Preface

For a lot of believers, Revelation is the book they skip. Too many beasts, too many bowls, too many numbers that never seem to add up. Somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that this last book of the Bible is a locked box, that nobody can really understand it, and that the safest thing is to leave it alone.

I want to push back on that from the very first page, because the book itself makes an extraordinary promise to the person who will actually engage with it: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it, because the time is near” (Revelation 1:3). This is the only book in the Bible that opens with a blessing pronounced simply on the reader and the hearer. That alone should settle the question of whether it is worth our time.

This book is a verse-by-verse study. My aim is to walk through Revelation carefully, a phrase at a time, explaining what the words meant to the people who first received them, showing how the Old Testament stands behind almost every image, and drawing out what it asks of us today. I am not interested in sensational date-setting or in matching prophecy to this morning’s headlines. Jesus Himself said that no one knows the day or the hour. I am interested in understanding the text, and in meeting the Person the text is written to reveal.

A word about method, because how you read Revelation determines what you find in it. There are four historic ways of approaching the book, and Chapter 1 lays all four out so you can recognize them when you meet them in a commentary or a conference. This study follows the futurist approach: it takes Revelation as a genuine prophecy of things still ahead of us, events right before the return of Christ, at His return, and after it, and it reads the book literally, which is not the same as reading it flatly. When a first-century man is shown a reality he has no vocabulary for, he reaches for symbols, and the symbols point to things that really happen. Our job is to work out what they point to. Alongside that, when we come to the seven letters of chapters 2 and 3, we will also notice a secondary pattern that many teachers have seen there, a sweep of church history from the apostles to the present, held loosely, as illustration rather than proof.

The plan of the book is simple. This first volume covers the groundwork and the opening movement:

• Chapter 1 builds the foundation: the genre, the four interpretive approaches, the case for reading prophecy literally, the resolution of the suffering Messiah and the conquering King, and the way Revelation is organized.
• Chapter 2 walks through Revelation 1, the vision of the risen and glorified Christ, which is where the whole book begins and to which it keeps returning.
• Chapter 3 covers Revelation 2 and 3, the seven letters that the Lord dictates to seven real congregations and, through them, to the whole church of every age.

The chapters that follow, from the throne room of Revelation 4 to the river of life in Revelation 22, are outlined in the table of contents and will be developed in the same way.

If you take nothing else from this study, take this: the question Revelation keeps asking, from its first verse to its last, is not “do you understand the symbols?” but “do you know who Jesus is?” Everything else in the book, every seal, every trumpet, every bowl, is simply this same Jesus finishing what He came to do.

So let us lay the foundation, and then begin.