The first edition of this sermon was lost, along with its detailed reference list, owing to a computer error. What follows is therefore only a partial reconstruction of the original but also contains much new material and many refinements not found in the first edition. It is essentially a re-write. On the plus side, this was the occasion for an important revelation being received which is shared in the next Rosh Chodesh message

Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah! Welcome to our ongoing series on the Book of Revelation of which this is the third part of many more to come, Yahweh willing. Today's subject is the Four Methods of Interpretation of the Book of Revelation which I will be presenting in two parts.

For the last two weeks we have been talking about the Apocalypse Beatitudes, an unusual way perhaps to begin such a study but one I felt strongly led to make. The reason, in part, is because I felt it important that we understand that this book of prophecy, though undoubtedly mysterious and complex in once sense, is also written to, and for, all believers in every generation and not just for the nevi'im (prophets) even if the nevi'im (prophets) may be required to unlock parts of it. It has a core which is of the utmost simplicity.

As I indicated last week, I want next of all to deal with the essentially exoteric material, teachings and revelations that are easy to understand about which there is not a great deal of dispute or debate in the Messianic Community (Church). Before we immerse ourselves in all that, we shall, as I always do, try to map out the overall picture by framing the whole first. Every artist must have some idea as to the size and scope of his planned creation and the Book of Revelation is no different in that respect. Yahweh, the Divine Artist, paints a picture in this the concluding book of the Bible (which is by design, I believe) that is both comprehensive and particular. So important are the dimensions of this prophetic work that various warnings are made not to tamper with it in any way - it shall not be added to, or subtracted from, with the direst of consequenes for those who attempt to do either:

"I solemnly declare to everyone who hears the prophetic words of this book: If anyone adds anything to what is written here, Elohim (God) will add to that person the plagues described in this book. And if anyone removes any of the words of this prophetic book, Elohim (God) will remove that person's share in the Tree of Life and in the Holy City (New Jerusalem) that are described in this book" (Rev.22:18-19, NLT).

Why is this book so special, so important, so precisely laid out that it requires no addition to, or subtraction from, that such a curse is added at its conclusion? A similar mitzvah (commandment) and warning is given near the beginning of the Bible, in Deuteronomy, which sadly has not been followed and is a reason we have so many denominations today - for, you see, such disregard for Yahweh's instructions leads to divisions and strife, setting one believer against another and in the process giving the Adversary easy victories in his subversive attempts to conquer mankind. That earlier warning may be found in the Torah (Law, Instruction) itself:

"Hear now, O Israel, the chuqqim (decrees) and mishpatim (ordinances, judgments) I am about to teach you. Follow them so that you may live and may go in and take possession of the land that the Yahweh, the Elohim (God) of your fathers, is giving you. Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the mitzvot (commandments) of Yahweh your Elohim (God) that I give you" (Deut.4:1-2, NIV).

"See that you do all I command you; do not add to it or take away (subtract) from it" (Deut.12:32, NIV).

One of the reasons why Yahweh has given us a written record is so that charlatans or just the plain ignorant cannot make up things as they go along. Of course, the Adversary seeks to corrupt the original instructions of our Heavenly Father both by corrupting the copying of Scripture both by adding to it (often, unpremeditatively, by accidentally incorporating scribal marginal notes) or by removing or modifying text not liked, a problem we have with the Masoretic Text that forms the basis of most contemporary Tanakh or Old Testament translations into English. One common way biblical texts get corrupted - again, not always intentionally - is by creating easier-to-read paraphrase versions of the Bible which properly should be viewed as commentaries rather than translations. So translation as well as transmission is another potential level of corruption. That is why careful preservation of the original manuscripts is so important and why many studious translations into modern languages need to be made, and why I warn people not to assume any one single translation (like the English King James Version) is error-free. At the very least the serious Bible student - and that's all of us - should have two or three Bible versions for comparitive purposes, if he can afford it, remembering that we are all called to be scriptorians like the Bereans (Acts 17:11).

The point being in saying all of this is that we take seriously the truth-statement and admonition of the Book of Proverbs:

"Every word of Elohim (God) is flawless; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him. Do not add to His words, or He will rebuke you and prove you a liar" (Prov.30:5-6, NIV).

This is a reason why continuationists like ourselves, who believe in ongoing revelation, need to be very, very, very careful indeed and why we should respect the view of cessationists who are, after all, only trying to be obedient to what Elohim (God) has said about not adding or subtracting from His Davar (Word), as they understand that, for they mistakenly extend the warnings to the whole Bible, thus justifying in their own minds a permanently closed canon (the Protestant one).

A purpose of the Book of Revelation, then, is to confirm all emet (truth) and to establish it all the more firmly, a reason why those whose doctrines and teachings are contradicted by it (like antinomians - those who are against the practical living of the moral and ethical Torah or Law of Yahweh) either ignore it or twist it altogether, adding their own meanings and/or subtracting Yahweh's, something I was at pains to point out last week and the week before. For true Christians/Messianics individually and collectively sing a spiritual and theological duet, a song with two parts - the Song of Moses (the Torah mitzvot or commandments) and the Song of the Lamb (the Gospel of Christ) - something most Protestants absolutely do not do because they are more concerned about freedom than obedience to truth.

Believers confronted by the reality and presence of the Book of Revelation tend to occupy two poles of thought and attitude with a whole range of attitudes inbetween:

• 1. At one extreme we have the fearful who are so scared by the book that they cannot (or won't) get into it; and
• 2. At the other we have the fanatical who just can't get their heads out of it.

And as I also pointed out, the Reformers Luther, Zwingli and Calvin either didn't understand it or mistrusted it, and were kept away from it primarily, I believe, because they frequently used the political authorities in Europe to achieve their political objectives rather than Elohim (God). By converting the princes and kings, the people of their principalities and kingdoms automatically 'converted' because that's the way things were done in the 16th and 17th centuries. They simply did 'more Constantine' - they institutionalised yet another variant of the 'Church' and perverted the Gospel in that way. We can never convert by compulsion. We neither have political power (which is a good thing) nor are we ever intended to because these powers, acording to the Book of Revelation, belong to the domain of Babylon and Satan, not to the New Jerusalem and Yahweh. Babylon stands condemned already and will perish in a day (Rev.17:5; 18:2ff.).

