Rev I tape 1 by Malcolm Smith Method of Interpretation

Revelation Chapter 1

So let us come to our first lecture and begin with Revelation and chapter 1, reading from the first verse.

‘The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave to him to show to his bond-servants the things which must shortly take place and He sent and communicated it by his angel to his bond-servant John who bore witness to the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ even to all that he saw. Blessed is he that reads and those who hear the words of the prophesy and heed the things which are written in it, for the time is near’. Verse 9, ‘I John your brother, a fellow partaker in the tribulation and Kingdom and perseverance which are in Jesus was on the Island of Patmos because of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus’.

As we come to this first lecture of the Revelation of Jesus, I want to start out by noting one or two things that I think are important, especially for those of you who have not heard anything said on the book of Revelation before. Firstly let me warn you in advance that the interpretation that we are about to indulge in in the book of Revelation is radically different from any other interpretation that I know of on the public market today. Now if you are a theologian or a student and if you buy books from some of the more reputable booksellers you will know this because interpretations have been in the Church for the last thousand years. But on the popular book market the view that I am about to give you is quite unknown and therefore if you are a reader of the popular Christian books, the interpretation which I am about to give will be totally different from anything you have ever heard before.

Now it could be that you have settled down in your particular view of the Revelation, which of course includes your view of the Second Coming and things to do with the end. And if you have settled down into that then it could be that you will be threatened by what I have to say from the minute I open my mouth. Now I am telling you therefore in advance before anyone decides to disagree with any one word that I say, please allow me to speak without stopping for 12 hours and when I have done my thing for 12 hours you can state whether you agree, or disagree but the very nature of the course is a gradual unfolding, laying down first of all the foundation and principles. Therefore to disagree at the very beginning is to be very unfair. Please, even if you feel I am totally wrong, please hold your peace, love me anyway and allow the Spirit of God to tell you whether I am right or wrong. You are going to have a million questions if you have any other view of the Revelation, and so please do not come to me, or if you are listening on tape do not go to the person who loaned you the tape. Just wait and as the questions occur write the questions down, have a special page in your notebook just for questions, and as soon as the questions occur write them down. And if they are not answered by the 12th lecture, then you can come to me and I will do my best to answer them. And as you write those questions down, don’t write them down as big questions, just write them down as a note, because if you write them down as a big question you are liable to think of them as a question and not hear anything else for the next twenty minutes.

I warn you that if you think there is a seven year tribulation to come, sooner or later you are likely to write down in your book, "WHAT ABOUT THE SEVEN YEAR TRIBULATION? Just write it down as "what about the seven-year tribulation?" and forget it until we come to such an answer – or you may say, "WHAT ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM?" and again, just write it as a casual note, "What about the Millennium?" Do not get all hung up on one question rather just note them down and as the interpretation unfolding answers them, cross them off with the answer. I believe that 99% of your questions will be answered by the 12th lecture. They certainly will not be answered by the 1st, 2nd or 3rd, and so kind of hang in there and do it that way, and even if at the end of the whole course you totally disagree with my interpretation of Revelation, which it could well be, and it wouldn’t threaten me if you did. Can we agree on one thing, that this course will undoubtedly glorify Jesus Christ as Lord of All, and I think whether you agree with me basically you will have to agree with me essentially that Jesus Christ is Lord of All and the interpretation that I am about to present from the book of Revelation states that as clearly as I know how. And so with those preliminary remarks let us come to our first lecture proper and there ask how we interpret the book of Revelation.

I have to ask the question, What is this book all about? No point in plunging into the book with a preconceived idea. The only way to interpret the Scripture is exegetically and the word ‘exegetically’ means let the Bible speak out at you, the other way of doing it is eisegetically which means coming to the Bible having already decided what it is going to say, and you speak into it your own interpretation and say, ‘there, the Bible agrees with me’. That is not the way to hear God speak. And so first of all I have to come not to the first chapter to study it, but to the whole book, and to say ‘What is the whole book about?’. I must come to that whole book as if I had never read it before, know nothing about it, and I come as a simple child to sit at the feet of this Book in the Power of the Spirit and say, ‘What does it mean?’

