REVELATION

The Book of Revelation has been interpreted many different ways throughout history. “Revelation: Fall of Judea, Rise of the Church” focuses on three concepts from Scripture: John the Baptist announced who the Messiah is; those who try to destroy the Messiah’s mission will themselves be destroyed (Judea ceased to exist as a nation from A.D. 135 until recent times); and Satan will be released after one thousand years to deceive the nations. Unlike many popular interpretations of Revelation that predict a future rapture and tribulation, I propose that many of the predictions happened during the early Church age as unbelieving Judeans tried to destroy Christ’s Church. Satan, as predicted, was released to deceive the nations one thousand years after the Church was firmly established. As a result, the world today is filled with thousands of conflicting Christian sects and with non-Christian, occult, even anti-Christian movements that have propelled humans to as dangerous a rebellion against God as the one before the flood. “Revelation: Fall of Judea, Rise of the Church” gets its initial inspiration from the work of J. Massyngberde Ford who proposed that some of the visions in Revelation were originally preached by John the Baptist. John the Evangelist, a disciple of the Baptist, was familiar with them and used them when he put the Book of Revelation into writing near the end of his life. If this is correct, it provides a significant key to interpreting the early visions in Revelation. There’s no real reason to doubt it. The Baptist certainly had much to say announcing Christ, but very little of what he said has been directly attributed to him in Scripture. If the early visions came from the Baptist, then they must have been meant for first-century Judeans. Curious, I searched historical works and discovered events that seem to match the early visions. My book outlines historical events between A.D 27 and 135 and compares them to the visions in Rev. 4-16. Judea experienced the great tribulation when that nation tried to destroy the mission of Jesus Christ. Very few commentaries on Revelation mention Bar Kochba and the destruction of the Judean nation and the dispersal of most of its inhabitants in A.D. 135. This, I think, would be the fulfillment of Rev. 16: 17 when the angel pours the last vial, and a loud voice says “It is done!” Judea ceased to exist as a nation. Its inhabitants were dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. Other peoples were moved in. So thorough was this dispersal that, seventeen centuries later, in 1856, only 10,500 Jews resided in their ancestral homeland. Nobody before me ties the history of Judea with these early visions in Revelation the way I did. Revelation also warned that, after one thousand years, Satan would be released to seduce the nations (Rev. 20: 2-3). Few commentators point out that the Roman Empire, after trying to eradicate Christianity for three hundred years suddenly became Christian, and the succeeding generations gradually formed a confederation of Christian nations called Christendom. Approximately one thousand years after the Empire became Christian, the events leading to the Reformation split Christendom into many warring nations and the thousands of conflicting Christian sects we have today. This certainly looks like the nations being deceived. These same previously Christian nations today tell us we are in the post-Christian era. Worse than that, some of these formally Christian nations have adopted many non-Christian and occult practices, not just Nazism and Communism, but bizarre aberrations of what was once the Christian message. I describe this thoroughly in my book.