Victory through the Lamb

A Guide to Revelation in Plain Language

Mark Wilson

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683591979
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The book introduces Christians to the book of Revelation through a study of one of its key themes: victory. Running counter to Revelations prevailing interpretation, it proposes that Christians, represented by the audience in the Seven Churches, have been in tribulation since the first century and that Revelation was written to help Christians be victorious over the challenges of life. Each chapter opens with an account of martyrdom. The final account tells the story of the three believers in Malatya, Turkey, who were brutally killed in 2007. The book is dedicated to the three. The volume also features a new translation of Revelation by the author, a scholar who has worked on Revelation for over two decades and who lives in the land of the Seven ChurchesTurkey.

Victory through the Lamb: A Guide to Revelation in Plain Language

© 2014 by Mark Wilson

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

First edition by Weaver Book Company.

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

The translation of portions of the New Testament and the entire book of Revelation is by Mark Wilson. Translation of the book of Revelation copyright © 2014 by Mark Wilson. Used by permission. All right reserved.

Old Testament quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Print ISBN 9781683591962

Digital ISBN 9781683591979

Cover and Interior Design: Frank Gutbrod

Copyeditor: Redslate Editing

eBook conversion: { In a Word } www.inawordbooks.com

To the memory of Necati Aydın,

Uğur Yüksel, and Tilmann Geske

who laid down their lives

for the word of God and

the witness of Jesus Christ.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Victory in the Seven Churches

Chapter 2

Victory of the Lamb

Chapter 3

Victory of the Large Multitude

Chapter 4

Victory of the Two Witnesses

Chapter 5

The Victory of the Male Child, the Woman, and Her Offspring

Chapter 6

Victory over the Beasts

Chapter 7

Victory of the 144,000 and the Harvest of the Victors

Chapter 8

Victory in the Songs of Moses and of the Lamb

Chapter 9

Victory over Mystery Babylon

Chapter 10

Victory over the Lamb’s Enemies

Chapter 11

Victory in the New Heaven and New Earth

Chapter 12

Victory at Jesus’ Second Coming

Epilogue

Prologue

On April 18, 2007, three Christians were killed in eastern Turkey in the city of Malatya. Two were Turks, Necati Aydın and Uğur Yüksel, while the third was German, Tilmann Geske. Their brutal murder shocked both the country’s small Christian community as well as many Turkish citizens. At the time my wife Dindy and I were living in Izmir, ancient Smyrna, one of the Seven Churches of Revelation. Necati had formerly lived in Izmir so his funeral, interment, and a later memorial service were all held in that city. We attended these along with many other Christians from around Turkey.

Before this, my understanding of martyrdom had been an academic one. I had read about Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, who had visited Smyrna on the way to his death in the Roman Colosseum in the early second century AD. And I had also read about the martyrdom of Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, in the city’s stadium in AD 156. (Both Ignatius’ letter to the church in Smyrna and the account of Polycarp’s death are found in a collection of early Christian documents called The Apostolic Fathers.) I had shared the story of their deaths with many visitors who came to Izmir. But suddenly the suffering of these early Christians was no longer abstract; we were part of the community that was mourning the tragic loss of brothers in Christ. I wrote an account of my impressions in a reflective article called “In the Presence of Martyrs,” which can be found in the Epilogue. We felt the apprehension that came upon the church in Turkey about what the future might hold for Christian witness. Experiencing the effects of martyrdom among Turkey’s Christians reinforced a view about suffering that I had gained from reading Revelation. It is this perspective that I would like to share with you in the following pages.

Persecution is generally viewed in two ways today in the church, especially in the West. On the one hand, it is largely forgotten and ignored, as something that happened in the past or is happening currently to a few unknown believers in faraway places. To think about tribulation and death in a society fixated on youthfulness and entertainment is very much out of step. On the other hand, there are scholarly voices today that suggest that the early Christians invented the stories of martyrdom and that the accounts of deaths like Polycarp’s are pious frauds. The purpose of this volume is to remind the church of its martyr heritage, while affirming that these accounts are real indeed and that many Christians in the first centuries of the church did, in fact, die for their witness about Jesus.

The premise of this book is a simple one: Christians have and always will suffer tribulation until Jesus returns at his second coming. I am aware that this view runs against the grain of much contemporary teaching on the subject. Because of many popular books, novels, and movies about the end times released in recent years, the expectation of many Christians in North America and beyond is that they will be taken out—raptured—before the Tribulation.

But this is not the teaching of Scripture or the experience of the church. Two thousand years ago John had a vision while exiled on the island of Patmos. This vision, written to Christians in seven cities of the Roman province of Asia (modern Turkey), continues to impact our world today. Its central message is that believers can overcome the tribulations of life, even persecution and martyrdom, because of the victory won by the Lamb of God. Despite John’s use of complicated symbols and abstract language, this core message is developed chapter by chapter throughout Revelation. This book seeks to present that message in an understandable way to all believers rather than just to scholars.

I have been teaching the book of Revelation for over two decades in various contexts—Sunday school classes, university and seminary classrooms, and church seminars. I have also written or edited five books dealing with Revelation and its history. The uniform feedback of my students is that Revelation is the most difficult book in the Bible to understand. It is also the most controversial because of the numerous theories, even abuses, of interpretation that have developed. Within my lifetime its apocalyptic visions have been used to predict the end of the world in 1988, 2000, and, most recently, in 2011. Of course, planet earth is still here, the church has not been raptured, and Jesus has not returned. Approaching Revelation as a kind of biblical crystal ball for reading current events in the media was not John’s intention. Rather it was to help Christians get through the daily struggles of life that they were facing.

What are some of the problems we encounter while trying to understand Revelation? First of all, its language and imagery are very strange to us. Can you imagine John making sense of a modern work of science fiction or fantasy written by a writer like C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien? This resembles our historical situation in reverse. We can make sense of Lewis or Tolkien, but have difficulty with a type of literature called “apocalyptic” that ancient readers would have readily understood. Jewish readers of Revelation would especially understand such imagery because it is found in Old Testament books like Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah.

Today another particular challenge encountered by many Christians is that they lack a basic knowledge of the Old Testament. I have taken surveys at various times and usually discover that many Christians in the audience or even students in my classes have never read the Old Testament in its entirety. For some reason Christians have gotten the idea that the New Testament is the only part of the Bible that must be read. John the Revelator, however, assumes that his audience knows and understands the Old Testament. Let’s look at one example: in chapter 2 he never explains who Balaam or Jezebel is. He presumes that these characters and their stories in the Old Testament are familiar to his audience.

A final challenge is that many Christians have been taught to read Revelation through a particular grid of interpretation. This popular perspective views everything after chapter 3 as future and without relevance to Revelation’s first audience. The church is MIA in chapters 4–18 until it returns in chapter 19 at the return of the Lord. However, we read no other book of the Bible in this way, but instead try to read each book on its own literary, cultural, and historical terms. As mentioned earlier, Revelation was written to r...

Table of contents

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