A Sudden Revelation!

Spock is an atheist but he's seen some pretty strange stuff.

Revelation is a puzzling book of the Bible for everyone. Its interpretory range is probably the most well-known and least understood in the Christian faith. Some people ignore it completely, and others take it way too seriously. For anyone desiring to just get the message and move on, however, Revelation reveals another, more ugly side; it's so hard to make sense of, nearly everyone who has studied it has differing views on it. In our American culture, the most commonplace and therefore the most 'conservative' view on the book is under the dispensational lens. Revelation's structure is considered an orderly, chronological foretelling of the 'end times,' the ordering of events in and around Christ's second coming. This is what I presumed to be true as a young lad, but, as always, I learn that no issue is as simple as Sunday-school instruction. A different view shifts the Revelation timetable back to the first century, interpreting the 'tribulation' mentioned in the first chapters as a rough timeline of events since Christ's big goodbye to his big hello, including our current era. This view plays around with the numerical values and lengths of time mentioned throughout the book, deriving symbolic meaning from them rather than a doomsday calender. Yet another view takes the traditional interpretation of Revelation being all-future and gets a little crazy with it, supposing that several different sections in the book are actually retellings of the same amount of time, different perspectives of a single event. If those aren't strange enough, just imagine when someone supposes that pieces of both views could be true, or draws a unique conclusion from a single passage in Revelation and frames a view of his own. Such is the book of Revelation.

My own views on Revelation are not exactly resolved by all this conjecture and interpretation; in fact, they're clouded by it. I am fascinated by the theory that some of Revelation's passages could refer to events long past, and I have no problem with stretching 1000 years over 2000 actual years or so (after all, Revelation is universally considered mostly figurative anyway.) To be quite honest, I am most disturbed by dispensationalism; it's a very recent interpretation that's backed only by a handful of unorthodox interpretations of Scripture and yet it's pervaded our culture. In that light I would be more likely to discard my childhood paradigm rather than strange, different views about Revelation. Those differing views have little effect on how I live my life; I only know that Jesus will return and I will live forever, and exactly how that happens couldn't be called clear in any view of Revelation. The fact that he will  return is what matters, not when. Insight how and when society 'gets better' or 'gets worse' shouldn't sway our mission for Christ; our job is to be Christ on earth whether everyone's saved or everyone's trying to kill us. I see a much deeper problem in apathetic people than a different view on the end times than me; developing a relationship with God brings about godly conduct, and if conduct is replaced by a 'life will get better anyway' or a 'Omigosh we're gonna die' attitude, then Christ is clearly not present. The real revelation of Revelation is that Christs's return is certain, and we've got to do everything in our power to get ready.