Navigating the Apocalypse

Chapter 1. Introduction: How to Read Revelation

Before we open a single verse of Revelation, there is groundwork to lay, and it is not optional. This book has been read in wildly different ways by sincere people, and if you do not know which lens a teacher is looking through, you can be carried off into something that is not scriptural at all. So think of this chapter as the foundation. Get it right, and the rest of the study will hold together. Skip it, and the beasts and bowls and numbers will feel like a locked room with no key.

The book itself, in its third verse, promises something remarkable to the person who will 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). No other book in the Bible opens with a blessing pronounced simply on the reader and the hearer. We will look closely at that verse in the next chapter. For now, let it do its work as motivation. This book was written to be understood and to be lived, not admired from a safe distance.

What Kind of Book Is This?

Revelation belongs to a category scholars call apocalyptic literature. In plain terms, an apocalyptic book is a work of prophecy with a particular focus: the events surrounding the end of world history. Revelation tells us three things. It tells us what will happen right before Jesus returns. It tells us what will happen when He returns. And it tells us what will happen after He returns and reigns. That is why the book has held readers spellbound for two thousand years. Everyone wants to know how the story ends, and this is the book that tells us.

One popular misconception is worth clearing up immediately, because it tangles up later chapters. Most people grow up assuming there is a single climactic battle in the end times, the Battle of Armageddon. There are actually two. One erupts near the beginning of the tribulation, when one of the riders of the four horses goes out and war breaks loose on the earth (Revelation 6:3–4). The other is Armageddon itself, at the very end, when Christ returns in glory and ends the rebellion with a word (Revelation 19:11–21). Keep those two apart in your mind and a great deal of confusion never gets started.

Four Ways People Read Revelation

Theologians have divided into four major camps over how to interpret this book. You need to know all four, not because we are going to follow all four, but so that when you pick up a commentary or sit under a prophecy seminar, you can recognize the approach standing behind it.

1. The historicist approach treats Revelation as a pre-written map of the entire course of church history, from the apostles to the end of the world. A historicist might say the seven seals of chapters 6 and 7 depict the barbarian invasions that toppled the Western Roman Empire, and the locusts of chapter 9 represent the armies that assaulted the Eastern Empire. This was once the majority Protestant view. It was the dominant Protestant interpretation for centuries, and it produced several massive, landmark commentaries that tried to line up every symbol with a datable event. Most Protestants moved away from it roughly two and a half centuries ago, with the notable exception of the Seventh-day Adventists, because these judgments read far more naturally as a still-future, concentrated seven-year period than as veiled European history.

2. The preterist approach holds that the prophecies of Revelation found their fulfillment shortly after the book was written. In this view, the Great Tribulation is not a future event at all but a set of events that took place roughly forty years after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Preterists read chapters 4 through 19 as symbolic language describing that period, all of it culminating in AD 70, when Rome destroyed Jerusalem and its temple.

3. The spiritual approach, also called the allegorical or idealist approach, remains common in contemporary interpretation. Its adherents do not read the prophecy as predicting specific future events at all. They read it as a way of teaching timeless spiritual lessons about the conflict between good and evil, lessons that apply equally in any century. In this view, the beast rising out of the sea in chapter 13 is not a prediction of a coming individual, the Antichrist. It is a symbol for oppressive political power in general, a Nero or a Hitler or a Stalin, in any age.

4. The futurist approach, held by the majority of contemporary evangelical scholars and the view this study follows, holds that John was shown things that are still ahead of us: events right before Christ’s return, at His return, and after it. Futurists read Revelation literally, which is not the same as reading it un-symbolically. Picture trying to describe a modern helicopter, or a tank, or a nuclear blast, using only the vocabulary of two thousand years ago. You would have to reach for images your hearers could grasp within their own frame of reference. Futurists argue that Revelation works the same way: the symbolism is the packaging, chosen because it was the only vocabulary available to a first-century writer, and the reader’s task is to discern what the symbols point to. When the second trumpet sounds and a third of the sea becomes blood (Revelation 8:8–9), that is a real, physical judgment described in ancient terms.

Knowing the four approaches, we can understand why people who love the same Bible arrive at such different readings of this one book. As we walk through it, we will approach Revelation on the conviction that John wrote it to tell believers what is going to happen in the end times, and that it should therefore be read literally. Why literally? There are three lines of evidence.

Why This Study Is Futurist: Three Reasons

First, history teaches us to read prophecy literally.

Every prophecy of Christ’s first coming was fulfilled with striking literalness. It was fulfilled exactly as the prophets said it would be.

Isaiah predicted that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, and He was (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:22–23). Micah prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and He was (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:3–6). Hosea’s words, read as prophecy, pointed to the Messiah being called out of Egypt, and Jesus was carried into Egypt as a child and later brought back (Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:15). The details pile up. He was abandoned by His disciples. He was beaten and treated cruelly. His hands and feet were pierced. Soldiers gambled for His clothing. Not one of His bones was broken. He was crucified between two criminals (see Psalm 22; Isaiah 53; Zechariah 12:10). Consider the piercing of the hands and feet in particular. Crucifixion was not a Jewish form of execution. In the era when that psalm was written, capital punishment among the Jews was by stoning. For a death by crucifixion to be described in detail centuries before the Romans made it common, and then for the Messiah to die exactly that way, is powerful evidence that prophecy is meant to be taken at its word.

If every prophecy of the first coming landed literally, it is only reasonable to expect the prophecies of the second coming to land literally too. And Jesus said so plainly: “they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:30). That is a physical, visible return. The angels confirmed it at the ascension: as the disciples watched Him taken up into a cloud, two men in white said, “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way that you have seen him going into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Paul describes the same event in unmistakably concrete terms: “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the archangel’s voice, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are still alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17), a moment anticipated already in 1 Thessalonians 1:10, where believers “wait for his Son from heaven.” Such specific language leaves no room for reducing the return of Christ to a purely inward, spiritual experience. It is true that Christ lives in the believer now by His Spirit, but His promise to come back concerns a real, bodily reappearance on the earth.

Second, God stakes His own uniqueness on predictive accuracy.

In Isaiah, God sets Himself apart from every false god by one particular ability: “I am God, and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from long ago what is not yet done, saying: my plan will take place, and I will do all my will” (Isaiah 46:9–10). Only God can announce the future in detail and then bring it to pass exactly as He said, down to the smallest particulars.

We see that predictive accuracy across four thousand years of Scripture, and it is so precise that skeptical scholars have argued the Book of Daniel must have been written after the events it describes, because its predictions are simply too exact to be genuine foresight. But the historical evidence supports Daniel’s own claim: those prophecies were given centuries before their fulfillment. How could Daniel be that accurate? By revelation. God reveals the future to His friends, and through His Word we are let in on what is coming. As we move through Revelation, we can rest assured that the events it unveils will unfold exactly as God foretold.

Third, the whole book turns on a single fact: Jesus is coming back.

“If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). Every other prophecy in Revelation orbits that one promise. The seals, the trumpets, the bowls, the beast, the harlot, the final battle, all of it is the machinery around the return of the King who will finish what was left unfinished at His first coming.

One Messiah, Two Appearances

Here is the piece that makes the whole book click into place.

When Jesus came the first time, He fulfilled only half of what the Old Testament prophets said about the Messiah. On one side stands Isaiah 53, the portrait of a suffering servant: despised, pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, led like a lamb to the slaughter, cut off from the land of the living. On the other side stand Zechariah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, describing a conquering King who rules the nations and reigns from Jerusalem. The two portraits seemed so opposed that some first-century rabbis actually taught there would be two messiahs, one humble and suffering, one royal and victorious.

The resolution is not two messiahs. It is two appearances of one Messiah. And the earliest disciples missed it even after the resurrection. In Acts 1:6 they are still asking, “Lord, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?” Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not correct the expectation itself. He never tells them there will be no earthly kingdom. He corrects only the timing: “It is not for you to know times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). Then He is taken up, and the angels promise He will return the same way He left. His first advent fulfilled the suffering-servant prophecies. His second advent will fulfill the conquering-King prophecies. Revelation is the book of that second appearance. It does not replace the gentle Savior we already know. It completes the picture of who He is.

The Fig Tree and the Rebirth of Israel

During His earthly ministry, on the Mount of Olives, the disciples asked Jesus about “the sign of your coming and of the end of the age” (Matthew 24:3). In the discourse that follows, Jesus does two things at once. He describes conditions leading up to His return, and He also foretells a nearer event: the destruction of the Jewish temple and the scattering of Israel. That nearer prophecy came true with unnerving precision. Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by Rome in AD 70, and the Jewish people were dispersed across the world for centuries.

But in the middle of that same discourse, Jesus offers a sign of hope, and He draws it from a fig tree: “Now learn this parable from the fig tree: As soon as its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near. In the same way, when you see all these things, recognize that he is near, at the door” (Matthew 24:32–33). The fig tree is a recurring biblical image for the nation of Israel. When the long-dormant tree begins to bud, when Israel revives after its long winter, it signals that the return of Christ is near.

The same hope runs through the prophets. Ezekiel is carried in a vision to a valley full of dry bones, and watches as breath enters them and they stand up “an intensely large army”; the LORD tells him plainly, “These bones are the whole house of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:10–11). Isaiah asks, “Who has ever heard of such a thing? Who has ever seen such things? Can a land be born in one day, or a nation be delivered in an instant? Yet as soon as Zion was in labor, she gave birth to her sons” (Isaiah 66:8). After nearly two millennia of dispersion and persecution, against every reasonable expectation, Israel was reestablished as a sovereign nation on May 14, 1948. The dormant fig tree began to leaf out.

A caution belongs right here. I am not setting dates, and neither should you. Scripture itself is clear that no one knows the day or the hour, and Jesus said even He, in His earthly ministry, did not know it (Mark 13:32). The point is not a countdown clock. The point is that the stage is set. The conditions the prophets described are, for the first time in twenty centuries, in place, which means the Lord could call His church to Himself at any moment.

How the Book Is Organized

Revelation moves largely in chronological order, but not perfectly, and that trips up a lot of readers. From time to time John pauses the forward motion for what we will call an interlude: a parenthetical section that supplies background, reaching backward or running alongside the main events rather than advancing the clock. Chapter 12, for example, steps out of the seal sequence to show us who is sealed and who is saved before the sequence resumes. Chapter 17 reaches all the way back to explain the conflict behind the conflict. When we hit an interlude, it will be flagged. Force every interlude into strict sequence and the whole book will seem to contradict itself. Recognize them for what they are, and the timeline holds together beautifully, from the seals, to the trumpets, to the bowls, to Armageddon.

There is also a structure to the book that is worth carrying in your head, because every major section unveils another facet of Jesus:

If you catch every seal, trumpet, and bowl in this book and miss Jesus, you have missed the book.

One more image will help you feel how the end-time events move. Picture a long row of dominoes, standing and waiting. Each domino is a distinct event, laid out in advance according to a master plan. Nothing happens until the first one is tipped. But once it falls, the rest go down in a rapid, unbroken chain, one right after another, with no space between them. That is the picture Revelation gives of the tribulation period. For a long time the pieces stand still. Then the first seal is broken, and the events fall in swift succession until, seven years later, Jesus Christ returns. We will see this in the text itself when we reach Revelation 1:1, in the word translated “soon.”

Bridge to Chapter 2

With the foundation in place, we are almost ready to open the book itself. But not quite yet. John did not invent the vocabulary he uses to describe what he saw: beasts with ten horns, a tribulation measured to the day, a bridegroom who comes for his bride, a temple desecrated by a self-exalting ruler. That language comes from somewhere, and a reader who meets it cold, in the middle of Revelation’s visions, will miss half of what it means.

So before we walk through Revelation’s own chapters, this book will spend five chapters laying the groundwork Revelation assumes we already have: two chapters in the book of Daniel, whose kingdoms, beasts, and seventy sevens of years supply Revelation’s outline and its clock; a chapter on the rapture, the catching up of the church that Paul describes in unmistakable detail and that shapes how we will read the church’s sudden absence from Revelation’s later visions; and two chapters on the Olivet Discourse, where Jesus Himself, days before His crucifixion, sat on a hillside above Jerusalem and told His disciples plainly what was coming and how to watch for it. Revelation borrows its imagery and its timeline from all three of these sources, so learning to read them first means that when the book finally opens with a door standing open in heaven, we will already recognize the language being spoken. That is where Chapter 2 begins.

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