Читать книгу Hidden In Plain Sight: A Study of the Revelation to John - Uchenna Mezue - Страница 7

The difficulty with this great work lies mainly in its style and content. It must be understood from the beginning, as the work itself declares (Rev. 1 v.1), that this is a spiritual work, which as such should never be analyzed intellectually. This is the failing of the various schools, which have attempted to limit its scope to time and place. It is a spiritual work and must be understood spiritually.

The Revelation is not written in a chronological sequence and without taking this into consideration, it will be impossible to understand it. Within the experiences of John in the spiritual, time is measured differently. There are sections in the book where John looks far back to indicate the origin of the current problems of Creation and of humanity and sections where he looks into the future to explore the consequences of the current trend in human and world activities. Yet, he sees both the past and the future almost simultaneously. The revelation embraces the past, the present and the future (Rev. 1:19).

Some scholars believe that the style of the revelation can best be described as ‘recapitulation’. Reddish argues that the structure of revelation is spiral in progression instead of linear and likens it to looking through a kaleidoscope or to listening to musical compositions where certain themes of the piece are repeated.

The Revelation understandably has many parallels from the Old Testament. This is expected since spiritual understanding builds on previous knowledge. However, given that the Son of God had manifested in the interval, the Revelation deviates significantly from the writings of the Old Testament in a number of ways. First, it recognizes the unity in the Trinity and describes the activity of the Creative Will, the Holy Spirit as One with the Love of God, Jesus. Consequently, it did not bother in many instances to distinguish between the two. Where John has to get his audience to relate more intimately with the work of the Light, he does indicate the activity of Jesus on earth at that time more clearly, since the primary audience being adherents of the Truth personified in Jesus, will identify more easily with such detail.

Throughout the work however, the activity of the Will of God is paramount and it may be said that the emphasis in the Revelation is on the activity of the Will of God in Creation unlike the rest of the New Testament that focused on the activity of the Love of God embodied in Jesus.

Secondly, John is here writing from the basis that the events are not only imminent, but are already beginning to happen and so unlike the earlier visions of the prophets documented in the Old Testament, John’s apocalypse represents a higher revelation; more intense and with greater immediacy. Since prophecies are predicated on human responses to the message given, we may conclude that given the timeline, the Revelation also deviates from the pattern of prophetic writings of the Old Testament. The sense of inevitability indicated from the beginning suggests that the primary event, the approach of the judgment is no longer subject to human will. This is different from prophetic pronouncements which are predicated on human will and which tend to change in detail depending on how the target audience receive and adapt to it (see Jonah to Nineveh).

In The Revelation, which came after the incarnation of the Son of God and humanity’s rejection of Him, the pattern became more firmly set and the prophecies of end time events could now be set as certainties, i.e. as a revelation of the inevitable. There are however some prophetic parts to the book and the author indicates as such (Rev. 1:3; 22:7,10,18,19). The messages to the seven churches are clearly prophetic and as indicated, if the peoples change, their final circumstance will change, which satisfies the criteria for prophecy. In addition, although the judgment is set and inevitable, its effect on the individuals remains subject to their adaptation to the message that precedes the onset of the judgment. Thus, the book is largely prophetic until the Son of Man manifests.

Thirdly, although the book is apocalyptic in its symbolism and imagery; it lacks many characteristics of the genre. This fact is well argued in the scholarly study of the revelation by Leon Morris (1989).

Thus, in spite of its cryptic certainty, The Revelation contains a series of apocalyptic and prophetic visions of the future and does not belong strictly to either genre. This has posed considerable difficulties for those who attempt to analyze the work intellectually. It must be viewed as a spiritual experience simply and faithfully documented.

In content, the Revelation is also unique amongst the other apocalyptic writings. It is wrong to suggest that it derives or copies some of its content from older literature. There is little doubt that the imageries may be similar. Since all derive from the same Truth, some similarity is inevitable, but the visions of John are clearer, richer, more detailed and more relevant to the end time. This level of clarity suggests a higher origin for John’s visions, and the work itself is particularly illuminated by the fact that the Son of God had not only incarnated, but also had promised the Spirit of Truth.

The events of Christ’s coming great as it was, is recognized in the revelation as an accomplished fact that impacts greatly on the new future. The church, implying those who live according to the Truth that Jesus represented, is assumed in the setting of the whole Creation (Spiritual and Material), and the mission of the comforter and the judgment of not just our earth, but of the whole Material Creation is indicated as imminent.

The visions indicate comprehensive views of events in Creation from the highest heights to the lowest depths, from the glory of the Divine through the perfidy of human spiritual to the deepest fallen beings in the Abyss. It also details humanity’s original estate, the path of our fall into sin, the work of salvation past, present and future and the inevitable judgment that must follow the unrepentant and unregenerate humanity; all explained in great details with apocalyptic clarity. It mourns with us but concurrently offers comfort. It prophesies judgment and destruction, but also offers hope of a renewal. No other section of the Bible contains the same depth and breadth as the Revelation and this has relevant implications for its origin.

Throughout the Revelation, we encounter visions where John was specifically asked to write down or not to write and sometimes even to seal what had been revealed (Rev. 10:4). As already indicated John was not carrying a book around during these spiritual journeys and the events occurred over a short specific interval. Therefore the writing must represent either an encoding of the visions in his spiritual being for later transcribing or there is another in a position to write the visions of the spiritual John in a book on earth, simultaneous with the visions. The latter is more likely. In the book collections of the Grail Foundation, a copy of the revelation in German and other works exist, which suggest that the author is John the Baptist and that his experiences were on the Isle of Patmos in the Spiritual spheres.

The Revelation is also unique in that for a long time it represented the highest level of revealed knowledge to humanity. The second section of the Revelation begins with the highest documented revelation of events in the Divine Spheres available at the time, suggesting the highest possible origin for the author. It is only with the subsequent incarnation of the Spirit of Truth that we received knowledge about the structure of Creation surpassing the revelation in depth. As indicated earlier, the revelation should be valued more for its content and the recognition of the author should follow. Indeed, he himself admonishes that we must take the message to heart if we are to benefit from it.

It is often assumed that the Revelation was directed at churches in the first century AD, because it started with, and is perceived as being directed at the seven churches in Asia Minor – Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. There is little doubt that all these cities existed in Asia Minor and that perhaps they contained flourishing churches at that time. However, available evidence suggests that contrary to the portrayal in the revelation, the Christians in these communities lived peacefully with their pagan neighbors (Ladd, 1972). Thus, in view of the heavily symbolic nature of the Revelation, we must ask ourselves the relevant questions – are these the major church communities in the first century when Revelation was written? Why select churches in Asia Minor over bigger, better-established churches in the other parts of the Roman Empire and even over Jerusalem?

More importantly, these seven churches are portrayed as actually representative of all striving Creation before the very throne of the Almighty as golden lampstands (Rev. 1:20)! In addition, that the towns are symbolic is also supported by the fact that by AD 90-95, when Revelation was commonly believed to have been written, the Jews were a defeated people and will not have the strong influences on the churches that are described.

It would thus seem that these churches are symbolic of groupings or collections of human spirits and that we are to seek a deeper meaning to these seven churches. As is well known, a church represents the community of human spirits and not the town or building. The community however, may be congregated in a specific named location and may rightly be addressed as such. The seven communities mentioned may thus either represent the people, indicating their maturity, or the place, which must be seen as more embracing than small towns in Asia Minor. If they represent communities of people, then it must embrace all human spirits grouped according to maturity and not just Christians. They may thus represent the maturity of homogeneous groups of humanity, such that the various communities represent groups whose maturity remain rooted in different spiritual epochs, much as we can observe today.

Once we accept Christ’s coming as pivotal in human spiritual development, these epochs may be seen to represent maturity limited to the pre-Christ era through those who accepted the Son of God, to those who are seriously awaiting the Son of Man. In this view, Ephesus will represent the community of striving human spirits before the coming of Christ, Smyrna represents the era of the living church, Pergamum the era of the fallen church and Thyatira the era of the modern church dominated by fallen womanhood. Sardis is addressed to a community facing imminent judgment, a call to awaken. Both Philadelphia and Laodicea are directed to church communities standing in the judgment. While Philadelphia represents the community of striving ones during the era of the judgment, Laodicea represents the community of indolent human spirits during the same era.

If the emphasis is on place, then we must look more closely at the choice of these seven little towns that no longer exist as such.

Symbolism from the revealed religions suggests that Creation is structured in sevens. In addition, we recognize in a broad sense a Spiritual and a Material part to Creation. Seven Universes exist in Material Creation and our Universe with its myriad galaxies and stars is called Ephesus. We now also understand (Abd-ru-shin), that Material Creation is divided into an Ethereal part that is beyond the perceptive capability of our physical organs and any instruments we may develop to aid such observation. The second part of Material Creation is the Gross Material part, the densest part of which is the physical plane. The conclusion seems to be that indeed these churches are indicative of World communities or Universes where human spirits exist, with Ephesus representing our Universe.

This understanding agrees with the representation of the Churches as golden lampstands before the throne of God and the form and details of the messages. The Lord is described as walking amongst the lampstands, describing a travel through the whole of Material Creation by the Creative Will of God prior to the judgment. Each community is shepherded by an Angel and the Judge minutely weighs each as he walks through. The admonitions and predicted punishments described in the book have a global tone and should not be seen as referring to small churches in a small corner of the earth.

We need to be less egocentric and earth-centric to understand the scope of The Revelation. This study views the churches as representing both communities of homogenous human spirits and World communities or Universes.