In early Christianity, the choice was always very clearly between 'Caesar (the Emperor, King, or Prince) is Lord [God]' and 'Yah'shua (Jesus) is Lord [God]'. It was a simple choice between the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Elohim (God) as far as absolutel, total allegiance was concerned, which is what triggered so much violent persecution when that choice was forced on the first believers. It's that 'black-and-white', and that is what the Book of Revelation makes absolutely, crystal clear. Once you have well and truly understood the Book of Revelation, your attitude toward politics, and your allegiances, will completely change. We are not to allow ourselves to be tarnished by secular politics which is thoroughly and unredeemably corrupt now, belonging to the dark élite masters who belong to Satan. When Christians are no longer protected by the law of a nation as citizens, then you know it has finally come to that. Indeed, it is now committed to utterly destroying us and on a scale never before attempted. They seek our annihilation. Either we must yield to them and accept the State as 'God' or we must be true to the Creator Yahweh-Elohim of this universe and His Son.

The Book of Revelation was written for those on the receiving end of their murderous rage both since the Cross, which marked the earliest times of the "last days" (Is.2:2; Mic.4:1; Ac.2:17; Heb.1:2; 2 Pet.3:3 - technically it began at the Incarnation), and at the 'end of the last days' (2 Tim.3:1; etc.).

We are here today, confronted by this remarkable book at the end of the Bible, with one commentator even describing it as "the only masterpiece of pure art in the New Testament, beautiful beyond description". Even liberals like William Barclay, who was on the translation team of the New English Bible (NEB) and produced an excellent paraphrase translation of the New Testament of his own (which you will often find me quoting from) gushed with praise over the Book of Revelation, saying it was "infinitely worthwhile to wrestle with until it gives its blessings and opens its riches". That is a challenge I gladly accept.

This is the only book in the Bible to which divine rewards and punishments have been directly attached. Yahweh views the facts and truths revealed here very, very seriously indeed, and He could hardly have made its importance clearer. And like Genesis at the very beginning of the Bible, which starts world history off, the Book of Revelation concludes it. So without it the Bible would most certainly be incomplete and we wouldn't know how the Story ends, nor would we have anything concrete to look forward to, for that matter. And moreover, like Genesis, the Book of Revelation is about the whole human race and not just that part of it chosen by Yahweh to represent Him to all the nations of the earth - to Abraham and Israel. And like the Letter to Jude which we studied in October, the target audience is first and foremost the arising second generation of the Messianic Community (Church) that was being corrupted, already, in its creed, conduct, character and conversation. Only in the Book of Revelation is this finally brought to resolution - the Book of Revelation fixes all the mess that had already begun in the first century in behalf of the new generation coming to maturity at the beginnong of the second century AD.

Imagine your favourite book or movie in which the last chapter or final scenes resolve the plot and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. Imagine your being left in mid air not knowing what happened. And that's what the Bible would have looked like had the Book of Revelation never been written or included. I said this was initially written to the second generation both arriving and yet to come, to comfort and inspire them in times of persecution, but was it only written to, and for, them?

This is a book full of future predictions and prophecy. It describes 56 separate events that occupy an entire third of the book, most of them starting after chapter 4. Half of these events are spoken in plain language for all to understand but the other half are depicted in strange symbolic pictures. These events are shown from two different perspectives - from earth to heaven and from present to future (e.g. Rev.4:1). About the only thing that commentators are all agreed upon is that the events described are future to the writer (John) and readers in the first century AD. So the book depects future events from the second century AD onwards. The big question, then is this: do the events depicted reveal only the immediate future, from John's perspective, or all the way into the 21st century? And as we, in the 21st century, read these events, have they already happened, are they about to happen, or both? This is where all the differences in opinion lie and why four different schools of interpretation have arisen.

And one thing you'll notice is that Bible commentaries, internet articles, and YouTube videos on the Book of Revelation are normally written from just one of these perspectives. Before assuming which one is right, we do have to carefully look at each one of them, because every teacher you come across will be viewing the Book of Revelation through his or her own chosen lens. It is far too risky to uncritically swallow the view of the first teacher you read or hear and that's, alas, all too common. So if you have a favourite commentary, do be careful to check out which point-of-view it's coming from. Do not assume that that point-of-view is necessarily right. Check out a variety of perspectives. It is all too easy, and far too risky, to jump on board with the view you encounter in the first commentary, internet article, or video you read or hear, because the way you see the Book of Revelation will effect the direction of your whole life! It pays to be rigorous and careful.

Keeping an Open Mind

Don't just swallow what the first preacher you listen to says or limit yourself to the commentary your church or group recommends. When I first became a believer the church I joined recommended only one particular Anglican commentary mostly, as it turns out, because the editor endorsed one of their pet doctrines which few others did. You need to be well informed of all the different views and then, to encourage you to keep your minds open, I advise you to weigh the evidence and choose what you believe as we progress through this course. That is my task today and in the months ahead. The more exposure we have to the book and to these views, and the more we trust the Ruach (Spirit) to bring us into unity, the plainer the truth will become. There are only four views so this isn't going to be too complicated.

These four schools, which you will need to memorise, so jot them down, are as follows:

• 1. The Preterist School;
• 2. The Historicist School, of which there are now 3 varieties (because the third is a new revelation, the Messianic Evangelical view ):
  • a. Linear;
  • b. Cyclical; and
  • c. Spiral (the Messianic Evangelical view).
• 3. The Futurist School, with different rapturist views as to what will happen to believers during the Tribulation:
  • a. Pre-Tribulationism;
  • b. Prewrath Tribulationism;
  • c. Seventh Trumpet Tribulationism; and
  • d. Post-Tribulationism (the Messianic Evangelical view ).
• 4. The Idealist/Symbolic School.

