How should we read the book of Revelation? Does the message of this book only apply to some faraway time in the future? In this brief clip, W. Robert Godfrey encourages us to approach the book of Revelation as its first readers did.
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Transcript:
The whole book of Revelation is bookended by this declaration that what is being said here must take place “soon.” How are we to interpret that? How are we to understand that? Because we do live two thousand years after this event. How does “soon” work? Well, part of what “soon” does for us, I think, is to remind us that it applies to us now. It’s not just in a far distant future. You know, when Daniel got his prophecy, the fulfillment was about four hundred years off, so it wasn’t an immediate reality for him. I think John wants us to say these things are an immediate reality for us, and in that sense it’s soon, and the time is drawing near. But beyond that, the whole New Testament approach to time is an approach that says since Jesus finished His work, there’s nothing really that needs to be done until the second coming, except the gathering of the elect. And in that sense, everything is fulfilled, everything is done, everything is accomplished. And in that sense, the end is soon. John in his first letter puts it even more pointedly, where he writes in 1 John 2:18, “Children, it is the last hour, and as you heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour.” Now, when John wrote that, he lived many more hours. He didn’t mean “hour” in the most literal sense there; he meant the time is short. There’s nothing yet that has to be fulfilled in prophecy for Christ to come again. We are in the very last era, the last hour, the last age, the last time of this passing-away world. And I think John is highlighting that again here. But the importance for us is to realize everything in this book is not to just be dismissed as something that’s going to happen sometime to someone probably a long time from now. Rather, it’s our world in which we live, and it’s the present reality that should inform our living and our particularly being faithful now.
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