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These seventy pages give this commentary its greatest value. Finally, based on his experience of preaching three times through Revelation p. He also shares helpful thoughts on worship pp. This commentary, however, suffers from a few significant weaknesses. First, from the first sentence of the book p. His interpretive discussions can run on. Second, Patterson regularly advances or dismisses interpretations for which he provides no footnote.
He also seems unaware of key interpretive possibilities and key inconsistencies in his own positions. The eye is weak and the light is dim. There is much that lies beyond the horizon which our eyes cannot reach. There is much that lies covered by the deeps, which our eyes could reach if the deeps were away.
We live - the wisest of us live - having great questions wrestling with us like that angel that wrestled with the patriarch in the darkness till the morning broke. We learn so little but our own ignorance, and we know so little but that we know nothing. There are the hard and obstinate knots that will not be untied; we bend all our faculties to them, and think they are giving a little bit, and they never give; and we gnaw at them, like the viper at the file, and we make nothing of it, but blunt our teeth!
It is no dream, my brethren I Why, think how the fact of dying will solve many a riddle! What mysteries have passed into light for them? Who can tell what strange enlargement of faculty this soul of ours is capable of? Who can tell how much of our blindness comes from the flesh that clogs us, from the working of the animal nature that is so strong in us? Who can tell what unknown resources and what possibilities of new powers there lie all dormant and unsuspected in the beggar on the dunghill, and in the idiot in the asylum?
This, at least, we are sure of: God will be incomprehensible, but there will be no mystery in God, except that most blessed mystery of feeling that the fullness of His nature still surpasses our comprehension. Questions that now fill the whole horizon of our minds will have shrunk away into a mere point, or been answered by the very change of position. Those problems which we think so mysterious - why God is doing this or that with us and the world; what is the meaning of this and the other sorrow - what will have become of these?
We shall look back and see that the bending line was leading straight as an arrow-flight, home to the centre, and that the end crowns and vindicates every step of the road. Men that love to know, let me ask you, where do you get the fulfilment, often dreamed of, of your desires, except here? Set this before you, as the highest truth for us: Christ is the beginning of all wisdom on earth.
Starting thence I can hope to solve the remaining mysteries when I stand at last, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, in the presence of the great light of God. Not that we shall know everything, for that were to cease to be finite. It needs, by our very nature, and for our blessedness, that there should be much unknown. It needs that we should ever be pressing forward. Only, the mysteries that are left will have no terror nor pain in them. Secondly, the text tells us of a state that is to come, when there shall be no more rebellious power. In the Old Testament the floods are often compared with the rage of the peoples, and the rebellion of man against the Will of God.
The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters; yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.
Here, then, the sea stands as the emblem of untamed power. It is lashed into yeasty foam, and drives before it great ships and huge stones like bulrushes, and seems to have a savage pleasure in eating into the slow-corroding land, and covering the beach with its devastation.
It is not to be always so, says my text. The kingdom of God is in the earth, and the kingdom of God admits of opposition. But the opposition, even here on earth, all comes to nothing. But there comes a time, too, when there shall be no more violence of rebellious wills lifting themselves against God. Our text is a blessed promise that, in that holy state to which the Apocalyptic vision carries our longing hopes, there shall be the cessation of all strife against our best Friend, of all reluctance to wear His yoke whose yoke brings rest to the soul.
The opposition that lies in all our hearts shall one day be subdued. The whole consent of our whole being shall yield itself to the obedience of sons, to the service of love. The wild rebellious power shall be softened into peace, and won to joyful acceptance of His law. In all the regions of that heavenly state, there shall be no jarring will, no reluctant submission. There shall be One will in heaven. Before I pass on, let me appeal to you, my friend, on this matter.
Here is the revelation for us of the utter hopelessness and vanity of all opposition to God. It is true on the widest scale. It is true on the narrowest. And it is true about all godless lives; about every man who carries on his work, except in loving obedience to his Father in heaven. There is one power in the world, and none else. When all is played out, and accounts are set right at the end, you will find that the power that seemed to be strong, if it stood against God, was weak as water and has done nothing, and is nothing!
Do not waste your lives in a work that is self-condemned to be hopeless! Submit yourselves to God! Put your faith in the Saviour to deliver you from your sins; and when the wild tossing of that great ocean of ungodly power and rebellious opposition is all hushed down into dead silence, you and your work will last and live hard by the stable throne of God. Lastly, the text foretells a state of things in which there is no more disquiet and unrest. The old, old figure which all the world, generation after generation in its turn, has spoken, is a Scriptural one as well, and enters into the fullness of the meaning of this passage before us.
Life is a voyage over a turbulent sea; changing circumstances come rolling after each other, like the undistinguishable billows of the great ocean. Tempests and storms rise. But for all that, friends, there is an end to it some day; and it is worth while for us to think about our island home, far, far beyond the sea. Surely some of us are longing to find anchorage whilst the storm lasts, and a haven at the end. There is one, if only you will believe it, and set yourselves towards it. Are we going there? Are we living for Christ? Are we putting our confidence in the Lord Jesus?
That restless, profitless working of the great homeless, hungry, moaning ocean - what a picture it is of the heart of a man that has no Christ, that has no God, that has no peace by pardon! A soul all tossed with its own boiling passion, a soul across which there howl great gusts of temptation, a soul which works and brings forth nothing but foam and mire! Some of you know that.
I suppose I need not occupy your time in showing that this is a symbol; that it does not mean literal fact at all; that it is not telling us anything about the geography of a future world, but that it is the material embodiment of a great spiritual truth. Revelation 1 "What You Have Seen". Recipients, Author and Time of Writing. It gives a new aim and centre for our lives. Jan 16, R. The number seven of the churches in Asia Minor chap. As for inconsistencies, when he argues against posttribulationalism for its inability to explain millennial repopulation p.
Well, then, think of one picture. It is no fancy, brethren, it is a truth. Let Christ speak to your hearts, and there is peace and quietness. Death, death itself, will be but the last burst of the expiring storm, the last blast of the blown-out tempest. And the fact that they come into view here as supplying the field for it makes the literal interpretation of their meaning the more probable.
Modern astronomy has seen worlds in flames in the sky, and passing by a fiery change into new forms; and the possibility of the heavens being dissolved, the elements melted with fervent heat, and a new heavens and new earth emerging, cannot be disputed. Into this renovated world the renovated city floats down from God. It has been present with Him, before its manifestation on earth, as all things that are to be manifested in time dwell eternally in the Divine mind, and as it had been realized in the person of the ascended Christ.
When He comes down from heaven again, the city comes with Him.
Revelation: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture (The New Book 39 of 37 in the New American Bible Commentary, New Testament Set. Revelation: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture book cover Revelation is his fifth full-length commentary, his first to be published in.
The former promise is cast in Old Testament mould, as are almost all the symbols and prophecies of this Book of Revelation. In outward form the tabernacle had stood in the centre of the wilderness encampment, and in the symbol of the Shekinah, God had dwelt with Israel, and they had been, in name, and by outward separation and consecration, His people. In the militant state of the Church on the old earth, God had dwelt with His people in reality, but with, alas!
But in that future all that was symbol shall be spiritual reality, and there will be no separation between the God who tabernacles among men and the men in whom He dwells. The mutual relation of possession of each other shall be perfect and perpetual. That is the brightest hope for us, and from it all other blessedness flows. His presence drives away all evils, as the risen moon clears the sky of clouds. How can sorrow, or crying, or pain, or death, live where He is, as He will be in the perfected city?
The undescribable future is best described by the negation of all that is sad and a foe to life. Reverse the miseries of earth, and you know something of the joys of heaven. How can we be sure that these radiant hopes are better than delusions, lights thrown on the black curtain of the unknown future by the reflection of our own imaginations? Therefore seers may write, and we may read, and be sure that when heaven and earth pass away His word shall not only not pass away, but bring the new heavens and the new earth. He who is Alpha, the beginning, from whom are all things, is Omega, the end, to whom are all things.
