Revelation: Chapter 7 and a Novel Twist
Revelation: Chapter 7 and a Novel Twist
Metaphors are open to wildly different interpretations. This chapter proves that observation.
I was using SMR/Beta audiovisual entrainment, and my mind got stuck in trying to verbalize the conversation between the elder and John. What to do? I can’t use my phone while yellow and magenta LEDs are flashing in my eyes. I asked Google smart speaker. It read out loud from an .org website that said what John heard were the Jewish evangelizers bringing in the uncountable harvest that he saw.
Oh?
Jewish evangelizers?
For a Christian doctrine?
Uh…
Meanwhile, N.T. Wright wrote: What John heard versus what he saw was like how John heard Jesus is the lion of Judah and saw Jesus as the lamb. In other words, each sense senses a different aspect of the same thing.
I don’t know what to believe!
Note: I’m following N.T. Wright’s Revelation: 22 Studies for Individuals and Groups and his newest book 20th Anniversary Edition with Study Guide, Revelation for Everyone. See my post Prepare for Revelation for suggested materials.
Symbols Raise Different Concepts in Different Individuals
That’s the challenge of Revelation. Symbolism doesn’t have only one interpretation.
Many decades ago, I, as an author of a short story, didn’t anticipate my university classmates to see one of my metaphors in the way they did. Yet I didn’t dispute it. I cocked my head, thought about it, and liked their interpretation. It fit. My eyes widened at how my subconscious may have intended their interpretation and how metaphor speaks individual messages to each person while retaining its collective symbolism.
Future, Past, Present in One
Wright talked about how Revelation intersects the future with the present and past. In listening to Google reciting that .org website’s interpretation, I suddenly saw how the crowd was the future — for God’s mission through Jesus is to save all of humanity, all of their children — while the numbered tribes were the past and the four angels holding back the winds were present.
Speaking of which…
“I saw four angels, standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to stop any winds from blowing on earth, or on the sea, or on any tree. And I saw another angel coming up from the east, holding the seal of the living God. He shouted out in a loud voice to the four angels who had responsibility for harming the earth and the sea. “Don’t harm the earth just yet,” he shouted, “or the sea, or the trees. Don’t do it until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.” Rev 7: 1-3
The four angels holding the four corners of the earth is a metaphor. An impressive image of destruction holding itself back before blowing hard across all the planet and the humans suffering on it. An image of exponential suffering to come.
But isn’t it interesting how the angel from the east asks them to hold back on destructing the earth, the seas, and the trees, as if it hasn’t happened yet? But it has. On a cataclysmic scale five times already, long before the oral traditions that lead to the Bible were told. And it’s happening right now because of human ego and humanity’s habit of denying obvious disastrous news.
Climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet.
Hurricanes, larger and ferocious, are downing trees. Humanity has been strip mining trees for decades for lumber, to grow crops, and to ranch animals.
Pollution is killing the seas; humans have already overfished most species, yet you wouldn’t know it from restaurant menus and grocery store fridges. And a warming planet is changing currents and the food cycle.
Floods and droughts ravage the earth more and more. Dams have dried up once powerful rivers. Highways and developers gobble up arable land; factory farms lay waste to and sequester extensive tracts of land while polluting neighbours’ air.
The four angels have let loose the winds. We are the winds destroying the earth, the sea, and any trees. Who will emerge from this human-caused tribulation?
Sufferers Present and Future
As I reviewed my mental imagery of chapter 7, I recalled the imagery from chapter 6 where murdered souls huddled under the altar, crying out for justice, pleading with God when they’d be avenged.
I thought: In this same throne room with those wretched souls suffering endlessly from the trauma of their injustice are the souls who’ve emerged from tribulation. While the former cry out for justice, the latter shout, like they’re dancing in joy, that salvation belongs to God. They hold palm branches. John reminds the reader of those fly-by-nighters who’d praised and led Jesus to Jerusalem before turning on him a week later. Are these multitude redeeming the palm branches, saying they’re not there for the temporarily popular guy but for all eternity with the one they love and declare, “Salvation belongs…to the lamb!”?
The past and the future. We suffer, yet we will not suffer anymore and “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Wright says the future will happen in the resurrection as described in chapter 21. God, then, isn’t wiping away the tears in heaven but in life after heaven.
That’s a bit of a long wait…
…but Thursday I began thinking about this idea of a general resurrection.
Seeing a Different Path Open Up
Why do we consider it a general resurrection? God raised one person — Jesus — but also in the gospel account of Matthew 27:52-53, God raised many dead holy people in the moment of Jesus’s death. They subsequently appeared to many after Jesus’s resurrection.
“The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.” Matt 27:52-53
Some suggest this raising is metaphorical; yet the verses before and after it are accounts of events. Seems a bit strange to stick a metaphor — that’s in the same language as the factual telling — in the middle of that factual telling.
Perhaps this account appears in only one gospel because it was as unbelievable then as now. After all, it’s one thing to believe God raised Jesus from the dead, quite another to believe God raised “the bodies of many holy people.” Why only those and not all of them? What does it mean that human beings long dead are alive again at the same time as Jesus? What happened to them? That last question is the same one I have about Lazarus. How did he live after he was raised?
Near-Death Experiences and the Resurrection
Perhaps near-death accounts can provide a glimpse into the raised-dead lives.
Those who’ve experienced near death encounters of Jesus, dead family, or a Heaven-type environment report the same thing: they want to go back. They much prefer life after death to life on Earth. The other common result: The near-death experience transformed them. They became compassionate, sensitive to others. They serve rather than take. Doesn’t that sound like people Jesus has recruited to work hand-in-hand with God to transform our present into the “New Jerusalem”?
On Friday, I popped in my earbuds and listened to another chapter of My Descent into Death. Howard Storm related an encounter. A young man handed him a book of poems while Storm was praying at Thomas Merton’s grave. Merton was a monk in Kentucky. Storm’s pastor sat watching Storm; afterwards, he told Storm he’d seen the young man appear, hand him the book open so that Storm would read a particular poem, take back the book, and vanish. Later, Storm saw a photo of Merton as a young man and recognized him as the young man who’d approached him with his book of poems.
If not for the witness, one would think Storm could not have taken nor held a physical book proffered by a visible spirit.
I stopped the audiobook.
A Sudden Perspective Shift
My tired, hurting legs kept hurting, but I no longer yearned to get home. I had some thinking to do. About the resurrection. About life as a spirit. About my trilogy. I posted on Bluesky:
“Listening to My Descent Into Death. Hearing a particular experience Howard Storm had that was witnessed. Wondering about the how and physics of it. Suddenly an idea that germinated in me yesterday about the Resurrection blossomed forth. I’m excited abt novel 3 now!”
I think if we stop sticking our biases and assumptions in the way of the language — if we started asking, how would this be possible? — we’d enter exciting paths into hidden places.
Look for us
In all the hidden places
Don’t be afraid.
A voice spoke that poem to me mind during the wee hours of Saturday morning. I knew I had to remember it. I repeated it every micro-wake. I posted it. And wondered, who is us?