Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 103 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This final lecture opens the book most Christians call impossible to understand, and shows why its own author disagrees: Revelation names itself a word of prophecy, mailed in a letter's frame to seven real churches. Dr. Essex walks the unveiled Christ of chapters 1 and 19, the approaches to interpretation, the structure of the judgments, and the plain reading of the thousand years. Listen for the pastoral center: the earthlings of Revelation know God's wrath is falling and refuse to repent, and the overcomer is simply the one who trusts and repents.
The author names himself John four times, 1:1, 1:4, 1:9, and 22:8, and identifies his book as prophecy and himself with the company of the prophets: the angel calls himself a fellow servant of your brethren the prophets, and the closing verses guard the words of the prophecy of this book. Roughly one word in ten of Revelation quotes or echoes the Old Testament, and John receives visions and is commanded to write them, exactly the prophetic pattern. The theory of an otherwise unknown presbyter John strains belief: at the end of the first century, a John standing without introduction in the line of the Old Testament prophets, exercising authority over the churches of Asia, is the apostle, as the church fathers from the second century on uniformly held. He writes from exile on Patmos, a brother and fellow partaker in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance in Jesus, his Greek carrying the accents of a mind that thought in Aramaic.
The fathers place the exile under Domitian, dating the book about AD 90 to 96; not one church father lends credibility to an earlier date. The preterist school needs a Neronian date near 65, since its whole reading, prophecy culminating in Jerusalem's fall in 70, collapses if John wrote in the nineties; but the letters themselves breathe a second generation. These are the churches of Paul's Ephesian years, when all Asia heard the word, and their condition has ripened past anything in the Pastorals: Ephesus has left its first love and stands under threat of its lampstand's removal, a finality Paul never pronounces; Laodicea has grown lukewarm enough to be spat out. Decades, not months, separate these letters from the sixties.
Every church Jesus addresses faces the era's twin pressures or something worse. False teachers: Ephesus tests and rejects them, Pergamum harbors the teaching of Balaam and the Nicolaitans, Thyatira tolerates the self-styled prophetess Jezebel. Persecution: Smyrna suffers the synagogue of Satan and is told the suffering will deepen, Pergamum remembers Antipas killed where Satan dwells, Philadelphia endures the same synagogue, with Satan named behind it all. And the two churches spared both, Sardis and Laodicea, receive the severest words: wake up; you are lukewarm; you say you are rich and need nothing. The churches with the least trouble were in the worst condition, a lesson believers from behind the Iron Curtain have preached to the affluent West, and a standing question for every congregation: if Christ wrote a letter to your church, what would he say?
Most commentators file Revelation under apocalyptic, from its own first word, and the label carries freight: highly symbolic language, a code supposedly transparent to the first readers and opaque to Rome, and, the slide that matters, numbers read symbolically all the way to chapter 20. It also produces the common verdict that the book cannot be understood, though it is the one New Testament book with a blessing pronounced on those who hear and keep it. But the author names his own genre three times over: the words of the prophecy, visions incorporating the word of the Lord in the manner of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah. And the frame is a letter: John to the seven churches, grace to you and peace, opening it, and, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all, closing it. Revelation is a unique letter whose body is a word of prophecy; and its epistolary nature dictates the method: as with every letter from Romans to Jude, first understand what it meant to the original hearers, then hear what the Spirit says to the churches still.
On earth the Son appeared in humility, his glory unveiled only at the transfiguration; in Revelation the transfiguration glory shines from first page to last. The opening vision: one like a son of man among the lampstands, robed and girded with gold, head and hair white as wool, eyes a flame of fire, feet burnished bronze, voice like many waters, and John, who had leaned on his breast at supper, falls at his feet as a dead man, raised by the words, I am the first and the last, and the living One; I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades. And in chapter 19, heaven opens on the white horse and its rider, called Faithful and True, eyes aflame, crowned with many diadems, robed in a garment dipped in blood, his name the Word of God. Not the babe of the manger the world prefers to keep small: the glorious One.
The salutation coins three titles found nowhere else: the faithful witness, whose testimony on earth and in this unveiling can be trusted; the firstborn of the dead, holding by resurrection the position of supremacy; and the ruler of the kings of the earth, who loves us and released us from our sins by his blood. In heaven's throne room, John weeping that none is worthy to open the scroll hears: stop weeping, behold, the Lion from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome, Genesis 49's lion joined to David's covenant, the One entitled to open the seals and claim creation. Twice he bears the name King of kings and Lord of lords, the supreme sovereign before whom beast and kings cannot stand. And twenty-eight times he is the Lamb, a word evoking both images at once: the redeeming Lamb who was slain, and, because he redeemed a people to reign with him, the conquering Lamb.
Revelation is the pouring out of the wrath Paul said was being stored up, and John names its owners: hide us from the presence of him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come. The earthlings of the book are not ignorant; they know whose judgments fall, and the drumbeat of condemnation is that they refuse to repent. The same verb sounds to the failing churches of chapters 2 and 3: repent, or share the judgments. For the book is written to the church, not to the world: believers who will not pass through that wrath still need to know what God will do to this earth, for exactly the reason Second Peter 3 gave in its compressed idiom, which Revelation now spells out: knowing that all these things are coming, what sort of people ought you to be?
The purpose: an unveiling given by Jesus Christ to encourage believers to faithfulness and to rebuke them concerning sin, and chapters 2 and 3 carry both edges, commendation and condemnation, church by church. Those chapters are also the book's hinge. Looking back, each message opens with Christ identifying himself by traits from the chapter 1 vision, chosen to fit that church: the one who holds the stars, most likely human messengers, and walks among the lampstands knows every church firsthand and can remove any lampstand. Looking forward, each message closes with a reward, to him who overcomes, and the rewards, the tree of life, the crown, the throne, land in chapters 19 to 22, in kingdom and eternal state; Philadelphia's promise, I will keep you from the hour of testing, spans the same arc. The saints of the church age stand between: hearing, heeding, repenting, and awaiting rewards that presuppose their place in the kingdom and the eternal state.
Dr. Robert Thomas's two volumes are the outstanding exegetical commentary from the premillennial dispensational standpoint. Aune's Word Biblical Commentary holds everything one could wish to know about apocalyptic scholarship; Beale's NIGTC, stronger, traces John's use of the Old Testament, where his real value lies, though both treat the book as apocalyptic rather than prophecy. In English interpretation Essex prizes J. B. Smith, a Mennonite scholar of Hiebert's lineage, even above Walvoord, though both belong on the shelf; Dr. MacArthur builds his exposition on Thomas and Smith. And Pate's Four Views on the Book of Revelation lets each approach speak from the horse's mouth, including Gentry's preterist chapter.
The historicist reading, the Reformers' own, Luther finding the papacy in the beast, saw chapters 4 through 18 as the church's unfolding history; each generation read itself as the last, the chart demanded endless revision, and by the nineteenth century the school had died, leaving no one to write its chapter in Pate. The preterist holds everything through the middle of chapter 19 fulfilled by the destruction of Jerusalem, an interpretation standing or falling with the Neronian date. The idealist reads the whole as symbol of the age-long battle of good and evil, nothing concrete, only assurance of final victory. The futurist takes the book at its word as prophecy: from chapter 4 the visions await fulfillment, and even the overcomers' rewards of chapters 2 and 3 are future. All futurists are premillennialists, though not all pretribulational; and since no verse of Revelation announces the rapture of 1 Thessalonians 4 in so many words, Essex's own journal article, The Rapture in the Book of Revelation, weighs the ten proposed locations and argues that 3:10, kept from the hour of testing, assumes the rapture as the means of that keeping: pretribulational.
The classic outline divides at 1:19, the things seen, the things which are, the things after these; Essex reads that verse inside the first vision rather than over the whole book, and structures Revelation instead by its four occurrences of, in the Spirit. From 1:9, the vision of the church age: the glorified Christ and his messages to the seven churches, and through them to all who have ears. From 4:2, the vision of the Great Tribulation, correlated with Daniel 9's seventieth week and the Olivet discourse across its halves. From 17:3, the vision that moves from Babylon's destruction through the seven steps from Christ's physical return to the new heaven and new earth. And from 21:10, the vision of the new Jerusalem, filling in the eternal state. Revelation runs, as many have said, from now to eternity, and closes with its epilogue.
Chapters 4 through 16 unfold three cycles of judgment, seals, trumpets, bowls, each opened by a heavenly prelude, each running four swift judgments, then a slower fifth and sixth, then a parenthesis before the seventh: between the sixth and seventh seals, the sealed of Israel and the multitude; between the sixth and seventh trumpets, the interlude reaching back to the woman, the child caught up, the dragon's war, and the beasts. How do the cycles relate? The telescopic arrangement, held by Thomas, Smith, and MacArthur, nests them: the seventh seal contains the trumpets, the seventh trumpet the bowls, nineteen sequential judgments. Essex leans to a recapitulation, though not the symbolic school's strict one-for-one: the sixth seal, seventh trumpet, and seventh bowl each portend the same culminating arrival, the silence of heaven emptied for the victory parade, the kingdom of the world become the kingdom of our Lord, the final warfare before the coming; broadly, the seals fall earlier in the seven years, the trumpets in its second half, the bowls at its very end. He grants it is a hard call, argued honestly on both sides, with Thomas's excursus the place to watch the debate.
Revelation 20's millennium is read three ways: a literal thousand years following this age; a symbol of this age's final period; or a symbol of the whole present age. The text's own grammar resists the symbols: from 19:11 the visions chain, and I saw heaven opened, and I saw an angel, and I saw the beast and the kings gathered, and I saw an angel bind Satan, and I saw thrones, and I saw the great white throne, one event after another: the coming, the battle, the beast and false prophet cast into the lake of fire, Satan bound for the thousand years, released when they are completed, then the last judgment. The symbolic readings must break the chain and fold 20:4 back behind 19:11. And Revelation never flags a number as symbolic: seven churches are seven churches, seven trumpets seven trumpets; a thousand years, joined to the word years, is a thousand years, which the present age has already outrun, and which the sequence places after the coming of Christ, hence premillennialism. For the pulpit: 1:3 preaches easily and 19:11 gloriously, but chapters 6 through 19 are wrath upon wrath, so keep the frame before the people: the judgments fall on those who know and refuse to repent, and the question the book asks its hearers is Peter's, what sort of people ought you to be? Believers will not pass through the tribulation, but they must not carry the world's unrepentant spirit; the overcomer is the one who trusts the word of Jesus Christ and repents. Get the details right, and make sure the congregation leaves knowing what the book asks of them while they live on this earth until Christ calls them home.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all eighteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does the author of Revelation identify himself and his book?
2. Why does the preterist school require an early date for Revelation?
3. What in the seven letters marks the churches as second generation?
4. Which two churches receive the severest words, and what afflicted them?
5. What genre does Revelation claim for itself, and in what frame?
6. What follows from Revelation's epistolary nature for interpretation?
7. How does the Christ of Revelation compare with the Christ of the gospels?
8. What double image does the title Lamb evoke in Revelation?
9. What is the drumbeat of condemnation over the earthlings of Revelation?
10. Why does the church need a book about wrath it will not pass through?
11. How do chapters 2 and 3 unify the whole book?
12. What is Beale's particular value among the exegetical commentaries?
13. Why did the historicist approach die out?
14. What does Essex argue about the rapture in Revelation?
15. How does Essex structure Revelation instead of the classic 1:19 division?
16. What is Essex's lean on the relation of seals, trumpets, and bowls?
17. What grammatical feature anchors the sequence of Revelation 19 and 20?
18. Why does Essex hold the thousand years to be literal and future?
All eighteen correct. Lecture 31 is complete.
The churches with the least trouble, Sardis and Laodicea, drew the sharpest rebukes. What is it about comfort that endangers a congregation more than persecution, and where might that warning land today?
Revelation's earthlings know whose wrath falls and refuse to repent, while the overcomer trusts and repents. How does the book's picture of judgment shape the way a believer thinks about repentance as a daily posture rather than a single event?
If Christ wrote a letter to your church in the pattern of chapters 2 and 3, what might he commend, what might he rebuke, and which of the overcomers' promises would most strengthen you to hear and heed it?
Blessed is the one who reads, and those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep the things which are written in it, for the time is near. (A paraphrase of Revelation 1:3)
Dr. Essex commends Thomas's two volumes as the essential exegesis, J. B. Smith and Walvoord for interpretation, Beale for John's use of the Old Testament, MacArthur for the pulpit, and Pate's Four Views for hearing each approach in its own voice, closing the course where the canon closes: with the King who is coming.