As we read through the many parts or sections in the Book of Revelation, you need to tentatively mark each of them in your mind with one (or more) of these four interpretations. It doesn't matter that you may get them wrong at first because your views will change the deeper we get into the text anyway. You might even be undecided and that's OK too. And then when we're done, you can decide whether one or more ways of interpretation apply to the book as a whole. So make provisional decisions but be flexible. As new information comes your way, it is perfectly alright to change your opinion. And as I said, as we are honest and open, I do believe we will reach unity in the end, as we did some years ago when we worked through another complicated subject, The Aviv 1 Quest.

Don't be intimidated or manipulated by those who claim that "'God', 'Jesus' or the 'Spirit' told me this or that'". Absolutely seek answers in prayer but beware, because not everyone who claims heavenly authority, the gift of revelation, prophecy, to have 'had a dream' or is 'spirit-filled' has it, or is so.

More often than not we have to systematically work hard through the Scriptures for them to unfold. Never assume the 'right' to revelation or prophecy. It is that self-entitlement attitude to 'the gifts' that is a product of our lawless, chaotic 21st century. We mostly learn to do exegesis through hard and careful work leading to 'insights', and it is that through which the Ruach (Spirit) mostly works because it is by this means that we learn best, retain more, and are inwardly changed at a deeper level. The more 'showy' gifts like revelation, prophecy, dreams, etc., tend to less frequently serve the exegete whilst being preferentially sought out by the more careless and lazy. However, the opposite is true also - if you're only going to rely on the intellect, as most scholars to, you can equally well end up taking a wrong turn, as we shall see as we look at the four schools.

The Preterist School (also sometimes called the First Century Historicist School) believes that all the Book of Revelation's predictions were fulfilled during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, at a time when the Messianic Community (Church) was under the extreme pressure of imperial persecutions. You may remember I have already mentioned the oppressive Emperor Domitian who was alive when John wrote his Apocalypse. I myself use many commentaries in my studies but one Anglican commentary in particular, edited by J.R.Dummelow, which I mentioned earlier and which I use a lot because that is what I was 'raised' with, honestly admits that he interprets Revelation through the eyes of the preterist [1]. I wish more commentators were so open about their beliefs - most of the time you have to guess or figure out where they're coming from. That's why, incidentally, we have lots of summaries of our beliefs and positions throughout our website [2].

So why was Dummelow a Preterist, remembering that his commentary was compiled in 1909 over a century ago in the Edwardian era before Darwinism was seriously challenged? The reason he gives is because John's Apocalypse is analagous to other apocalypses such as the apocryphal Apocalyse of Paul written in about the 4th century AD as a pseudepigraph, that's to say, a document written in the name of the deceased Paul and claiming to build on Paul's reference to a journey to heaven in 2 Corinthians 12. Another pseudepigraph is the non-Christian Apocalypse of Adam, a Gnostic text written in about the 2nd century AD. There are several others written in the Pharisee period before Christ. All are fakes yet all employ what might be called the 'apocalyptic style' of writing.

So John was not writing in a new style of literature but his revelation was absolutely new and fresh. Unlike the others, it was inspired. We should not be surprised by this because every age writes in its own styles. But for Dummelow, whose understanding of the Creation story in Genesis was clearly influenced by Darwinism and the new so-called liberal 'Higher Criticism' coming out of Germany, clearly thought that a similar style meant similar content, and since none of the pseudepigraphical and apocryphal 'apocalypses' ever prophesied more than one or two centuries into the future, he assumed that John was somehow imitating them. This was an error on his part. So I don't think this is at all a good reason. Had any of those 'other' apocalypses been inspired, then they would undoubtedly have been incorporated into the Bible. They're not even in the Catholic Apocrypha, so sceptically were they viewed.

The second assumption made by Dummelow is actually not unreasonable which is why we must take Preterism seriously in other respects. He wrote:

"It seems natural to suppose that the book would be meant to be intelligible by those to whom it was addressed, and would have arisen out of the circumstances of their state (existence). Moreover, the language and the figures of that book are found to fit the early days of Christianity" [3].

I think we can agree that the Book of Revelation was written for believers in the 1st century to prepare them, their children, and their grandchildren for what would happen in the second and third centuries, if not directly then at the very least in a kind of prophetic foreshadowing of what was to come much further down the timeline in our own day. I think that's beyond dispute since persecution occurs in all ages in consequence of either orchestrated misunderstandings or, the most likely, naked evil design. So we are looking at the immediate future in the first instance for an original audience and readership. But can we, having said that, exclude all the centuries after those first two or three centuries as the Preterists demand?

Let's take a concrete example. The 'great city' of Babylon, sitting on seven hills in Revelation 17:9, would have been identified by Preterists as Rome because Rome was very great, with the entire Mediterranean Sea its private lake, had a huge empire, and was built on seven hills known as the Palatine, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Aventine and Capitoline Hills. It would have been quite natural for first century believers to make the association between Babylon and Rome because they lived in, and knew all about, Rome and the Roman Empire of which they were a formal part, whether willingly or unwillingly (like the occupied Judeans). This Preterist position is strengthened further by what Peter says in 1 Peter 5:13 where the apostle makes the same comparison in a piece of obvious coding in times of persecution, a clear reference to the Messianic Community (Church) in Rome which is in exile in the Imperial Capital. The coding is employed so as not to provoke the wrath of the authorities in case a copy of the letter were to fall into their hands, much as we must increasingly use code words to get around online censorship today:

"She who is in Babylon, elect together with you, greets you; and so does Mark my son" (1 Peter 5:13, NKJV).

