New Daily Study Bible: The Revelation of John 1. William Barclay

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       INTRODUCTION TO THE REVELATION OF JOHN

       The Strange Book

      When we embark upon the study of Revelation, we feel ourselves projected into a different world. Here is something quite unlike the rest of the New Testament. Not only is Revelation different; it is also notoriously difficult to understand. The result is that it has sometimes been abandoned as quite unintelligible and it has sometimes become the playground of religious eccentrics, who use it to map out celestial timetables of what is to come or who find in it evidence for their own eccentricities. One despairing commentator said that there are as many riddles in Revelation as there are words, and another that the study of Revelation either finds or leaves the reader mad.

      The founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, would have denied Revelation a place in the New Testament. Along with James, Jude, 2 Peter and Hebrews, he relegated it to a separate list at the end of his New Testament. He declared that in it there are only images and visions such as are found nowhere else in the Bible. He complained that, notwithstanding the obscurity of his writing, the writer had the boldness to add threats and promises for those who disobeyed or kept his words, unintelligible though they were. In it, said Luther, Christ is neither taught nor acknowledged; and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is not perceptible in it. Another Reformation scholar, Huldreich Zwingli, is equally hostile to Revelation. ‘With the Apocalypse,’ he writes, ‘we have no concern, for it is not a biblical book . . . The Apocalypse has no savour of the mouth or the mind of John. I can, if I so will, reject its testimonies.’ Most voices have stressed the unintelligibility of Revelation, and not a few have questioned its right to a place in the New Testament.

      On the other hand, there are those in every generation who have loved this book. In his commentary, T. S. Kepler quotes the verdict of the early Church historian and Archbishop of Quebec, Philip Carrington, and makes it his own: ‘In the case of Revelation, we are dealing with an artist greater than Stevenson or Coleridge or Bach. St John has a better sense of the right word than Stevenson; he has a greater command of unearthly supernatural loveliness than Coleridge; he has a richer sense of melody and rhythm and composition than Bach . . . It is the only masterpiece of pure art in the New Testament . . . Its fulness and richness and harmonic variety place it far above Greek tragedy.’

      We shall no doubt find this book difficult and bewildering; but doubtless, too, we shall find it infinitely worth while to wrestle with it until it gives us its blessing and opens its riches to us.

       Apocalyptic Literature

      In any study of Revelation, we must begin by remembering the basic fact that, although unique in the New Testament, it is nonetheless representative of a kind of literature which was the most common of all in the period between the Old and the New Testaments. Revelation is commonly called the Apocalypse – in Greek apokalupsis. Between the Old and the New Testaments, there grew up a great mass of what is called apocalyptic literature, the product of an indestructible Jewish hope.

      The Jews could not forget that they were the chosen people of God. To them, that involved the certainty that some day they would arrive at world supremacy. In their early history, they looked forward to the coming of a king of David’s line who would unite the nation and lead them to greatness. A shoot was to come forth from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1, 11:10). God would raise up a righteous branch for David (Jeremiah 23:5). Some day, the people would serve David, their king (Jeremiah 30:9). David would be their shepherd and their king (Ezekiel 34:23, 37:24). The booth of David would be repaired (Amos 9:11); out of Bethlehem there would come a ruler who would be great to the ends of the earth (Micah 5:2–4).

      But the whole history of Israel contradicted these hopes. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom – small enough to begin with – split into two under Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and so lost its unity. The northern kingdom, with its capital at Samaria, vanished in the last quarter of the eighth century BC before the assault of the Assyrians, never again reappeared in history and is now referred to as the lost ten tribes. The southern kingdom, with its capital at Jerusalem, was reduced to slavery and exile by the Babylonians in the early part of the sixth century BC. It later came under the rule of the Persians, the Greeks and finally the Romans. History for the Jews was a catalogue of disasters from which it became clear that no human deliverer could rescue them.

       The Two Ages

      Jewish thought stubbornly held to the conviction of the chosenness of the Jews but had to adjust itself to the facts of history. It did so by working out a scheme of history. The Jews divided all time into two ages. There was this present age, which is wholly bad and beyond redemption. For it, there can be nothing but total destruction. The Jews, therefore, waited for the end of things as they are. There was the age which is to come, which was to be wholly good, the golden age of God, in which would be peace, prosperity and righteousness, and the place of God’s chosen people would at last be upheld as theirs by right.

      How was this present age to become the age which is to come? The Jews believed that the change could never be brought about by human agency and, therefore, looked for the direct intervention of God. He would come striding on to the stage of history to blast this present world out of existence and bring in his golden time. The day of the coming of God was called the day of the Lord and was to be a terrible time of fear and destruction and judgment, which would be the signs of the coming new age.

      All apocalyptic literature deals with these events – the sin of the present age, the terrors of the time between, and the blessings of the time to come. It is entirely composed of dreams and visions of the end. That means that all apocalyptic literature is inevitably cryptic. It is continually attempting to describe the indescribable, to say the unsayable and to paint the unpaintable.

      This is further complicated by another fact. It was only natural that these apocalyptic visions should flame the more brightly in the minds of people living under tyranny and oppression. The more some alien power held them down, the more they dreamed of the destruction of that СКАЧАТЬ