Revelation Rumors - Take 1

This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things which must happen soon, which he sent and made known [signified] by his angel to his servant, John, (Revelation 1:1)

I have spent many months immersing myself in close study of the book of Revelation and as a result it has both been transformed in my thinking and has become very vibrant, exciting and alive to me.

After being invited to present what I am discovering at various venues recently, I feel that it would be beneficial to share more in writing what is coming to light for me. Far too long this book has languished under harsh views of interpreters and prognosticators who rely on its symbols and frightening language to distort the beautiful revelation of God's heart through His Son Jesus Christ. Yet if we took seriously the very first verse of this book and allowed it to be the primary criteria by which we read the rest of the book, this would not have to be the case.

This has been what has made the most difference in my recent study. A few years ago God challenged me to reexamine this book from a new perspective, from the perspective of heaven and of Jesus. The very first line here declares that this book is a revealing of Jesus, so it only makes sense that whatever I conclude in my reading of this book should in no way conflict with what Jesus reveals to us about God. To do so is to violate the premise set out in the very first phrase of the book.

When I went through this book for myself with new eyesight using this paradigm, I was and continue to be amazed at how incredibly beautiful and powerful this book is when shed of the dark views of God that permeates nearly all of religion. Rather than having to twist and force passages to fit together based on conflicting ideas, I now find a beautiful harmony and stunning insights all through this book. This has so energized my thinking and aroused my passion that at times I feel like I might explode if I cannot find someone with which to share what is pouring out of its pages.

I have hundreds of pages of notes I have accumulated over recent years from my studies, yet each time I come to look at any part of it again, it seems so fresh and new and I seldom take time to review what I have written in the past. Yet it is important to not lose sight of what has been discovered earlier, so I will make an attempt to collate things old and new (for me at least) to condense what I have found so far as well as to share the never-ceasing new revelations that keep pouring out nearly every day.

Two Keys

Full disclosure alert here. I am not a unbiased reader of Scripture. That is true for everyone, so maybe it would be more accurate to simply relate what my bias is presently. The last half of my life has been marked by radical changes in my perspective of what God is like and how He feels about sinners in particular. Having been raised in a very fundamentalist home and 'disciplined in the fear of the Lord' as some put it, my view of God was of a powerful deity up in the sky ever looking critically at my every move, thought and feeling with the sole purpose of finding any fault whereby I could be excluded from going to heaven. I know this sounds harsh, and my parents would have recoiled in horror if they had heard this was how I felt. Yet I have to be honest about this, even though at the time I would have been surprised had someone told this to me directly. Nevertheless, this view of a hyper-critical God constantly threatening to punish me for the slightest infraction of His laws, shaped my personality and character and made it impossible to love Him, even though that too was part of His demands.

It took many years and great persistence on the part of the Holy Spirit to begin to soften and challenge these rigid views of a terrifying God, keen to put me in flames of hell while I was desperate to be good enough to qualify for heaven. The real truth is that God is not at all like how I imagined Him to be growing up, and over many years through various events He began to make inroads into my thinking, challenging me to give Him permission to define Himself directly to me instead of clinging to what I had imagined growing up. The truth I later came to see in Romans 2 is truly the power that alone is effective to dismantle fear and dark views of God, contrary to what I thought for much of my life.

Or do you despise the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and patience, not knowing that the goodness [kindness] of God leads you to repentance? (Romans 2:4)

Let me disclose something else that may become obvious along the way. What I discovered to my amazement as God began unraveling years of distortions about Him that kept me afraid of Him and unable to believe in His love, was that nearly every religious word has been hijacked by religion and its definition supplanted with counterfeit ones. This shocked me at first, yet the more I saw how this was true the more determined I became to seek out the original definitions and replace the false ones in my head with the right ones. This has resulted in untold positive effects on every part of my life as I slowly have come to see light where before there had only been fear, threatenings and hopelessness.

Over time as I increased my awareness of the true meanings of words I was reading, I discovered that the Bible was coming alive for me and that passages I dreaded reading now conveyed entirely new and fresh insights that were often opposite to how I had heard them used all my life. So if I sound like a broken record (that's a dated term isn't it), constantly rehashing what words actually mean, you can know why. For if we don't understand the real meaning of the words we are using, it will be impossible to know the truth that can set us free from fear, which is one major reason Jesus came to save us.

So I start with a fresh definition of the word repentance. I used to imagine it was something like groveling in guilt or something along that line. Then I learned it simply means to change the way I think. That's it. To repent simply means to perceive reality very differently than how I used to see it. But the kicker here is very opposite to what I long assumed growing up, for the primary motivations used to try to get me to conform to the law, keep the rules, be a good boy, etc., were threats of punishment, fear or inflicted suffering. So imagine my surprise when the true message of this verse finally struck me as odd because it was so opposite of what I had always assumed.

It is God's kindness, not threats of punishment or enticements of rewards, that alone is effective to get anyone to change the way they think, especially about God and His disposition towards them. This is key when coming to a study of the book of Revelation. For if we cling to views that this book is about an angry God running out of patience and unleashing angry outbursts and harsh punishments against recalcitrant sinners, it will be impossible to glimpse the truth that this is in fact a revelation of Jesus Christ. Anything that deviates from this violates the very first line of the book and cannot be trusted.

What I have come to see is that when a person begins to read this book, they must not overlook the two keys waiting at the entrance that empowers one to unlock everything else in the book. If we don't pick up the keys and keep them close, we can't expect to make sense of anything else here. So next time we will look more closely at what constitutes these two keys.