There lies the security that the drift of the universe is towards God, its source, and that at last man, who came from God, will come back to God, and Eden be surpassed by the new Jerusalem. The conditions of entering the city are gathered up in words which recall many strains of prophecy and promise. Thirst is the condition of drinking of the water of life - as John the Evangelist delights to tell that Jesus said by the well at Samaria and in the temple court. Conflict and victory make His children heirs of these things, as the Christ had spoken by the Spirit to the churches.
The Christian victory perfects the paternal and filial relation between God and us. And all three promises are but variations of the answer to the question: How can I become a citizen of that city of God? There is no temple, no outward shrine, no place of special communion, no dependence on externals, because the communion with God and the Lamb is perfect, continuous, spiritual.
There is no sun, moon, nor artificial light, for far brighter than their feeble beams is the light in which the citizens see light. That light is perpetual, and no night ever darkens the sky. That light draws all men to it. Possibly the Seer thinks of kings and nations as still subsisting, but more probably he carries over the features of the old earth into the new, in order to express the great hope that all shall be drawn to the light, and royalties and nations be merged in citizenship.
One solemn word limits the universality of the vision. Nothing excludes but uncleanness, but that does exclude. Only we must be pure, thirsty for the water of life, and fight and conquer through Jesus.
That fact constitutes one of the many subtle threads of connection between these two books, which at first sight seem so extremely unlike each other; and it is a morsel of evidence in favour of the common authorship of the Gospel and of the Apocalypse, which has often, and very vehemently in these latter days of criticism, been denied. The force of the word, however, is the matter to which I desire especially to draw attention. In all three passages, then, we may see allusion to that early symbolical dwelling of God with man.
And it is to these three aspects of the one thought, set forth in rude symbol by the movable tent in the wilderness, that I ask you to turn now. First, then, we have to think of that Tabernacle for earth. The human nature, the visible, material body of Jesus Christ, in which there enshrined itself the everlasting Word, which from the beginning was the Agent of all divine revelation, that is the true Temple of God. When we begin to speak about the special presence of Omnipresence in any one place, we soon lose ourselves, and get into deep waters of glory, where there is no standing.
And I do not care to deal here with theological definitions or thorny questions, but simply to set forth, as the language of my text sets before us, that one transcendent, wonderful, all-blessed thought that this poor human nature is capable of, and has really once in the history of the world received into itself, the real, actual presence of the whole fulness of the Divinity.
What must be the kindred and likeness between Godhood and manhood when into the frail vehicle of our humanity that wondrous treasure can be poured; when the fire of God can burn in the bush of our human nature, and that nature not be consumed? So it has been. One can only explain these symbols in connection with the Holy Scriptures as a whole and especially in connection with prophecy as a whole. For we learn from Peter, in 2 Peter 1: The Revelation is the only book in the NT mentioning John as author. John mentions his name four times in the book Revelation 1: He is the author of the forth gospel and of three epistles.
Irenaeus also mentions that John has written the book of Revelation towards the end of the Roman emperor Domitian's reign. Domitian reigned from 81 to 95 AC. According to Revelation 1: However, doubts in relation to the authorship of Revelation have been raised from the time of Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria and pupil of Origines 2 nd part of 3 rd century onward. The reasons mentioned are doctrinal distinctions compared with John's other writings as well as the very simple language of the book.
There is no convincing reason however why one should doubt the Apostle John's authorship. It is evident that the Revelation bears the style of an epistle at the beginning and at the end. Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come. If we were to conclude from that, however, that the Revelation is addressed to the seven churches of Minor Asia mentioned at the beginning we would misunderstand the purpose of the Holy Spirit.
The final words of Revelation which are directed to all the saints contradict this thought. But the introductory words of the book also distinctly show that the Revelation is directed to all Christians. Blessed is he who reads and they who hear the words of this prophecy.
The number seven of the churches in Asia Minor chap. Verse 1 of the Revelation already shows God's intention: The person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Redeemer, is in the centre of these future events. We see the Lord Jesus as righteous judge in chapter 1 and as the one who will soon be coming in the last chapter.
But also in the course of the entire book of Revelation we see, time and again, the Lord Jesus as the one who acts. There we see the Lord Jesus as judge of his church amidst the seven golden candlesticks. These churches symbolically present the whole of Christendom from the beginning to the end.