If someone were to take a poll of orthodox theological historians about which book of the Holy Bible, Old and New Testament, we ought to approach with the greatest amount of humility and the least amount of dogmaticism with regards to its interpretation, I suspect that the Book of Revelation would win hands down. It might even be a unanimous vote.
The Apocalypse – Greek for “revelation” – of St. John is considered by most Biblical scholars to have been the last book of the New Testament to have been written. It was certainly the last book to be received into the canon by the Church. Its author identifies himself as “John” and traditionally he is believed to have been the St. John who was one of Christ’s Twelve Apostles and also to have been the author of the fourth Gospel and the three Johannine epistles. I have no quarrel with the traditional view and find the so-called “higher critical” arguments against the traditional ascription of authorship for these, or any other of the canonical Scriptures for that matter, to be utterly unconvincing. In the ninth verse of the first chapter he mentions that he was in exile for his faith on the isle of Patmos. The persecution that put him there is usually believed to have been that which occurred in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in the last decade of the first century, although some have argued that it was that which occurred in the reign of Nero. If the latter are correct, this would place the composition of the book around the same time as that of the book of Acts.
The book begins with St. John having a vision in which Jesus Christ appears to him in His heavenly glory and gives him seven messages to be sent to the Churches in Asia – Asia Minor, that is, which is now Turkey – to whom St. John also addresses the book as a whole. These occupy the second and third chapters, after which he has a vision in which a door opens in heaven and an angelic voice summons him up to the throne of God. There he has an extended vision of events filled with vivid imagery taken from the various prophetic books of the Old Testament. These begin with Jesus Christ, depicted as both the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” and the “Lamb that was slain”, taking the scroll that is in the hand of God, being the Only One worthy of doing so, and opening the seven seals one at a time. After this seven angels blow their trumpets. The final trumpet introduces the next seven angels who have the seven bowls of the wrath of God, but before they are poured out upon the earth there is an interlude in which a drama plays out involving a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and crowned with twelve stars, the Son to Whom she gives birth, the seven-headed, ten-horned, red dragon who is “the devil and Satan” and who seeks to devour the Child and wages war against St. Michael and the angels in heaven before being cast out, a beast which rises out of the sea having the same number of heads and horns as the devil and who receives great power and authority from the devil, and a second beast who arises out of the earth with horns like a lamb but who speaks like a dragon, and who makes a great idol of the first beast, makes the whole world worship it, and forces them to bear the mark of the beast. The bowls of wrath are then poured out upon the world, the harlot “Babylon” who rides the beast is destroyed, the armies of the world gather to fight at Armageddon, at which Jesus Christ, leading the armies of heaven, returns to the earth, casts the beast and the false prophet (the second beast) into the Lake of Fire and binds the devil for a thousand years. After the thousand years the devil is released, wages one last war against God and His saints, is judged and cast into the Lake of Fire, after which the Final Judgement of the dead takes place before Christ’s Great White Throne and the lost are cast into the Lake of Fire. This all culminates in a vision of the new heavens, the new earth, and the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city which descends to the earth to be the eternal home of the redeemed.
Apart from the thousand years of the twentieth chapter, which is the subject of debate between the amillennialists (that it is figurative of the period between Christ’s two comings), the premillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age to be inaugurated by the Second Coming) and the postmillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age which will culminate in the Second Coming), the final chapters of Revelation largely pertain to the elements of eschatology about the substance of which, albeit not necessarily the details, there has been a general consensus among orthodox and traditional Christians – the Second Coming itself, and the Quattuor Novissima (Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell).
It is the part between the letters to the Churches in the second and third chapters and the Second Coming in the nineteenth that causes most of the trouble. Do the colourful images in these chapters depict people and events from the first century when the book was being written as the Preterists say? (1) Are they a picture of the whole of human history between the First and Second Comings as the Historicists say? Or do they refer to events and persons yet to come in the period immediately prior to the Second Coming as the Futurists say? Is it, perhaps, a combination of all three options? (2)
The reason that I suspect the Book of Revelation would win our hypothetical poll is that throughout the Church’s history there has been no lack of individuals who have both held to the Futurist interpretation of the book and read the people and events of their own time into it, saying that those people and events are the final fulfilment of those prophecies. This has frequently been accompanied by date-setting for the Second Coming – despite the clear warnings against this in the Olivet Discourse – even if it is of the evasive sort that tries to get around said warnings by saying “Jesus said we don’t know the day or the hour, but He said nothing about the week, month, year, decade etc.” This has given the Futurist interpretation a bad name among many theologians, although the majority of Futurists have not been this irresponsible.
Having said all that, I do not wish to make the case for any particular interpretation of Revelation here, but to make the point that the eerie correlation between what is going on at present and the thirteenth chapter of Revelation ought to be sounding warning bells regardless of how we interpret Revelation.
To illustrate my point, allow me to note that there are people out there who deny the existence of evil spirits. Such people may be rationalist, materialist, unbelievers, or they may be the kind of “Christian” who likes to cherry-pick everything that is positive from the Christian worldview and omit the negative. Either way, how would such people regard a Satanic temple or any other religion dedicated to the worship of evil spirits?
The answer is that they are not likely to regard such cults significantly differently from those of us who affirm the existence of evil spirits. To join such a cult is to make the conscious choice to side with evil. This ought to be a problem even for people who deny the existence of spiritual entities personifying that evil.
Half a year ago, almost the whole of the world was shut down in order to “flatten the curve” of the spread of COVID-19, an experimental new strategy that in many ways resembled past Communist revolutions albeit on a global scale. Everyone was placed under a sort of house arrest, with day passes allowed for business arbitrarily deemed to be “essential.” The basic freedoms that we have long regarded as fundamental to our civil order in the Commonwealth Realms and most other Western countries such as the American republic were clearly classified by the “powers that be” who dictated this whole “lockdown” as “non-essential.” A glance at what was considered to be “essential” and “non-essential” tells us what we need to know about the spirit moving those powers. Businesses that produced and sold the goods necessary for maintaining our physical lives were declared to be essential, but libraries, art museums, symphony orchestras and everything that elevated those lives from that mere physical level were regarded as non-essential. Abortuaries, marijuana shops, and plenty of other businesses that promote vice and self-destructive behaviour were labelled essential, but Churches where the Word of life is proclaimed and the Sacrament of life distributed were at the top of the non-essential list. Family gatherings, real life social interaction, community, and basically everything traditionally regarded as good, were treated as crimes and outlawed. When the restrictions began to be eased, Churches were left closed longer than almost anything else. Clearly, the spirit moving the powers behind the lockdown is that which the Book of Revelation describes as a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns.
We are now several phases into the re-opening in most places. There has now arisen, however, a demand for a new restriction. Our governments are being pressured to make it mandatory for people to wear masks over their lower faces in public places. Many of the businesses that remained open during the lockdown required their employees to wear masks, especially if they were involved in directly serving customers. Now some of these same businesses, even in the absence of public orders, are requiring their customers to wear masks. Last week, for example, Walmart made mask-wearing mandatory at all of their Canadian locations. The World Health Organization, which pooh-poohed the efficacy of masks at the beginning of the pandemic, has thrown its weight behind mask-wearing, and the public health officials such as Dr. Theresa Tam in Canada and Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States who seem incapable of thinking independently of the WHO, have likewise done an about-face on the matter. Celebrities have been enlisted as part of a massive media campaign to shame people into wearing masks. If those who would make masks mandatory get their way, nobody will be able to buy or sell unless he wears a mask. The similarity between this and Revelation thirteen, noting especially verses sixteen to seventeen, is remarkable, even if the present situation involves a mask and that in the book involves a mark. Regardless of whether one reads Revelation thirteen as being about the first century Roman Empire (Preterist) or about the empire of the Antichrist who will rule just prior to the Second Coming (Futurist) this is cause for alarm. For even if the beast of Revelation is a figure of the past whose time has long come and gone, he is hardly an example worthy of emulation. In Revelation he and all who take his mark end up in the lake of fire.
One does not have to believe that we are seeing the final fulfilment of Revelation thirteen according to the Futurist interpretation, or even hold to the Futurist interpretation, to have a deep, spiritual, theological, and ethical problem with the totalitarian spirit of the present day and with mandatory masking. Revelation thirteen is grounds for opposing such things regardless of one’s interpretation of Revelation.
(1) Full Preterists would apply this to the entirety of Revelation including the last four chapters. Full Preterism is the claim that all Scriptural prophecy was fulfilled in the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Full Preterism is not an interpretation available to the orthodox for it denies that Christ “will come again to judge the quick and the dead”, which, being affirmed by all of the Creeds, has clearly been regarded by the Church as belonging to the esse of the faith rather than to the adiophora since the earliest centuries.
(2) Another interpretive option is the Spiritual/Allegorical interpretation in which the events of Revelation are regarded as depicting the spiritual conflict in each believer’s life – think John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
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