This is a quick article I’ve written to assist a friend who is researching eschatology (“end times” teachings). The goal is not so much to target specific conclusions about such things, but common methodological errors that I’ve observed many make over the years. You’ll find that much of my concern here is about the state of mind and the character of the reader.
I hope these considerations are helpful to you in your own puzzling over end-times matters.
- Bad Assumptions. One big class of mistake is this: To assume in advance that we know what the Revelation is about, rather than letting the book tell us itself. We can impose our own ideas onto the text, rather than really listening to it. Some of the items that follow are specific instances of this general class of error.
- Timing. It’s a mistake not to listen to the now-ancient text when it tells is that it was about “things that must soon take place” (Revelation 1:1, and several other such statements). Many assume instead that it was written nearly 2,000 years ago, mostly to tell about events that wouldn’t happen until our time or afterwards. They are not listening to what it says ― which is a terrible mistake to make when handling the Word of God. An excellent study exercise is this: Read the entire Revelation, highlighting every time statement made in it. I.e.: “soon”, “quickly”, etc. Judge for yourself whether the imminence of it seemed to be a pressing theme of the author.
- Separating from the Greater Context. It’s a mistake to assume that the Revelation is a stand-alone work, and that it’s not deeply rooted in the rest of the scriptures. This fact can ruin the fun of the casual sleuth, making it obvious that we need to become good students of the wider body of Bible literature instead of just entertaining ourselves by taking a casual stab here and there at what the Revelation means. The one who draws on the rest of scripture in interpreting the Revelation can reach vastly-different conclusions that the one who has nothing else to go on but the Revelation itself. The original audience of the Revelation was not one that was ignorant of the larger body of scripture, but that was expected to be familiar with it.
- Separating from Major First-Century Events. Example: There’s a mass resurrection described in Matthew 27:51-53, but many interpreters of the Revelation make no attempt to let this event instruct their understanding of the Revelation. Was this one of the resurrections mentioned in Revelation 20:4-6? If so, which one? And if not, why would it bear no mention in the Revelation, which was written later in the same century as that mass resurrection?
Similarly, many will read the Revelation with little idea that the Temple in Jerusalem was utterly destroyed in 70AD, in a judgment long foretold by God and his prophets, and that had been recently foretold by Jesus in the First Century. Should this historical fact be in view as we interpret the Revelation? Would the author really have skipped these mega-events in order to tell us a story wholly about something else? - Conflating Metaphor and Non-Metaphor. Example: Some take 6:3 literally (“…the stars of the sky fell to the earth…”), not realizing that the author has already explicitly demonstrated that at least sometimes, he uses “stars” as a metaphor for angels (Revelation 1:20 “…the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches…”). Another such thing to examine is all the “thousand years” talk in Revelation 20. Scripture famously addresses “a thousand years” in not just one other place, but two: Psalm 90:4, and 2 Peter 3:8, both passages rather cryptically, and without explaining themselves, equating the “thousand years” figure with “a day”. Is the well-informed member of the Revelation’s original audience supposed to know this when he gets to Chapter 20? Is he supposed to have the whole body of scripture in mind, or is he supposed to doggedly refuse to consider anything else he has learned from the Word of God as he’s interpreting the meaning of the Revelation?
NOTE: There may also be instances where errors are made by assuming that passages intended literally by the author of the Revelation were intended instead as metaphors. - Reading Linearly, As If from a Timeline. Many will assume that the way the author presents the material in the Revelation is a simple timeline of events, from start to finish. The miss the possibility that the author, from time to time, presents information in “tableau” fashion, as if to bring the various pieces of a larger puzzle into view before telling the audience how those pieces fit together. For example, I would suggest that Revelation 12:1-6 is just such a “tableau”, bringing to mind this “woman” and this “dragon” (who can be identified from elsewhere in scripture) before launching into an account of the “war in heaven” that involved this dragon. (Read the whole chapter here.) I think it’s highly likely that there are several other such tableau passages in the Revelation, and it may not make good sense to try to read them into the timeline in strict chronological order.
- Separating from the Original Audience. Many will read the text as if it had been written for us in 2025, and without a thought as to the fact that it was written nearly 2,000 years ago to an audience contemporary with the author. In other words, we read with only ourselves in mind, where it would make much more sense to read with that original audience in mind. That is to ask, what would they have understood? What would this have meant to them? Knowing what they knew already, how would they have taken this?
- Not Accounting for Modern Manipulation. Many today will adopt modern interpretations of the Revelation without having accounted for the biases and motives of those who are promoting those interpretations. They may have no idea what underlying motivations could be at play, such as financial or political motivations, for example. They do not realize they may be being manipulated.
- Assuming the End of the World. It is very popular to assume that the Revelation is generally about the end of all life on Earth as we know it. And with this assumption in mind, the reader can easily interpret more and more of the Revelation to be painting such a picture. A very fruitful study, however, is this: List every judgment in the Revelation, noting whether any is said to destroy Planet Earth, or to destroy all life thereon. If it is not expressly stated, are we safe to assume it? And have we done our due diligence in surveying alternative possibilities?
- Doing the Math on Revelation 21:1.
Revelation 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
It’s easy for us to assume an old Planet Earth being literally destroyed, and a new one being put literally in its place. It’s harder for us, however, to understand why such a thing would be necessary when it comes to Heaven. Just why would that be? What was wrong with the First Heaven that it would need to be replaced? Do we really understand this?
And what’s up with “the sea was no more”? Isn’t that part of Planet Earth? And if you’re going to get a New Earth, wouldn’t it naturally be expected to come with a New Sea? So why is this part left out in the new picture?
I submit that these questions (and our great difficulty in answering them well) demonstrates that we are not very well qualified to understand the Revelation. Most of us, it seems, simply take this interpretation (of Planet Earth being replaced with a new one) as what we are being told, and give it little thought thereafter. But I don’t think we should presume this to be true if we can’t explain what could possibly be going on here. Indeed! Have we given any thought to other possibilities? Imagine, for example, that what we’re being told about here were not a literal replacement of Heaven and Earth (without any Sea this time), but simply a new order of things, where Satan is no longer in charge, but God and Jesus are. And would it help you to know that the “sea” is an ancient metaphor for the chaotic reign of evil? What if we’re being told about a new order of things in which there was simply no need for a place for Satan and his rebel angels, since they had already been put permanently in the Lake of Fire? Do we really know enough to rule this out? Are we really in a good position simply to ignore this possibility, and plow headlong into the common assumptions about what the Revelation means?
Let’s face it: Most of us are not Bible scholars, and are simply unequipped in our present state for handling such far-reaching considerations very well. We are amateurs at best. And further, we tend not to understand just how susceptible we are to the way that information is first framed for us by those who present it to us. We have no idea that had it been presented in a different way, or a different order, we might have drawn very different conclusions about it.
I believe that the Revelation was meant to be understood by the well-informed Christians of the day in which it was written. But we are not them. And to complicate our difficulties considerably, it was written to be cryptic, so as not to reveal its treasures to outsiders. We can become insiders if we study enough, but we don’t do ourselves any favors when we simply assume that we are insiders, and that we should naturally understand it without having to work at it pretty hard. Sadly, I’ve seen far too many moderns arrogantly assume that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will make the Revelation’s meaning plain to them, just by their reading it, and without having to lift a scholarly finger to see what all of this kind of writing had been done in the many centuries of Bible history that preceded the First Century. Well, it’s not working. And even so, though there are a great many such people arrogantly assuming that they’ll understand it, they are not reaching the same conclusions, and are considerably at odds with one another in their interpretations.
Whatever the Revelation is describing, it was to happen in short order, and was imminent at the time the book was published. (There’s considerable disagreement on the timing of this, ranging from the late 60s to the late 90s AD.) It’s a fundamental mistake, then, to go looking for the bulk of its fulfillment in our own day, or even future to us. If you assume it’s about “the end of the world”, then you can easily prove to yourself that it hasn’t happened yet, because you can see that “the world” is still here. But I question the assumption that this is what it was about. I think instead that it was about the end of a temporary order of things that had been running a long time, and that had been prophesied as coming to an end, to be replaced with a new order of things. I believe you’ll find much discussion of this in a Bible study about the “age” and the “ages” and the transition between the two, and the then-imminence of it all. (I asked Grok 3 to compile a list of passages.)
In short, Jesus had finally arrived and had “fulfilled” the Law of Moses, which fulfillment was ushering in a new “age” from what had existed before. I believe that much of the language about these things was metaphorical in nature, such what we might seem to us like “end of the world” talk was only “end of the age”. Similarly, we do well to ask the question about “the end times”: “the end of what?” It’s too easy to assume that it simply meant “the end of existence”, or something like that. But this is much too simplistic a view, and does not serve us well. A brief survey of the body of language about “end times” and “last days” and such can instruct us considerably.
This topic is one for the long-game student, and the casual 1-day seminar student is going to be quite prone to making mistakes in judgment. I do believe the the Revelation can be understood by us moderns fairly well, though not fully. And I certainly see how, if I were wickedly inclined, I could use the Revelation to spin quite a story for modern-day political purposes, making an audience more agreeable to the machinations of some particular political regime. I could tell them that this or that current event is nothing more than the rumblings of such-and-such prophecy about to be fulfilled in our own lives. And I could get them to overlook the logical fallacy that what was written 2,000 years ago as “must soon take place” is to be read by us today as if it were written to us today and about us today. Sadly, people tend to believe what they want to believe, and I could help them imagine all manner of reasons to believe any of a number of false scenarios about our near future.
Interestingly, one of the things that a great many people really want to believe is this: Nobody would be so twisted as to want to deceive me about the right interpretation of the Revelation. But when faced with differing interpretations, they quickly shift to thinking that some definitely want to deceive them, and if not that, that those people are simply mistaken. Well, then, why couldn’t they be mistaken themselves? Is this an impossibility?
Which of these could be wrong?:
- God would not let me be wrong about this.
- God would not let my preacher be wrong about this.
- If I were wrong about this, I would know it.
If the church down the road can get this wrong (as many will certainly believe), then why can’t one’s own church be wrong about these things?
