Revelation Apocalypse Quotes

You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?' 'REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.

The hugest changes were the ones that could not be seen – that’s where the real apocalypse lay: in people’s hearts, their souls, their beings.

And it does great signs and even makes fire to come down out of heaven upon the earth before men’. That’s from Revelations Thirteen." FADE by Kailin Gow

St John from the book of The Revelation “He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The One to Bring the End Days. Like I said before, the details are in plenty of mythologies, but when you look in the bible, in Revelations, it’s so clear. Someone rises during the End Days and charms his way to a position of great power.”, FADE by Kailin Gow

God created mankind in His image and likeness, remember? For some reason, you people always forget your divinity.

We are used to the thought that we’ll go to Heaven if we avoid sins or have our pastor remove them. To labor ourselves into paradise is a new and somewhat discouraging perspective.

When authors claim new revelations dealing with apocalyptic themes, book sales increase.  Christians who chase after the sensational constantly look for keys to unlock the mysteries of the apocalypse. 

Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don’t think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we’ve erected, that is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist.

The soul is imbued with a yearning that is carried, like a torch, from incarnation to incarnation. It burns with a curiosity about life and it’s true identity. Souls live, strive, and evolve, driven to seeking the truth about the world and themselves.

We use to think that we’ll go to Heaven if we avoid sins or have our pastor remove them. To labor ourselves into paradise is a new and somewhat discouraging perspective.

There’s a way to live like a god.

Doomsday sells, but doesn’t ring with truth. Could it be that the Apocalypse is a personal eschatology?

The solemn and devotional ceremonies of the Piscean Age and the fear of God will give way to a friendly, intimate relationship with God. At long last, Jesus’ happy teachings will resurface.

We probably ought to be careful about deciding we're feeling offended; it can get old after a while. We become offended in all the ways God isn't. The seat of offendedness (like the seat of judgment) can be a real tricky spot to occupy. Before we know it, it can become a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. It becomes all we're known for, and when we're all caught up in all the things we're against, we forget the beauty of the things we're supposed to be for. We forget what the kingdom of God looks like and all the wonderfully odd characters taking up residence there. We forget to revel in dappled things. We forget we're dappled.

When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves—as Jews who had found God's messiah—we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon." [From the author's concluding Historical Note]

The end of the world is almost here," I say. And then, even though he won't get the Book of Revelation reference, "Surely, it comes quickly." "God," he says through gritted teeth. "I really want to make a sex joke right now. But you've ruined it. You've ruined it with the apocalypse.

Now you can look at the idea of a unified world system, what the Bible refers to as the future ‘Babylon,’ like a three-legged stool. Global Government, Global Economy, and Global Religion. In the Bible, each of those are prophesied to be world powers at the end of the age. And by the way, each of them will be destroyed by God according to biblical prophecy. You can read it for yourself in last book in the Bible, Revelation, chapters seventeen and eighteen.

Since the Word became flesh (John 1.14), heaven and earth remain indissolubly joined.

God's saving offer of life and love is available for all; but it cannot be separated from his judgement on evil, and his triumph over it.

Biblical eschatology fundamentally challenges the "official" scientific idea that the universe will end in a violent heat death, and instead that the cosmos will be set free from its decadence. It calls us to consider the sobering similarities between ancient pagan cosmologies (creation began with war & violence between the gods) and modern naturalism as a nihilistic, philosophical worldview (all will end in astronomical war & violence). Instead, the revelation (apocalypse) of the Lamb is that God created out of love and love will win in the end.

Live knowing that you are already dust, long gone, already outside time and looking in, reviewing life, finally understanding every déja vu, your own guardian angel. Know that the scorched-black demons and the pristine, fluttering seraphs are in some sense naught but you yourself unpacked, unfolded in a higher space from whence the myriad gods unfurl, not bygone legends but your once and future selves, your attributes blossomed into their purest and most potent symbol-forms. And these, with all their beast-heats, crowns and lightings, all their different colors, are become combined into the single whiteness that is godhead. That is all. This, then, is revelation. All is one, and all is deity, this beautiful undying fire of being that is everywhere about us; that we are. O man, o woman, know yourself, and know you are divine. Respect yourself, respect the least phenomenon of your existence as it were the breath of God. Know that our universe is all one place, a single firelit room, all time a single moment. Know that there has only ever been one person here. Know you are everything, forever. Know I love you.

