Review - “Revelation for the Rest of Us”
“I don’t get it!” Is the most frequent thing I hear as a pastor about Revelation. In some ways I’m glad to hear that, it means they haven’t bought into the whole “Left Behind,” “Late Great Planet Earth,” speculative nonsense. On the other hand, I love the book of Revelation as John engages the imagination with these wonderful visions to encourage, challenge, and push God’s people to be faithful followers of the Lamb (Jesus) in a world (Babylon) that wants to draw us away from the path that brings life.
For many years now I’ve pointed people interested in gaining a fuller understanding of Revelation to either Eugene Peterson’s “Reversed Thunder,” or Craig Koester’s “Revelation and the End of All Things.” Both are excellent reads and very accessible to the non-academic reader, but now I have a new favourite, Scot McKnight’s and Cody Matchett’s “Revelation for the Rest of Us.”
“Revelation for the Rest of Us” is written in five parts with each section drawing the reader deeper into a deeper appreciation of how this piece of apocalyptic writing would have been understood in its original context as well as how we should think about it today. It is a push to faithful discipleship.
As the reader begins to understand and appreciate the imagery in Revelation and its relationship with the rest of Scripture, particularly its connection to other prophetic material, you’re invited to think about what it all means in a contemporary context. While McKnight and Matchett provide a timeless framework for understanding Revelation they are also writing for today and don’t shy away from the issues of militarism, racism, Christian Nationalism, and capitalism, as they challenge God’s people to live as people of the New Jerusalem and not as people of Babylon.
If there’s a criticism of this book it would be that it is that the contemporary examples are American focused. This shouldn’t be a problem as the principles of reading Revelation should be readily applicable to life in any nation and it wouldn’t be hard for a non-American reader to find examples from their own Babylon. I think anyone in my homeland of Northern Ireland can appreciate how, “Too many today have surrendered their minds to political ideology and colonized the Word of God to their ideology. They cease being prophets and instead become ideologues and demagogues. Such persons cannot disciple people in the book of Revelation but instead they disciple people into partisan politics. Jesus ceases being their Lord and instead becomes their ideological tool who is summoned into the room to sanctify their ideology.”
As someone who has read and studied Revelation for several decades I appreciated the freshness of this work. It invites the reader to think carefully about our allegiances and in the final section, Discipleship for Dissidents Today, (I love being considered a dissident in the world) the authors drive home the call to live as followers of Jesus without capitulating to the world. We, God’s people, are dissidents.
How does the book end? It ends with a prayer for discernment as we await the new Jerusalem.