This is, however, more than a cipher - more than a code - because the comparison is also prophetic and true. Rome is exactly like ancient Babylon spiritually-speaking! We find the apostle John, who wrote the Book of Revelation, using a similar cipher in one of his epistles, coding a similar message where he likewise speaks of the "elect" or "chosen lady" and her children (the congregation and its members) (2 John 1). Though Electa Kyria could be the name of a proper person (after all, we call girls 'Grace', 'Charity' and other similar names), the same kind of greeting in other epistles (e.g. 1 Pet.1:1; Titus 1:1) clearly points to one or more ekklesia or congregations. There was a time when Catholics might have assumed these cryptic words were pointing to the 'Blessed Virgin Mary' (BVM) whom they both venerate and deify as Co-Redemptrix (Co-Redeemer) with Christ. Modern Catholic Bibles like the Revised New American Bible (RNAB) do not subscribe to this any longer, I'm glad to say.

It is perfectly true that some prophecy doesn't actually concern us now because it was completely fulfilled 'back then' in the first centuries unless you are a history buff and just like knowing about such things. But that doesn't mean it is of limited value to a believer not particularly interested in history. We can always learn lessons from all the historical narrative in Scripture and indeed it constitutes a major part of the Bible so it cannot be unimportant to faith. We can, and do, draw inspiration and instruction from what has gone before, what Yahweh has accomplished, and how early believers responded in faith to His commands. History is, in the end, important. Don't you enjoy reading the old historical accounts to see what Yahweh did? I do! They inspire and encourage me, and teach me about our Father's character, reveal the sacred patterns in Yahweh's ways and speak to my own situation.

Now, we're going to be fair to all the different positions here - we've got to be honest and non-partisan: the strength of the Preterist view is the teaching that all Bible study should, at the very least, begin with the original context of both the writer and the readers. Absolutely. This is something I have gone to great lengths to underscore in my ministry over the decades because so many errors which you will encounter - errors of interpretation - result from uncritically projecting ancient prophecies, which may have been fulfilled long ago, into our own day. Not everything that happens is a prophetic foreshadowing of the future.

We have to be very careful of this kind of uninformed 'pop theology' which all too often claims to be 'Spirit-guided' when more often than not it is simply the fruit of over-fertile, creative imaginations better suited to fiction writers. I'm sorry, but Bible students can't behave like artists. It isn't a subjective thing but a science that demands rigour and accuracy. We can't just sit around sacually and combine Scripture with our own (usually unredeemed) imaginations and try to make passages mean what we would very much like them to believe. We can't trust what's coming out of our subconscious as the artist does because, like I said, exegesis (Scriptire interpretation) isn't art!

Far too many believers do that, mistakenly believing that whatever comes from their subconscious self is actually the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit). It isn't...not unless your subconscious is definitely inhabited by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit), an assumption that cannot be etsted except against the written Davar (Word) of the Bible. We can't afford to be subjective like this when it comes to Holy Writ.

Just consider all the New Agers and Hindus (to name but two religions) who interpret the Bible through the lenses of their own radically different belief systems and end up completely twisting it. I have a number of books written by Buddhists and Hindu gurus who read the Bible in a totally different way to spiritually regenerated believers. Their interpretations, which undercut the historical base reality of the texts, lead only to confusion. Bhagwan Shree Ragneesh did this and wrote an entire book called The Mustard Seed: Reflections on Sayings of Jesus. He hasn't a clue what salvation is and interprets everything the Saviour said through the lenses of pantheism and reincarnation, ideas totally alien to the biblcial world. That's not to say he didn't have some interesting things to say but it's so jumbled up in his Hindu world that investing time to separate it all just isn't worth it. In my experience, well-meaning people easily get lost in such an exercise. I know, I tried to once. And, of course, the 'sayings of Jesus' to which the title of his book refers, aren't those in the canonical Gospel in the Bible but from a very corruped source, the 'Gospel of Thomas' that contains much gnostic material resulting in a very mixed bag of both authentic and ivented sayings. Liberal and New Age Christians are attracted to this kind of material like flies to a corpse.

So we must begin by asking such questions as, 'What did this prophecy mean to them', the earliest believers? Obviously we can't go and interview the first believers but we can read the writings of the early sub-apostolic 'fathers' - the second generation leaders - who tell us what the thological conversations were all about in their own day. Some of them even wrote commentaries on various Bible books like those of the Gospels by Isho'dad of Merv, Bishop of Hadatha, written in Aramaic, in the mid 9th century, though by then, of course, Christianity was 700 years old. Nevertheless commentaries like this give you an idea of the evolution of theological thought set in motion through the progressive acceptance of various dogmas over time. But we need to go much earlier than that because by then so much Catholic dogma was already established about, for instance, the Virgin Mary, much of it based on pagan myths - see, for instance, Morena: The End-Time Antivirgin and Mother Goddess.

What the writer intended and what the readers would understand in their historical situation are vital steps toward a true interpretation and application of Scripture in our time. But there are a number of weaknesses in the Preterist view. To begin with, very few of the specific predictions actually came true during the time of the Roman Empire. That's our biggest red flag. Only a few general trends can be identified with any certainty but there is no particular correspondence. And I am sure you will have come across those who have tried to distill '666' from the Latin letters of Nero Caesar. As you know, Latin letters have numeric correspondences just like Hebrew and Greek [4]. The trouble is, you can make the names of various persons add up to 666 - I remember when they did it with the last Soviet leader, Mikael Gorbachov, because he had a birthmark on his forehead which many foolish believers were claiming was the 'Mark of the Beast'. They did it with the name of US President Barak Obama too. You can find 666's all over the place if you want to! I see them on car licence plates all the time. The number is not uncommon. You can squeeze your own wishes into Scripture if you're not very, very careful. So watch out for the prophetic sensation-mongers - they're out in large packs right now all over the internet predicting this and that!

People also conveniently forget that the Book of Revelation was written some 30 years after Nero's death so why would this be a big thing after the event? Who would be interested or even care. One tyrant down, more on the way. They'd be more interested in Domitian at this time whom they called the 'Bald Nero' because he was just as sadistic. So it can't have been Nero - he had been dead for 30 years and wasn't future.