Now the first consideration must be to remember that it is a book. This of course can be applied to every book of the Bible, it is not just miraculous words hanging in space. When the men wrote the Bible they did so in terms of the Book – a book that began – it began with normal, earthly, human grammar and syntax, it was written in a certain place by a certain man to certain people in a certain historical context, and until I know that I have absolutely no way of finding out what it has to say. Supposing I wrote a letter to you, and let us suppose I wrote it from Washington DC and I mentioned just in passing certain things which had to do with the Carter administration, and in four thousand years’ time they found that letter, I think both you and I feel that we were cheated if the people 4000 years from now picked up the letter and merely read it as if it had been written four thousand years from now. In order to understand it I would expect them to research who this chap called Malcolm is. I would want them at least to find out who this person was who lived in the 1970s. They may not find out, but at least I hope they would try. And certainly I would expect them to find out what Washington is, and I would expect them to find out what "Carter Administration" means, and only then would they really be able to find out what that letter was about. Do you appreciate what I am saying? Now, when you come to the Book of Revelation, I can’t just say, ‘Ooh, prophecy, it must be for us’. Why should it be? I can’t say that until first of all I have gone to ask questions of it as a book. Who wrote it? To whom was it written, when was it written, why was it written, what is the historical context? And that is quite easy because it is not 4000 years ago, it is a mere 1970 years ago, which is not very long ago historically speaking.

And so when was it written? It was written approximately AD 95. That tells me a lot right there, as we shall see in a moment. Who was it written by? It was written by John and traditionally John the Apostle He was very much alive in AD 95 even though he was a very old man. He was the very youngest of all the Apostles. When he began to follow Jesus he could have been no more than 16 or 17 and he was the very last of the Apostles, and this very old old man who had been banished to the Island of Patmos which is an Island in the Mediterranean, wrote this book after he received the Revelation from God. He wrote it to 7 real churches which were on the mainland, over which he had been the pastor and overseer. Seven churches – there were many more churches on the mainland, but these seven were very strategically placed churches, so that when they got a copy of this book, having read it themselves, they could then pass it on to those that were around them. In most of these cases these churches stand at the head of a valley, or a pass beyond which were many other churches, and so when they had read this book, they could pass it on. And so it is a very real historical situation. To get the book out of the clouds and bring it down to earth John wrote it from a real Devil’s island called Patmos and he wrote it to seven strategically placed churches who were going to pass it on to others. We gather that from the verses we have just read together. John said in verse nine that he was on the island of Patmos and he goes on to say in verse 11 ‘Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamon, Thyatira, Sardis Philadelphia, Laodecia’. Very real churches and at this point in time I just want to underline that because many interpretations of Revelation already assume that they are symbolic, - and I say, why should they be? If I wrote to the church in Morristown, why should that be a symbolic name? It is not, it is a real historic place, and so we take that as it stands.

Now why was John on Patmos and what was the condition of the churches in that day? Pretty rough. John was on Patmos because he had been banished there, his crime was that he was a Christian. We know from Roman history that in 95 there was an emperor who was reigning over the Roman Empire. His name was Diocletian. Diocletian was a fanatic in emperor worship. In the Roman Empire it was more or less there all of the time, depending on the emperor, but it was sort of always there; that which held the empire together was emperor worship. Now by emperor worship I mean that once a year every member of the Roman Empire would have to go down town, stand before the City Fathers raise his right hand, and say ‘Caesar (that is the Roman Emperor) is Lord, is God’, hand take a pinch of incense and drop it into the flames in front of a statue of the Caesar and there admit he’s God. Now it depended on the emperor whether that was enforced or not. Diocletian was a fanatic – he began every one of his letters, or each of the bills passed through Senate with the words, ‘Your Lord and your God Diocletian speaks’. Whenever he gave a speech he always began it by saying, ‘Thus says your Lord God Diocletian’, and when he entered a theatre, everyone had to stand and worship him and state, ‘Our Lord and Lady, our God’.

Editors note: I think Malcolm was refering to Domitian (AD 81-96 ) rather than Diocletian (AD 284-305 ).

Now he had a thing about Christians, because Christians would not stand before a statue of an emperor and say He is Lord. In fact many of them would simply say, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’. That was the whole issue. Remember when the disciples went to Thessalonica – that was the whole issue in the Acts. The whole thing against them was that they were preaching another King, even Jesus. That was the whole issue. Who is Lord God, the Caesar of Rome or Jesus? That was the whole issue. Some emperors could care less about it, and the Christians had an easy time. When Diocletian came, all the pressure was on, because Christians resolutely stood firm. Jesus Christ is Lord and God.

