Book Notice: Revelation for Everyone (Tom Wright)

Tom Wright

Revelation for Everyone
London: SPCK, 2011
Available at Amazon.com

The next, and I think final, installment in Tom Wright’s NT4E series is “Revelation”. Here Wright offers an idealist/preterist take on Revelation. Here are some quotes to give you a taste:

From the intro: “John, its author – sometimes called ‘John the Seer’ or ‘John the Divine,’ sometimes (probably wrongly) identified with the John who wrote the gospel and epistles – is picking up a way of writing well known in the Jewish world of the time. This way of writing was designed to correspond to, and make available, the visions and ‘revelations’ seen by holy, prayerful people who were wrestling with the question of divine purpose. Like the theatre audience, they and the rest of God’s people felt themselves in the dark. As they studied their ancient scriptures and said their prayers, they believed that they music was building up to something, but nobody was quite sure what. But then, like someone all by themselves in the theatre for the first performance, the ‘seer’ – the word reflects the reality, ‘one who sees’ sometihng that other people do not – finds that the curtain is suddenly up. Suddenly the ‘seer’ is witnessing a scene, is in fact invited to be part of a scene, within God’s on going drama” (p. 2).

On Rev 1:1: (1) It is a four staged revelation about something God revealed to Jesus, which Jesus passed on via an angel, which the angel then gave to John, and John gives to the churches. (2) It takes the form of an extended letter. (3) The book is a prophecy. (4) The book functions as a witness. (5) The central figure if Jesus (pp. 4-5).

On Rev 2:26-27: “As frequently in Revelation, Jesus intends to make his people a ‘royal priesthood’. What is required at the moment, for those who have not been drawn away by the teaching and practices of ‘Jezebel’, is that they ‘hold on tightly’. This is a word for all those Christians today who find themselves in churches and fellowships where teaching and behaviour which they known is not the way of the Messiah is being eagerly embraced, and hailed as God-given.”

On Rev 4:1-6: “This is the victory in which the seven letters were urging the churches to claim their share. We now discover how that victory comes about. It begins with the unveiling of reality. Behind the complex and messy confusions of church life in ancient Turkey; behind the challenges of the fake synagogues and the threatening rulers; behind the ambiguous struggles and difficulties of ordinary Christians – there stands the heavenly throne room in which the world’s creator and lord remains sovereign. Only by stopping our tracks and contemplating the vision can we begin to glimpse the reality which not only makes sense of our own realities but enables us, too, to win the victory.” (p. 46).

On Rev 5:1-7: “And now we come to one of the most decisive moments in all scripture. What John has heard is the announcement of the lion. What he sees is the lamb. He is to hold what he has heard while gazing at what he now sees; and he is told what is seeing in his head as he reflects on what he has heard. The two seem radically different. The lion is the symbol both of ultimate power and of supreme royalty, while the lamb symbolizes both gentle vulnerability and, through its sacrifice, the ultimate weakness of death. The but the two are now to be fused together, completely and for ever. From this moment on, John, and we his careful readers, are to understand that the victory won by the lion is accomplished through the sacrifice of the lamb, and in no other way. But we are also to understand that what has been accomplished by the lamb’s sacrifice is not merely the wiping away of sin for a few people here and there. The victory won by the lamb is God’s lion-like victory, through his faithful Israel-in-person, through his obedience humanity-in-person, over all the forces of corruption and death, over everything that would destroy and obliterate God’s good, powerful and lovely creation.” (pp. 53-54).

On Rev 14:6: “For many today, the Christian ‘good news’ or ‘gospel is a message about them: God loves them, God forgives them, God promises them a blissful place in ‘heaven’. But, without diminishing the personal meaning, most of the summaries of the ‘good news’ in the Bible are much larger in scope. Paul summarizes the ‘good news’ in terms of the saving events of Jesus’ scripture-fulfilling death and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15.3-8), or of Jesus’ Davidic descent, his pubic recognition as ‘son of God’ (Romans 1.3-5).” (p. 129).

On Rev 20:1-6: “But should we take the thousand years symbolically as well? Against, I believe we should. John has used all kinds of symbolic numbers throughout his book. It would ve very odd if he were suddenly to throw in  a rather obvious round a symbolic number, but expect us to take it literally. There were some around the year AD 1000, who supposed they were about to see the end of this ‘millennium’, but with other such speculations the date passed without significant eschatological events taking place. But what is the actualy reality to which the symbol points? It appears at first sight every difficult to see this millennium as ‘the age of the church’. Nobody aware of church history would suppose that there has been no satanic attack, no deceiving of the nations (or of the church itself) during that time. It could be a time still in the future, either the final prelude to the second coming of the Messiah or a period immediately after that coming – the classic ‘post-millennial’ and ‘pre-millennial’ interpretations. Both of these seem to me to miss the point, for reasons too numerous to go into here … The clue to the passage is, I believe, in the opening line: ‘I saw thrones, with people sitting on them, who were given authority to judge.’ This is straight out of Daniel 7, where the ‘thrones’ were for ‘the Ancient of Days’ and ‘One like a son of man’. But Daniel 7 itself interprets the latter phrase corporately, so that ‘the saints of the most high’ receive the kingdom and authority to judge. It looks, then, as though John is referring not to a thousand-year period on earth, but to the heavenly reality which obtains during a particular period. Jesus, according to the whole New Testament, is already reigning (Matthew 28.18; 1 Corinthians 15.25-28; etc.); and what John is saying is that the martyrs are already reigning with him. This, indeed, is more or less what is said, as well, in Ephesians 2.6, where the church is ‘seated in heavenly places in the Messiah Jesus’. Presumably they aren’t just sitting there doing nothing. Perhaps, after all, John’s ‘millennium’ does correspond to a more widely known early Christian view – though in Ephesians there is no sense that this only applies to the martyrs.” (179-80).

On Rev 20:7-15: “The point is then that God, the creator, at last takes his seat for the final judgment. Here, as throughout scripture, this judgment will in accordance with the totality of the live that each person has lived. That, it seems, is what is written in the ‘books’. Countless anxious protestant teachers, worried that this somehow does away with ‘justification by faith’, miss the point entirely. We should not necessarily try to fit Paul’s way of saying things exactly into John’s, but actually things are simpler than that in this case. When Paul speaks of ‘justification by faith’, he’s talking about the present reality according to which all those who believe in Jesus as the risen Lord are already assured of the divine verdict, ‘in the right’, and are also assured thereby that this same verdict will be issued on the last day. But the way in which the verdict of the last day corresponds to the verdict issued in the present, on the basis of faith alone, is by the work of the spirit; and the spirit produces, in the individual Christian, that overall tenor of life (Paul does not suppose that Christians are incapable of sinning) which is ‘seeking for glory, honour and immorality’ (Romans 2.7).

On Rev 22:8-21: “The letter – it was always a letter, as well as a prophecy and a revelation – ends as it should, with a closing greeting. ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all’ (verse 21). But, however conventional, this greeting now carries the freight of the entire book. It is dense with a thousand images of ‘grace’, pregnant with the power of the word ‘Lord’ when spoken under the nose of Caesar, sparkling in the still-open invitation to ‘you all’, and above all delicious with the name, the name that is now exalted high over all, the name of the slaughtered lamb, the name of the one we love and long to see. This book has been a revelation of Jesus, a testimony to Jesus, an act of homage to Jesus. This word. This book. This prophecy. Listen to the bells. Coming soon. This Jesus.” (p. 207).