Final Takes

From Cara Yeh:

Essentially, the book of Revelation is laid out in one verse. In Revelation 1:16, John is told to write the “things which he has seen.” I believe that is the vision of Jesus, which he is given in chapter 1. He is also told to write “those that are,” and he writes about the seven churches in chapters 2-3. Finally, he is told to write, “those that are to take place after this,” and he writes all that follows in chapters 9-22. Only an infinite God, who exists outside of space and time, could do this.

As we look at finishing the book of Revelation, I am reminded of the blessing promised to the reader back in Revelation 1:3. “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.” No other book of the Bible makes such a promise. Do we truly believe God’s word – that by reading and studying this book and believing the time is near that we will be blessed? If so, then I would argue that this is not the end of Revelation, but hopefully the beginning. I pray that this study has lit a fire in you to seek after understanding God’s Word in light of prophecy and all that is written in Revelation. May you not simply walk away thinking it was all too difficult to understand, but that you would seek to understand all that is written. I can promise – because God promised it first – you will be blessed!

From Jan Roberson:

A study of Revelation has been a thing that I have avoided in the past.  But I have come to love the rich picture of God glorious throne and the wonder of Jesus as the victorious Lamb. The cosmic nature of the book teaches me to keep my mind presently in the heavenly realms. The awful descriptions of the enemy in various forms reminds me of the fierceness of the spiritual battle that I too often miss.

As I study Revelation and end times I, I often wonder, what does it look like to be ready? This study has helped me to see some of the answers to that question more clearly. How can I be ready for the things to come?

By falling in love with Jesus.  

Looking at him, listening to him, seeking his presence. 

By knowing God’s Word thoroughly so I can know him. 

Meditating on his attributes and being amazed and awed at who he is. 

Knowing and loving Jesus counteracts the fear that comes with looking at things that are far beyond us and frightening.  “God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” “Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.” 1 John 4:16,18

By dying. By learning how to be a martyr. 

Currently, I am not being put to this test. So how do I get ready? “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross and follow me.  If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it.  But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it.” Mark 8:34ff

Give up my own way continually, yield to the Lord, yield to others. 

Humble myself and give up my rights (my right to be right, right to be offended, right to prove my point, etc.).  

Learn what it is to sacrifice for the sake of love.

Loving like Jesus. 

“Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children.  Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ.  He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.” Eph. 5:1,2

Am I willing to follow Jesus and do the hard stuff of really loving people? 

“But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.”  And “Love your enemies! Do good to them.  Lend to them without expecting to be repaid.  Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.” Luke 6:27, 35

This is perhaps the most difficult saying of Jesus amidst the so called ‘hard sayings of Jesus’.  There are plenty of people, who though not enemies, are very hard to really love. 

Not retaliating when someone hurts you or your loved ones? 

Doing good to enemies and praying for them? Nearly impossible! 

And yet, Jesus paved the way in his death. Jesus gave his powerful Holy Spirit to do his work in and through us. And he calls us to do the hard love.  

So, before I say that I would give my life for the sake of the gospel, I want to be ready to live a life of love and sacrifice here and now.  Mark Twain famously said, “It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.”

I may not understand all that Revelation is about, but I do understand that being faithfully obedient to the Lord means loving the Lord with all my heart and loving others sacrificially.

From Paul Bernard

The longer I've spent in Revelation, the more I've come to realize that it really isn’t about what I thought it was about.  It really is much less a revelation of timing and events and catastrophes and more a revelation of Jesus.  I preached that when we first started, but it really has become quite a bit more obvious as time has gone on.  Revelation is not primarily a book about beasts, plagues, seals, trumpets, or timelines… It is primarily about Jesus Christ. Again and again, the curtain is pulled back so that we can see who is really on the throne, who is really in control, and where history is really headed.

I've learned that nothing is wobbly. I like that term because it’s often how I feel about the world right now.  The earth shakes, kingdoms rise and fall, and evil seems to gain ground, and then… there’s God.  On His throne, steadfast and immovable. Not wobbly at all. Nothing’s a surprise to Him. Nothing threatens Him. Nothing can stop His perfect purposes. Revelation has strengthened my confidence that God's sovereignty is not just a theological concept, but a present reality.

I've learned that Jesus is both Lion and Lamb. I think I am far more comfortable with Jesus the Lamb than Jesus the Lion.  He is the sacrificial Savior who gave His life for sinners, and He is also the conquering King who will one day judge evil and establish His kingdom. The cross and the crown belong together.

I've learned that the prayers of God's people matter more than we realize. Revelation shows prayers rising before God like incense and becoming part of His work in the world. Heaven hears what earth seems to overlook.

I've learned that compromise is far more dangerous than persecution. The churches were often most vulnerable not when Rome attacked them, but when they began accommodating the spirit of the age. Christ continually calls His people to faithfulness, endurance, repentance, and holiness. This is a theme of Revelation.

I've learned that evil is real, destructive, and deceptive. Sin never stays small. Yet even God's judgments reveal His mercy, serving as warnings that call people to repentance before final judgment comes.

I've learned that followers of Jesus are repeatedly called to overcome. Revelation was not written to satisfy curiosity but to strengthen the church. The central question is not whether believers can predict every future event, but whether they will remain faithful to Christ when following Him becomes very costly.

Most of all, I've learned that our story ends well. The Lamb wins. Babylon falls. Satan is defeated. Death is destroyed. The kingdom comes. Christ makes all things new. 

For believers, Revelation is ultimately a book of hope… although I admit, there is a lot that comes between us and that hope. But even just the other day I was reminded that no matter how dark the present moment may seem, Jesus Christ reigns today, and one day every knee will bow before Him.  As long as I know that’s coming, then whatever we have to walk through between here and there is a little easier to handle.

From Paul Goodrich:

I keep coming back to the Throne. For far too long it's been easy to think of Revelation as a confusing roadmap to some very scary days to come, but this time around we've all been encouraged to slow down and allow chapters 4, 5 and 7 both to bracket the scary bits in chapter 6 and to set up the scary bits that follow. Revelation only looks chaotic when we lose sight of Who is in charge of every line of the story. That's actually true of life in general, come to think of it, and the same principle applies: this day, this week, this life only look chaotic when we lose sight of Who is in charge.

Then, of course, there are the final chapters. I'm currently preparing a message for the memorial service of a dear friend, and I frequently find myself needing to stop writing and just read and meditate on chapters 21 and 22. That's where our story is headed. The territory between here and there needs our attention, to be sure, but the voyage is not our destination.

From Mark Odell:

Although I’ve gone through Revelation before a number of times, studying it in collaboration with other deeply perceptive and committed believers at an unprecedented level of depth for the last 2 years has been a clarifying, encouraging, puzzling, exasperating, comforting, and inspiring exercise for me. Here are some things I come away with:

The telos of God has never been in doubt, and Revelation brings that out in such a clear (well, sort of…) and compelling way. He reigns gloriously; he has always reigned—everything in the Bible and everything in history has been completely within his grasp and according to his plan, though appearances since Gen. 3 would call that into question, and our lived experience in the post-Gen. 3 world would also. Revelation, the revelation of Jesus, the Lord/Lion/Lamb, who was and is and is to come, puts all doubt to rest. It can’t get any better than that. He will be glorified, and we will be glorified along with him. Anchoring oneself to that Truth is the ultimate purpose of the book, and the greatest source of supernatural serenity imaginable.

Revelation is not a bizarre, cryptic roadmap without a legend for deciphering the future as much as an abbreviated narrative of history’s perfect completion. Reading it now, as much as when it was first received, is part of our seeing through a glass darkly, but there will come a time when we will see face to face, and it will be jaw-droppingly clear. But as with God himself, who is inscrutable—we are like him, but he is not like us, what we read in the book will not be decipherable using the ordinary human categories we try to neatly put it in (Is. 55’s God’s ways are far above ours). The Church in history has treated Revelation with interpretational caution, mostly because whenever it has tried to explicate specifics about who, what, when, where, etc., it has gotten it wrong. And despite the track record, that seems to be one of our constant temptations now. This study and message series has done well at not falling into that particular trap.

 The end result of yielding to the temptation, which is a genuine struggle for me, is significantly negative in three ways: One, we get contentious about the various interpretations, and it can get heated enough that we could divide from one another. This single book’s genre, eschatological prophecy, more than most others has produced some highly entrenched “camps” among believers, and being dogmatic about it is not hard. Yet doing so is unwise—we are to read the signs, but it is not for us to know the days and times of the Lord’s return, so we should stop trying to get specific. Two, if we can just figure out what it all means, we can rely on our sight and not live fully by peaceful yielded faith. If we think we know what’s going to happen, we will adjust accordingly, and that is an invitation to disaster. Three, we can get so focused on the specifics that we miss the most significant lessons of God’s holiness, power, and glory, his perfect, just, and terrible judgments against all who spurn his loving goodness through their adamant rebellion, and the importance for his own of standing firm without fear until the end regardless of what comes in between now and the consummation of the kingdom and the new heavens and the new earth. 

 Humanity has not changed since the Fall. The ones blessed the most and given the most from God are the ones who eventually become proud and full of themselves, and they are most susceptible to falling away and ultimately becoming the haters of God. And they don’t see it for a long time. The OT people of God, the Jews, were given the invitation to be unique in the world as God’s own people, yet they were the ones who received some of his harshest judgment for their continued rejection of him. They persevered in that to the point of missing and then killing their own Messiah, with great confidence, even though they had developed a most comprehensive method of living that they claimed God demanded. Post-Christian America, part of the post-Christian West, as a society received some of the greatest earthly blessings imaginable because of an initial fidelity to Christianity’s ideals, and yet is now emblematic of Revelation’s Babylon, the evil world’s system, and exports some of the very worst idolatry the world has ever seen. We have apostatized and earned God’s judgment. 

This study has amplified an already palpably growing yearning in me to be more connected to the depth and breadth of the Church’s own rich and multifaceted history, the ancient faith passed down to the saints. I have lived my entire 50+ years of Christian life within the narrow band of contemporary American Protestant evangelicalism, starting off in the Plymouth Brethren (which has particular connection to Revelation and eschatology through Dispensationalism), then moving into the mainstream of late 20th century/early 21st century evangelicalism, typified in the last 35 years by the personality-driven, corporate CEO attractional model, megachurch franchising approach in many non-denominational or loosely denominational churches. This is McChurch, where evangelical Protestant churches are largely analogous to various fastfood restaurants where you can get a sandwich, fries, maybe a salad (really? Who buys those?), and a soda with little distinction between them, and not necessarily a lot of nutrition. This is NOT a criticism of Crossroads specifically, nor am I on the verge of crossing back over the Tiber; rather, it is a longing for a depth of biblically orthodox faith with its consequent life that is rare among us today, and I’m not sure exactly what it looks like. But I can hear and smell and taste it in Revelation’s climax. It’s C.S. Lewis’s “further in and further up,” and I can barely wait! Even so, come Lord Jesus!

From Brandon Zeider:

When people read Revelation, especially for the first time, they tend to focus on the bad stuff: the plagues, the wars, the death. It's understandable. Those things can be scary, and Jesus certainly didn't sugarcoat it. But I've come to believe that focus misses the main point.

Remember, this is the Revelation of Jesus Christ. It’s His revelation - not of the Antichrist, the tribulation, or a timeline to be decoded. It is the unveiling of the risen Christ: the Son of Man among the lampstands, the Lamb who was slain and yet is worthy to open the scroll, and the King who returns Faithful and True. Strip away the debates and He is what remains standing at the center of every chapter.

There is but one road, and all paths ultimately lead to Him.

In 2 Peter 3 we are warned that in the last days scoffers will come, saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation." The delay itself becomes their argument. Nothing has changed, so nothing will.

But let the scoffers scoff, for it is written. That is the beautiful thing about truth: it doesn’t require belief, and it never has. The promise of His coming stands whether it is mocked or embraced, and the passing of years is not evidence against it. The scoffers see only a Lamb who was slain and assume the story is finished. 

What the scoffers don’t know is that the Lamb they mock is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and the Lion is coming. For it is also written, that every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. 

Every time I study Revelation, I learn something new, and this time through has been no exception. Over the years my views on how best to understand the book have changed, and they may keep changing as I keep studying. But underneath the shifting frameworks, one thing has remained unshakeable: my firm belief in the coming Return of the King.

That, in the end, is what Revelation is for. Not to frighten us with the darkness, but to fix our eyes on the One who overcomes it. 

Come, Lord Jesus.

From Martin Canell:

"Why the book of Revelation?" That was the first question that came to mind when Pastor Paul approached me about this study. I knew why I had personally leaned into Revelation in the past: I am convinced we are living in the last days. In 2 Timothy 3:1-5, the Apostle Paul describes the end times with sobering clarity:

1"But know this, that in the last days difficult times will come. 2 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, without gentleness, without love for good, 4 treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 holding to a form of godliness, but having denied its power. Keep away from such men as these." (Legacy Standard Bible)

It is easy to spot these traits today—in our world, our nation, our politics, our economy, and unfortunately, even among our friends, our families, and within the Church itself. Realizing just how close we might be to the end can be unsettling. 

Like many people, I used to be captivated by world events and how perfectly they seem to align with the return of Jesus Christ. However, after spending significant time diving into Revelation, my focus has completely flipped. Why? Because reading, studying, and meditating on this book the way God intended shifts our gaze away from the world’s chaos and back to God, His absolute sovereignty, and the finished work of Jesus Christ.

My study of Revelation over the past two years has brought me profound peace—more than I have ever experienced before. Through this book, God has given me steady anchors for my soul. He reminds me that He is totally in control. The incredible descriptions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the heavenly throne room are repeated throughout the narrative, serving as a constant reminder of His majesty.

Yet, it goes even deeper than that.

When discussing Revelation, I often hear people say, "The most important thing is that ultimately God wins and we win." While that is true, I now realize that perspective misses the bullseye of one of the book's central themes.

Jesus has already conquered; the war is already won.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the greatest victory I will ever know, and my name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Jesus, God Almighty, became my sacrifice and substitute for sin. Now, sealed by the Holy Spirit, I can trust that God’s plan will ultimately restore all of creation to perfect harmony. He will create a new Heaven, a new Earth, and a new Jerusalem where I will dwell with Him forever. This isn't just the Garden of Eden restored; it is an entirely new realm.

Viewed through this lens, I believe Revelation is essentially Jesus’ "mop-up operation." The war is officially over, even if the enemy refuses to surrender quietly.

In His sovereignty, God is incredibly compassionate and long-suffering, delaying the final judgment because He desires that no one should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). How comforting is it to know that He patiently waited for me, and He is waiting for many more. Is He waiting for you?