05.12 | Prophecy Bounces
Revelation 1
‘The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.’
Revelation 1:1-2
Patmos is a Greek island, about thirty miles out from the western coast of Turkey. In the First Century, it was a military garrison—a small island amidst the many scattered islands of the Aegean Sea. And on this island, sometime in the mid-late First Century, a man called John1 had a vision, where the resurrected and glorified Jesus came and spoke to him, revealing to him extraordinary things. John wrote these things down, and we have them, as the final book of our Christian Scriptures: the book of Revelation.
I don’t know if you’ve tried reading Revelation before. There is no book in the New Testament that has caused more confusion or more controversy. Many begin, and quickly get lost—disoriented amidst graphic images and symbolic numbers and a lot of questions about what it all means.
Today I want to give us a few framing ideas that will help us as we travel.
Firstly, Revelation is a deeply biblical book. Many of us begin Revelation, and then quickly get lost in the graphic imagery—horses and bowls of wrath, lamp stands and olive trees, stars and trumpets and beasts coming out of the sea. This imagery may not be immediately familiar to us, but we are enormously helped when we recognise that virtually every image of Revelation has appeared before in the Old Testament Scriptures.2 These images have backstory, and thus, what they meant previously helps us to understand how they were understood in the First Century, which in turn helps us draw meaning now. We’ll be unpacking these as we go along.
Secondly, numbers carry a lot of meaning the Bible. They are like signposts to certain themes, again with a deep backstory throughout the Scriptures beforehand. Sometimes, before they are giving us mathematical predictions, they are giving us theological themes, drawing our attention to where those very numbers have appeared before. Recognising these connections helps us as we travel.
Thirdly, Revelation was written to seven specific churches. These were real churches, all in ancient Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). They were communities of actual believers, who had names, faces, homes, and leaders. This is helpful for us to remember, because in this we recognise that they didn’t receive Revelation as a book of mystery—only to be understood by a future generation who experienced its fulfilment. They understood Revelation to mean something, that gave clarity and perspective to their lives there and then. Asking what Revelation meant to those seven churches then greatly informs how we are to read Revelation now.
Pull all this together, and we get an important idea for prophecy in the Scriptures. It is this:
Prophecy bounces.
When we read the prophetic words of the Old Testament, often we find that there was an immediate fulfilment of those prophetic words, and then that there was a more perfect fulfilment of them in the person and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus. They were partially fulfilled, and then they were perfectly fulfilled, and some of them point beyond us, to a future completion of the victory of Jesus that we still await. Like a bouncy ball dropped from a height, those prophetic words strike history at specific moments of fulfilment—partial fulfilment followed by more perfect fulfilments that follow.
The words of Revelation bounce. They have struck the earth before in the Old Testament Scriptures. They struck the earth again in the person and ministry and cross of Jesus. They struck again in the First Century, as those seven churches received these words. And they are striking home again, as our moment gallops towards history’s completion in the imminent return of Jesus.
Buckle up, my friends. Prophecy gives heavenly perspective on earthly events. We are about to enter a Scripture-soaked, heaven’s-eye-view on the world as it was then, and as it is now, and as it will be on that Great Day to come. And we are going to find that, amidst a world of chaos and struggle and culminating friction between heaven and hell, we follow a Jesus enthroned and victorious. And the end of His Story is glorious beyond all imaginings.
Reflect:
Begin this journey by bringing to mind the chaos of the world. Now, invite the Spirit of God to sanctify this pathway through Revelation—opening your eyes to the hope-flooded perspective of the heavens.
Pray:
Father in heaven,
Awaken my mind—
That in these days of Revelation thoughts,
I would learn more truly to see.
To see this age,
To see myself,
To see all suffering and strain, beauty and glory,
As a integrated in an inbreaking Masterplan
Under the Great Storyteller of history.
Turn my anxieties to faith;
Fuel my prayers with zeal;
And settle my heart,
In the peace and the stability
Of hope—
That I may stand resilient, clear, and focused,
In these raging days
That will certainly soon pass.
Come, Lord Jesus.
In Your Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Hosea 7:8-10:15 | Psalm 139:13-24
Scholars divide on whether this was John, the apostle and disciple of Jesus, another John known as ‘John the Elder’, or potentially a third John, described as ‘John the Seer.’
Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart describe “over 250 specific echoes of or allusions to the Old Testament so that every significant moment in his “story” is imagined almost exclusively in Old Testament language.” (Gordon D. Fee & Douglas Stuart: How to Read the Bible Book by Book, p.429)