Introduction
In this last post on the dating of Revelation, I want to lay out some ancillary considerations that have helped land me on the early date. These are a mash-up of arguments I have read along with some of my own observations. None of these in itself is a nail in the coffin or a mic drop or a piece of dried grass that fractures the camel’s vertebrae. Nevertheless, I find them compelling and worthy of consideration.
Someone once said eschatology is like a poorly fitting pair of pants; too tight in parts, too loose in others. One must decide where they are comfortable being uncomfortable and no one doesn’t have holes. This is no discouragement that we oughtn’t strive for truth, or even have our strong convictions. Only we must understand that eschatologically speaking, each perspective has its pinchy parts and places that sag like the skin of a Shar-Pei puppy.
Excuse Me, Miss. Your Hermeneutic is Showing
Hermeneutics is the interpretive approach to understanding an ancient document in light of its original intention. Exegesis is the historical, cultural, and grammatical analysis of the text. The seven churches of Asia were the intended recipients of the letter of Revelation, an indisputable fact that corners our hermeneutic. We are third-party observers of a communication between two friends many years ago, who had a shared knowledge we are not privy to. Our job is to step into their shoes and understand the sender’s intent and how the receiver would have understood the message.
More than any other book of the Bible, Revelation causes our interpretative standards to get all wonky, and the first thing to start sagging is that we forget the difference between the letter being written for us and being written to us. It was written for us, as was all the Word of God, but none of it was written to us, and so we must be diligent in seeking the original intent of the sender to the recipient, what the historical context was, the purpose of the author, etc.
Mindfulness must be given to the basic principles of communication. All communication is, at its most basic level, information transmitted from sender to recipient. Simple enough? Actually, no. When we inspect the requirements of information we see that certain benchmarks must be met or the message fails to achieve its purpose.
Briefly, for the sender’s goals to be met, he must assemble a message in such a way that the receiver can understand his meaning. He must use a shared code to relay a meaningful idea, which the recipient decodes based on common vernacular. Once understood, the recipients can take action on the message, achieving the original and ultimate intention of the sender, which is obedience of some kind. Gibberish from the sender means that either he is writing in the wrong language, his grammar is unintelligible, or the ideas are locked behind a veil of indecipherable symbols. If the sender fails on any of these things, the only action the recipient can take is to screw up his face.
If Smith sends a message to Jones in their shared language, but the message Jones inscribes is semantically meaningless to Jones, then the message has failed. Jones doesn’t know what to do with it. He cannot take any action, and Smith’s intention for sending the message is thwarted. The message has failed.
Let’s look again at John’s introduction:
Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.
Revelation 1:3
Contained within his introduction are the effects John, the sender, intends the message to have – reading aloud, hearing, and obeying the ideas contained within, to the end that the recipients will receive a blessing. Furthermore, John tells them they will be able to put this to immediate use as “the time is near.” This comports well with what we have just discussed regarding the purpose of information: Read (decode the message), hear (understand the meaning), and keep (obey it).
Immediate suspicion ought to be roused of any hermeneutic that involves only a modern fulfillment, or progressive unfolding, of John’s words for the very simple reason that the letter would have been utterly meaningless to the Asian churches, causing his stated purpose to fizzle out. Yet this is the preferred interpretative method by the majority today.
This method sees John describing the future like a witness describing a perp to a police sketch artist. The artist does not know who or what this person is, only faithfully scribbling down mysterious descriptors to make an image (ie: “his eyebrows were like two jousting caterpillars”). In this view, John was whisked away in the Spirit to the future to witness strange images of helicopters and skyscrapers flitting past his eyes, meteoric projectiles flying to and fro, jostling masses in the queue to be forehead stamped with a UPC code. Having no vocabulary for these things, he employed fantastic analogies borrowed from his time to describe to his audience what he saw, who would then sketch in their mind’s eye some composition of what John was talking about. With this futurist perspective, our job is to then line up these visions with headlines or current events to find a suitable match to fit his description.
