In my early years as a child reading the story of Gideon and the Fleece in Judges 6, I didn’t go so far as to think that I should put out a fleece in my yard overnight to try and discern God’s will for me. However, I did draw from the story a belief that if I wanted to know what God thought about something in my life, I could “test” God by asking for a specific sign and He would give me the sign that I wanted, every time.
Now, God can work in our lives with miraculous signs and wonders, surely. But this isn’t necessarily the way that He works (or that He promises to work) all the time. A robust understanding of all of Scripture, and of the context of Scripture as a whole, show us this quite clearly – there are times when God performs signs and wonders through or for the benefit of His people, but there are other times when God asks His people to trust Him and be faithful to Him by reading and rightly applying what is already written in His Word, not by additional signs in the natural world.
For me, it took learning more about Scripture as a whole to see this overarching pattern and to grow in my understanding of what it is God is saying to His people in the story of all of Scripture, and what it is He isn’t saying (in this case, I had to learn that the story of Gideon isn’t mostly about God telling me to work really hard to discern His specific will in every circumstance of my individual life).
When we read Scripture, we are not first and foremost encountering a tool to help decipher the details of our own day and age, or of God’s will for our individual lives. First and foremost, when we read Scripture, we are encountering the Word of God written for a specific and particular audience in the past – the original audience of the text. And at the same time, we are also encountering the Word of God written for all of His people living across all of time, in which the primary story is about God and His rescue and redemption of His people, not about the lives of specific people on earth.
Scripture is written for God’s people who lived “back then” – John did have an original audience for the book of Revelation. At the same time, it’s also written for God’s people who live right now. Scripture is for them – and Scripture is for us, too (and for every age and every century in between).
As we seek to understand God’s Word, it’s helpful for us to keep this in mind. We have to hold these things in tension – Scripture was written for a specific people in a specific time and place, but it’s also interpretable for and applicable to all of God’s people in all times and all places.
When we read the book of Revelation, in particular, this is a tension that we are reminded of again and again. We saw this in the letters to the churches – as Pastor Joe and others preaching kept reiterating in their sermons, these letters to the churches in the book of Revelation were written to real churches in a specific time and place, and their content is also applicable for the people of God in all times and places.
When we lose sight of either side of this coin, we start to get into some funky places.
If we forget that Scripture is true and useful and applicable in all times and places, we might start to think that we are just reading dusty manuscripts written long ago, old letters to old churches and epistles to long-gone groups of people that don’t really have much to do with us right now.
But on the other hand, if we forget that Scripture was first written to a specific people in a specific place (like in the example of the letters to the churches) then we can start to make hasty jumps and shaky interpretive leaps in application because we’ve lost the roots of interpretation, so to speak, that help us grow into robust application in our time and our own lives.
I think this is a problem that can be especially evident and especially dangerous with the book of Revelation, because “forgetting the roots” of this book can mean losing sight of its many allusions to the Old Testament (like Pastor Joe has been talking about in many of his sermons) and it can also mean losing sight of the way that the original audience of the book would have seen those Old Testament roots and allusions and would have understood and applied them.
It can lead to, instead, a type of application where we see everything through the lens of how it applies to me, right now, or to my time period alone.
And with Revelation, one subtle way this can happen is that modern Christians (whenever those modern Christians happen to live – whether in the 1600s or the 2000s) can be tempted to believe that we are definitely the ones about whom every piece of this book is written.
Reading Scripture responsibly reminds us that Revelation was applicable to its original audience even though some of the culmination of its writings didn’t come about in the lifetimes of that original audience (though some of them did).
And that helps us, as we look around at the world today, remember that the same book that was applicable to John’s original audience is also applicable to us today – and at the same time, helps us to remember that we don’t need to get lost in the weeds of trying to predict or anticipate the exact dates for every single event in this book.
Instead, as we read the book of Revelation (and as we read, really, all of Scripture) we can rest knowing that our call is the call of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), and that call is not dependent on trying to figure out exactly when Jesus might with finality return. We can rest knowing that the God who held all things as John sat down and wrote down these visions is the God who holds all things today, and who has held all things in every moment that’s happened between then and now.
And we can rest knowing that Jesus might make His final return in our lifetimes – but He might not, and determining when He is coming doesn’t have a whole lot to do with living faithfully until He does (or until we go to be with Him).
So as we continue to study the book of Revelation, my encouragement to us as a Church is to remember and lean into this tension – the tension of remembering both the original audience of the text and our own time and application today – and to encourage one another each and every day as we see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:25), whether that final day when Christ returns does come in our lifetimes, or later on in someone else’s.
