by Zack Hunt
The unveiling
While Revelation may come at the end of the New Testament, apocalyptic theology was central to Christianity from the very beginning. The focus of Jesus’ ministry was the dawning of the kingdom of God and the unveiling, or revealing, of the truth about what that kingdom looked like. As I mentioned earlier, that is, after all, what apocalypse means: “an unveiling.” This is exactly what John is doing in his apocalypse: he’s unveiling the truth of the state of the world both now and in the soon-to-come future.
Jesus’ ministry was also apocalyptic, although his unveiling of the truth was directed toward the religious institutions of his day rather than the church, as it did not yet exist. But it is that calling to account, and Christ’s overall call for repentance, that has many scholars viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. He didn’t tell stories of dragons and talking scrolls like John did. Rather, he is seen by those scholars as an apocalyptic prophet because he believed the last days were at hand. He went around warning people about the end, preparing them for judgment day by calling on his followers to repent and promising justice for the oppressed.
The letters of the apostle Paul also reveal an apocalyptic worldview.1 His letters disclose a man convinced that Jesus was about to return any day and a theology thoroughly shaped by that conviction. One example of that conviction is his view of marriage. Paul didn’t seem to think marriage was all that important, and even advised people to stay single if they could (1 Corinthians 7:1-7). Paul wrote this not because he was opposed to the institution of marriage but because he wanted Christians to focus the entirety of their time and attention on preparing for what he thought was the imminent return of Jesus.
But once again, apocalypse doesn’t necessarily refer to the end of the world. Through modern movies, books, comics, and, ironically, even the church, we’ve become conditioned to equate apocalypse with the end. But again, translated literally, apocalypse simply means “an unveiling.” That’s the key point of Revelation. For all its talk about the end, its focus is on the unveiling of truth to the people of God. This truth had just as much to do with their present as it did with their future. In that sense, John isn’t just writing apocalyptic literature. He’s also following in the rich tradition of the Old Testament prophets.
Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Of course Revelation is Bible prophecy! It’s, like, the prophetic book of the Bible.” The thing is, it is and it isn’t. Revelation is definitely in the prophetic tradition of Scripture—just not in the way you’re probably thinking or folks like Jack Van Impe would have you believe.
Prophesying about the present
Unlike the colloquial use of the word prophecy today, biblical prophecy has very little to do with predicting the future. Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah did warn about the future, but not like Nostradamus. They were, on behalf of God, issuing warnings about what would happen if the people of God didn’t repent from their wicked ways and restore justice to the land. The prophets weren’t fortune-tellers. They were warning the people of God about what would happen in the future if they did or didn’t act a certain way in the present. Which is why biblical prophecy is about the present as much as or more than it is about the future.
This is exactly the dynamic we see in Revelation. John begins his apocalypse with a word from Jesus to seven then-present-day churches (Revelation 1–3). He’s not telling their fortune; he’s giving them instructions for how to live in the here and now. How they do that directly affects what is to come in the future. But the focus of John’s prophetic words from Jesus are on the present, just as they would be from any Old Testament prophet.
In fact, John explicitly declared himself to be a prophet in the final chapter of Revelation (see Revelation 22:9). Several times throughout his apocalypse, he draws from the language and imagery of the Old Testament prophets. The words of Isaiah are referenced repeatedly, most directly in Revelation 21, which draws from Isaiah 65:17: “See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind” (NIV). A command for John to eat the scroll is likely drawn directly from Ezekiel 2:8-10. There are echoes of Hosea marrying the prostitute Gomer in John’s invocation of a prostitute to describe the people’s idolatry (Revelation 17–18). And there are also echoes of Amos’s poignant cry to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24) when John describes the song of the 144,000 sealed servants of God as being like “the roar of rushing water” (Revelation 14:2 NIV).
Revelation also comes back, time and time again, to the contrast between true and false prophets. The warning against false prophets comes up repeatedly in the letters to the churches before becoming a key part of the apocalyptic imagery later on, when the false prophet of the beast appears. The reason for this concern about false prophets is because John’s task in writing Revelation was to reveal, or unveil, the truth. After all, that’s what an apocalypse is all about. False prophets lead people astray from the truth, but real prophets like John proclaim the truth about God. That truth is a call to repentance and justice lest the people of God suffer judgment.
So rather than being biblical versions of Nostradamus, the prophets were more like your mom when you were a teenager, warning you to get off your phone before you lose privileges to it forever. You may end up losing your phone, but it wasn’t because your mom was psychic. It was because she warned you what was going to happen if you didn’t listen, and because she had the power to ensure those consequences came to pass, they did. The same thing was true for Israel and the prophets—except that God, being God, could ensure that those consequences would come to pass no matter how smooth a talker you thought you were or how sneaky you thought you could be by stealing your phone back while your mom was sleeping. In other words, biblical prophecy isn’t about predicting a set-in-stone future. It’s about what will happen in the future if the words of the prophet are not heeded in the present. Nothing here is about the fortune-telling power of the prophet; everything is about the power of God.