Two obvious problems present themselves. First, to the Asian churches, the police sketch would be meaningless, and the purpose of the letter thwarted, as stated above. Also, the only generation the visions would be of use to would be the absolute last generation on planet Earth, passing over millions who, though having what they thought were compatible interpretations in their own day, were nonetheless incorrect about them. Too often these mistaken presumptions were accompanied by trepidation and poor planning, inciting believers to pull back from the world, hole up, not have children, etc. (This is not the universal response, or even the majority response, but it does have a regrettably large representation.) Though encouragement could come in the general idea of God trouncing his enemies in the last generation, whenever that would be, it would fulfill none of the intentions that John made clear in his introduction.
What is much more in line with sound biblical interpretation and the principles of information is that John pulled from a bank of symbols he shared with the churches from their common heritage and knowledge of the Old Testament. There are over a thousand allusions, quotations, and symbols he pulled directly from the Torah and placed into an apocalyptic poem of things to come in metaphors the churches would understand. Lamentably, removing the “true meaning” of the visions twenty-plus centuries from the letter’s writing uproots us from the aid of the common vernacular that John shared with his audience, through which is our only hope of decoding the visions in a hermeneutical and exegetically responsible way.
An early date view necessitates this shared symbolic interpretation, one that the Asian churches would have been able to unravel through their working understanding of the imagery of the Old Testament. When the prophets of old said the sun and moon would be darkened and the stars would fall, they understood this as de-creation language symbolizing the fall of earthly empires. They knew that when John referred to “the land” and “the sea,” it was a poetic metaphor for Israel and the Gentiles. It was baked into their folklore that the Temple stood atop the Abyss, plugging it u,p and its destruction would release the roiling demon hordes within. The numerology of threes, fours, sevens, tens, twelves, and thousands made numbers alive with meaning. Visions of whores they knew to be a reference to their national past, as God frequently referred to Israel as a harlot, an unfaithful bride. Imagery, which to us is shrouded in mystery, emerges from the fog with crisp edges when we place ourselves in their time, looking through their eyes.
Not to say the letter was an easy read even back then (Revelation 13:18). I’m sure there was some befuddlement. But they had the tools and knowledge to see that the imagery John used had symbolic meaning that was discernible to them, so that John’s intention of warning and encouragement would be understood. We, too, can share in this understanding, having access to the same symbols and Old Testament, with an advantage they did not have: we live in the future and know the history surrounding Revelation’s writing.
No book in the Bible has caused more speculation and confabulation. We do not do the letter justice by assuming it was written to us in what we presume to be the “last days” of the planet. At the same time, all scripture is God-breathed and useful to everyone in any age of the church. So John’s words are beneficial to us, and we may be encouraged by them, seeing in them the dramatization of the covenant transition and the fulfilled prophecy of Jesus, which are the next considerations for an early date.
Covenant Significance
Early date view sees Revelation as a tale of two cities: The old and the new Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem had as its covenant symbol the Temple, where sacrifices atoned for sin yet always reminded us of their insufficiency. The members of the Old Covenant were the Jews, the chosen people of God. But they had abandoned the covenant through disobedience, rejected God’s warnings and messengers he sent. God sent his own son to them to bring them back. Instead of giving God their fruits, they reasoned to kill him so that the vineyard could all be theirs (Matthew 21:33-43). Because of this final rejection, God called to account that generation for all the blood guilt of all the prophets of history. The Jews were cast off as a chosen people by their own doing, and the physical manifestation of this covenantal cataclysm ending was the total annihilation of the symbol of the once-happy marriage between God and his people, the Temple.
The other city is the New Jerusalem, the Bride of Christ, the Church, the true Israel. This is the Israel of promise (Galatians 3:29), comprised of those who share the faith of Abraham, who have been circumcised in the heart, both Jews and Gentiles (Romans 2:29). This group is the recipients of the New Covenant, where God wrote the law on their hearts, gave them a heart of flesh all made available through his grace beginning with the central event of human history – the advent of Christ.
The death and resurrection of Christ displayed to all humanity through time and to the spiritual powers the justice, grace, and love of God. His character was seen as fully as it can be on earth, in this central event of God making a new covenant in his blood. There is no bigger story. There never will be. All of creation was made for this purpose, so God could display the glory of his grace (Ephesians 1:7-10).
