Revelation may be the most anticipated book in the Bible, and it is almost certainly the most misunderstood. It is also, at its heart, one of the simplest. Before we open a single seal or meet a single horseman, we need to answer one question: what kind of book are we holding?
First, what this series is not
Nobody gains anything when a pastor announces he is going to teach Revelation. If anything, he opens himself up to criticism, because by the end every person in the room will hold a different view on something. That is fine. We have to learn to disagree agreeably — to not major in the minors, and to agree on the major point, which in Revelation is Jesus Christ.
So this class is not here to impress anyone, to bury you in material, or to predict dates. Jesus said that no man knows the day nor the hour — not even the Son. If Jesus does not know, you and I certainly do not. And we are not going to guess at who the Antichrist is. It is probably not Donald Trump, and it is probably not Elon Musk.
What we are going to do is get the big picture of the book, point you to resources for deeper study, and follow the instruction the book gives in its very first line.
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass.”Revelation 1:1
The purpose of the book
That opening verse is the long and short of it. The book is about Jesus — His sacrificial death, His glorious resurrection, and His second coming. In the first two verses His name appears twice; by verse nine it has appeared five times. Whatever else Revelation contains, it is first the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Notice who it is written to: “his servants.” The word is bondslaves — people who have been set free by Christ and have willingly chosen to serve Him. That is the church. That is you, if you have trusted Him. The things it describes “must” come to pass — they are necessary — and they will come “shortly,” swiftly, all at once. Like a mudslide that takes a whole building in seconds, the events of this book will not creep in. They will arrive.
And then verse three: Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein. Revelation is not a book to be afraid of. Are there difficult things in it? Absolutely. Is it impossible to understand? Absolutely not. Do not glory in ignorance and check out when it gets deep. The goal here is not to put the jelly on the bottom shelf; it is to hand you a step stool so you can reach the top shelf yourself.
Who wrote it, and what it is about
The book names its author: John (Revelation 1:1; 1:9). Most likely this is the beloved disciple who wrote the Gospel of John and the three letters that bear his name — the same writer who built his gospel around sevens (seven miracles, seven “I am” statements) and carries that pattern straight into Revelation. Whichever John it was, his message is unmistakable: Jesus Christ.
Look at the picture he gives in chapter one — the Son of Man among the candlesticks, hair white as wool, eyes like flames of fire, feet like brass in a furnace, a voice like many waters, a sharp two-edged sword going out of His mouth, a face like the sun. John falls at His feet as dead, and Jesus lays a hand on him and says, “Fear not; I am the first and the last.”
Many people come to Revelation enamored with the Antichrist, the tribulation, the beasts, and the four horsemen. (We will get to the horsemen — stick with us.) But nothing in this book is more important than Jesus Christ, His worthiness, His death, and His promised return. If that disappoints you, your affection is in the wrong place. We should be more in awe of the Christ of chapter one than of the dragon in the chapters that follow. Revelation is not a secret predictive code about the timing of the end of the world.
1. Revelation is an apocalypse
The Bible is a library, not a single book — sixty-six books by more than forty authors, written over 1,500 years on three continents in three languages, with one message: the redemption of mankind to God through Jesus Christ. Inside that library are at least eight kinds of writing. History (Joshua, Judges). Law (Leviticus). Poetry (Psalms). Gospels. Acts. Wisdom (Proverbs). Epistles — Paul’s letters to churches. And apocalypse: Daniel, and Revelation.
You read a history book differently than you read a poem. Neither is better; each serves a purpose. So when we come to Revelation, we have to know what we are reading. The word revelation is the Greek apokalypsis — an unveiling, a disclosure, information made known in a way that can be understood.
An apocalypse, then, is the retelling of a prophet’s symbolic dreams and visions, revealing God’s heavenly perspective on past and present events so that the present can be seen in light of God’s final outcome. A heavenly messenger — an angel, or Christ Himself — shows a human recipient hidden realities about the future and about the way things really are, so that we can live now according to how God sees things.
One distinction matters here. Revelation is not a Jewish apocalypse like parts of Daniel and Ezekiel, or the non-canonical book of Enoch. It is a Christian apocalypse that stands in continuity with Jewish apocalyptic writing — Jewish in form, Christian in content and theology. Why does that matter? Because the key to its symbols is the Old Testament. John rarely says “it was this.” He says “it was like this,” “as it were,” “like unto.” When he sees Jesus standing among seven candlesticks, his first readers — who knew the Scriptures nearly by heart — heard Zechariah immediately. All through the book, the pictures are drawn from Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Isaiah.
2. Revelation is a prophecy
John says so himself: “the words of this prophecy” (Revelation 1:3). A prophecy is a word from God, through a prophet, to God’s people. Revelation stands in the line of Isaiah and the major and minor prophets — and it brings all of their prophecies to their climax, which is the return of Jesus.
3. Revelation is a letter to churches
This apocalyptic prophecy was mailed. It went to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea (Revelation 1:4; 1:11). Some take these as figurative; I believe they were literal congregations that received a literal letter, because they were literally doing some things right and some things wrong. To each one Jesus says, in effect: I commend you for this — keep doing it. Stop doing that — here is how to fix it. And if you fix it, here is the reward.
Those letters are startlingly practical for us as individuals, families, and churches today, and we will take them one at a time later in the series — after we have been to the throne room of chapter four, seen the Lion-Lamb of chapter five, and watched Him take the sealed scroll in chapter six.
A word about sevens
Chapter one alone gives us seven churches, seven spirits, seven golden candlesticks, and seven stars. Seven is the number of perfection and completeness, rooted in the seven-day Sabbath cycle: God finished His work on the seventh day and blessed it (Genesis 2:2–3); Israel was told to keep the seventh day (Exodus 20:8–10); and the Sabbath was to be “a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever” (Exodus 31:16–17).
Why does that matter? Because Revelation is an apocalypse, and apocalypse speaks in symbols. In a book steeped in symbolism, numbers are never random. When you read seven, or twelve, or twenty-four, or 144,000, the question is always: is this a headcount, or a picture of fullness? Twelve is the number of wholeness — twelve tribes. A thousand was the largest number the writers used; Scripture says “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands,” not billions. So is the 144,000 exactly twelve thousand from each tribe, or a whole and complete company too large to count? That is worth chewing on — and maybe arguing about. Revelation is not a book of literal history. It is an apocalyptic, symbolic picture of literal things to come.
Where we go from here
What is the purpose of Revelation? The death, burial, resurrection, and glorious appearing of Jesus Christ. What is the book? An apocalypse, a prophecy, and a letter to churches. If in teaching it I ever get so far into the weeds that we cannot find Jesus, we have strayed from the point and need to get back.
Next week: how should I read Revelation? — some practical tools, and a look at how this book of endings ties every loose thread of Scripture, all the way back to Genesis, into a perfect bow. The week after, we will stand in front of the Christ of chapter one and ask what the sword, the fire, and the brass actually mean — so that the Jesus in our minds is not a figure with a sword in His mouth, but the living Lord as He truly is, for today and for eternity.