The key to Revelation’s place in the tradition of biblical prophecy, then, is not in its ability to predict future events but in its often-overlooked call to repentance, and its promises of liberation and justice. Revelation is, if it is nothing else, a sustained critique of Rome, for which the ancient enemy of Israel, Babylon, plays the role of stand-in. Rome is Babylon, the great oppressor, not just of the people of God, but of anyone in the ancient world who stood in its way.
But Israel had another ancient oppressor: Egypt. For John’s first audience, the parallels between Revelation and Exodus also would have been striking, as both tell the tale of liberation from oppression by way of plagues that afflict the afflicters in order to set the afflicted free. But plagues aren’t the only invocation of Exodus in Revelation. In fact, the entire section on the seven trumpets and bowls of wrath can be seen as reimagining the story of Exodus when God besieged Egypt with plagues until the people of Israel were liberated.2 Exodus is also invoked in the opening chapter of Revelation, when God is described as “who is and who was and who is to come,” an echo of God’s name as revealed to Moses: “I am who I am” (Revelation 1:4; Exodus 3:14). The prayers of the people of God for deliverance in Revelation are just like the cries of the people of God in Exodus 2 and 3, as is the reference to “mourning and crying and pain” (Revelation 21:4), which likewise conjures up the cries of Israel in Egyptian bondage.
Retelling the story of God’s faithfulness, and reminding people that they follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who brought them out of Egypt, are recurring themes throughout the Old Testament in both the Prophets and elsewhere. But as an apocalyptic prophet, John goes even further. John doesn’t simply retell the story of the Exodus for the church; he takes on the mantle of Moses and attacks the system of oppression under which they were living. Calling out injustice was a key task of any Old Testament prophet, who didn’t just warn the people to repent o
f their sins but also offered hope in the form of a promise that God was already at work, breaking into their present to create a new future.
Justice revealed
Nearly every apocalyptic image John uses in reference to Babylon (that is, Rome) is a direct attack on the imperial system of oppression and injustice of his day. The beast comes from Babylon not as a special, set-apart figure but as the embodiment of a system and empire that is fundamentally antithetical to the way of Christ. The way of Jesus is love of enemies, peace, plenty, and life eternal. The way of Rome, or Babylon, is “conquest, war, famine, and death.”3
In the kingdom of Jesus, everyone shares what they have and none go without, for all are equal (Acts 2:42-47). In the kingdom of Caesar, as John describes particularly with the third horse of the apocalypse, economic injustice reigns and the chasm between rich and poor is not only immense; it is unbridgeable. Likewise, when John describes the great whore of Babylon, he’s attacking not prostitution or women but the economic injustice of the Roman Empire, which got rich by preying on the weak and vulnerable throughout the empire.4
Like the story of Exodus, Revelation promises that justice and liberation are coming, that those Rome has oppressed and exploited will soon be liberated, healed, and welcomed into the promised kingdom of God. It’s that promise of justice that should further reshape our understanding of Revelation, moving it away from book of apocalyptic terror and toward a message of hope. Being able to see that promise of hope for justice in Revelation is a challenge for most of us. If this is the first time you’ve thought about the book of Revelation in terms of things like economic and social justice, you’re not alone. That was certainly the case for me, even long after I gave up my addiction to Jack Van Impe Presents. Back when I thought Revelation was a road map to the future, if someone had tried to tell me that it was actually a prophetic call to justice, I would have assumed they were on drugs or, worse, were a godless liberal.
As my old, rapture-loving self would have done, you may even consider such a reading to be eisegesis: that is, a reading of a text that projects one’s own presuppositions and biases onto it in order to find a meaning one wants to be there but isn’t actually supported by the text itself. If that’s the case, trust me; I get it. It’s hard to think about biblical prophecy, Revelation, and the apocalypse as anything other than gloom and doom about the future. But the reason we struggle to see such a prophetic call to justice isn’t the obscurity of the text itself, the graphic imagery, or even the dispensationalist conditioning many of us were raised with, although those things surely play a role. The reason most of us struggle to see Revelation as a prophetic call to justice is because we are blinded by our own privilege.
It’s hard to see the cry for liberation and justice when we have no need for liberation and justice in our own lives. That’s not to say that because we’re not dirt poor or from a developing country that we haven’t been wronged in life, haven’t had to struggle, and aren’t in need of some sort of justice. But if you’re anything like me and you grew up as a straight, white, middle-class conservative Christian in the United States, the idea that Revelation is about liberation, justice, and transformation in the here and now and not a secret road map to your mansion in heaven? Well, it can sound as bizarre as a ten-headed beast or a guy eating a scroll.