Now not all over the Roman Empire was that enforced. Again, not only did it depend upon the Emperor – it depended on his officials in the far-flung empire, but you see if we trace the history of emperor worship, where did it begin? It began in Pergamum – a long time ago, but it began there. You see the Roman emperors had done so much good for these uncivilized people – they brought them roads, they brought them civilization, and the response of the populous was to worship the Caesar that had done it, and it was there, in the middle of those seven churches that John was overseer of that emperor worship began, instituted by the populous, and the very first temple that was ever built in honour of a Caesar, was built right there within the seven churches, becoming one of the most fanatical areas for emperor-worship Therefore when John refused to bow to the Emperor, he was banished to the Island of Patmos which is a very small rock island in the Mediterranean, and there he worked in the marble mines, hacking marble out of the rock. He was an old hand -in his eighties at least - probably on the edge of his nineties, he was hacking rock with great chains around him. The particular banishment that John had meant that he was in chains for the rest of his life, he was manacled around his wrists and around his feet, and he lived on bread and water slapped onto the ground, and he had done that for a number of years at this point of time.

On the mainland because of this refusal to bow to Caesar, many many of the Christians lost their jobs. Today we have unions. That is nothing new. Unions are as old as the Bible and the Unions of the Roman Empire always had a patron deity and over the patron deity was the emperor. When you joined the order of mechanics union – I doubt whether they had one in Ephesus, but it will do, when you joined that, the patron deity shall was, shall we say, Venus – now if you are going to join the union it means that whenever the Union meets you have got to worship Venus, and the worship of Venus included all manner of immorality and sexual orgies, so Christians refused to join the Union, and so were they out. Even if you got past that, you had to worship the Emperor in order to get a job. And so Christians were known on the mainland of Asia at that time as being jobless. If you were a Christian it meant you had no right to your own home. If the people in town wanted to come and take your furniture they could come and take it, the police would not stop them. You were less than a dog, you didn’t even worship the Emperor. It is as if someone today stood and refused to pledge allegiance to the American Flag. The Emperor worship was that which drew many nations together making them one nation under the Emperor and to pledge allegiance to the Flag was the same as pledging allegiance to the Emperor as Lord and God. And the Christians would not do it and so they were called traitors, they were called third citizens, lower than slaves. If anybody wanted to take your house, let them take it, the police would not stop them. Christians were those who were bullied by everybody, thrown on the streets, lived in caves on the outskirts of the towns many times, and Christians did not have jobs, those who did have jobs lost them. Many of them lost their lives too, that was not always first on the list, but it came to that many times when they were brutally murdered because of their Christianity.

I think that it should be noted in that first verse where it says God gave this to John to show to His bond-servants. Who was this letter written to? Well, that was the historical context. In the middle of that context it was written to bond-servants. Bond-servant means a "slave out of love". I love Jesus, and I love Him to the point where I am prepared to stand up and be counted, I am His slave for ever. We have commented before on the term "Christian". If you were my slave, all you in the front row here, it would be quite a mouthful in Greek to say ‘the slaves of Malcolm’, and so you would be called the ‘Malcolmanios’; ‘anios’ on the end simply means ‘the slaves of’. Christians got the name because the pagans heard them talk about someone called Christ and they kept saying that they belonged to Him exclusively, that they were His slaves, and so they nicknamed them the ‘Christianios’. The slaves of the Christ. And if you are going to take your stand in the middle of such a historical situation as we have just described, you had better be the slaves of Jesus.

There is nowhere in the Bible, certainly, no where in this book of Revelation where you can even smell the idea of ‘Bless God I have been saved out of Hell’. They did not even think in such terms. You did not become a Christian in order to be happy when you die. There was no such thing as an appeal as ‘Would you like to go to Heaven when you die?’ Rather, would you like to become a Christian and come to Heaven with us tomorrow. To become a Christian meant probable death and it was very real, and you will notice also the word that comes here in verse 2 – it talks about His angel to his Bond-servant John, so John includes himself with them, the designation of a Christian – one who was totally surrendered to Jesus Christ, and then it says who bore witness, and I want you to notice that word "witness" and then it goes on ‘the testimony of Jesus Christ’. Especially that word ‘witness’ and it is linked also to the word ‘testimony’. The original Greek word there that describes that, is the word ‘martyr’. Of course in our minds we have separated that. Over the years the word ‘witness’ has been degenerated. It has lost its value. There was a time when if you opened your mouth to give witness to Jesus Christ the strong chance was that you would pay for that with your life, and therefore they never separated the idea of martyr and witness. A witness was one who had a martyr mentality. Now you will need to remember that. We are going to come across that throughout this book. It is one of the themes, so let me repeat that As far as these early Christians were concerned if you are going to give witness or testimony to Jesus Christ you have a martyr mentality. That is you have already confronted that issue. If they suddenly burst in on you and arrested you in order to martyr you, that is kill you, that would not be altogether a surprise because you had faced up to that when you had walked into the waters of baptism. When you were baptized as a Christian, you really did say ‘I am exiting this world’ -and it just could be you could have been dead before sundown. It was a martyr mentality. The way we look at it today is I give testimony to Jesus, I witness about Jesus, but there are some people in the world who are martyrs. Now there is no difference in the Greek, not in the minds of the early Christians –martyr is a witness, a witness could well be a martyr – it is all tied in there.

Now any interpretation that we have of Revelation has to be with all those facts in mind. I think I can prove that as I go along. But I cannot, morally, honestly come to this book of Revelation and disregard that. This book was written to people under persecution of such a degree that if they opened their mouth and confessed they were Christians they had better already have faced up to martyrdom, because that is what it took. A martyrdom of real bloodshed and death or a martyrdom which was living martyrdom, a banishment like John or loss of home or loss of job, but you could not just sing through life if you were going to be a Christian. That is the people this book was written to. Hold every one of those points in mind as we consider the interpretation.

I think it is very obvious that this book invites a lot of very fanciful soulless interpretations, and so right from the beginning we must surround ourselves with guards. Whatever we say this book means I have to be careful I am not running off with a fanciful interpretation. Let’s face it. When I say Fanciful Interpretation, I believe that a great percentage of those persons who have produced those fanciful interpretations have done so in utmost sincerity. In the Middle Ages the Protestant Reformers saw this Book full of Roman Catholicism. I have read their writings and I do not believe that they were deliberately going off in their field. In utmost sincerity they saw many things that were apostate to Christianity and they said 'it is in the book of Revelation'. So if you read certain interpretations of this Book you will find that they saw Napoleon, Mohammed. It is all there, it is in the Book. If you read the interpretations of the Mark of the Beast, it is unreal how many people have come under the Mark of the Beast. Hitler, Mussolini, and we could go to the Library of Congress and bring all these books out. They were written. Charles Price, one of the greatest Pentecostal Evangelists of the 1920s wrote a book and conclusively proved that Mussolini was found in the book of Revelation, and then he died, but as Charles Price said the day after Mussolini died he just thanked God he had sold all of the books before he died, and then offered an apology to the world that he was wrong. And the latest I have heard is that poor Henry Kissinger is in the Book of Revelation. And so it goes on, and I am sure that each one is quite sincere in what he says, but as the years unfold we just have to drop them all one by one and say they were fanciful, they were popular, they sold a lot of books, but they were soulless, they were wrong. So as we come to this book we have to be very careful that we know the mind of the Holy Spirit.

Now the first rule which we must apply is that we must take into account the Christians it was written to. I will never understand this book until I can get at least in part inside the heads of the people it was written to. And once I can hear this book read to me through their ears, then I will be step one towards understanding it. Now just supposing, and this is only a possibility at this point, we are coming like little children to this book to find out what it means, but just supposing that this whole book is either for the 1970s or maybe for the 1990s as yet totally unfulfilled Just supposing that this Book awaits a future time before it is happening. If that is the case, then I have got to find that plainly stated to those first-century readers. They must understand that. When they read this book, having read it they will have to close it and say, we understand that there is nothing in this book for us, it awaits another 2000 years before its fulfillment, and so shelve it away. You follow what I am saying then? Because if God wrote this book to the 1970s or to a time yet future to those 1970s and did not tell those first-century readers, then He is cheating them. Because they thought it was for them. It says, ‘Write to the Churches in Asia, Write it to them’. Suppose I wrote you a letter, really I did not tell you, but I wrote it for someone who has not been born yet. But I pretended to write it to you, and I made great big promises to you in that letter for you, but I did not really mean them for you, it was all really a trick. It was for somebody who had not been born yet. Well that would be low, it would be cheating, unless of course I put in the letter, ‘this is not for you’. And so we will find out if that is what it says, but if it does say so it must say so very plainly, because the first people who read this book were first-century Christians. In fact I would go so far as to say that the only way I read it is by reading it over their shoulder, right? If you have not been to one of these schools before I like would like you to nod, because I will go over it again. You see what I mean – this was written to seven churches in Asia. 2000 years later I am looking over their shoulder and saying, Oh is that what it says? It was written to them, basically not to me. It was only written to me as the whole Word of God was written to me. But I will never understand it until I understand what it meant to the first receivers of the letter. We must understand that very plainly.

The second great guard that we put up in our interpretation, is that the Book promises a unique blessing to everyone who reads it. Note that verse 3, ‘Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy’. Now that is suddenly taken out of the context of the first century because it does not say "blessed are all the first century readers" So that means (a) it was written first of all for the first century but (b) anyone who reads this book will be blessed out of his skin. If a first century Christian reads this book he is going to be so blessed, I would suggest more than any other way blessed because there is no other blessing like that attached to any other book in the New Testament. So here is a special blessing to any first-century Christian who reads that book. Secondly, anyone in 1300 or 1500 or 1900 or the year 2000 if they read this book they will be blessed with the same unique blessing because it is an open-ended blessing. Although I say (1) we must take into account the people it was written to, I say (2) we understand that the blessing is for all people at all times who will ever read the book or hear it read.

That leads me to a third statement of interpretation. I doubt very much that those first-century Christians under the persecution that they were, I don’t think they were interested in a Mao-se-Tung as the Anti-Christ. I doubt very much whether they were interested in the Common Market of Europe. You see these people were under such a persecution, they needed sustenance. They needed the comfort of the Holy Spirit. They were not people who were vaguely curious about the future, and I don’t think you could have gone to these people and said I think you are going to have a prophecy crusade. They weren’t interested in prophecy crusades, they might be dead tomorrow morning, certainly Dad lost his job last night because he confessed Jesus as Lord. Who is interested in an era of history that hasn’t even come yet? If God says you are going to read this book but it is all about a far distant future, then God mocks them when he says you are going to be blessed out of your skin. When I come home having been beaten up and my wounds are still bleeding, and I come home and find they have ransacked my house and I find my children living in caves - who gives a fig who the Anti-Christ is? If I am going to read a book that is going to bless me, that has got to meet me in my pain, has got to meet me in my despair - as I look around and see what has happened to the Church – where is it? I am the only one left! This book has got to meet me where I am at.

So whatever interpretation we find in this book it must be intensely practical to people under persecution and it must meet the man under persecution in AD 95 or in AD 1540 or in 1970, wherever we find ourselves in history God says, Here is a blessing, and He gave it under the worst situation, so wherever you find yourself above that it would give you a blessing. That is merely a principle of interpretation. Where you go from there is between you and the Holy Spirit but these things you must hold in mind.

Also when I come to any book of the Bible I must ask myself, ‘what kind of literature is this?’. If I wrote to you a novel or wrote you a book of poems you would read my novel very differently from the way you read my poems – I hope – because the way you read poetry you would not dream of doing with novels. When you read a book of the Bible you must ask, What kind of literature is this? The very first verse tells me. It says ‘He sent and communicated it by way of an Angel’ I don’t often disagree with the translation of the New American Standard Version but on this occasion I do – the King James’ is better there, it says they sent and signified it. The original Greek word there is ‘He sent and made it known by signs and symbols’. He made it known by tokens. Signs, symbols, tokens. So He communicated it. What the New American Standard is trying to say, it was not straightforward. It was done by a certain mode of communication which was sign, symbol or token, so whatever we find in the book we shall see but as I approach the portals of this book I must understand that (1) whatever I find here it is a symbol. So I shall find cities – I shall find a city called "Jerusalem" I shall find a city called "The New Jerusalem". I shall find Babylon. I shall find a river called the Great Euphrates. I will find a great lumbering beast. I will find a little woolly lamb and I will also find another lamb as it had been slain, that is full of eyes and horns. In fact the more I look at the pictures of this book the more grotesque they become. It looks like a painting of modern art. I find a woman sitting on a beast, lumbering across the desert, and she has a cup full of blood.

Now as I approach this book, I have to get one thing in my head, it tells me this is not an ordinary narrative. This is not straightforward novel form. This is a book of signs and symbols. So when I meet a city called Jerusalem, even though I do not know what it is, I know it is not Jerusalem. For a symbol is pointing away to something else. When I meet a city called Babylon I may not know what it is pointing to, but I know it is a sign, it is not the city of Babylon itself. When I see a beast in all its grotesqueness, I may not find what that beast is pointing to but let me not say it is a literal beast because I was warned to begin with it is full of signs, symbols and tokens.

What is the atmosphere of the book? That is another question you always have to ask. I suggest all of you read through this book at least fifteen to twenty times. Before I gave the first lectures on Revelation I read it through the book fifty times and memorized most of it in order to feel the atmosphere of it and to find out what is going on. Gradually as you soak your head in this book you begin to feel you are in an opera – it is a cosmic opera. There is a choir and there is a lot of singing, and you feel as long as you keep inside John’s head you are sitting in the middle of a stage. It is very important to know the atmosphere – you are John, and you have gone to your cave on the side of Patmos and you are looking over the Mediterranean Sea and above you is the bright dome of the sky – behind you is the dark cave and you are sitting there and suddenly the whole lot explodes and you see all around you moving pictures and you begin to hear a trumpet behind you, and you turn around to see and you see something that basically is totally indescribable – you see in symbolic form a picture of Jesus, and then he tells you write and you grab your pen and you begin to write as he dictates the seven letters to the seven churches. And you turn around and suddenly the whole scene changes, it is as if you have stepped into the other half of the Universe and in the middle there, over the sea, but the sea isn’t there any more. You are seeing a great big moving opera, it fills the whole sky. Talk about outdoor movies! In the very centre you see a throne, and the whole thing is in symbol pictures and then you see a Lamb appearing moving towards the throne. He takes a book and then you see one of those grotesque creatures beside the throne and they say, "Come" Then galloping across the universe comes a man on a white horse. He has hardly gone before another voice says, ‘Come’ and now comes a red horse – you see it is moving all the time, the whole universe, it’s cosmic, and then when you are gasping, you wonder what is going on, it seems the whole stage goes dark and you hear a voice and it says "Of the tribe of Judah 12000 and the whole roll call of Israel 144000 and then suddenly you look again and you see a multitude that no man can number and they are all waving palm branches and they are singing. Then you hear singing ‘Worthy is the Lamb, Worthy is the Lamb’ keeps coming up right through the opera and suddenly one of the actors on stage, he was centre stage at one point but now he is sort of off-duty comes and says, ‘Come with me’ and you go trotting onto the stage and you suddenly feel under foot it is sand and you are in the desert and lumbering across in front of you is a great beast and on it sits a woman in scarlet, and you are on stage, you are part of the action. And another time he says,’ would you like to see the Lamb’s wife’?, and you suddenly feel yourself going through space going through the air, and you land on the top of a great mountain and you see coming out of the sky the great city New Jerusalem and you are given a ruler and you go and measure it. It is all part of the action. It is a cosmic stage – involves the entire universe, choirs by the billion, solo pieces, angels blowing trumpets, and all the time you are John and you are writing it down as fast as you can.

Do you know that even the Greek in which John wrote backs me up on that. You see John was essentially a Hebrew and he never really did think in Greek, he had a go at learning it, but you know, if you ever learn Spanish or French and you think in English and then interpret into Spanish it comes out awful because you didn’t think in Spanish. John thought in Hebrew and when he wrote the book he wrote it in Greek so everyone could read it. Normally when he did anything official he had a whole lot of people in Ephesus where he was the overseer and they corrected all his Greek. But here on the Island of Patmos (a) there was no one to correct him and (b) he was writing as fast as he could. The result was that the book of the Revelation written in Greek is the worst Greek of the New Testament, it is terrible Greek. It is obviously written by someone who is thinking in Hebrew but writing in Greek. It was obviously written by someone who did not have time to look at the last sentence. Whoever wrote the book of Revelation is writing it as fast as he can, following it all the time.

