator, which is inseparable from celebration of the wisdom of creation, that is, from the knowledge that the way this world works sustainably was built into its genetic and relational reality. This means that no technology that violates the fundamental laws of nature’s infinite interconnectedness is sustainable. And no economy based on mindless extraction of irreplaceable resources from the earth’s finite store and that denies that generosity, not greed, is the fundamental reality of human nature is sustainable.

The future lies with those who know and live as if God knew what God was making in the billions of years of this earth’s history. The church, with good help from Jesus speaking in the book of Revelation, could help us know this.

John K. Stoner is a member of Akron (Pa.) Mennonite Church.