Jason Locke's Blog

Who is Revelation written for? Does it talk about the end times? How should we interpret it? The Book of Revelation is without doubt one of the Bible's most difficult books. It is filled with apocalyptic material that confuses modern, Western readers. We don't speak in such symbolic language today. To be fair, however, apocalyptic writings were confusing to ancient readers as well. Jewish apocalypticism was wildly popular starting in the mid-second century BC through the late first century AD. While the metaphorical depictions of apocalyptic preaching were not intended to be taken literally, that's exactly what people did. Rereading the ancient prophets like Isaiah, many Jews took the apocalyptic images literally and believed God wanted them to rebel against Rome. The disaster that followed with General Titus's pillaging of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple nearly caused the extermination of the Jewish people. Clearly, they had misinterpreted the apocalypt...

Out of the 66 books in the Christian Bible, none has been abused and misused more than the Book of Revelation. It seems to be such a hard book to understand. But this isn't a new problem. Even Augustine of Hippo, writing in the early 5th century, had this to say about the Book of Revelation: "Now in this book called the Apocalypse there are, to be sure, many obscure statements, designed to exercise the mind" (from  City of God ). Not every ancient Christian believed this highly allegorical writing deserved a spot in the canonized list of authorized writings. But find its way into the Bible it did. And so we now turn our attention to it. Revelation belongs in a genre of literature called apocalyptic writings. It's a strange world for us in Western society today. We find a few other examples of similar material in the Bible (Zech 9-14, Ezek 38-39, Isa 24-27 and the Book of Daniel), but this style of writing was especially common in the century or two leading up to...