And so here you are, you are on a stage which is set in the centre of the Universe, and all around you action is taking place – it is changing so fast you have to keep looking. I state that because as we come to this book I don’t want us to come with a magnifying glass to nitpick over every tiny detail. What appeared to John was a picture – gone, picture – gone. What I want to find out, what does that picture mean? I am not particularly concerned with some of the details – I have read books on Revelation 9 where it talks about some creatures who had faces like men hair like women, tails like scorpions and they go into such detail – the eyes of the men what did they mean? Quite frankly I don’t care what they did mean. When I look at that whole picture I can sure see what it means. The whole picture, -the details I am not too sure about,( I wonder if we were ever meant to be too sure about) we are supposed to get the picture as the cosmic opera took place across the cosmic stage.

What does the book say of itself? Because if I am going to interpret it correctly at least I should stay within what it states about itself. And it states in the very first verse, ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ’. There ‘revelation’ means unveiling. So this book is the unveiling of Jesus Christ to me. I can never look at this book or read its parts without taking it into account that this is an unveiling of Jesus, therefore it has in view all that He has done – that is that He has died, and as He died He shouted ‘It is finished’ He was buried, He has risen again, He has been coronated King and He has given the Holy Spirit, and unless I take that into consideration I shall never understand the Book. This is not a revelation of His Second Coming, it is a revelation of Him. There is a big difference. It is concerning what He has done, but because it is of Him then it is of Who He now is, His now relationship to the Universe, the world of men, and it also takes in all that He has in store for the future, His second coming and eternal reign.

I believe this is the only way we can interpret those passages like in the third verse of this first chapter, also in chapter 3.11 and in a number of times in the last chapter, 22 and in those chapters and verses it states that He is coming soon, or that the time is near. That used to bother me a little bit because 2000 years ago and the end still has not come, but then when I realised it’s talking about Him, what is the greatest thing we know about Jesus Christ? It is that when He died and rose again He accomplished and finished everything that there was to do. He put away sin. He completely defeated the Devil and He rose again carrying His Church into the heavenly places. It’s finished, it’s finished, it’s finished. Revelation is built on that. If He has finished, finished and finished, then there is nothing more to do, then whatever else is to happen must be soon. Do you see what I mean by that? It is written from the backdrop of all He has done, so we are not waiting for something to be done. Those who say whatever is coming, it is so in that sense we are living in a tension, we are living in a hallelujah tension, it is done!

And yet, we are caught there between the two, but not with a despair tension, but with a glorious tension. Such has been done, but whatever else has to be is only because it has all been done, it will only be the unveiling, the making manifest of that which already is and that must be soon. And so every Christian throughout the ages lives in the soon-ness. They are not looking for this idea that there is a great battle coming between the Devil and Jesus. After 1000 years of just making it the Devil is ruining it again. No. The book of Revelation says, No, no it is finished. The battle is not coming, it is done. There is a mopping up operation, but it is done. Therefore behold I come quickly – it is soon, we don’t look for some big accomplishment, it is merely making manifest of what already is – it is done.

So it is the unveiling of Jesus Christ of Who He was, therefore Who He is and therefore what He shall do. In that sense it unfolds history to me in the light of the end. We don’t think of history in the light of the end. We think of history in the light of the past, or the now, whereas Revelation teaches me to interpret what is happening right now in the light of the end, therefore everything that happens today is judged not by the past nor by the present but by the end. In a game of chess – the very first pawn you move in chess has the last move in view. If you have ever played chess you will appreciate that every move you make, you cannot judge that move by what it does now. You might go and sacrifice your bishop, and that is bad, but you should see what I am doing. I am moving towards the final move when I am going to get that king. So revelation says, don’t judge history by now, or don’t say ‘look at this, look at that’ rather understand that every move of history must now be judged with the end in view, so over and over again in the book of Revelation we see where Jesus Christ is in the past, understand the present in the light that He is my future, there is no more future, it is all Him. So all history is to be judged in the light of Jesus Christ.

Such an unveiling must be easy, these were not theologians, and when you are being beaten up for your faith you don’t go to a long drawn out Bible study of even 12 weeks to try and find out what it means, you need to know, so that is why it is simple. Jesus does not send a message and then make it so difficult that nobody can understand it. On the other hand, it must be so difficult that no pagan, no emperor, no police force can understand it. If they understood it, it would make it even worse for the Christians. So the code that interprets the symbols that reveals to me Jesus must be so utterly simple that the newest Christian at least has got the key, the key, and the most righteous pagan who does not have the Old Testament doesn’t know what it is talking about.

