A Book of Blessing

Here we have this invitation to enter in to this revelation that God is giving to His people.

The Father through the Son, the Son through the Angel, the Angel through John, John to us. And the purpose is that we would know what Jesus Christ has been doing, what Jesus Christ has for us, what blessing He has for us. There are those who read the book of Revelation with a newspaper in hand or while scrolling through the world news. Others avoid the book altogether due to its apocalyptic language and imagery, but it is a book of blessing and we shouldn't ignore it.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and thank you for joining us today for Renewing Your Mind. The book of Revelation in its first chapter says, Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy. So why would anyone neglect the reading and diligent study of this particular book? Well, all week Ligonier teaching fellow W. Robert Godfrey will walk us through the book of Revelation. It's an important book that is often misunderstood and help us see the truths and the comfort it can bring for God's people.

Here's Dr. Godfrey as he introduces us to this book of blessing. Welcome to our teaching series on the book of the Revelation. I think it's an exciting book to look into. It's a fascinating book.

It's a book that has attracted through the centuries a great deal of interest and study and reflection and as we know also a great deal of silliness. So we're going to try to avoid the silliness and find the truth and find the blessing. Let me read the opening verses of the book of the Revelation. 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. 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.

That's fascinating, isn't it? Blessed is the one who reads this prophecy aloud. Well, we're going to do some of that as we study this book together and that I hope will be the effect of our study together, that we'll be blessed. That we'll be blessed to understand God's truth, God's purpose in this book and that we will be blessed to be encouraged to live faithfully for him. So I want to suggest that this book should not be approached as a puzzle book, as a secret code book, as a book that is closed and sealed and not capable of being understood. There are a lot of relationships between the book of the Revelation and the prophecy of Daniel, but Daniel was told to seal up his book for future generations. The book of the Revelation is unsealed for us, so we shouldn't see it as a book that's incomprehensible or a book that is so obscure that we can't get close to it at all. Our approach is going to be to try to see how God is speaking to his people in every generation and how that book is given to us to be a blessing. So some people approach the book of the Revelation as if the only interesting questions are, who's the beast?

Who's 666? What exactly does the thousand year reign of Christ mean? Now we'll talk about those things as we get there and we'll try to figure out what is meant by those things, but the book is really given to us as a whole. It's not given to us just to lift verses out and ask questions of those verses in isolation from what's all around it. So our approach will be very much to try to see the book as a whole with a conviction that it has a message as a whole, that it holds together. And the more that we can see how it holds together, the better we'll be able to interpret it. So we want to look at the big picture of the book is part of what we will do. We're going to look at plenty of details.

I hope not too many, but we're going to look very carefully as we go along. But we're not going to try to be exhaustive. I'm not going to interact with all the various interpretations along the way. I'm going to pursue positively.

It's a nice way to put it. In other words, I'm just going to tell you what I think. We're going to pursue positively how I think the book should be understood rather than constantly interacting with all the other approaches. There are lots of books out there. You're probably aware of that, but we're going to try to see how the book is speaking to us. Now, in approaching that, we ought to bear in mind that in the history of the church, there have been four major approaches to this book. Now, under each of those four, there have been lots of variations.

But there are four basic approaches to this book. One of those approaches is called the Preterist approach. And Preterist is derived from a Latin word, praeter, which means beyond or before. So the Preterist view of the book is that most of it is already fulfilled.

The radical Preterist would say it's all fulfilled. So that approach to the book says the book is about what has already taken place. And most of the Preterists want to say very passionately the book was written before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, and that a lot of what's described here is about the destruction of the temple. So that's one whole approach, one important historical approach to the book.

And under that Preterist approach, there are a lot of subdivisions, but that's one large approach. Another large approach historically is called the church historical approach. And the church historical approach thinks that the book of the Revelation is a prophecy about the whole history of the church from the ascension of Christ to His second coming.

It's sort of fascinating, in the 16th century, at the time of the Reformation, almost all Protestants were church historical interpreters of the book of the Revelation. And that meant that the question always was, what chapter are we in? If this prophesies the whole history of the church, then where I am today is somewhere in the book of the Revelation. Are we in chapter 17? Are we in chapter 18? Are we in chapter 19?

It's usually pretty far along because every age thinks they're near the end. So that church historical approach was very popular. Almost all Protestants held to it in the 16th century, and ironically, today it's almost disappeared altogether. I don't know offhand anyone who still holds to the church historical approach to the book of the Revelation. But since I'm a historian, I have to tell you about this important historical approach to the book. Thirdly, there is what we might call, what we do call, the futurist approach. And the futurist approach is that almost the whole book from chapter 4 on is about the future, is yet to be fulfilled, is yet to come. And the most influential, the best known representation of the futurist approach in our time has been dispensationalism. Now there are other forms of futurism. Dispensationalism is not the only one, but dispensationalism, late 19th century on into the 20th century in America, became very widespread amongst conservative Protestants, and so it's probably the best known futurist approach. Now we know even amongst dispensationalists there are significant differences as to the tribulation.

Are you pre-trib, post-trib, mid-trib? If you don't know what that means, your salvation can still be secure. But it points that under the heading of these big schools of interpretation, there are all sorts of subdivisions and differences. The problem, I think, one of the problems with the futurist approach is the futurists always tell us that they're the ones who really take the book of the Revelation literally. That the rest of us take it spiritually. But if you're a futurist and you take the book of the Revelation literally, what do you do when right in the very first verse we're told that the things here must take place soon? Well, if 2,000 years have gone by since John's time and these things we're still waiting for, it's a little hard to take soon literally and make it mean 2,000 plus years. I don't want to be mean-spirited about that, but it is a point to ponder. Now the soon is a bit of a problem for everybody except the preterists, and the preterists, not surprisingly, rest a lot on that statement.

And it's appropriate. So anyway, futurism is the third major school. The fourth school, and as you probably can imagine, I've saved the best for last, the fourth school is sometimes called the idealist school or the spiritualist school.

Neither of them the happiest labels perhaps. To put a more positive spin on it, we might call it the present blessing school. That may prejudice the approach to that idea, but the idea is this book is given for a spiritual blessing to the church to describe indeed what is going to happen, but what is going to happen through the whole period of the church, not century by century, but talking generally about the life of the church so that in every century we can be encouraged by this book and waiting for the coming of Christ again. And that's the basic approach that we'll take here. So it's not all in the past, it's not all in the future, it's not revealing century by century what's going to happen in the life of the church, but it is given as pictures to us of what the Lord is doing in history for his people and how that history will culminate in the glorious return of Christ.

So we'll see that more as we go along. Now in terms of this basic approach that I'm going to pursue, there have been a number of books that have done that approach, and amongst the better known of them is some of you will know William Hendrickson's book More Than Conquerors. That was published way back in 1962, and that was one of the more effective promoters of this general approach to the book of the Revelation, and it's a very fine and useful book. More recently we have G.K. Beale's large, impressive commentary, the book of the Revelation, was published in 1999.

If you want to know everything about the book of the Revelation, that's the book for you. It is really a testimony to fantastic scholarship. He talks so much about the background of the book, other kinds of books that may have influenced the book.

It's amazing. It's written by a very fine conservative, Reformed scholar, and just has a huge amount of detail in there. In 2001, Dennis Johnson published a much more accessible and popular book, but again taking the same basic view, entitled The Triumph of the Lamb.

I like that title. It's a great way of thinking about the book, The Triumph of the Lamb. So those are three very useful books to keep in mind if you want to do more study. I'm hoping to exhaust you so you never want to look at the book again.

No, not really. But there's always more to study, isn't there? There's always more to learn. So we're going to take a look at the book, but there are these other resources that can continue to help Hendrickson, Beale, and Johnson. Now you may ask, if we have these three books with which I generally agree and think are really very good books, why am I doing this? Why am I doing my own thing? Well, I was encouraged a number of years ago to study the book.

I didn't even really want to do it. And as I studied it, I realized I was coming up not with a different general approach or a lot of different specific interpretations, but I was coming up with a different outline of the book, a different notion of the structure of the book. And Dennis Johnson is actually a good friend of mine. We've talked together for decades. And so I went to him and I said, Dennis, I'm really worried about me.

And he said, why are you worried? And I said, because I've come up with my own outline of the Book of the Revelation and surely I must be wrong. And Dennis smiled his wise and pastoral smile and said, everybody has their own outline of the Book of the Revelation.

Why shouldn't you be able to have yours? So with that encouragement, I plunged forward. Now, I'm a church historian. I'm not a New Testament scholar. But I believe, and of course, every crazy who interprets the Book of the Revelation believes he or she has found the unique key.

I don't think I found a unique key, but what I did was to just listen to how the Book of the Revelation presents itself. And what is the very first thing that strikes you as you begin to read the Book of the Revelation? Well, one of the things that strikes you early on is that there are sevens everywhere. You know, you start right out with seven churches, but you're blessed by the seven spirits that are before his throne there. Seven seals and seven plagues. I mean, the sevens go on and on throughout the book. Major sevens, minor sevens, just lots of sevens in the book. And so as I approached this question of the structure of the book, I thought to myself, well, let's look for sevens as we go along. And so you start right out with seven churches, and then you move right on to seven seals.

And I began to say, is this the controlling structure of the book as a whole? And then you discover, well, there are actually sections of the book where there are partial sevens. You start out with one, two, three, and then they stop numbering.

This is appearances of angels. And then you have sections of the book that aren't numbered at all. Chapters 12 into 14 and the last chapters of the book, 17 to the end, there aren't specific sevens. But I asked myself, if seven is so explicitly present in so much of the book, is it possible that these sections that aren't explicitly numbered might still be divided into sevens? And as I pursued that, and as I say, I convinced myself, as I pursued that, I concluded this book really does have seven sections or seven cycles, as I've been calling. So the structure of the book, I'm arguing, is seven sections. And in each of those seven cycles, there are seven sub-points. And I thought to myself, well, if that's true, why aren't those sevens always explicitly labeled? Well, one of the things I discovered from my study of the Psalms is that in Eastern thought, near Eastern thought, they like a little variation.

