Genesis and Revelation

I do not believe that Revelation was intended to be a literal "future history of the end times", as it is taken to be by so many popular interpreters today.  In fact, I think that one of the most unfortunate and harmful developments in the 20th century was the (mostly American) promotion of this manner of interpretation, to the extent that the average American Christian is aware of no other way to read this book.   The "Left Behind" series and its movie have provided vivid mental images and deep predispositions to misinterpret this very important "final word" of God, with the result that we are largely expecting the wrong things and missing the comfort and instruction and wisdom that it was meant to provide.

Revelation was never intended to be a predictive literal history of the end times, so that we could figure out exactly what will happen and where.  If that were its purpose, it would have been of no use to all the Christians living in the thousands of years between the first and the last coming of our Lord, and II Tim 3:16 would not apply to this book for those Christians.  No, Revelation was intended for all the Church down through every day, decade, and century, so that God's people would understand the world they inhabit in any given age.  It is a vivid, symbolic description of the forces behind the history of the Church age, so that we might recognize the enemy and his works, our Lord and His works, and take heart and comfort knowing that we are "more than conquerors through Him".

In this regard, Revelation is akin to the creation and fall account in Genesis. The purpose of Genesis was never to give us specific historical or scientific information about the formation of the cosmos, but to answer our very legitimate questions, "Where did we come from? What is the world like? What is our meaning and purpose? How does God relate to us and our physical, social, and psychological world? What is wrong with the world?" In other words, Genesis answers the origin and meaning questions profoundly. Our world is real, not illusory. It is a creation, meaning it has no self-existence, but came into being through the action of a creator who existed outside it and before it. It did not arise from chaos through struggle of primeval gods, as in the Enuma Elish, or accidentally, but came into existence through the thoughts and power of the creator, in an orderly manner. The categories of creation: form, substance, perception, time, life, habitat, rhythms, thought--all come from the mind of this creator, and all is related to all, by design. We come into being as the last and highest terrestrial creation, made to be so like God that we can actually have fellowship with him, walk with him. Our cosmos was created to be harmonious; it was all good. Our relationships to each other were good, without shame or deception or hiddenness; our relationship to the richly varied physical world was to be one of tending and keeping and further development. Work, in itself, was good, and involved tending and creating beauty and utility and sustenance for ourselves (gardening.) God made us as lesser gods to rule over the cosmos as his faithful servants, bringing forth out of the earth things delightful to us both.

All this is depicted as being accomplished in seven days.  Man is created on the sixth, and God rests on the seventh.  Seven, from the very beginning, becomes associated with the completion of God's work, including his contemplation and enjoyment of it.  Like God, we are to do our own work over six days, and rest in fellowship with Him on the seventh.  This is a deeply developed concept throughout the Old Testament; this Sabbath is to be enjoyed not only by Man but also by his animals and his land.  The Sabbath...the seventh day...is developed further in the New Testament by the actions and teaching of Jesus, and of the author of the Letter to the Hebrews.  In the latter, it becomes a symbol of our resting in the work of the Lord in our salvation, an endless Sabbath.

God gave us everything, but left us there in the Garden a single prohibition, by which His sovereignty and our faithfulness would be established: do not eat the fruit of this one tree. In this single law, the separateness of his will from ours was demonstrated. It was a moral universe, in which we had the choice whether to recognize his legitimate sovereignty or assert our own.
We asserted our own will and sovereignty over against God's, and fell, taking our whole domain with us.  All our relationships were disrupted thereby; with God, with our habitat and fallen domain, and with each other.   In this, we were tempted by the Serpent, who had apparently rebelled already.  The consequences to this serpent included the pronouncement that, one day, the Seed of the Woman would crush his head, and the serpent would bruise the heel of this Seed.

So Genesis tells us much about our beginnings.  We know where we came from, how we got here, how it is that we are so wonderfully godlike yet so terribly twisted.  We understand the cosmos to be orderly and its behavior law-like.  We find an explanation for the fascinating impression of design and purposefulness that we discover in the hard sciences, and an explanation for the aspirations and the perverseness that we find in history and psychology.  But what of the future?  Where are we going?  Does future history have any guiding principles?  Are we going to get better and better and overcome all our fatal flaws (Star Trek) or more and more complexly twisted until we have blighted everything (1984/Terminator/pick your apocalyptic story)?

Genesis and Revelation are the bookends of the revealed scripture.  They are the transition zones, the interfaces, with unknown history.  Genesis stands at the border of the unknowable prehistoric past, and Revelation at the border of the unknowable future.  They help bring the specific, historical, didactic and literary scriptures right into our current world, whenever that happens to be.  The Book of Revelation, correctly understood, was as important and meaningful to the first century Christians as it is now, and (the key is...) that understanding was the same then as now.  "Blessed is he who reads these words, and blessed is he who hears them and keeps them."   How do you "keep" a future history?  That makes no sense.  No, you "keep" words that are about how to live wisely and with understanding, whenever in history you happen to have been placed.