Lecture 31: Revelation's Christ, the Church in Tribulation, and the City with Open Gates

The lecture, section by section

1. Preach the agreements

   Schreiner names his burden with Revelation up front: evangelicals love to argue about the places where the book divides them, and the disagreements are real, but we agree on most of what Revelation teaches, and the agreements are the glory of the book. Chief among them is its Christology, and he spends the hour there deliberately: what Revelation says about Jesus Christ is something every reader can preach with full confidence.

2. The Son of Man with the Ancient of Days' hair

   The opening vision is apocalyptic, not portraiture. The robe and golden sash are priestly language; the double-edged sword proceeding from his mouth is a symbol, not surgery; the eyes like flaming fire mean he sees everything; the feet like burnished bronze, on Schreiner's reading, are feet that crush his enemies; the voice is like cascading waters, and John, seeing him, falls at his feet as though dead, a correction for anyone who casually wishes to see such glory. And John has made one deliberate change to Daniel 7: there it is the Ancient of Days whose hair is white like wool, and John gives that hair to the Son of Man. He has not forgotten his Daniel. He is saying that the Son of Man is equal with Yahweh: pure, ancient, fully God.

3. The first and the last

   I am the first and I am the last: in Isaiah 44 those are Yahweh's own words, so that anyone wondering whether Revelation teaches the deity of Christ can simply set the texts side by side; case closed. I was dead, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades: it can be very hard to die, Schreiner says gently, and it is deep comfort that Jesus holds those keys. And the beginning of God's creation, in the letter to Laodicea, means either that the risen Christ is the beginning of the new creation, as Beale argues, or that he is sovereign over creation; Schreiner is unsure which, and on neither reading is Jesus a creature.

4. On the same level as God

   Watch how naturally Revelation sets the Lamb beside God. The terrified cry for the mountains to hide them from the presence of the one on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, and this Lamb is not cuddly. The multitude sings salvation to our God and to the Lamb. The Lamb at the center of the throne will shepherd them, though lambs are sheep and not shepherds, because this Lamb is the LORD who is my shepherd. He rules the nations with a rod of iron, Psalm 2 fulfilled; he is the Word of God, King of kings and Lord of lords. And in the new creation the grammar completes itself: the city has no temple, for the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple; no need of sun, for God's glory illumines it and its lamp is the Lamb; and the river of the water of life flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb.

5. Satan fell at the cross

   When is Satan thrown out of heaven in Revelation 12? Some say the primeval fall, some the end of history; Schreiner argues the chapter answers itself: they conquered him by the blood of the Lamb. The casting down is the cross, and it is not about physical locality: it means the accuser has no ground left to accuse. Revelation 12 is Romans 8 in apocalyptic dress: there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus; who shall bring any charge against God's elect, when Christ has died, has been raised, and intercedes? The key to victory in this book is the cross.

6. Ten days at Smyrna

   Revelation everywhere assumes that believers will suffer, and the letter to Smyrna shows how the book pastors sufferers. The titles are chosen for a dying church: the first and the last, who was dead and came to life. Your poverty, he tells them, is wealth. The synagogue-of-Satan line is not antisemitism; it is not a word of hatred at all, but the sober observation that local opposition was likely abetting the persecution, together with the assurance of who God's true assembly is. Then: the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, and you will have affliction ten days. Schreiner was once taught that this meant a ten-day sentence and release, but the same breath says be faithful unto death; the ten, like the seven of the seven spirits, is symbolic: the affliction is short, even when it runs all the way to dying, short the way Peter calls this whole life a little while. And beyond it, the crown of life.

7. The overcomer's pictures

   The promises to the one who overcomes are a gallery of symbols for one gift. Eating from the tree of life in paradise; safety from the second death; the hidden manna; the white stone, the entrance token of that culture; the white garments of purity: each is a picture saying you will have eternal life, and you will get in. And how do they overcome? By the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

8. Heard a number, saw a multitude

   Who are the 144,000? Good people disagree, and Schreiner reads them as the church, the whole people of God. The number is symbolic, twelve times twelve times a thousand. The church is the new Israel, in a book that twice speaks of those who say they are Jews and are not. The tribal list is like no other, Dan omitted, Joseph's house doubled, and the tribes themselves have long since become untraceable, so that a literal census is not even meaningful. The seal on the forehead is symbolic of belonging to God; the harps are pictures of joy, not eternal music lessons; and the description of them as virgins undefiled with women must be symbolic, for marriage defiles no one: it is the Old Testament's betrothal language, Israel engaged to God alone, a people wholly his, blameless, with no lie in their mouths. Then the master key: John heard the number of the sealed, and he looked and saw a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation. He heard a Lion and saw a Lamb; he heard 144,000 and saw an uncountable host. It is the same group, and the passage preaches: when the day of wrath comes, who is able to stand? Those who are sealed.

