God's Problem (34 page)

An amazing passage this. Several points about it are worth emphasizing. First, Paul appears to think that he will be one of those still living when this cataclysmic event takes place (he includes himself among “we who are alive, who remain”). Second, the entire passage presupposes an ancient cosmology in which the universe we live in consists of three levels (sometimes called the three-storied universe). There is the level where we human beings now live, on the flat earth. There is the realm below us where the dead exist (e.g., in Sheol). And there is the realm above us, where God—and
now Christ—lives. In this understanding, Christ was once with us on our level, then died and went to the lower level. But he was raised from the dead, to our level, and then ascended to the level above us. He is coming back down here, though, and when he does, those below us will go up, and we too will be caught up with them, to meet the Lord above, in the air.

That’s how Paul thought—completely like an ancient person who didn’t realize that this world is round, that it is simply one planet in a large solar system of planets circling a single star out of billions of other stars in our galaxy, which is only a moderately sized galaxy among billions of others. In
our
cosmology, there is no such thing as up and down, literally speaking. And God certainly doesn’t live “up there” or the dead “down below.” We have a different universe from Paul’s. It’s hard to imagine how he would have conceptualized his apocalyptic message if he had known what we know about planet Earth.

Suffering in the Meantime

For Paul, then, as an apocalypticist, suffering as we experience it now will end when the final resurrection occurs and this world and our mortal bodies are transformed into what is imperishable and impervious to pain, suffering, and death. But what happens in the meantime? For Paul, what happens is a lot of suffering.

Paul’s letters to the Corinthians (both 1 and 2 Corinthians) were written against those who supposed that they were already experiencing the benefits of the resurrected life in the present. For Paul, nothing could be further from the truth. Christ’s resurrection was the beginning of the end, but the end of the end had not yet come, and until it did, this was a world of pain and misery. As he says elsewhere, in his letter to the Romans:

Life in the present is a life of pain and suffering, as we groan like women who are going through the agonies of childbirth. That, for Paul, is the way that it has to be. The future redemption has not yet taken place, and we are still experiencing life in our mortal bodies.

Paul emphasizes that Christ himself did not lead a painless existence in this life. To be sure, Paul, as has frequently been noticed, says very little about Jesus’ actual life in his letters. Paul never mentions any of Jesus’ great miracles, his healings, his exorcisms, his raising of the dead. He does not dwell on the spectacular things that Jesus did or experienced. He dwells on one and only one aspect of Jesus’ life: his crucifixion. For Paul, this was a symbol of what it means to live in this world. Life in the present is a life wracked with pain and agony, just as Christ experienced the agony of the cross. That is why, for Paul, the “super-apostles” as he calls them—the self-styled apostles who appeared in the church of Corinth—had seriously misunderstood the message of the gospel (see 2 Cor. 11).

These so-called apostles believed that Christ had given them the power to rise above the miseries of life here on earth, and that anyone who followed their teachings would be able to do the same. Not according to Paul. Life in this world was miserable, and those who followed Christ would fully participate in the misery that he experienced at the cross. That’s why, for Paul, being an apostle in this age meant suffering—and so he proudly displays his own
suffering for Christ, his imprisonments, floggings, beatings; his being subject to stoning and shipwreck and constant danger and hardship; his hunger, thirst, and homelessness (2 Cor. 11:23–29). These were the marks of the true apostle, in this age of suffering, in the days before Jesus returned in glory and brought about the resurrection of the dead, when those who were faithful to him now would be rewarded and made perfect and whole, as they entered into the great Kingdom of God that he was bringing from heaven.

The Apocalypse of John

When I teach my class on the New Testament at Chapel Hill, I always begin the first week by asking students to hand in a list of three things they would like to learn from the course before the semester is over. In part I do this to help them start thinking about what it is they are interested in; in part I do it to see what, or if, they are already thinking. Some of the responses I get are truly bizarre: “I want to learn more about why Buddhists don’t believe in God” or “I want to learn whether Moses really parted the Red Sea.” For a class on the New Testament. And so it goes. But there’s one item I can always count on getting, many times over: “I want to learn what the book of Revelation says about the end of the world.”

For some reason the vast majority of people who think about the book of Revelation suppose that it is concerned with our own future, that it is about what will happen when history as we know it comes to a screeching halt. Most people seem to think that the book was written explicitly with us in mind: all of history has been moving toward us, we are the climax of all that has so far happened, the prophecies are being fulfilled in our own day. In other words, it’s all about us. Or it’s all about me.

When we finally get to the book of Revelation—which I save till the end of the course, naturally—some students are upset that I don’t talk about the current conflict in the Middle East as a fulfillment of the ancient prophecies, or about how Russia is predicted to
launch a nuclear attack on Israel, or about how the European commonwealth is soon to be headed by a political leader who will turn out to be none other than the Antichrist. But the sad reality is that I don’t think the book of Revelation—or any other book of the Bible—was written with us in mind. It was written for people living in the author’s own day. It was not anticipating the rise of militant Islam, the war on terror, a future oil crisis, or an eventual nuclear holocaust. It was anticipating that the end would come in the author’s own time. When the author of Revelation expected that the Lord Jesus “was coming soon” (Rev. 22:20), he really meant “soon”—not two thousand years later. It was only a later bit of sophistry that devised the idea that “soon” with God meant “the distant future”—that “with the Lord a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day,” as the author of 2 Peter put it (2 Pet. 3:8). This redefinition of what “soon” might mean makes sense, of course. If the author of Revelation, and other ancient Christian prophets like Paul, thought the end was to come right away, and it never did come, what else
could
one do but say that “right away” meant by God’s calendar, not by earthly calendars?

For critical scholars of the New Testament, interpreting the book of Revelation means understanding what it might have meant in its own context. And one thing is clear about that context: this author, who calls himself John, thought that things were going badly on earth and that they were only going to get worse, until the end, when all hell would break out. There is no book of the Bible more focused on suffering than the book of Revelation. Here we read of war, famine, epidemics, natural disasters, massacres, martyrdoms, economic hardship, political nightmares, and, eventually, Armageddon itself. No wonder people have always—from day one—assumed it was referring to their own time. For every generation, it sounds precisely
like
their own time.

In the preceding chapter I talked about the literary genre of the “apocalypse,” which began to be popular at about the time of the Maccabean Revolt. The genre actually takes its name from the book
of Revelation, which describes itself as an “Apocalypse [or Revelation] of Jesus Christ” (Rev. 1:1). This book is the one full-fledged apocalypse of the New Testament, in many ways like the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and, like other apocalypses both Jewish and Christian, written at about the same time. Like other apocalypses it discusses the visions of a prophet who is given a guided tour of heaven and shown the heavenly truths—and future events—that make sense of earthly realities. These visions are often couched in bizarre symbols that include, as in the book of Daniel, wild beasts who wreak havoc on earth; and the symbols are often interpreted by an angelic companion who lets the prophet, and his reader, know what they actually mean. Like other apocalypses the book of Revelation has a kind of triumphalist march: just as the book of Daniel stresses that after all the catastrophes that strike the earth God will give the ultimate rulership of earth over to his chosen ones, so too the book of Revelation. Following chapter upon chapter of earthly disasters there comes a final battle and there arrives a utopian state, in which there will be no more pain, sorrow, or suffering. God’s kingdom will arrive, and those destined to inhabit it will lead glorious lives forever. But there is hell to pay first.
⁶

The Flow of the Narrative

After the book opens with the author identifying himself as John and indicating that Christ was soon to return from heaven (Rev. 1:1, 7), he describes a symbolic vision of Christ as “one like the Son of Man” who appears in the midst of “seven golden lamp stands” (Rev. 1:12–13). It is an overpowering vision: Christ is a mighty figure who wears a long robe with a gold sash (showing his royalty), he has hair “white as snow” (showing his eternality), with eyes like “a flame of fire” (showing him as judge), and his voice sounds “like the sound of many waters” (showing his power). He holds seven stars in his hand (which represent the guardian angels of the seven churches of Asia Minor that the book is addressed to—they are in
Christ’s hand), and sticking out of his mouth is a “two-edged sword” (showing that he speaks the word of God, which in Scripture is sometimes called a sword with two edges [see Heb. 4:12] because it is the word of judgment). Understandably, when the prophet sees all this, he faints.

Christ raises John up, however, and tells him to “write the things you have seen, and the things that are, and the things that are about to take place after these things” (Rev. 1:19). This command provides the structure of the book. What John has already seen is the vision of Christ who controls, ultimately, the churches among which he is present. The “things that are” refers to the current situation of the seven churches of Asia Minor; each of which is sent a letter from Christ (in chapters 2–3) in which their successes and failures are indicated and they are exhorted to do what is right and to remain faithful here at the end of time. The “things that are about to take place” refers to the vast bulk of the book, chapters 4–22, in which the prophet has a series of visions about the future course of earth’s history. It is these visions that have most enthralled readers of this book over the years.

The visions begin with the prophet looking up and seeing a doorway in the sky (like Paul, this author thinks of the universe in three stories: up above the sky is where God dwells). He is told to “come up here” so that he can be shown “what must take place after these things” (Rev. 4:1). Somehow the prophet shoots up into the sky and through the door, and finds himself in the throne room of God, where the Almighty with his dreadful power is being worshiped and adored eternally by twenty-four elders (the twelve patriarchs of Israel and the twelve apostles?) and four living creatures (which appear to represent all life-forms). The author then sees a scroll in God’s right hand, a scroll “sealed with seven seals” (Rev. 5:1). He begins to weep when he realizes that there is no one worthy to break the seals of the scroll. But then he sees a “lamb standing as if it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6)—obviously an image of Christ, who elsewhere in the New Testament is referred to as “the lamb of God
who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). This one, we learn, is worthy to open the scroll by breaking its seals.

The lamb receives the scroll, to much praise and adoration of the elders and living creatures. And then the action begins. The lamb breaks the seals one at a time, and each time he breaks a seal, a horrendous set of disasters strikes the earth—war, slaughter, economic hardship, death, martyrdom, and widespread destruction. With the breaking of the sixth seal come massive upheavals in heaven and earth: