We need to know something about the book before we can understand it.
August 1, 2007 (Wednesday) – When I was a small child, I used to love opening my grandmother’s old trunk and rummaging through the stuff in the lift-out shelf at the top. I just remember two kinds of items on that shelf: old pictures and my grandmother’s old, small Bible. I was a pre-schooler at first, so the Bible was an item of interest that I could not read. As I grew, I became more interested in her Bible, and able to read some of it. So I turned to the back part and read from the book of Revelation (chapter 9) about a fallen star opening a bottomless pit which emitted a dense smoke cloud and out of the cloud came locusts like scorpions who could hurt only those without the seal of God on their foreheads. They could not kill them, but they would torment them with their scorpion sting that hurt so bad that men wanted to die but could not. The locusts were as big as horses, with faces of men and gold crowns on their heads and tails like scorpions with stings in them to hurt men five months. Wow! Imagine yourself a little kid who had just learned to read, discovering what the book said. So what did I do? I asked my grandmother about it, and she told me that it was completely literal and one of these days those locusts as big as horses with huge scorpions for tails would be on our streets. It was hard for me to get that picture out of my young mind.*
I give you that example because it illustrates that the Bible contains materials that require interpretation. I was not ready yet, at such a young age, to understand that part of the Bible.
I later discovered that we must approach each book of the Bible in a unique way. We need to know something about the book before we can begin to understand what it says. We need to know who wrote it, when it was written, and why. We need to know something about the historical setting. That’s just a part of what we need to know if we are to understand what the book says. Fortunately, there are many books we can buy which will tell us all that and more. Many of them are written with the novice in mind, so that the language, etc. is easy for the beginner to understand. We get so much more from Bible Study if we can understand more about what it meant when it was written. Then we can make applications to ourselves and the present day.
Back to my reading Revelation 9 as a 7-year-old child. I would have been less confused if I had opened the Bible to the book of Luke, with its simple narratives of Jesus’ experiences in helping people. No one could have been able to explain to me that the Book of Revelation is an example of Apocalypic literature, and that this fact must be taken into account in interpreting the many symbols in the book. Revelation is much like a pageant, or a portfolio of paintings, bulging with hidden meanings, and the scenes are quickly changing before our eyes. An understanding of the Jewish scriptures as well as a knowledge of the paganism of the Roman Empire which was insisting on Emperor worship at the time are also necessary to one who really wants to understand the Book of Revelation. The plain fact is that the one great message of the book to the suffering Christian church was, “Never give up! The future may look dark, but God is still in control, and He will be victorious. The Church of the Lamb of God will triumph over all its enemies and the Lamb will be honored as King of all Kings!” I wish my grandmother could have known that. It would have encouraged her, and it certainly would have helped me to stop looking for those monster scorpion-locusts as big as horses.
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*To get a glimpse of the images in Revelation, take a look at the images of Pat Marvenko Smith. They give a visual impression of the word pictures of Revelation (She has one on Revelation 9).