The royal life
The theologian Walter Brueggemann would call this life of privilege “the royal tradition.”5 Not because any of us are royalty, but because relative to our neighbors in other parts of the world or even just across town, our lives are more akin to the biblical kings than to their subjects, in whose shoes we typically place ourselves when we read the Bible. Brueggemann argues that when we read the Bible it actually takes less imagination than we might assume to see ourselves in the life of an Old Testament king like Saul or David even though, on the surface, their lives may seem radically foreign to our own.6 But if we live in North America, chances are our lives have a lot more in common with royalty like Saul and David than we realize. For example, where our next meal will come from, or if it will come at all, is not something most of us give much thought to. In the context of the world of the Old Testament, that fact puts us far closer to the life of Saul or David than to the lives of their subjects. The same is true for access to things like medicine and education. The degree of medical care and education we take for granted would have been reserved for royalty in Saul and David’s day.
We don’t have to search too hard to see how this sort of privilege of the royal tradition exhibits itself in our lives today. Countless Americans are inoculated against seeing the suffering of our neighbors and having basic empathy for them, not to mention the urge to serve. Take, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement. It arose out of a long, painful history of black men, women, and children being killed both at the hands of police officers and extrajudicial mobs, who were often white and often have not been held accountable in any meaningful way. Protests, including marches through the streets and sit-ins on the highway, have been held across the country. Those unaffected by the tragedies, including white people of varying degrees of socioeconomic standing, often dismiss the cries of the Black Lives Matter protesters as nothing more than complaining. Little credence is given to what the protesters are saying, because the lives of those dismissing their cries are so far removed from the life experience of the protesters, are so privileged in comparison, that the separation is almost as stark as that of King Saul and the people of Israel. Even the word protest seems almost dismissive of what is happening because they’re not simply expressing disapproval; they’re fighting for their lives.
Or consider the Trump administration’s decision to separate immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Although the decision was met with horror and outrage across the United States and around the world, the response among the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump was noticeably different.7 Some have tepidly criticized the practice, conceding that there was probably a better way. But a life of ease has kept them from empathizing with the plight of the families involved, and endless opportunities in the States keep them from seeing that the reason so many entered the country improperly was not out of a disregard for law and order, but out of desperation and a willingness to do whatever they had to do to rescue themselves, or at least their children, from violence, oppression, and hopelessness.
Sadly, these are but two prominent examples of what is too often a daily way of life, a life of taken-for-granted, oblivious privilege that allows too many people—mostly white, American Christians like me—to go about thinking our lives are normative and that anyone who deviates from our sense of normalcy must be doing so for malicious and sinful reasons. This is why Revelation is so hard for so many of us to understand, particularly as a prophetic call to justice. As New Testament scholar Barbara Rossing explains, “Victims of injustice have a special window into these stories that affluent Christians cannot fathom. Like the plagues of Exodus, the stories of Revelation speak most clearly to people who struggle under oppression—to ‘God’s little people,’ as South African Allan Boesak calls them. For the rich and comfortable, the plagues sound vengeful and terrifying. But to people suffering under oppressions the plagues are good news because they herald the end of the oppression itself.”8
The Latin American theologian Pablo Richard goes even further:
Cosmic agonies of this kind, however, are not “natural” disasters but rather the direct consequences of the structure of domination and oppression: the poor die in floods because they are pushed out of safe places and forced to live alongside rivers; in earthquakes and hurricanes the poor lose their flimsy houses because they are poor and cannot build better ones; plagues, such as cholera and tuberculosis, fall primarily on the poor because they are malnourished. . . . Hence the plagues of the trumpets and bowls in Revelation refer not to “natural” disasters, but to the agonies of history that the empire itself causes and suffers; they are ag
onies of the beast caused by its very idolatry and lawlessness. Today the plagues of Revelation are rather the disastrous results of ecological destruction, the arms race, irrational consumerism, the idolatrous logic of the market, and the irrational use of technology and of natural resources.9
In other words, dispensationalists have one thing right. The book of Revelation is perhaps more relevant today than it ever has been—just not for the reasons they suggest.
Relevant Revelation
Revelation is relevant today but not because of events unfolding in Israel. Revelation is relevant today because the plagues it warns about are all around us. There are no winged beasts flying through the skies, or horsemen riding on pale horses, but the plagues they bring with them—famine, poverty, economic injustice, ecological disaster, death—are all very real today.
The reason some of us look for those beasts in the pages of the Left Behind series, rather than recognizing them in Revelation for what they are, is that they’re not a reality for most of us. Privileged people like me turn to the fictionalized version of struggle and pain because we can’t relate to the epic struggle to survive and the pain of oppression that gave birth to Revelation. Most of us don’t worry about where our next meal will come from, or whether our home will disappear because of rising ocean levels. The four horsemen who bring death and destruction (Revelation 6:1-8) are an apocalyptic fantasy for most of us living in places like the United States. For countless people around the world, they are a daily reality.
