A Revelation Invitation

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.(Revelation 1:1a)

Imagine that you are a young follower of Jesus in the city of Smyrna nearly two thousand years ago. You have a wife and three children. Your two sons assist you in the pottery trade but you have had difficulty making ends meet ever since you were expelled from the city’s pottery guild. When you became a Christian, you ceased worshiping Athena, goddess of craft. To the guild members your affront to Athena subjected them to the Daemones Ceramici, the ceramic demons, the five malevolent spirits who plague potter craftsmen. Not only does the guild exclude you, they have sabotaged your kiln, broken your pottery and slandered you in the community. The authorities will not come to your defense because you brought this on yourself. You only have your faith in Jesus Christ and the support of his church.

Now imagine your small house church has gathered in the back room of your shop on a Saturday evening to read a letter that just arrived from Ephesus. Your brother, John, who recently returned to Ephesus from his exile on Patmos, has passed along his new letter making the rounds of the churches in the province. Then for the first time you hear, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.” Wow! God is speaking directly to us who are sitting in this room! Jesus has not forgotten us! He knows the difficulties we are enduring! He tells us that he is about to do something and do it soon! You ponder what that could be while you listen with rapt attention as if sitting before the very throne of God.

So many of us enter the reading of Revelation with different concerns than those of our brother in Smyrna. We may ask, “Are we living in the last days—the end times?” If that’s our first question, maybe we need to step back and put ourselves in the sandals of our first century brothers and sisters. Shouldn’t we expect Jesus to speak directly to their needs rather than to our speculations about end times? Besides, John points out that the things coming will happen soon. How soon is soon? It appears that our first century brothers were about to witness things that follow in the letter. Otherwise, what relevance would the book have had to them? Because they were experiencing very troubling times, they needed encouragement to persevere. They needed to make sense of their own circumstances, not ours.

The early church was under siege from the Roman Empire, from the civil authorities and from economic, social and cultural persecution. Jesus, through his vision to John, was about to walk them through the perilous path before them—troubling circumstances they would have to navigate. Revelation showed the Christians that as mighty as the Roman Empire appeared to be, it was destined for destruction. And as weak as the church appeared to be, Rome would not prevail against it. God was going to preserve his church through whatever Rome hurled at it.

So, we will do ourselves a favor if we stop looking in Revelation for clues of the last days. People in every generation have speculated that they were living in the last days—the end times. Some Christians believed this in the first century, some expect it in the twenty-first century and others will presume it in the thirty-first century if Jesus has not returned by then. This simply is not the purpose of the book. We don’t know when that day will come, nor does Revelation give us any clues to the timing.

Christians of every generation, ours included, are opposed by powers like those that tormented the early church. Revelation will help us navigate those difficult times in the same way that it helped our brothers and sisters in the early church. In Revelation God shows us how we can stand up under these trials. God shows his children how he is at work in the world as well as how those evil powers operate. And how he is sovereign over them.

Lord Jesus, come to our rescue. The world opposes your church and mistreats your brothers and sisters. Thank you for revealing how you oppose these evil powers, and how you will bring us through our trials victoriously. You give us hope to persevere. You reveal how you will defeat Satan and the world’s dark powers. Act soon. Come quickly. Amen.