If people are right about Babylon being Rome - and millions of Protestants absolutely believe that, thanks to Luther and other founding fathers of the Reformation, along with the Seventh-Day Adventists - then it also means that after Rome fell, the major part of the Book of Revelation lost its direct relevence and really said little to the later Messianic Community. But is that true? After the Roman Empire was gone, did people close up their Books of Revelation and stop reading the prophetic parts? No. Now you could argue that, in a sense, Rome never fell, even though it was overrun a few times and sacked, even though it split into two Empires - Western and Eastern - but that it always survived in some form. Constantinople, the New Rome, capital of the Byzantine Empire, survived until 1453 when it was conquered by the Moslem Ottomans who have been there ever since (renaming it Istanbul).

What were/are those two Romes today? Well, the Western Part would be Catholic Rome in Italy and the Eastern Part the Eastern Orthodox Church's Constantinople until 1453 and, since then, Moscow in Russia. I think there's a certain validity to that position but we must be careful not to take it too far. But is that the way the first century believers would have been thinking? No, because these churches didn't exist until the Great Schism in 1054. And if you want to see how there might be some kind of application to the theory of the continuation of Rome you can see our European Union website. It is very hard to make that view reflect the plain sense of the Book of Revelation - remember, we have to think the way they thought about it in the first instance. And since nearly all scholars accept that the last few chapters cover the end of the world, which is still future to us, clearly in the Preterist model a huge gap is left between the beginning and the end of history of Messianic Israel (the Church) if we say that Babylon was Rome. This leaves us with no direct guidance for many intervening centuries. That may be true, of course, but I don't think the evidence supports that assumption.

This Preterist deficiency is met by the second approach and this is called the Historicist School. The historicists believe that the predictions in the Book of Revelation cover the entire so-called 'Church Age' between the First Coming of Messiah and the Second with all the generations inbetween covered too. They view Revelation as a coded history of Anno Domini or 'Year of the Lord' in symbolic form, covering the major phases and crises of the entire 2,000 year period. So for historicists, the fulfilment is the uninterrupted, gap-free history of the Messianic Communmity (Church) past, present and future. It's all allegedly there. We're in the story, albeit in a very symbolical form, and we can know what's next on the divine program, no matter when we were born because there's no vaccuum, as it were, between the first three centuries of the end of the Roman period and the things at the very end. It's a continuous history, they claim. This is a very widespread belief amongst conservative Bible teachers. Anyone teaching about this book online is most likely an adherent of this School. So those seekers inhabiting the internet are very likely to have this School of interpretation drummed into them because they're going to encounter it a lot and assume it's established fact.

A very good illustration of this School is something a scholar once did. He created a cross-referenced index between every section of the Book of Revelation and the many volumes of the Cambridge Ancient and Modern History series which was authoritative in its time. Up until the last few years it was generally held by historicists that we were living somewhere between chapters 16 and 17, the section on the Seven Bowls of Wrath. What with the present crisis, we increasingly hear people who believe we're in those very last chapters now beyond chapters 16 and 17. They're not the first to have believed this and will, first, be surprised, and then disappointed, that they weren't. The people whose devotionals my family read every day are historicists from a conservative Baptist denomination. Years ago, one of their team authored a fascinating little booklet, which influenced my thinking for many years, about the 7 congregations or 'churches' of Asia Minor which, he claimed, represented the 'Church Age' divided up into seven chunks of history. Had I been a Baptist with little exposure to other denominations and their teachings, I might well have remained in that school of thought.

One good thing about this thesis is that it has made the Book of Revelationm relevent to every generation of believer. It has stimulated interest and that's not a bad thing because we ought to be interested in this book whether we fully understand it or not. But this positive does have its negatives. And one of them I could mention is that many details in the prophecies are force-fitted into known events and that makes the whole thesis artificial. But there's a bigger problem: if the Book if Revelation is a code for the last 2,000 years of history, why can't any two historicists agree on the correlation of Scripture and history? Had they been following the right method, there would surely have been a greater degree of unanimity in their conclusions than there actually is. And still they finish up with many unfulfilled details.

The latest attemps at historicism are some really very weak attempts to fit the current Covid 'Pandemic' into it by playing around with words that weren't designed to be used that way. It's all very subjective but these are the sorts of things itching ears want to hear because they want to prove the Bible is true to themselves and others by any means, even if it means imagining and thereby making things up. We can't do that. The Bible doesn't need our help in proving itself to be true and we don't need the kind of assurance it is assumed we need in seeing prophecy fulfilled before our very eyes any more than we need first hand experiences of miracles like Red Sea crossing to be convinced that Yah'shua (Jesus) is the Saviour of the world. The Bible's historical miracles are more than adequate for the building of a solid faith. And when people get it wrong, as most historicists do, it has the opposite effect of making believers look foolish and discrediting the Name of Christ before the world. And some - those weaker in the faith - may stop trusting altogether. The existential fulfilment of prophecy in our own day, nice though that is if it's true, is icing on the cake, not the cake itself, a bonus to an already vibrant spiritual life, and not the main faith-building ingredient or a means to rescue faltering faith because then that kind of counterfeit, fleshy 'faith' will need more miracles of that kind to kep it alive. That's the bait of the charismatic movement. The historical resurrection is our main faith-builder.

There is, however, more than one school of historicism, and we have only considered the first one so far which we call the Linear Historicist School or the Panoramic Historicist School (see above) because it believes that the central part of the Book of Revelation goes in one straight chronological line of events from the first to the second Advent of Messiah. The second type is called the Cyclical Historicist School. Its proponents believe that it covers the whole of 'Church history' more than once, constantly returning to the beginning and 'recapitulating' the events from another angle.