9. The tribulation we are in

   The multitude comes out of the great tribulation, and Schreiner, showing his hand, takes the great tribulation to be the whole span from the resurrection to the second coming: this present evil age, in which every Christian lives. They have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, and so they stand before the throne, serving day and night in his temple, which is his presence; they hunger no more, thirst no more, no scorching heat strikes them, for the Lamb at the center of the throne shepherds them to springs of living water, and God wipes away every tear from their eyes. That last line belongs to the new creation, which is exactly the point: sealed through the cross, suffering now, some dying, and then the city. Revelation, Schreiner keeps insisting, is not saying something different from the rest of the New Testament; it is saying the same things in different clothes.

10. The church measured and prophesying

    Chapter 11's measuring of the temple, on Schreiner's reading, is the church measured, that is, protected by God. The 1260 days, the forty-two months, the three and a half years, the time, times, and half a time are all one symbolic period: the whole age from the resurrection to the return, the broken half-seven of suffering before the consummation, the very age we live in. The two witnesses are the church, and the fire from their mouths is judgment in symbol: what is the church doing in this present age? Prophesying judgment and salvation, opposed and apparently beaten, and finally, like the witnesses, vindicated by God.

11. The city with open gates

    The new Jerusalem descends radiant with God's glory, with the beauty of jasper, and Schreiner passes on C. S. Lewis's remark, conceding it may be a touch snarky, that anyone who knows how to read literature knows such language is not literal: John is describing the indescribable. The city has twelve gates bearing the names of the tribes and twelve foundations bearing the names of the apostles: one people of God, built on the apostles. Its measurements announce their own symbolism, twelve thousand stadia, a wall of one hundred forty-four cubits. The high wall means the city is safe, in the idiom of a world where walls meant safety; and the gates that are never shut mean the city is safe again, for a fortress with open gates fears nothing. There is no temple, for the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple, and no lamp, for the Lamb is its lamp. The nations bring their glory into it: every good and beautiful thing of this life will be there. Schreiner remembers his little daughter asking whether the family dog would be in heaven, and answering that whatever she needed for her joy would be there, perhaps in a new way. And the tree of life stands with leaves for the healing of the nations, in a city where no one will ever be sick: healing as a symbol of a world finally whole.

12. Holding the millennium loosely

    And the millennium? Schreiner begins by right-sizing it: whatever the millennium is, it is temporary, and he is more interested in the forever, finding it odd how many are more excited about the temporary than the eternal. Postmillennialism he cannot ground, though he would be happiest of all if it were true, and he would love the pretribulation rapture to be true too, while not believing it at all. He was a convinced premillennialist most of his life, and still calls two of its arguments great: the first resurrection most naturally sounds physical, and the binding of Satan is a serious point; he jokes that he is premillennial on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, amillennial on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and enjoying the Sabbath rest on Sundays. His slight lean is amillennial, for four reasons: it coheres with the symbolic reading the whole book has required; premillennialism is not taught elsewhere in Scripture, since the alleged Old Testament millennium texts, Isaiah 60, Ezekiel 40 to 48, describe the new creation; Revelation is apocalyptic and hard, and no doctrine should rest chiefly on the Bible's most difficult book; and, with Meredith Kline, the first resurrection is spiritual and the second physical, just as the first death is physical and the second eternal. Make up your own mind, he says, and hold it with open hands.

13. Loose ends at the last bell

    The closing questions gather the course's habits. Genre: Revelation identifies itself as prophecy and reads as apocalyptic, kin to the visionary books outside the canon, and it is also a letter; with Ladd, why not prophecy and apocalyptic together, all three at once. Ethnic Israel: Schreiner affirms from Romans a future salvation for ethnic Israel, and finds no special millennial role for Israel in Revelation. And the casting down of Satan in chapter 12 and his binding in chapter 20: two images of one reality, Satan removed from his former exercise of rule, a point on which a dear friend's very long email slowly persuaded him not to press earth against abyss; chapter 20, with the recapitulation reading he commends, retells rather than continues the story. The course ends as it began: the Lamb at the center, and the kingdom the LORD's.

1. John heard a number and saw a multitude no one could count. When your faith feels small and local, what changes if you remember which crowd you actually belong to?

2. Smyrna was told its affliction would be short even if it ended in death. What present hardship would look different measured against the crown of life, and who in your church could help you measure it that way?

3. The nations bring their glory into the city: every good and beautiful thing preserved. What good thing are you gripping as if it could be lost forever, and what would holding it with open hands look like this week?