A couple years ago, while attending the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, I escaped the Texas heat into a hipster chicken restaurant with my friend Dr. Valentin Siniy, who leads a seminary in Ukraine. A former student spotted us and joined the table. Over fried chicken, the conversation turned to controversy, as it often does at denominational meetings.
Church life never lacks issues packaged as the most urgent matter ever to confront Christendom. She asked what I thought. Instead of my two cents, I gave her two questions to ask of any such topic.
First, look to church history. G.K. Chesterton called tradition “the democracy of the dead,” because it gives the faithful of past generations a vote. Has the church cared about this over the last two thousand years?
Second, look to the global church. Do our brothers and sisters in Nigeria, India, Brazil, and Ukraine share this concern? Or does it only seem urgent in one country, one denomination, one decade?
Those two questions are especially useful when we open the most misused book in the Bible.
A Book That Keeps Getting Hijacked
Few books have been hijacked by Christian pop culture like Revelation. In 1970, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth mapped the Cold War onto Bible prophecy. In 1988, a pamphlet offered 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. In 2011, Harold Camping’s billboards announced May 21.
Then came blood moons, microchips, and Left Behind. Last September, #RaptureTok went viral when a man in South Africa claimed Jesus would come on September 23 or 24. Some people reportedly quit jobs and sold possessions. September 25 arrived like any other Thursday.
Some of the sharpest critiques came from African evangelicals themselves. Every date-setter, they noted, from William Miller to Camping, trades Scripture for private knowledge and secret calendars. The global church was not impressed.
So what has the church in every century, and believers around the world today, many of them suffering, cherished in this book? Not a timeline or a decoder ring for tomorrow’s headlines. A Person. “Behold, he is coming with the clouds” (Rev. 1:7).
A Letter Before a Prophecy
Before Revelation is a prophecy, it is a letter. John writes from exile on Patmos to seven real congregations in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. Some faced persecution; others faced the quieter danger of comfort and compromise. They didn’t need a code for the twenty-first century. They needed to know who was really on the throne.
John’s answer is Jesus Christ, “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth” (1:5). Faithful unto death on the cross, risen as the first of a great harvest, already enthroned above Caesar.
Then, before John tells us what Jesus will do, he bursts into praise for what Jesus has done: he “loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” (1:5). Our hope for the future rests on finished work in the past.
He Is Coming Himself
“Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him” (1:7). Jesus returns just as he left.
His return will be personal: not an idea or a spirit of progress, but “this Jesus” (Acts 1:11). The Christian hope is not first an event; it is a reunion. It will be visible: “every eye will see him.” You won’t need a TikTok prophet to tell you it happened. And it will be physical: “even those who pierced him.” The one who returns still bears the wounds Thomas touched. The scars that will make the wicked wail will make the redeemed sing.
Run our two questions here, and the answer is overwhelming. The Didache urged early believers to keep their lamps lit. The Apostles’ Creed confesses, “From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.” The Lausanne Covenant of 1974, drafted by evangelicals from more than 150 nations, says Christ “will return personally and visibly, in power and glory.” On this point, the global church speaks with one voice.
As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “When the author walks on to the stage the play is over.”
The Firstborn Means More Are Coming
John calls Jesus “the firstborn of the dead,” and a firstborn implies siblings. Paul calls him the “firstfruits” (1 Cor. 15:20); the first sheaf promises the whole field. Because his tomb is empty, ours will be too.
This is not a vague hope that our souls float on. It is the resurrection of the body. Around AD 200, Tertullian put it bluntly: “The flesh is the hinge of salvation.” God does not save us out of bodies; he saves bodies.
But the same appearing that is glory for the redeemed is terror for those who refuse him: “all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (1:7). Judgment is real. Yet the Heidelberg Catechism offers the believer’s comfort: we await “the very judge who has already offered himself to the judgment of God in my place.” There is still time to look on the Pierced One in faith rather than in terror.
And Revelation ends not with escape but with heaven coming down. God makes all things new and dwells again with his people on earth, like Eden but somehow better.
The Most Embarrassing Verse
In his essay “The World’s Last Night,” C.S. Lewis called Mark 13:32 “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.” There Jesus says, “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Jesus is fully God and fully human. Sometimes he says what only God can say (“Your sins are forgiven”). Sometimes he says what only a human can say (“I thirst”). Here he speaks in his humanity. If humanity at its closest to God doesn’t know precise details about the end, we should be cautious about turning Revelation’s symbolism into a tidy grid and acting like we have it all figured out.
Lewis thought pictures of cosmic catastrophe help us less than the plain idea of Judgment. The better question is how what we say and do today will look when that final light streams in on it. That is a better use of Revelation than any chart.
So, back to our two questions. What has the historic church believed? What does the global church believe? For two thousand years, across every continent, the church has cherished this truth: Jesus will return in person to make all things new. So we believe, and we persevere with hope.