They don't want everything too repetitive and too much the same. So it wouldn't be surprising if there were slightly different approaches to labeling sections. And then I thought to myself, you know, we're told there are seven letters to seven churches, and we're certainly obviously able to count that there are, in fact, seven letters. But we're not told, here's letter one, here's letter two, here's letter three.

They're not explicitly numbered for us. So I concluded that maybe this approach of seven sections with seven subsections to each one actually is arising from the text and not being imposed on the text. If you look at a lot of other outlines, they go along and then they have to have parentheses and things because things don't quite fit in the way they'd been approaching it. And I don't have any parentheses.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm right, but I think I'll be able to convince you this is a helpful approach. Now, there's one other little variation. What I discovered is that although I think it's pretty clear there are seven sections and seven subsections, some of the cycles have an introduction and some don't. Four have an introduction and three don't. Again, I think that's just artistic variation, but we'll see. We're not going to spend a lot of time talking about structure.

Don't get too nervous about this. But I really do believe, the more I study the Bible, that structure is a huge help to the understanding of meaning. If you understand how a book is put together, it's going to help you see what the particular parts mean. One of the great problems of biblical interpretation in the history of the church has been people who pull a verse out of context.

And then make something of it without enough relating it to its immediate context and the broader context of the Bible. So I hope our approach to structure will help us see more deeply into the meaning of this book. And that will be our aim as we go along. So we'll look at that outline as we move along.

We'll look at the various ways in which that's shown to us. But as we move forward, what we're going to do is, first of all, look at the brief introduction to the whole book, which is really just three verses, the first three verses of the book that I read at our beginning here. And then we'll move into the first cycle, which begins at 1, 4, with the introduction to that cycle. I think a lot of interpreters see those verses after chapter 1, verse 4, as an introduction to the book as a whole.

And whether we see it as an introduction of the cycle or the book as a whole doesn't matter hugely. But I really think I'll be able to convince you this is an introduction to this letter to the churches. And when we see this introduction as prefacing the letter to the churches specifically, it'll help us see what those letters mean a little more. So we're going to look at this and begin to try to understand what the Spirit is saying to the churches. So that introduction of the book as a whole.

There are several elements there that are important that we ought to note and that we ought to take very seriously. And the first part of that is what it tells us about the nature of the book. And it says, this is a revelation. This is the revelation. Now what is a revelation?

In Greek, that word is apocalypsis, from which we get our English word apocalyptic or apocalypse. And what that word really means is an unveiling, a lifting of the veil so we can see and understand. And I think that's very important that this is the way that book begins. It begins not by saying, I'm going to give you a difficult and veiled truth. It begins by saying, the truth I'm going to give you is an unveiling of truth. So it ought to be understandable, right?

We ought to be able to maybe not understand every word, but understand generally what's happening in this book. So this is the revelation of Jesus Christ. And I think what it means there is not so much that it's a revelation from Jesus Christ, although it certainly is that. But what this means primarily is this is a revelation that tells us about Jesus Christ.

It's probably both things, really. This is a revelation that is from Jesus and about Jesus. And we'll see that said a little later, too. This is the testimony of Jesus Christ.

There I think it's more focal. This is the testimony Jesus Christ is bearing to us. This is his word to us. This is his speaking to us.

And it's interesting how that's given to us, isn't it? God speaks to Jesus. Jesus speaks to the angel. The angel speaks to John, and John speaks to us.

All in just this one or two verses. This picture of revelation coming to us and reminding us that when we hear the word of God, we hear it through ministers who have borne it. John ministered the word in writing this book.

The angel and remember the word angel in Greek means messenger. The messenger of God bore witness to John. And the angel saw the eternal word of God who bore witness to him. And Jesus, as he says in John's gospel over and over again, Jesus came bearing the word of his Father. So here we have this invitation to enter in to this revelation that God is giving to his people. The Father through the Son, the Son through the angel, the angel through John, John to us. And the purpose is that we would know what Jesus Christ has been doing, what Jesus Christ has for us, what blessing he has for us. And that's the thing I want to keep at the center of what we're doing, that we look for the way in which this word comes to bless us, to encourage us, to draw us closer to Christ, to make us more faithful.

This is the very heart of what the book is about and what we want to try to see there, and I think we will. So thank you for being here for this first lecture, and we'll next time begin to look more fully in the way in which this book begins. That was Ligonier Teaching Fellow W. Robert Godfrey on the book of Revelation.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. As you heard Dr. Godfrey explain today, this is a book to be understood, not a book to remain hidden. And this study titled Blessed Hope walks you through the book of Revelation, chapter by chapter, clearing away some of the confusion, and you'll hear practical insights from Dr. Godfrey. And it can be yours for your gift of any amount when you make your donation at renewingyourmind.org. We'll send you this three DVD set and give you digital access to all 24 messages as well as the study guide. So give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343. If Jesus were to write a letter to your church, I'm sure people would rush to read it, to study it, and to apply it to their lives. Well, in the book of Revelation, there are seven letters to seven churches, and tomorrow Dr. Godfrey will introduce those letters, what it says to the church today, and how it can be an encouragement for you and I. That's tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .