As with the study of every book in the Bible, we must begin with this vital question, “Why was the book of Revelation written?” What purpose does it serve in the grand narrative of Scripture? While we understand the Gospels as the life story of Jesus and Acts as the history of the early church, Revelation challenges us to look beyond—to see God’s ultimate plan for humanity unfold.

As stated in previous blogs, Revelation’s message is the same as the rest of the Bible. However, the delivery vastly differs. Holy Scripture closes with an echo of truth that can be traced throughout Scripture, but delivered in elaborate pictures and images. We must recognize the importance of reading Revelation with an eye to the rest of Scripture. Failure to do so leads to wild speculations rather than interpreting Scripture by Scripture. This is why many are led away to chase speculations rather than solid biblical exegesis.

There seem to be two attitudes in the church when it comes to studying Revelation. One is to ignore it. We’re comfortable with the Gospels or the letters to the churches, but the content of Revelation intimidates us. The other attitude is a natural result of the intimidation we feel with this book. We are convinced that we can’t understand it unless we rely on the teaching of others. What we may not realize is that many of the popular books on the market are authored by people who have adopted the same attitude. They themselves have turned to others to try to explain this book. What if these authors have the wrong viewpoint? How would we know if we have never studied the Scripture for ourselves? Can we study Revelation in the same way as we would Romans or Hebrews?

When we as new believers come into the church, we are encouraged to read our Bibles but are seldom taught the proper way to study it. The process is actually quite simple. As we study the text, we ask the following questions: who, when, where, why, how, and what. While this is the standard practice of studying other books of the Bible, for some reason most people seem to set this aside when approaching the book of Revelation. However, if we apply this practice to our study of this book we will find that the key to understanding Revelation lies in simply examining the text directly!

When studying a book in the Bible, the first question should always be: “Who is the author?” When we come to Revelation the answer is provided in the first verse; John the Apostle wrote it. What do we know about John? What other books of the Bible has he written? The next question we should ask is when was it written? There continues to be much debate about this question. Most scholars date it in the mid to late 90’s. There are many scholars however that believe this book was written much earlier, before 70 A.D. At first glance this information doesn’t seem to be significant. However, when we fit this book into the larger picture of the history of the people of God, we should ask the question, ’What took place in 70 A.D.?’ Those of us who are familiar with early church history know that both the temple and the city of Jerusalem were destroyed by the Roman general Titus in the year 70 A.D.

How does this help us to understand the message of the book of Revelation? Let’s look at Revelation 1:1-3. According to John’s statement in this text, the things he wrote about would take place soon. Those who teach that Revelation was written in the mid to late 90s interpret this to mean that once these events start happening they will happen very quickly. They do not believe that “soon” relates to the time when the book was being written. Those who hold to a pre-70 A.D. date believe that much of what is described in Revelation was already taking place as John wrote it.

To accurately interpret a text, one must consider how the original audience would have understood it. How do you think the recipients of this letter would have understood John’s statement about “the things which must soon take place?”

It’s not as difficult to understand where John wrote from since he tells us he wrote while on the island of Patmos (Revelation 1:9). What sort of a place was Patmos and why was John there? Again, Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias are good sources for us to find the answer to this question. From them, we learn something from Church History that helps explain why John was writing from Patmos. According to church tradition, the Romans tried to kill John by throwing him in a caldron of burning oil but he survived. So they banished him to Patmos to work the mines there.

The more important question we should ask of this book is why—why was the book written? We’ll take that up in the next blog.