I’m going to spend a few posts explaining what the book of “Revelation” is actually “revealing,” but first I want to explain what it is NOT revealing.  It is not revealing what is to happen soon, in our own day, as fundamentalist readers (just about the only ones who read the book in any detail) have repeatedly claimed (insisted!) for the past 200 years.  Just last week there was another fundamentalist scare: the rapture is gonna happen soon!  Hey, read the book of Revelation, it SAYS so!!

Yeah, no it ain’t gonna happen soon and no, Revelation does not say so.  It’s about something else.

Who knew?   Well, critical scholars for one.  And anyone who follows all these doomsday predictions and predictors for another.

Here’s (part of) what I say about it in my book Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (Simon & Schuster, 2022).

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It can be amusing for non-fundamentalist readers who first encounter modern prophecy books (which are written to show how the Bible predicts how the end is coming soon in OUR time) to notice how many of these books begin by indicating that all of their fundamentalist predecessors had been wrong: they were too precise in picking a date, or they misinterpreted this or that passage, or they were advancing their own agendas instead of listening to what the Bible actually predicts.  But NOW, they say, in THIS book we will see what the signs are definitely pointing to.

Often the author will insist these are not his own hypotheses but are the teachings of the Bible itself.  The implication is clear: if you disagree with the author’s claims, you are disagreeing with God.

The invariable thesis of all of these books – that the Bible was not written for its own time but for ours — encounters a rather obvious problem: it would mean that the biblical authors who address specific readers did not expect them to have any clue what they were talking about.  That’s not how authors, ancient or modern, work.  Authors write for readers in their own time and place.  When John addressed the first-century Christians in the church of Philadelphia in Asia Minor, he was giving them a message.  He did not secretly intend the message for twenty-first century Christians in the church of Philadelphia Pennsylvania.

Among modern prophecy “experts” who argue to the contrary that Revelation was meant for readers living 1900 years after its author’s death, none has been more outspoken than Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth. In 1970 Lindsay argued that Revelation described what would happen before the end of the 1980s.  When his predictions didn’t come true, or even close to true, he continued writing books and giving lectures about how NOW the signs were coming to be fulfilled. He was still talking about over 50 years later.  (He died just last year.)

But that must mean that the biblical authors were not, in fact, writing for Christians in the 1970s and 1980s, as he originally claimed, but for those in the 1990s, then for those in the 2000s, then in the 2010s, and now in the 2020s.  The goal posts continually move.  If they didn’t, there’d be no reason to keep writing more and more books showing that the prophecies are finally now being fulfilled.

In his original book, when Lindsay argues that Revelation was not written to be understood by its first-century readers, he does so with an intriguing sleight of hand.  He does indeed stress that we need to put the author in his own time and understand what he understood.   But that does not mean that Lindsey wants to understand the book in its own context.  Just the contrary.

In Lindsey’s view, as a first-century Christian, John of Patmos was shown visions of events to transpire 1900 years later and he simply could not understand what he was seeing.  How could he?  How could someone 2000 years ago describe the explosion of a nuclear bomb?  He would have to do the best he could using the only images available to him in his first-century context.  That’s what he did.

Lindsey explains how this works, over and again.  His explanations seem to make good sense to his readers… millions of them.  But the explanations never do quite work when you look at what the biblical author actually says.  Most readers don’t do that, of course; they just take Lindsey’s word for it. They would be better off looking at the passages. Let me give an example, one that Lindsey has repeated over the years.  It involves a striking passage from Revelation 9, which describes the plague of torturous locusts unleashed on the earth when the “fifth trumpet” is blown.

Here I quote the passage in full:

1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace…. 

3 Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. 4 They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.  5 They were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone. 6 And in those days, people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them.  (Revelation 9:1-6)

 

It is a horrible image of suffering.  John goes on to describe these vicious locusts in greater detail, and these details give Lindsey the code he needs to unlock the puzzle of the modern-day reality that the first-century prophet tried to explain.  I have highlighted the key words:

7 In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, 8 their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; 9 they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. 10 They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months.  (Revelation 9:7-10)

Lindsey uses these details to show what these locusts coming through the air to assault people really are.  They are attack helicopters.   The prophet John is seeing a battle scene right out of “Apocalypse Now,” or, for Lindsey, right out of the actual war in Vietnam.

These locusts look to John like battle horses because they are mobile creatures rushing into battle. (Note: they are flying through the smoke; is this from napalm?)  They seem to have human faces: those are the pilots looking through the windscreens.  They have crowns of gold: those are the pilots’ helmets.   The creatures have something that looks like women’s hair.  That’s a description of the rotors moving so quickly they appear like wispy strands of hair.  They seem to have lion’s teeth because under the windscreens are six-barrel cannons that from a distance look like teeth at the bottom of the face.  And they sound like many chariots rushing into battle because of the overwhelming noise from the rotors, familiar to anyone who has heard the terrifying sound of choppers overhead.

It certainly sounds plausible.  And so that’s probably it, right?

No. There’s a problem with this understanding, and it involves what these locusts are instructed to do.  Why, according to Revelation, do they come out of the pit in the first place?  What is the catastrophe they are to cause on earth?  Lindsey skips that little detail.  These creatures are told to torture people for five months… but not to kill them.  The people they attack do not die.  They are not allowed to die.  On the contrary, they desperately want to die but cannot.  The locusts sting, and the sting is fiercely painful but never mortal.  Everyone but the followers of Jesus is forced to endure five months of horrible anguish, with no possibility of death.

The reason Lindsey’s interpretation does not work is because he does not take the text seriously enough.   Futuristic interpretations almost never do. That is ironic, of course, when they are proclaimed by fundamentalists who think the Bible provides God’s own words.  But the interpreters choose not to read the words carefully. 

 

These locusts can’t be attack helicopters.  If they were, why would they not be able to kill anyone?  Isn’t that the point of an attack helicopter?  Has any government ever designed one with say, a six-barrel cannon, meant to inflict unstoppable torment for five months without causing a single death?

The reason Lindsey’s interpretation does not work is because he does not take the text seriously enough.   Futuristic interpretations almost never do. That is ironic, of course, when they are proclaimed by fundamentalists who think the Bible provides God’s own words.  But the interpreters choose not to read the words carefully.  A large part of the problem is their approach itself, as I’ve discussed before.  These “readers” are not reading:  they are assembling a jigsaw puzzle, which leads them to ignore what the text actually says in order to create the picture they themselves have imagined.

Historical scholars do not approach texts this way.  To interpret a passage, they see what it actually says before trying to figure out what it means.