Revelation is a Sermon, Not a Lecture

There is a key difference between sermons and lectures. If a pastor speaks about a passage from the pulpit on Sunday in the same way a professor speaks, there is a problem. A professor’s primary job is to relay information. Good ones attempt to move the heart, but that is not their primary goal. The pastor in the pulpit is the opposite—he not only wants to relay information like a professor, but he also wants to move the heart. Jonathan Edwards’s most famous book, Religious Affections, painstakingly pointed this out. If we know a lot of things about God but don’t experience Him, we’re not truly saved. As such, the pastor couldn’t care less if you learn things about God every Sunday if that learning isn’t coupled with an experience of God. Pastors of the Reformation called this “experimental theology” (see Joel Beeke’s Reformed Preaching). This is not to say information is not important. It’s vital. This is to say information without experience is not enough. Edwards uses the analogy of honey. If you know everything there is to know about honey—its texture, color, how it’s made, its chemical makeup—but you’ve never actually tasted it, you don’t truly know it. The same goes for God.

Revelation is more of a sermon than a lecture. Many Christians have stuck it under the microscope like a chemist analyzing honey in a lab. We have ripped it apart and pressed each and every symbol, metaphor, and curious phrase into a scientific mold that demands perfect understanding. We have been looking at the Book of Revelation like it’s a spreadsheet with calculations that we can perfectly understand if we just try hard enough. But, lo and behold, millennia of genius interpreters have failed to gather a consensus. In fact, the more we study Revelation, the more theories emerge! What is the cause of this dilemma? We have forgotten that Revelation is a sermon intended to move the heart, not fill the head.

When we approach Revelation like children needing a warm embrace from their father, like people longing to taste the sweetness of the honey of God’s Word, we begin to understand what Revelation is trying to teach us. The sermon is quite simple: praise God! The main point is this—Satan and his henchmen want to destroy Christ and His church. But, glory be to God, Jesus is much stronger, more beautiful, and more capable than Satan. Therefore, Christian, keep serving the King, and don’t bend your knee to Satan!

If you gave the book of Revelation to a 12-year-old who had never been taught anything about Revelation and you asked her to read it from beginning to end, she would likely give you a synopsis very similar to what you just read. There are scary monsters and bad guys, but Jesus wins in the end. That’s the point.

To prove this point, think about this: Almost every Christian everywhere knows that you have to think about the original audience when reading the Bible. Who was the book of Ephesians written to? 1 Corinthians? Titus? Thinking about the original audience is so important; many of the books of the Bible get their title simply from the audience like the books just mentioned. Why do we forget this when reading Revelation? John wasn’t thinking about 21^st-century America when he was writing in a cave in Patmos off the coast of Ephesus in the first century A.D.  Who was he thinking about? Obviously, Christians in the Roman Empire. Specifically, Christians who were being persecuted for their faith (remember how terrible Nero was?).

When we read Revelation with this background—John writing to first-century persecuted Christians—and we understand that it’s more of a sermon than a seminary lecture or laboratory experiment, we begin to see that Revelation isn’t so concerned with helping us predict the finer points of the future. If it were, it would have done a horrible job because people have tried to use it that way and failed miserably (look here and here for many examples) for thousands of years!

If your pastor preached a sermon on Isaiah 53, the passage detailing the great suffering of Jesus, and you walked out with dry eyes able to dispassionately rattle off the intricate meaning of Hebrew words, ways the text prophesied Christ, and what each symbol represented, he would be disappointed in you. The goal of a sermon on Isaiah 53 isn’t less than conveying those things, but it is much, much more. The point of the sermon should be to help the hearers see how beautiful Christ is so that they long to be with Him. The facts are just servants of that higher focus; facts and data are like groomsmen at the wedding who better not get in the way of the couple.

In the same way, if we approach Revelation only desiring to gain facts and predict the future, we have more prediction addiction than hearts aflame for Christ. Instead, we should sit under the preaching of Revelation and pray that the Lord uses it to encourage us, to enliven us, to inspire us, and to draw us closer to Christ. None of those things have to do with figuring out what the mark of the beast is going to be. And you don’t have to be a genius to derive the intended benefit of the book of Revelation. Indeed, children read it better than most adults.

-Rob Golding