Such a huge transition of covenants is dramatized by Jerusalem’s destruction, as the baton of the Kingdom is handed off from the Old to the New Jerusalem, playwritten before our eyes in the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation. During this cataclysmic period between the ascension and the Temple’s destruction, the two covenantal realities of human existence met like massive weather fronts. The cold mass of the Old Covenant clashed with the incoming warm front of the New and created tempestuous updrafts, crackling static, and dazzling vortices in the spiritual and physical realms. It was a thunderous time for all humanity; a despairing time for the principalities and powers as their weapons were stripped and their Master bound. As Jesus said, such a time “has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.” Such a time is worthy of such a Revelation.
The Kingdom Victory
How we read Revelation will determine our expectations of the future. That’s how prophecy works. This, in turn, affects our understanding of the Kingdom of God, what it is or is not in our age, and what our expectation of it ought to be.
If we see mass apostasy and a tsunami of evil in our immediate or distant future based on our reading of Revelation, then we know how to brace ourselves, how to steel our spirits, and what to expect in our gospel endeavors. Namely, they will be unsuccessful in baptizing the nations and teaching them to obey Jesus (Matthew 28:19-20), and the general attitude of the powers of earth towards the children of God will sour. Maybe this is in two weeks, maybe in two centuries, but this must necessarily happen if we take the visions of John to be in our future.
All agree that the Kingdom of God is among us to some extent, that Jesus came preaching it and brought it to us (Matthew 12:28). There is, however, considerable disagreement on the extent to which we expect that Kingdom to expand here before Christ’s second coming. Some believe He will return to a small contingent of sheep surrounded by the slavering wolves of darkness. Others see a more balanced amount of good and evil, like Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares. Then some see the Lord returning to a mostly Christianized world.
Regardless of which of these categories one may find themselves in, it is important to note that all parties want the last option to be true. Is it not a sincere desire of all Christians to see all come to a knowledge of the truth? Furthermore, the last option is what all churches preach and motivate their congregations towards. Spiritual multiplication is the bread and butter of any evangelical denomination. Strengthening the momentum, Jesus said that all authority in the spiritual and earthly realms has been given to him. Nevertheless, despite the synergism of aligned desire, motivation, and power, most think Christ’s kingdom on earth will not expand in any meaningful way.
In my opinion, this is because we believe what we see rather than what God says about His plan. Late date reading follows from a presumption of decline because this is what most of us see in our country. This decline further strengthens the belief that we are meant to decline, based on our presumptions of Revelation, and act accordingly, because why fight the inevitable? I do not mean this as an indictment of the church’s heart or desire towards the nations, but rather a strong faith in God’s word. If the belief is that the Bible prophesies things getting bad, and things seem to be getting bad, then we don’t want to find ourselves fighting against God’s immutable plan for history.
But the whole point is that the late date reading of Revelation, which is a large contributor to this view of the end, is precisely what needs to be redressed. If we see the majority of Revelation as having already happened, then what we have before us is the slow, intractable advance of the Kingdom of God. The Great Commission will be successful in that all the nations will be baptized and taught to obey King Jesus. The difference is not a subtle one.
That God will be glorified and things will unfold exactly as He wants them to, no one is debating. But this does mean our story ends with God either magnifying his justice in his wrath against a disobedient world and the hubris of sinful man, while saving out of it the few chosen, or with Christ returning to a world covered with the knowledge of God and to the resounding marvel of a world filled with saints. If either one is the case, we ought to see the plot development throughout the story, all the way from the beginning. So what do we see?
We see God placing man on earth and telling them to make the whole thing a garden. We see Yeshua entering into a promised land filled with giants and a command to take it all. We see promises that the Israel of God will be as numerous as beach sand and spangled stars. We see Jesus telling his disciples that the gates of Hell cannot and will not prevail against the church’s onslaught. We see Jesus commissioning his disciples to teach and baptize all the nations, after reminding them he controls everything. We see Yeshua with his happy band of Twelve standing on the Jordan of a new Promised Land, the whole earth, filled with disarmed enemies, and a command to take it all. We see Satan bound from being able to deceive the nations, and a promise that Jesus must reign until all his enemies have been made into an ottoman.
Ezekiel, John’s favorite prophet to reference, describes this in chapter 47 as the living water flowing from the Temple, which Jesus tells us is our hearts (John 5). First, it starts as a trickle among the toes, then rises to the knees, up to the thighs, the neck, and then floods the earth so deep one must doggy paddle. When the sweet water from the Temple touches the salty brine, the oceans turn sweet themselves.
(Not all places are transformed, however. The marshes and swamps stay salty, indicating the fullness of the Kingdom will not be realized on earth (Ezekiel 47:11) prior to Christ’s return. I bring this up to obviate the hyper-preterist accusation, which sees all of Revelation already being fulfilled, where I advocate for a partial preterist view, which sees most of Revelation in our rearview mirror – the technicalities of which I will not get address.)
A Most Embarrassing Verse
John’s Revelation and the Olivet Discourse recorded in the synoptic gospels (Matthew 24-25, Mark 13, Luke 21) have clear parallels. In the Discourse, Jesus foretells great tribulation, with wars and rumors of wars, suns being darkened, stars falling from the sky, and Temple destruction. Most scholars see John and Jesus as referring to the same event, the end of the world, and for good reason. With Jesus using phrases like “then the end will come” and “so will be the coming of the Son of Man”, it’s not an illogical jump to make.
It seems there are three ways to see the Revelation/Discourse relationship. 1) Both are referring to the end of the world. 2) Both are referring to the events surrounding the Temple’s destruction (70 AD). 3) The discourse is seen as a mini-apocalypse, having some fulfillment in 70 AD, but at some point during the prophecy, Jesus starts referring to the end of time, putting it at the end of the world. Though there are varying opinions, I think these three sum up the majority.
Problems arise, however, when we consider Jesus’s timing. He says, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34). If Jesus is talking about the end of the world, as a late-date reading of Revelation does, then we have to wrestle with the fact that his prophecy, by all measures, failed.
Atheists use the Discourse to claim that Jesus cannot be the Son of God, citing his not returning in “this generation” as proof that he was a failed prophet. Jews do the same. Liberal seminaries use the same reasoning to prove the Bible cannot be the infallible, inspired word of God. Even stout-hearted saints within our own ranks are tripped up. CS Lewis himself found this failed prophecy “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.” He expounded
“It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, ‘this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else.
CS Lewis, The World’s Last Night
Based on what is the current late-date understanding, the Olivet Discourse can be seen as a theatrical preview to Revelation, where the unveiling of the end of the world is on display. Since the world did not end in that generation, then he is a false prophet. This is a glaring problem and is associated with a late date of Revelation due to the presumed connection between it and the Discourse.
Rebutting this failed prophecy, late date advocates do with Jesus’s words the same as was done to John’s: take the obvious immediacy and splice in an extended length of time. The living, breathing generation of men Jesus was talking to becomes some faceless future generation that happens to be living when these things occur. Or perhaps “this generation” really means this race of men- Jews- would still be in existence when the events occur. John’s clear temporal marker “soon” suffered the same treatment, as we saw in Part 2, and what he intended to mean would happen quickly was degraded to some kind of slow-starting soonness.
But there isn’t a shadow of authority to interpret Jesus’s words this way, and neither does it remove the difficulty because Jesus uses the exact same “generation” phrase in many other places during his ministry (Mark 8:12; Luke 11:29, 9:41; Matthew 17:17, 12:41, 11:16, et al). This smeared meaning is read into the text and must be, in order to avoid sharing Lewis’s embarrassment and the atheist’s legitimate claim of failed prophecy.
Take heart! There is another way to read the Savior’s words that enshrines him as the Son of God who prophesied the future. This comports with an early date reading of Revelation.
It is noteworthy that John’s gospel does not contain the Olivet Discourse, leading some to see the entirety of Revelation as John’s exposition on it. This is very likely the case if one holds an early date, as both would be referring mainly to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and all the horrific festivities surrounding it.
Strengthening this case, early church fathers, such as Eusebius and Epiphanies, rightly understood Jesus to be referring to the destruction of Jerusalem and credited the early Christians’ remembrance of Jesus’ prophecy as the reason they survived. After Vespasian marched on Jerusalem and surrounded the city, he inexplicably returned north after a brief six-day siege. Eusebius says that when the Christians saw this, they recalled Jesus’ prophecy, “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, flee to the hills,” and fled to Pella. The Jews who stayed in the stronghold were all slaughtered when Vespasian returned a week later.
Marvelous happenings are predicted in the Discourse, and much of the language, like John’s, feels like the future. The Son of Man coming on the clouds, sending out the angels with trumpets, two people milling and one is taken, the other left – these references to a mind not familiar with Old Testament symbolism and prophecy will see this as our future. But a faithful hermeneutic will understand that Jesus is referencing, for example, Daniel’s vision where we see the Son of Man coming on the clouds.
I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
Daniel 7:13-14
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.
Where does the Son of Man come? Not to earth, but to the Ancient of Days to receive a Kingdom. This is a reference to the ascension, where the freshly resurrected and victorious Jesus came home to receive dominion and a kingdom; this is not the Second Advent.
If Jesus and John are referring to two different destructions, Jerusalem and the World, respectively, then the obvious question arises as to why Jesus’s destruction could not also apply to John’s? But a late-date Revelation precludes this possibility, and so Jesus’s prediction must necessarily be ripped out of its most natural context and be hauled into our future, at the end of the world, along with John’s.
So we have good reason to see the Discourse referring to 70 AD based on Jesus’s “this generation” reference, and also that the early church believed this to be the case as well. The question for us then is, why do we not?
Apocalyptic Paroxysms
The West is a dogpile of apocalyptic spasms with America on top. Secular and Christian alike, we are wedded in our belief that the end is near, either from cataclysmic climate collapse or the apocalyptic wrath of God, regardless of the recent past littered with failed prophecy. For both sides, the world ought to have ended a baker’s dozen times by now. Both sides were looking at the signs of the times, both thought they were living at the end of history, and both have been very wrong.
I have a running document in my email drafts paralleling the failed predictions of climate scientists over the past fifty years alongside the failed predictions of end times prophecy, the identity of the anti-christ, what the mark of the beast is, etc. It is long.
The only certainty we have from these two sides is the commitment to believe whatever new-fangled prediction is hot off the press, past failed predictions doing nothing to dissuade unswerving eschatological commitments. I have spoken with people at my own church who use the oft-repeated phrase, “I really believe that I will see the Lord return in my lifetime.” So have countless others, now with the Lord, who have lived and died without their eschatology being realized.
So many people seeing Revelation illuminated by the headlines of their day is a consequence of a late date view – a view unbounded by time. This leads to wild, rampant speculation and licenses the imagination to paste newspaper headlines over whatever symbolic image of John’s could be contorted to fit.
I buy socks by the dozen, and each pair is advertised to fit sizes 6-12. Such a diversity of foot sizes and shapes able to be covered with one size sock is only do to the extreme elasticity of the fabric. Somewhere in there is a metaphor for the kind of newspaper exegesis a late date view encourages. Type in “end times prophecy” into the YouTube search bar. I rest my case.
It is difficult to extricate ourselves from our generation, where we read our Bibles through the lens of our time. But extricate ourselves we must. When we do, we see other giants of the faith who saw things differently from our frenetic 21st-century sensationalist minds. Men like Augustine, arguably one of the most influential men of the church, believed the events of Revelation to have happened in the first century.
This is not an argument for an early date, per se, only a recognition of the wacky predilections a late date opens us to, and how we must rise above cultural assumptions and obey the principles of Biblical interpretation.
Conclusion
Is eschatology an aftermarket modification, like putting a spoiler on your Honda Civic, or an integral part of the engine? How many Christians have a well-informed, Biblically defensible eschatological position? Is having a position even important? These are the questions I believe we ought to be asking in our churches. My observation is that most Christians do see eschatology (if they could define the word) as a hood ornament. If they do have a view of eschatology, it is a jambalaya of various opinions, verses, adult fiction, and views passively received through parents or childhood churches.
Further dampening our knowledge is the belief that these topics only cause division, placing eschatology in the “foolish controversies” (Titus 3:9) category that we oughtn’t bother ourselves with. We need to be gospel centered, we are told. This has led to the conversations happening in the times after the Sunday sermon, in the shadowy outer aisles of the sanctuary, and has not been given its proper importance by church leaders.
This is unhelpful. Avoiding these conversations for the sake of some fragile crystalline unity means our love for each other is only as deep as our willingness to avoid difficult conversations. And I cannot think of something affecting our gospel centered trajectory more than the late date belief of gospel contraction and ecclesiastical atrophy, and the early date hope of gospel triumph.
Things are changing, conversations are happening, and this is good. Churches need to be prepared to lead a robust, fair conversation bounded by principles of Biblical interpretation and the spirit of love that doesn’t castigate, denounce, or cause undo division.
Thought Butter 