We have made it so difficult, God makes it so simple, He puts the book at the end of the Bible, gives us 66 (65) books which come before it and then fills this book with echoes and allusions to every other book of the Bible. We shall see as we go through that almost every verse of the book of Revelation has a direct or implied reference to another part of the Bible, and as you go back to that other part of the Bible, you’ve got it. The key. We have mentioned Jerusalem – obviously the rest of the Bible is full of Jerusalem. Find out what Jerusalem was in the Bible, you have got the key to what is mentioned in Revelation. Babylon is mentioned from Genesis 10 right through to Malachi. You go back to Genesis 10 and to clue in at one or two other places and you know what Babylon means. You say Beasts? Well, the Old Testament is full of them. What about when there was blood in the sea, and hail from the sky? That is in the OLD TESTAMENT too. All the have to do is go back. When you go back, you have the key. What about 2 witnesses. Read Deuteronomy –that is the key - Deuteronomy tells you what the two witnesses are. On and on it goes, God made it so simple, He said, if you are a born again believer – and in the first Century they had the Old Testament, they did not have all the New Testament that we have – they had the Old Testament.. He said, if you have read the Old Testament you will know what this means. A Roman comes along and reads it and says, I knew these Christians were stupid, he doesn’t know what it means, the code is only for the initiated, those who are born again and have an Old Testament in their hands. You will see as we go through how simple that becomes.

And so here we have these cosmic pictures rapidly moving across this stage and those cosmic pictures are unveiling to us Jesus Christ. And they are showing us in a word things are not what they seem to be. God has unchanging decrees. He is unfolding them in and through Jesus Christ. Satan is behind the world. It doesn’t look like it, the world seems very quiet and normal but behind it all there is an evil mind that is working. Revelation unveils that and says don’t worry Jesus has already defeated Satan, hang in there. It is mopping up time, Satan is defeated before he has even started. Suddenly I discover that I am going to live for ever, if I did not know already. My eternal dimension is unveiled to me and the whole thing in relation to Who Jesus Christ is. If you read this book and study it you will discover that what you thought was a very real world out there is not such a real world at all. Behind it there is the real world, the world where Jesus Christ is the centre, the demons are under His feet and the purposes of God are achieving their end. All based on the finished work of Jesus Christ.

The outline of this book is very very simple. There are seven visions. Seven times over God in this book starts with what Jesus did at the cross, moves through with an interpretation of what is happening now because of that and ends with the grand finale of what we shall call the Second Coming. Having done that it moves back to the finished work of Christ on the Cross, moves through with an interpretation of what is happening today and ends with the grand end, with Jesus Christ returning to this world, and a whole new world beginning. Back again, start again with the finished work of Christ, moving through with yet another aspect which interprets what is going on today in the light of the cross, ends in the final judgment and the eternal reign of Jesus Christ. Seven times over it does that.

The first vision which we shall be considering in our next hour is from chapters 1- 3 which shows us Christ in the middle of His Church which in turn is in the middle of the world. The second vision is from chapter 4 through chapter 7 which portrays the Church in trial and persecution. The third vision which is chapters 8 to 11 shows that the Church is protected– it is triumphant, in fact God avenges the Church. Those who dare touch the Church are touched by God. The fourth vision, chapters 12 through 14 Christ in His Church opposes the Satanic trinity. The Fifth vision which is chapters 15 and 16 shows me the wrath of God which falls on those who will not repent. The sixth vision chapters 17 through 19 shows me the fall of Babylon and the destruction of all the beasts that oppose God, and the final vision chapters 20-22 shows the judgment of Satan made manifest, the eternal victory of Christ and the Church for ever and for ever and for ever. We shall cover those seven visions in 12 hours, and I believe that at the end of that time we shall know that things are not what they seem to be. The Lamb reigns. Amen!

Webmaster note: Malcolm refers to the emperor Diocletian (AD 284-305), I think he means Domitian (AD 81-96).

The original set of 12 tapes can be obtained from Malcolm Smith's web site.
They are suitable for group study.

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