Signs and Symbols
The Spirit and the bride say, come.
The Book of Revelation has always been fascinating to me. In fact, it was the first part of the Bible that I ever read as an adult. I had always known it as a map of The End of All Things, but it was now just more confusing than ever. Now that I had been shown by God that He was all Love and all this crazy torture stuff was misunderstood, this book had some rough spots for sure.
At the time I began to open my mind to the alternatives, I was frequenting a Universalist site with hundreds of pages of text. Being as I didn't have much time to sit and read, I would transfer the text to mp3 using a free online program and I would listen to the pages and pages of written material while doing my housework. On that particular site was a whole series about how Revelation was not a literal book at all, but completely symbolic. I put the series off until I got through all the Universalist stuff and then decided to hear him out.
While I did like what the author was doing, something was still unsatisfying to me. If everything in the book was symbolic, then it could be interpreted in an unending number of ways. And I wasn't completely buying this guy's interpretation of everything. I looked around a bit more at other authors and thinkers who were doing the same things- all claiming Holy Spirit guidance.
That's all fine and good, but what is the Truth?
What I did get out of that study, which was huge turning point, was that there was such a thing as "apocalyptic language" and it could be proven by testing other parts of scripture that used that same language- all with non-literal results. (Please look at the chart here to see what I mean.) It had been right in front of me the whole time. The doomsday cataclysmic events that the Book of Revelation foretold were figurative. There would be no literal rivers of blood, or armies of locusts, or mountains rolling up like scrolls, or mark of the Beast. And I could see that because this type of language had all been used in scripture before to apply to things that never literally happened.
So what then was the book all about, really? I was shocked when I began to think it all had already happened and I found out I wasn't alone in that conclusion.
Part Seven
