Top Highlights

• Revelation is not a handbook to last-days events. It is a pastoral letter written to Christians of every age and generation.
• Revelation is full of the Old Testament. There are more allusions to the Old Testament in Revelation than in all other books of the New Testament combined. Most scholars estimate there are over 500 such allusions in Revelation’s 404 verses, compared with less than 200 in all of Paul’s letters.
• The great mistake of much current interpretation is the tendency to interpret Revelation in light of current news reports rather than the Bible itself.
• This dual nature of Revelation—pastoral and prophetic—calls for a radical change in the way in which Christians, especially in the North American context, understand it. Although it does in some places speak of the events immediately preceding the return of Christ, for the most part it addresses each of us precisely in the place where we live now.
• The story line of Revelation retraces that of the Exodus. Christians are portrayed as leaving the bondage of spiritual Egypt or Babylon, crossing the fearful sea where evil resides, and entering the place of God’s protection in the wilderness as they fix their eyes on the eventual goal of the eternal Promised Land. The plagues of Exodus are replica...