A popular book when I was young was William Hendickson's, More Than Conquerors, written in 1960 (no connection to a series of sermons with the same name I once gave). Hendickson claimed to have discovered seven such repeating cycles, each covering the whole 'Church Age' - chapters 1-3, 4-7, 8-11, 12-14, 15-16, 17-19 and 20-21. It's a fascinating idea. This enabled him to place the 'Millennium' (Ch.20) before the Second Coming (Ch.19) and this birthed the whole 'post-millenialist' view. I know one messianic minister with an online ministry who holds this view. But once again, this 'Progressive Parallelism', as it's sometimes called, doesn't work without akwardly and unnaturally forcing it onto the text, rather than being found within it. And in particular, the radical separation of chapters 19 and 20 is totally unwarranted. So I have to say this School has to be rejected too. I

n practical terms, all the failed prophecies coming out of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements particularly, which rely heavily on this school of interpretation (just take all the failed 'Rapture' prophecies, for example) ought to be a dire warning to us. These so-called 'Spirit-filled' preachers betray their unrealistic dependence on such failed models. And they keep on making these false prophecies, not understanding that their overall historical grid for intepretion is wrong. They bring dishonour, shame and discredit to the whole continuationist belief in modern-day prophecy. The more they fail, the less people will believe in contemporary revelation and so entrench the cessationists in their equally wrong belief...and all because the Book of Revelation is so poorly understood.

If all the historicists can come up with is these two schools, then I have to say that of the four schools, this is probably the least satisfactory one - the least credible, hwoever 'neat' and appealing to our love of orderliness. There is, however, a new third School, which I came up with myself, which is based on a correspondence to the annual cycle of the festivals of Messianic Israel which I call the Spiral Historicist School. In its broadest outline (I want to cover this in more detail as we get into the text later) my theory posits that whilst the Book of Revelation depicts a linear unfolding of events, it does so by looking at the climax or conclusion in the final chapters and then sending an echo back into the past, as it were, to the very beginning of the apostolic and post-apostolic era (the first three centuries) causing history itself to actually be repeated in ways not unlike the cycles of history we see portrayed in the Book of Judges. This means that events and characters repeat the final cycle though less precisely at the beginning. The resolution becomes, as it were, sharper, and the events and characters more like each other, the closer we approach the end. That is why this current Penultimate Judgment in this last-but-one cycle is looking more and more like the Final Judgment-to-come as Satan hones his dark manipulative skills using the human resources and technologies now available to him. But more about this later. I just wanted to seed the idea in your mind now so that you can test it as we look futher at history.

The third model is called the Futurist School. This school believes that the central block of predictions in the Book of Revelation applies solely to the last few years leading up to the Second Coming. So there is this huge gap inbetween the first three centuries up to the end of the Roman Empire and the chunk of final history right at the end of the book. If this is true then everything is all still future (hence the label)...unless, as some do in every generation when a catastrophe is underway (like the First and Second World Wars or, now, the Pandemic and the attempted Globalist takeover of the world), they assume it's taking place right now.

Some of you may know that the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are futurists too, believe that the beginning of the First World War - 1914 - marked the beginning of these end-times. They prophesied (falsely) that Christ would return before the last member of the 1914 generation died. He didn't and that's when they changed their doctrine and taught that Yah'shua (Jesus) came invisibly then (very naughty....but then the Adventists did the same sort of theological tinkering when Christ didn't turn up in 1844 as Miller had prophesied and invented the doctrine of the 'Investigative Judgment'). That's called 'damage control theology' and it gets more and more complicated and confusing with each subsequent false prophecy made. The Mormons did the same thing when Christ didn't show up when one of their 'prophets' predicted He would by shifting location from the Mount of Olives to one of their temples.

So the futurist believes nearly all the prophecies in Revelation concerns the climax of evil control in the world, which will be the "Great Tribulation" for the people of Elohim (God) (Rev.7:14). Yah'shua (Jesus) also refers to this in Matthew 24:12-22. So in the Futurist School of thought, all (or most of) the events described will be compressed into quite a short period of time - 3½ years, to be precise, explicitly referred to as "a time, times, and half a time" or "42 months" or "1,260 days" (Rev.11:2-3; 12:6,14 which quote from Dan.12:7).

Since all the events are still future, the predictions tend to be taken more literally as an accurate description of what will happen. There is no longer any need to tailor them to fit past history. Certainly, the series of disasters seems to lead straight into the end of the world. What, then, according to the futurist model, is the message for the Messianic Community (Church) throughout the ages? Most of the book would only be relevant to the very last generation of believers, clearly, since it's all shoved at the very end of the time scale. Yet surprisingly, many futurists believe the qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones) will be 'raptured' to heaven before the troubles start, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because then the only people who would be affected would be the unbelievers and we know this book was not written for them! So, according to these rapturist futurists, believers aren't going to be here to see the end events and so don't need to know what will happen.

So we must ask ourselves, why bother to write about these events at all? And especially in such detail? It makes absolutely no sense This concerns especially 'pre-tribbers' (that's the vast majority of rapturist believers) and partly the 'mid-tribbers' (since they believe they'll be here for the first half of the 7-year tribulation period). So believers, if the rapturist futurists are right, don't need to know anything about the end of the Book of Revelation as they'll (allegedly) in in 'heaven'. That begs the question: why would Yahweh go to all the trouble of giving such a huge chunk of detailed revelation if it's not for anybody?? The unbelievers aren't interested. And the believers have supposedly been whisked away in their magical ride to goodness-knows-where. That makes the prophecies entirely redundant, making this a huge weakness of the model if you happen to be a rapturist. And if you are, you need to choose one or the other: and if you choose to remain a rapturist, you're effectively 'removing' unneeded passages from that Book of Revelation by making them irrelvent.

A further weakness of the futurists is that they tend to treat the prophecies as a kind of 'almanac' or annual calendar which leads to an excessive interested in charts and schedules of the future. When I went on line the other day to find some illustrations for this message I found no end of these charts and they all differed from one another. Hal Lindsey, who wrote a lot when I was young (I have his books), springs to mind as being a popular author on this subject. He got a lot of things wrong. And the fact that they do not always agree, further suggests that the Book of Revelation was not primarily written for such speculative purposes. It's a time-consuming exercise of futility. Far better to view the 3½ period through the lenses of John and the first and early second century believers' theological and linguistic tools. Once we have understood them, then we can maybe start looking at modern events.

Only the other night I was reading and re-reading chapters 2 and 3 containing the messages to the seven messianic communities (churches) in the Roman Province of Asia Minor and asking myself the question, 'Why these seven in particular? Why not Corinth, Thessalonica, Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, Colossae or any of the other communities of believers mentioned in the New Testament?' I marked them on a map and it became immediately clear that, beginning with Ephesus where John lived, all of these congregations were within the apostle John's preaching 'circuit' or area of direct ministerial responsibility. These were his congregations. They are all extinct now. Patmos, where he was exiled, was just across the sea from Ephesus where he was headquartered. This is specifically a Johannine reference and until we grasp that, we're not going to make sense of this book. This is John's world, his community, 30 years after Paul, the final crop of the matured first generation. More of that when we come to make a detailed study.

That brings us to the fourth and final school - the Idealist School. This particular school removed all the specific time references altogether and discourages correlation with particular events. It's entirely non-historical in its approach. The proponents of this view, very many of which are liberals (though by no mans all of them), see in the Book of Revelation symbolic representations of good and evil principles which are common in every age. The events described are therefore to be viewed non-literally. According to this view, the New Jerusalem would be used to explain the blessedness of, even at this late stage of 2021, the true believers whose lives are "hidden with Messiah (Christ) in Elohim (God)" (Col.3:3, NIV). In other words, they don't think it's a real city - a real place in a real location - it's something 'inside' or, at the very least, local to our living space. And thus the Book of Revelation, according to this fourth model, pictures an eternal struggle between good and evil. So the truths contained in this narrative can be applied to any century and anywhere: 'Any time, any place, anhwere, there's a wonderful world you can share,' as the Martini advertisement used to go. Every moment is the 'millennium', every moment is the 'second coming', every moment is the 'judgment', etc..

What of Elohim (God) and the Devil in this scenario? Well, some Idealists would say they are locked in an eternal contest - it's ongoing - with winning or losing being the possibility at any one one moment in time. Divine victory, according to them, can be experienced by an overcoming people at any time, itself not untrue (because we are indeed engaged in such a contest in mortality). Thus, to the Idealist, as you are spiritually overcoming, you are concluding the battle personally - for yourself. So the essential message can be universally applied throughout time and space. I suspect, but I would have to confirm it, that's probably partly the view of former Anglican bishop, N.T.Wright, who leans toward the liberal side though he does believe in a literal Second Coming and Resurrection. Most idealists do not. Most liberal Anglican and Episcopalian bishops, who are liberals, tend to promote doctrines along the lines of the Idealists.

Unfortunately, if one is not very careful, this view can so easily mutate into New Age, occultic ideas about the eternal struggle between Yin and Yang which find a kind of perverse 'balance' that will always exist until the end of time. Occultists believe that Yahweh and Satan are more-or-less equally matched and in an ongoing, perpetual struggle. This extension of idealism then can lead into pantheism (believe in an impersonal, collective, universal god) and reincarnation.

Understand that I am not dismissing this intepretation because the great merit of this model is that the message of the book becomes directly relevant to all who read it. They are in a struggle and are assured that "the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world" (1 John 4:4, NIV). In other words, as Paul said in Romans 8:37, "we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us" (Rom.8:37, NIV). Absolutely! So as far as the immediate present is concerned, there is this spiritual or allegorical sense in which you can look at anything in Scripture that has an historical basis, precisely because Yahweh has ordained an historical tavnith (pattern) since He steers and determines the final outcome of collective historical events, so long as it follows divine tavnith or pattern. You can spiritualise or allegorise many a literal text and make it applicable to the here-and-now (though not all). This is, however, a little different from the Idealists who believe there is no historical bases to end-time prophecies who view them, along with the early history in Genesis, as myth.

But the question is: Is this what the writer, John, intended the prophecies to mean? Like I said, I completely agree with this assesment at a certain level. And as I keep on reminding you, prophecy has more than one layer of meaning and application so you can't just limit yourself to one. A layer of prophecy can be very physical and temporal, it can be viewed through the lens of eternity, it can be talking about communities or indiviiduals, it can be allegorised into a spiritual devotional or moral principle, or ti can be talking about your emotional life. A good example of the latter is surely the Olive Branch revelation about Stilling the Storm (OB 268) that uses a literal event on the Sea of Galilee as a springboard to learning how to still or calm the turbulent emotions within your soul soul in Christ so that you can enjoy shalom (peace). Scripture - and especially prophecy - having many levels of meaning - is a complication we're going to have to deal with as we work our way through the Book of Revelation.

The weakness of the Idealist position is that it tends to be adopted to the exclusion of one or more of the other models in order to justify unbelief. It becomes exceedingly dangerous when it treats the Book of Revelation as a myth and joins the stomping ground of agnostics amd atheists whom it readily caters to because they don't believe in miracles and authentic prophecy. It can then become a Trojan horse to infect the Messianic Community (Church) with heresy. The fact that it is so popular with liberals and Marxists is a good reason to treat it with caution. They use it to navigate their doubts without abandoning Christianity altogether and certainly for some it may well serve a limited purpose to prevent a complete slide into unbelief. I would call such people 'Christian humanists' whose hearts are at least more-or-less well-intentioned on a personal level, if somewhat deceived on the level of Elohim (God) - see green cicle below:

Thus Idealists regard the Book of Revelation as spiritually but not historically true. To them, these are fictional events but the stories contain important morals and guidelines for a spiritual life. They view the Bible much as we might view Æsop's Fables, our own Books of Abraham, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and even, dare I say it, the Book of Mormon which is obviously not historical but, according to liberal Latter Day Saints in the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), nevertheless has spiritual value as an idealistic parable or allegory. One might agree with that were it not for the fact that its author, Joseph Smith, actually claimed it to be a literal historical record (which it isn't) and the fact that it is a doctrinal mishmash.

For the idealist, these truths must be dug out of the narrative before being applied. But the cost of this demythologising process, is to jettison a great deal of the material by dismissing it as 'poetic licence' which belongs to the oackage rather than the content. And lying beneath this view, when it is treated as exclusively the correct model, is the Greek philosophy of Platonism which separated the phsyical and the spiritual, the profane and the sacred, eternity and time. The Plationists taught that their god was timeless. So truth, the Idealists argue, is timeless too, yet timely, but they reject any idea that it concerns "the times" as the Bible attests:

"And He (Yahweh, Elohim/God the Father) made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Messiah, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment - to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Messiah" (Eph.1:9-10, NIV).

You see, the Plationic notion of history as cyclical rather than linear or spiral (and thus coming to a definite conclusion) cut out the need for an end time, because they believe this 'cycling' will go on forever. What I dislike, and think is dangerous, about this Neoplatonic version of Idealism is, as I said previously, because you can see shades of reincarnationism (the endless transmigration of souls into new bodies after death) and occultism in this school. It makes it very easy for people to hold those beliefs to become liberal 'Christians' just as Rome's compromise with paganism made it easy for former pagans to become Catholic and so infiltrate and corrupt the true Besorah (Gospel, Good News). Today it has become explicit with liberal churches not only employing atheists but pagans who claim to believe in several religions simultaneously. For you see, idealism can, and does, remove the necessity for belief in the literal, physical incarnation (Virgin Birth), resurrection, and atonement - in short, the whole work of the Cross, thereby nullifying salvation altogether and reducing it to a set of principles that anyone from any religion can embrace. It leads, ultimately, to the One World Religion of the Anti-Messiah/Antichrist that we are rapidly heading towards now.

The Besorah (Gospel, Good News) is as much physical as it is spiritual! It tells us that the dark forces lose both on earth and in the spiritual dimension and that the wicked are destroyed out of both, which are then joined together into a new combined, permanently insperable, reality. The unbelievers have no part of it. In fact, the dark powers have already lost - at Calvary - and the remaining time is essentially extended time to allow all souls to be born onto earth and so have the opportunity to work out their salvation (Phil.2:12). When this has been done, Satan's presence is no longer required and He, and His fallen malakim (angels) - the demons - will be expelled and cast into hell. That's the true narrative, the true Story. It has a concrete ending.

We may say, then, with absolute certainty, that this liberal, cyclical, idealist view has serious consequences for biblical eschatology (the doctrine of the end times and 'last things', from the Greek word eschatos meaning 'end' or 'last'). It is unsound, unsafe. When you transfer the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment from the future into the present, as the Idealists are forced to do, you end up with an entirely mutilated Gospel. It's no longer 'good news'. It bleeds the meaning of atonement completely dry. Then eschatology becomes existential, in other words, concerned only with the present moment of existence, or - worse - it can be 'realised' now. This is in accorcd with the false occultic, New Age 'Christian' doctrine, that Christ is within and can be 'realised' in you so that you become part of the 'collective Christ'. And this is pantheism, the belief we are all 'God 'by default and simply need to 'realise' it, is the very opposite of Christianity/Messianism. I have met so many mortal, fallible and deluded people who seriously believe the fantasy that they are either gods or goddesses without displaying any of the attributes of divinity, other than the false, arrogant, conceited kind that the fallen angels display.

In this Idealist model, radical changes have to be made to the 'predictions' to make them fit the present - usually by 'spiritualising' them, a very Plationic way of thinking that seriously infected the Church early on, and very quickly, as the apostles moved out of Israel and into the Greek and Roman worlds. Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and traditional Protestantism are saturated with Neo-Platonism, most especially in the Creeds. Thus, as I said, the New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation, instead of being a place, a city, becomes exlusively a description of people. Now, it is that too - certainly - but it's not only that. It then becomes the idealised picture of the Messianic Community (Church) with all the architectural details conveniently forgotten because thay can have no meaning in this particular school of thought.

That's all I have to say about this subject today. We have four models that are used to explain or interpret the Book of Revelation. Next week, Yah willing, after you have had time to chew this all over, I am going to quickly summarise all that I've said today - condense it right down - and then we'll start to build a new model that incorporates all four of these schools, because all four apply to different areas of the prophecies but not to all the others, and this will include my own spiral model. I think - I hope - by the time we have finished, you will have a powerful witnessing tool in your hands that makes sense of all the Book of Revelation, without contradiction, without havinhg to force any part into flawed models. This does mean you have got to learn to think on multiple levels so it does mean hard work, but the rewards will more than compensate you for your efforts. Plus you will enjoy greater clarity of thought and, hopefully, a better communion with Elohim (God). Finally, you'll be able to take the skills you have learned here to assist you in the interpretation of all Scripture, and especially the nevi'im (prophets). Hopefully you will have added incentive to do this because of the rising tide of troubles in the world as we move ever deeper into the Penultimate Judgment so we don't make critical, or possibly even life-threatening mistakes, as we see, and confront, these things being fulfilled before our very eyes.

After that, we will tackle the 'simple stuff' before we get into the really 'chunk meat' of the prophecies. So, until next time, I pray that Yahweh will bless you all richly and that you will enjoy the rest of this Sabbath. Amen.

Endnotes

[1] J.R.Dummelow (editor), The One Volume Bible Commentary (MacMillan, London: 1909), p.1066
[2] Like What We Are and Believe in a Nutshell and Lev's Hot Potatoes: Hard Truths for the Remnant
[3] Dummelow, op.cit., pp.1066-7
[4] Which have sadly become somewhat occultised in Gematria and Theomatics, so you must be very careful

Acknowledgements