2 Cents

This year my only New Year's resolution was to start (and finish!) an in depth study of the book of Revelation.  At the beginning of the year I started going verse-by-verse through the book with the help of some of the top New Testament scholars and their commentaries and I resolved not to move on to the next verse until I had a firm and confident grasp on the previous one.

I thought it would take me a couple months.  Well, it's the middle of May and I'm just now on chapter 20.

The process has been absolutely fascinating.  There are a number of things I've learned over the last few months that I think are worth sharing so I've decided to transfer it into a series of blog posts for anyone that might be interested.

The first thing I've learned is this:  Revelation is unique compared to other books of the Bible.

Most books of the Bible are written in such a way that any ordinary person picking them up should be able to understand the meaning of the author.  Revelation, however, is intentionally cryptic because of its genre.  Revelation can be categorized in the genre of Apocalyptic Literature, something you just don't see today.  Since no one writes in that genre anymore, it can be extremely confusing to read it.

Because of all of this you're not going to get most of the meaning out of Revelation unless you have some help from someone who knows what they're doing - like a New Testament scholar.

I know we're so used to hearing "The Bible is for everyone," and that's true, but I mean do you understand what Gog & Magog is (Rev. 20:8)?  Or the number of the beast, 666 (13:18)?  Or why Jesus is depicted as having seven eyes and seven horns (5:6)?

So the first thing I've learned from Revelation is that it is steeped in symbolism and we all need help to uncover what John intended those symbols to mean.  In fact, there's so much symbolism in Revelation that in the whole 22 chapters it is rare for John to speak literally.  A literal interpretation of any verse is the exception, not the norm in this book.

If you're like me and you've read Revelation numerous times without understanding a large percentage of the book, hopefully these next few blog posts will shed some light for you on this difficult part of the Bible.