Thoughts on Revelation
LOSS & TRIUMPH
Thoughts on Revelation
LOSS & TRIUMPH
The future victory of the redeemed is described in numerous images. Marriage suppers, a City 15,000 miles high, wide and broad, made of jewels and precious things. There is an Edenic garden with lines of Trees of Life, with leaves that heal the diseases of the nations, enthronement for 1,000 years and access to a River of Life (and numerous other images in the book).
The fate of the defeated armies of the Dragon and his Beasts is to be trampled in a winepress until the blood is a river six feet deep and one hundred and eighty miles long (14:17-20). Their fate is death, resurrection to a second death, ceaseless burning in a lake of fire (which in 14:9-11 is located in the presence of the Lamb) and various other things.
To take either of these two composite pictures as the actual description of what is yet ahead and build a doctrine on it that people must receive or be called heretics makes no sense. We do not believe that the Revelation passages that speak of a lake of fire should be used to support the doctrine of eternal conscious torture of the unforgiven. Further, our study points us in this direction: the battle in Revelation is Christ and the Church against the Dragon and Rome. The extended picture of Rome’s defeat, which includes warning plagues, followed by a full outpouring of wrath, was not meant to be understood in any literal fashion, including the judgment scenes. These are all images of how an anti-God, anti-holiness, anti-life tyrannical kingdom was to go down before a God of holiness, life and power. It spoke to the church in the first century and speaks to every generation that follows.
To build a picture of heavenly bliss or hellish torture in the future on the precise details given in these images is to miss the mark completely.