During the persecutions under the Emperor Domitian, John was summoned to Rome, where he was tortured by immersion in a pot of boiling oil and subsequently banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean sea. It was there he wrote his Apocalypse. It was only after the death of Domitian, in A.D. 96, that he returned to Ephesus, where he was still living during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117). He became so old and frail that he could no longer walk and had to be carried to meetings and services. All he could manage to say was, "My little children, love one another." He repeated this over and over.

In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not.

The Agora had fallen, too. Vince turned the radio off, dismissing what they'd just heard, and merged onto I-87. A little shriek of madness sounded in the back of his brain, but he said, with admirable calm considering, "Seriously, love, I think we've got this.

The Sacral has disappeared from daily reality of the modern world, and it is completely obvious that we live in the ”End of Times”, but the Sacral has not vanished (since it could not vanish theoretically, as it is eternal), but was transferred to a nightly, invisible projection, and is now ready to come down on human physical cosmos in a terrible apocalyptic moment of apogee of history, at a point, when the world that forgot about its spiritual nature and disowned it, will be forced to meet with it in a brutal flash of Revelation.

She is such a blade—-beautiful, powerful, and deadly to her enemies-—as well as her bond-mate due to her fatal flaw. The questions are—How deep is her flaw and can it be healed? After all, a mortal is not a mearcair blade to be discarded if forged improperly. (Kagan Donmall regarding Tessa Montgomery)

It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship—a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle—which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this—the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind,—is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution.

[..] as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends Merlin, Wan-Si, et al. clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcizing those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Saviour, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end; the man who was meant to take her away from all this, from the listless reality of life in a ground-floor flat in Lambeth. What now for Clara? Ryan would find another fad; Darcus need only turn to the other channel; for Hortense another date would of course materialize, along with more leaflets, ever more faith. But Clara was not like Hortense. Yet a residue, left over from the evaporation of Clara's faith, remained. She still wished for a saviour. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to choose her above others so that she might Walk in white with Him: for [she] was worthy. Revelation 3:4.

John has a narrow mind. For him, neither the beauty nor the prosperity of the city of Ephesus is worth a second glance. Ephesus was situated at the end of the Silk Road from China and the caravan route from India which used to pass through the Parthian Empire en route to the West. But the prophet is quite unaware that this particular world exists at all. Even culture means absolutely nothing to him; for example, in 18:22 he rejoices that not only song but also the sound of the flute have disappeared. The world which he knows is limited to the seven churches whose Christianity corresponded with his own; and that in but a single province of the Roman Empire, namely Asia. As to the rest, he is only familiar with the mother church in Jerusalem and the sister church in Rome. John is utterly obsessed by Rome. The fact that this particular metropolis had bestowed both law and peace upon no less than one-half of the world never got through to him at all. He is also quite oblivious of the fact that Rome oppresses nations and exploits slaves. He could not care less about national or social considerations. He abominates the "whore on the seven hills" simply because Rome is persecuting Christians. This is precisely what the Apocalypse is all about: innocent suffering.

This sort of reading of the Apocalypse was nowhere more eloquently performed than in the simple anthem of the U.S. Civil Rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.” The word “overcome” was taken from the King James Version’s rendering of the verb nikan, used pervasively in Revelation and translated in most modern versions as “conquer.”33 The word is used in the refrain of promise that concludes each of the letters to the seven churches. For example, “To him that over-cometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (3:21, KJV). As freedom marchers from the black churches joined hands and sang, “We shall overcome someday,” they were expressing their faith that, despite their lack of conventional political power, their witness to the truth would prevail over violence and oppression.

Why would God have inspired the words of the Bible if he chose not to preserve these words for posterity? Put differently, what should make me think he had inspired the words in the first place if I knew for certain (as I did) that he had not preserved them? This became a major problem for me in trying to figure out which Bible I thought was inspired. Another big problem is one that I don’t deal with in Misquoting Jesus. If God inspired certain books in the decades after Jesus died, how do I know that the later church fathers chose the right books to be included in the Bible? I could accept it on faith—surely God would not allow noninspired books in the canon of Scripture. But as I engaged in more historical study of the early Christian movement, I began to realize that there were lots of Christians in lots of places who fully believed that other books were to be accepted as Scripture; conversely, some of the books that eventually made it into the canon were rejected by church leaders in different parts of the church, sometimes for centuries. In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not. If God was making sure that his church would have the inspired books of Scripture, and only those books, why were there such heated debates and disagreements that took place over three hundred years? Why didn’t God just make sure that these debates lasted weeks, with assured results, rather than centuries?1

I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only in more literary treatments of the same radical fiction, but in the literary treatment of radical fictions in general. The assumptions I have made in doing so I shall try to examine next time. Meanwhile it may be useful to have some kind of summary account of what I've been saying. The main object: is the critical business of making sense of some of the radical ways of making sense of the world. Apocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the first thing to say tbout them, although the second is that they change. The Johannine acquires the characteristics of the Sibylline Apocalypse, and develops other subsidiary fictions which, in the course of time, change the laws we prescribe to nature, and specifically to time. Men of all kinds act, as well as reflect, as if this apparently random collocation of opinion and predictions were true. When it appears that it cannot be so, they act as if it were true in a different sense. Had it been otherwise, Virgil could not have been altissimo poeta in a Christian tradition; the Knight Faithful and True could not have appeared in the opening stanzas of "The Faerie Queene". And what is far more puzzling, the City of Apocalypse could not have appeared as a modern Babylon, together with the 'shipmen and merchants who were made rich by her' and by the 'inexplicable splendour' of her 'fine linen, and purple and scarlet,' in The Waste Land, where we see all these things, as in Revelation, 'come to nought.' Nor is this a matter of literary allusion merely. The Emperor of the Last Days turns up as a Flemish or an Italian peasant, as Queen Elizabeth or as Hitler; the Joachite transition as a Brazilian revolution, or as the Tudor settlement, or as the Third Reich. The apocalyptic types--empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe--are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand, in the middest.

The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls? Doubt it not! For traditions are full of Divne Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspirations is not of one Age or of one Creed. p. 321

Christianity does the opposite of Plato. The rejection of reality by philosophy today is the most astonishing thing imaginable. Perhaps it is the proximity of revelation, the ever greater pressure it exerts, that feeds this impulse. But I think that revelation is going to become obvious in the “end times,” precisely because the Apocalypse marks the end, the pulling down of the mythological and philosophical screen that was erected against the truth. And since most people do not want to know the truth, this end can come about only in a violent fashion. The

What if I tell you that in our time, with only the help of three devices, an encyclopedia, a sheet of paper and a pencil, as in a game we can solve all the riddles of our History in a total perspective, down to the abyssal clarity? – from the 'Ages of Man' to the last Golden Age of mankind, the great prophecies and the mystery of Evil. So that everything that was doubtful becomes irrefutable: the Apocalypse! – You think this impossible? – I tell you: you don’t know the Aleph. And you cannot discern the times. Yet the Aleph and the New Order of the Times are one and the same.

You don’t believe Hobbamock is invincible?” “No. My people centuries ago proved that. He is powerful— and gaining strength with each new child. But I do not think he is invincible . . . yet. Could he become invincible? Could he gain so much strength that nothing could stop him? This is a question that has kept me up nights.” “But you’re convinced he can be defeated?” “Absolutely.” “By a kid carrying some kind of magic spear.” “Yes,” Charlie said softly. “I had . . . an experience, what Quidnecks call pniese. What your Bible calls a revelation or apocalypse. The pniese made everything clear.

Dennis White has asked me to write a letter recommending him to the Emanuel Lutheran Seminary (Master of Divinity Program), and I am happy to grant his modest request. Four years ago Mr. White enrolled as a dewy-eyed freshman in one of my introductory literature courses (Cross-cultural Readings in English, or some such dumping ground of a title); he returned several years later for another dose of instruction, this time in the Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop—a particularly memorable collection of students given their shared enthusiasm for all things monstrous and demonic, nearly every story turned in for discussion involving vampires, werewolves, victims tumbling into sepulchers, and other excuses for bloodletting. I leave it to professionals in your line of work to pass judgment on this maudlin reveling in violence. A cry for help of some sort? A lack of faith — given the daily onslaught of news about melting ice caps, hunger, joblessness, war — in the validity or existence of a future? Now in my middle fifties, an irrelevant codger, I find it discomfiting to see this generation dancing to the music of apocalypse and carrying their psychic burdens in front of them like infants in arms.

It is fashionable to avoid talking of the wrath of God. Karl Barth for years neglected the theme and likewise most contemporary theologians. But the Apocalypse knows no such finicky reserve. There are sixteen references to wrath here. Moderns have forgotten that the most loved verse of the Bible warns that unbelievers will “perish.” The sun that melts wax also hardens clay. No one can be the same after hearing the gospel. They are either better or worse—much better or much worse. But God’s wrath is not irritable and moody like ours. It is the inevitable recoil of holiness against all that would destroy.

My mother was in charge of language. My father had never really learned to read - he could manage slowly, with his fingers on the line, but he had left school at twelve and gone to work at the Liverpool docks. Before he was twelve, no one had bothered to read to him. His own father had been a drunk who often took his small son to the pub with him, left him outside, staggered out hours later and walked home, and forgot my dad, asleep in a doorway. Dad loved Mrs Winterson reading out loud - and I did too. She always stood up while we two sat down, and it was intimate and impressive all at the same time. She read the Bible every night for half an hour, starting at the beginning, and making her way through all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. When she got to her favourite bit, the Book of Revelation, and the Apocalypse, and everyone being exploded and the Devil in the bottomless pit, she gave us all a week off to think about things. Then she started again, Genesis Chapter One. 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...' It seemed to me to be a lot of work to make a whole planet, a whole universe, and blow it up, but that is one of the problems with the literal-minded versions of Christianity; why look after the planet when you know it is all going to end in pieces?

I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.

Jergen Moltmann writes, End-time histories might better be referred to as exterminism. These are acts of military, economic, or ecological violence. Anyone who talks about “the apocalypse” or “the battle of Armageddon” is providing a religious interpretation for mass human crime, and is trying to make God responsible for what human beings are doing. Nothing has a more fatal effect than the expectation of a fatal future. These “cosmic catastrophe promoters” do not awaken the faith and hope of people. The only result is a general alarmism. What Christian apocalyptic intends is not to evoke horror in the face of the end, but to encourage endurance in resisting the powers of this world. Anyone who interprets the threatening nuclear annihilation of humanity apocalyptically as Armageddon is pushing onto God the responsibility of human beings. This is the height of godlessness and irresponsibility. This type of apocalyptic must be exposed.

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.

Finally, the ethical staying power of the Apocalypse is a product of its imaginative richness. The text throbs with theopoetic energy, expressed in its numerous songs of praise and worship. It is no accident that Milton drew inspiration from Revelation or that Handel found the lyrics for the climactic choruses of the Messiah (“Hallelujah” and “Worthy Is the Lamb”) in the poetry of Revelation: “The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever” (based on Rev. 11:15).

I have a problem with Saint Paul, who never actually met Jesus, and with whoever it was who wrote the book of Revelation (it was definitely not Saint John). I also take issue with the idea that Jesus, after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, started working out and riding horses and having second thoughts about the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. Where did this new muscular Christ come from? What are the four horsemen of the apocalypse so pissed about? What situation could possibly be made better by unleashing war, pestilence, famine, and death?

Surely I am coming quickly” (Revelation 22:20). The more aware we are of His impending return, the more motivated we’ll be in our work for Him in these last days.

how does this outer life, apocalypse reported, penetrate my dreams

parallel to all other ages, not a chronological series of events. Indeed, one of the great marvels of God’s gracious activity toward us is that it occurs in real time without being prejudiced in favor of any particular age. Just because we are the latest does not mean we are the best. The effects of sin prevent any age—including ours—from being “golden,” at least in the spiritual sense. Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God’s people will prevail. Revelation is the last book of the Bible. It reveals important truths about the end times. But it is also last in another important sense—it calls on all the hermeneutical courage, wisdom, and maturity one can muster in order to be understood properly. In many ways it serves as a graduation exercise for the NIV Application Commentary Series, an opportunity to fully apply the many lessons we have learned in the Bridging Contexts sections of previous volumes. God’s time is his, not ours. The story of God’s gracious activity on our behalf will be fulfilled in a great and glorious conclusion. But all Christians, everywhere and at all times, have equal access to the time. That access has been and is made possible by God’s message in the book of Revelation. Terry C. Muck Author’s Preface AS A NEW CHRISTIAN recently converted from atheism, I eagerly hurried through Paul’s letters, reaching Revelation as soon as possible. Once I reached it, however, I could hardly understand a word of it. I listened attentively to the first few “prophecy teachers” I heard, but even if they had not contradicted one another, over the years I watched as most of their detailed predictions failed to materialize. Perhaps six years after my conversion, as I began to read Revelation in Greek for the first time, the book came alive to me. Because I was now moving through the text more carefully, I noticed the transitions and the structure, and I realized it was probably addressing something much different from what I had first supposed. At the same time, I catalogued parallels I found between Revelation and biblical prophets like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. I also began reading an apocalypse contemporary with Revelation, 4 Ezra (2 Esdras in the Apocrypha), to learn more about the way Revelation’s original, first-century audience may have heard its claims. Yet even in my first two years as a Christian, Revelation and other end-time passages proved a turning point for me. As a young Christian, I was immediately schooled in a particular, popular end-time view, which I respectfully swallowed (the

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near. This

Revelation unveils that bride. The climax of the Apocalypse, then, is the communion of the Church and Christ: the marriage supper of the Lamb

I’ll end with a story. A friend of mine was a student in France in 1967–68 at the Catholic University of the West. And one day her class visited a château in the Loire Valley. The docent took them into a room with an enormous stretch of hanging fabric, many yards across from one wall to the other. And on the fabric were hundreds of ugly knots and tangles of stray thread in a chaos of confused shapes that made very little sense. And the docent said, “This is what the artist saw as he worked.” Then she led my friend and her class around to the front of the fabric. And what they saw there is the great tapestry of the Apocalypse of St. John, the story of the book of Revelation in ninety immense panels. Created between 1377 and 1382, it’s one of the most stunning and beautiful expressions of medieval civilization, and among the greatest artistic achievements of the European heritage. The point is simply this: We rarely see the full effects of the good we do in this life. So much of what we do seems a tangle of frustrations and failures. We don’t see—on this side of the tapestry—the pattern of meaning that our faith weaves. But one day we’ll stand on the other side. And on that day, we’ll see the beauty that God has allowed us to add to the great story of his creation, the richness we’ve added to the lives of our family and friends, the mark for the better we’ve left on the world, and the revelation of his love that goes from age to age no matter how good or bad the times. We are each an unrepeatable, infinitely treasured part of that story. And this is why our lives matter.

One by Stewart Stafford Death riding a pale horse, Warned it was time to leave, No hiding place as dice rolled, I sank to my knees to grieve. Six hundred and sixty-six morticians, Greeted the thing from the sea, Scuttling sideways down the road, It headed for Washington D.C. Navel-gazing, not my thing at all, But the Day of Judgement came by, Grabbing my phone lightning-fast, A dying breath to scream goodbye. Firestorms, tsunamis, the dead resurrecting, The sun shattered into nine, Winds that flayed skin from bone, Jester bells at dawn's last shine. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Revelation 6:5–8 (HCSB): When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and there was a black horse. The horseman on it had a set of scales in his hand. Then I heard something like a voice among the four living creatures say, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius—but do not harm the olive oil and the wine.” When He opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and there was a pale green horse. The horseman on it was named Death, and Hades was following after him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill by the sword, by famine, by plague, and by the wild animals of the earth.

Revelation 6:7–8 (NLT): When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the fourth living being say, “Come!” I looked up and saw a horse whose color was pale green. Its rider was named Death, and his companion was the Grave. These two were given authority over one-fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword and famine and disease and wild animals.

Revelation 17:3–6 (NLT): So the angel took me in the Spirit into the wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that had seven heads and ten horns, and blasphemies against God were written all over it. The woman wore purple and scarlet clothing and beautiful jewelry made of gold and precious gems and pearls. In her hand she held a gold goblet full of obscenities and the impurities of her immorality. A mysterious name was written on her forehead: “Babylon the Great, Mother of All Prostitutes and Obscenities in the World.” I could see that she was drunk—drunk with the blood of God’s holy people who were witnesses for Jesus. I stared at her in complete amazement.

Revelation 6:9–11 (HCSB): When He opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the people slaughtered because of God’s word and the testimony they had. They cried out with a loud voice: “Lord, the One who is holy and true, how long until You judge and avenge our blood from those who live on the earth?” So a white robe was given to each of them, and they were told to rest a little while longer until the number would be completed of their fellow slaves and their brothers, who were going to be killed just as they had been.

Apocalypticism refers to the belief that God has revealed the imminent end of the ongoing struggle between good and evil in history. Apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation about the future or the heavenly realm is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality. The Greek word apokalypsis means “uncovering” or “revelation.

Indeed, more than two-thirds of Revelation’s four hundred four verses allude to Old Testament passages. The reason we often cannot make heads or tails out of them is that we have not sufficiently learned to read the Bible for all it is worth. When our interpretations are tethered to the hottest sensation rather than to the Holy Scripture, we are apt to grab at anything—and usually miss.

Apocalypse means revelation. Maybe it’s time all these hidden things were revealed.

Each of the seven seals reveals a part of the book. When we understand that each seal as a separate covenant, then everything makes sense.

Revelation 13:2 declares that his mouth is ‘as the mouth of a lion’ which is a symbolic expression telling of the majesty and awe-producing effects of his voice.”[46] Just as the voice of a lion surpasses that of all other beasts, so the Antichrist will outrival orators both ancient and modern.

Scripture is a guide for conduct as well as the source of doctrine. Seven times in the book of Revelation we read this phrase: “He who has an ear, let him hear” (2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). What we read in this book should govern our conduct.

Our conduct today is affected by what we know of tomorrow. The book of Revelation tells us of God’s plan for the future and assures us that we are on the winning side. It often appears that the enemy is winning, but Revelation puts everything into perspective. Satan

It is a symbiotic relationship of sorts that we share, one where I also benefit by borrowing from its reserves of strength and will, but I also revel in the dark bloodlust within its soul. Tell me, what is the beast that lurks within you?

As I described in chapter 1, it was only when I began attending Mass that the many parts of this puzzling book suddenly began to fall into place. Before long, I could see the sense in Revelation's altar (Rev 8:3), its robed clergymen (4:4), candles (1:12), incense (5:8), manna (2:17), chalices (ch. 16), Sunday worship (1:10), the prominence it gives to the Blessed Virgin Mary (12:1–6), the “Holy, Holy, Holy” (4:8), the Gloria (15:3–4), the Sign of the Cross (14:1), the Alleluia (19:1, 3, 6), the readings from Scripture (ch. 2–3), and the “Lamb of God” (many, many times). These are not interruptions in the narrative or incidental details; they are the very stuff of the Apocalypse.

Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book. (Revelation 22:7)

The word apocalypse has become associated with a devastating event, including the end of the world. But the term actually means “to unveil” or “to reveal.

MSB: You're saying, then, that the coming of Christ, by fatally undermining the regime of violence, ought to have the consequence either that from now on heaven and earth are separate, ushering in the Apocalypse, or, to the contrary, that the immanence of the divine order, in the Hegelian sense, must now be considered to have been made actual? RG: It's not clear. Sacrificial interpretations are always interesting, because they take into account what you have just said: they reflect the power of God in a world that, from the historical point of view, obviously remains pre-apocalyptic. Attempts will continue to be made, one after the other, to establish a divine order on earth. The error of idealists is to unfailingly believe that these attempts will succeed—whereas violence remains embedded in the world. The triumph of the Cross is the unfinished work of a tiny minority. Even if Satan is conquered each time an individual is saved, his power endures. It's my Jansenism coming out, you see. Satan has been conquered. But humanity, instead of bringing into existence the order of things that it desires, threatens to completely destroy the world instead. This order of things is historical. Luke calls it “the times of the Gentiles,”8 which is to say the age of those who are going to convert, only in the wrong way. Ignoring the apocalypse of the Revelation to John amounts to converting to Pelagianism—you know, the theory of that old Englishman who believed in the excellence of the world and who took issue with the doctrine of original sin and of grace. MSB

we must try to do justice to the three categories of literature – apocalypse, prophecy and letter – into which Revelation seems to fall.

Although most early Christian prophecy was oral, not written, John had plenty of models for a written prophecy, both in the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures and in the later Jewish apocalypses. In its literary forms what he writes is indebted to both kinds of model.

The extent and character of the continuity and the differences between prophecy and apocalyptic are highly debatable. But the distinction means that the relationship between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses has also been debated. Often the issue has been posed in a misleading way, as though John himself would have made the kinds of distinction modern scholars have made between prophecy and apocalyptic. This is very unlikely. The book of Daniel, which was one of John’s major Old Testament sources, he would certainly have regarded as a prophetic book. If he knew some of the post-biblical apocalypses, as he most probably did, he will have seen them as a form of prophecy. The forms and traditions which Revelation shares with other works we call apocalypses John will have used as vehicles of prophecy, in continuity with Old Testament prophecy.

We may still ask in what sense Revelation belongs to the genre of ancient religious literature we call the apocalypse. J. J. Collins defines the literary genre apocalypse in this way: ‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.2 The reference to eschatological salvation would be disputed in some recent study of the apocalypses. Although the apocalypses have conventionally been thought to be about history and eschatology, this is not necessarily true of all of them. The heavenly secrets revealed to the seer in the extant Jewish apocalypses cover a rather wide range of topics and are not exclusively concerned with history and eschatology.3 John’s apocalypse, however, is exclusively concerned with eschatology: with eschatological judgment and salvation, and with the impact of these on the present situation in which he writes.

The heavenly revelation he receives concerns God’s activity in history to achieve his eschatological purpose for the world. In other words, John’s concerns are exclusively prophetic. He uses the apocalyptic genre as a vehicle of prophecy, as not all Jewish apocalyptists did consistently. So it would be best to call John’s work a prophetic apocalypse or apocalyptic prophecy. With that qualification, it obviously fits the definition of the genre apocalypse quoted above, and there should be no difficulty in recognizing its generic relationship to the Jewish apocalypses, while at the same time acknowledging its continuity with Old Testament prophecy.

In the first place, John’s work is a prophetic apocalypse in that it communicates a disclosure of a transcendent perspective on this world.

A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so many of the latter: who is Lord over the world?

The first is rarely noticed. John’s work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important.

A second formal, literary difference between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses is that, unlike the latter, Revelation is not pseudepigraphal.

Mankind’s happy end and people’s happy endings are inevitable.

Jesus was born at the dawn of the Piscean Age, for which he designed a new religion. Now, our planet’s era is changing again and this time Aquarius will rule.

Jesus wasn’t the first to resurrect Christ inside.

We’ll get the real story when we get to heaven! REFLECTION

Direct brain implants will allow users to enter full-immersion virtual reality—with complete sensory stimulation—without any external equipment. The use of direct brain implants in the brain’s frontal lobe(essentially behind the forehead) was seen by the Apostle John 2000 years ago. “It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.” Revelation 13:16-17 (NIV)

apuckalips FW 455.1 n. The revelation of a cataclysmic upheaval or Apocalypse when you can pucker up your lips and kiss your ass goodbye. (“nor homemade hurricanes in our Cohortyard, no cupahurling nor apuckalips nor no puncheon jodelling nor no nothing”) Punch and Judy appear here.

It is not merely stored away as one more news item, one more piece of religious information, one more scenario—that would be especially unfruitful for modern man, who suffers massive oversaturation of theory, knowledge, and scenarios. Instead, the revelation takes a form that is a loud shout in a world growing deaf. The authority of its horrific imagery guarantees an absolute claim on the imagination. We are intrigued, puzzled, frustrated, alarmed, and ultimately encouraged. In short, we are aroused to a kind of attention before the mystery of human history as it unfolds, precisely because we do not know when or how the ultimate danger is to be incarnated. With prayerful reading, the book assists in the conversion of attention into holy vigilance, the spirit of the watchman.

Has nobody not told you, Brian, that you've got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn't even mind, but you don't even have a fuckin' future, I don't have a future. Nobody has a future. The party's over. Take a look around you man, it's all breaking up. Are you not familiar with the book of Revelations of St. John, the final book of the Bible prophesying the apocalypse?... He forced everyone to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one shall be able to buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the name of the beast, or the number of his name, and the number of the beast is 6-6-6... What can such a specific prophecy mean? What is the mark? Well the mark, Brian, is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode that you'll find on every bog roll and packet of johnnies and every poxy pork pie, and every fuckin' barcode is divided into two parts by three markers, and those three markers are always represented by the number 6. 6-6-6! Now what does it say? No one shall be able to buy or sell without that mark. And now what they're planning to do in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society, what they're planning to do, what they've already tested on the American troops, they're going to subcutaneously laser tattoo that mark onto your right hand, or onto your forehead. They're going to replace plastic with flesh. Fact! In the same book of Revelations when the seven seals are broken open on the day of judgment and the seven angels blow the trumpets, when the third angel blows her bugle, wormwood will fall from the sky, wormwood will poison a third part of all the waters and a third part of all the land and many many many people will die! Now do you know what the Russian translation for wormwood is?... Chernobyl! Fact. On August the 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are gonna line up into the shape of a cross... They're gonna line up in the signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocalypse, as mentioned in the book of Daniel, another fuckin' fact! Do you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Brian, the game is up!

Revelation 11:3–5 (HCSB): I will empower my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, dressed in sackcloth.” These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. If anyone wants to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and consumes their enemies; if anyone wants to harm them, he must be killed in this way.

Revelation 6:1–4 (HCSB): Then I saw the Lamb open one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, “Come!” I looked, and there was a white horse. The horseman on it had a bow; a crown was given to him, and he went out as a victor to conquer. When He opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” Then another horse went out, a fiery red one, and its horseman was empowered to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another. And a large sword was given to him. CHAPTER 1 A PRIVATE DINNER 2 Thessalonians 2:9–12 (NLT): This man will come to do the work of Satan with counterfeit power and signs and miracles. He will use every kind of evil deception to fool those on their way to destruction, because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them. So God will cause them to be greatly deceived, and they will believe these lies. Then they will be condemned for enjoying evil rather than believing the truth.

A faulty understanding of science, along with rigorism and spiritual flattening in religion, termed scientism or biblicism, respectively, have taken hold of the Book of Man and lead in every way to a miserable, indeed abject, conception of History. There has been a will to reduce History to a universal law, on the pattern of the natural sciences (Ultimate Law of History, abbreviated to ULH). Or the revelations of scripture are presumptuously held for a gnomon, the shadow-stick of a sundial allowing calculation of the course of salvific History. The outcome, at best, was loss of meaning and relativism. Novus ordo is the reckoning. History has its own Universal Formula. This “formula” is not a law, nor a scheme, but an order: Novus ordo.

What if I tell you that in our time, with only the help of three devices, an encyclopedia, a sheet of paper and a pencil, as in a game we can solve all the riddles of our History in a total perspective, down to the abyssal clarity? – from the "Ages of Man" to the last Golden Age of mankind, the great prophecies and the mystery of Evil. So that everything that was doubtful becomes irrefutable: the Apocalypse! – You think this impossible? – I tell you: you don’t know the Aleph. And you cannot discern the times. Yet the Aleph and the New Order of the Times are one and the same.

Revelation 8:12 (NLT): Then the fourth angel blew his trumpet, and one-third of the sun was struck, and one-third of the moon, and one-third of the stars, and they became dark. And one-third of the day was dark, and also one-third of the night. Joel 2:10–11 (HCSB): The earth quakes before them; the sky shakes. The sun and moon grow dark, and the stars cease their shining. The Lord raises His voice in the presence of His army. His camp is very large; Those who carry out His command are powerful. Indeed, the Day of the Lord is terrible and dreadful—who can endure it?

Revelation 8:5, 7 (NLT): Then the angel filled the incense burner with fire from the altar and threw it down upon the earth; and thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and there was a terrible earthquake. . . . The first angel blew his trumpet, and hail and fire mixed with blood were thrown down on the earth. One-third of the earth was set on fire, one-third of the trees were burned, and all the green grass was burned.

Revelation 8:8–9 (NLT): Then the second angel blew his trumpet, and a great mountain of fire was thrown into the sea. One-third of the water in the sea became blood, one-third of all things living in the sea died, and one-third of all the ships on the sea were destroyed.

Revelation 8:10–11 (HCSB): The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from heaven. It fell on a third of the rivers and springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood, and a third of the waters became wormwood. So, many of the people died from the waters, because they had been made bitter.

The Apocalypse, as Leithard puts it, unveils ‘the formation of a fully human church as it describes the cruciformization of witnesses…These witnesses become, like Jesus in his suffering, fully human as they bear witness to God’s glory in the face of Christ’.150 Christ is indeed, as the Apostle puts it, ‘the first born of many brethren’, and the whole of creation is groaning, awaiting the revelation—the apocalypse, the unveiling—of the sons of God (cf. Rom. 8:18–30).

Originating in Jewish scripture, the idea of apocalypse combines two meanings, mystical and eschatological: a revelation and the end of a world.

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, “We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?

The gospel is preached as a mystery, hidden throughout the ages in the writings of Scripture, but now apocalyptically revealed. The revelation of this mystery, this apocalypse, is nothing less than the turn of the ages, marking out two distinct eras, distinct not in content, but in terms of clarity: