Revelation 4:1 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Revelation 4:1

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We now come to visions which explain, in general terms, all that will take place throughout the age of the church, that is, the last age of the earth before the Day of Judgement, the period of time which lies between the first coming of Christ and his return in power and glory. That we call the gospel age, or the age of the church. It is the last period of earth’s history before the return of Christ which is referred to particularly in this book. The apostle John looks and he sees a vision of God the Father, and his throne on high. Before we come to the history of the church and the revelation of the great war that will take place through all the ages between the two comings of Christ – the war between the church of Christ and this world under the power of the evil one – we have a vision of the throne and it is very significant. Chapter 4 begins the second section of the book which continues till the end of chapter 6. It is about particular persecutions and problems that Satan launches against the churches. The words, ‘After this’, introduce this second section, as they do the third section in Revelation 7. The previous section had viewed the gospel age from the point of view of the life of the individual churches. Now a new vision begins and according to the plan of the book, this second vision puts more emphasis on the invisible spiritual causes of the events that take place on earth. It is again a scan of the entire gospel age, but now it looks at history from heaven’s point of view. It is not completely confined to heaven but where it descends to earth, it shows earth’s history to be dominated by the redemptive purposes of God.The structure of this book is very important and very wonderful. We begin not with a view of the church, but with a view of God as ruler and sovereign Lord. This is as it should be. It is God who is the author of all things. He has determined that there would be a great church of saved Jews and saved Gentiles that will constitute eternally the kingdom of Christ. There, saved people with glorified bodies will occupy a rejuvenated earth and heaven, seemingly combined, a place which is physical and yet spiritual. But before we get insights into that, and the events that will befall the church through this period – the centuries between the comings of Christ – we are to see the throne of God, and we are to see the authority, the absolute sovereignty of God. That is our comfort. If we are in a time of persecution, affliction, or difficulty – and we always are to some degree – then we have this hanging over everything: that God is on his throne, and he is sovereign. He will not permit anything to take place that would crush and destroy us, or threaten our spiritual standing and security in Christ. He will limit everything that happens, however bad it may seem, and he will bring it to a close and cause that particular empire of evil to fall, and his people will receive another token of their ultimate victory. ‘After this I looked.’ It is a seeing vision. What John is going to see throughout this book is mainly symbols. We do not look in the Book of Revelation for concrete views of how things will be, physical likenesses. We look at symbols, and the symbols are possible to read and to understand, because they are all taken from the Old Testament, and we have met them all before and they have been explained in some measure, so that we know what the symbols mean. This is not a mystery book. But the revelation has to come in symbols because the reality cannot be viewed at this stage, cannot be grasped. The images begin at once, and they are obvious. Some people – not regenerate people – read this Book of Revelation and they say, ‘This is just utter nonsense, a collection of wild visionary statements that make no sense.’ They don’t begin to understand it or figure it out, even intelligent people, even people who are good at secular literary analysis. They won’t understand the book unless they see it through the lens of the Old Testament, where most of the symbols are first found. Here we have a door opened in heaven. Imagine it. John looks and something moves him to look up on the bleak Isle of Patmos. Perhaps he is on a rocky place looking out to sea, and he looks into the skies and sees the stars, the heavenly bodies. There as he looks, a great door opens across the heavens – not the physical heavens, but the third heavens, the dwelling place of God – and a voice, the first voice which he had heard – described in chapter 1 – speaks to him, the voice of Christ. It is described as a voice as of a trumpet. Of course, it was not a trumpet, but ‘as of a trumpet’. A ringing, penetrating, commanding voice, with authority and Lordship in it somehow. So the only way to describe it is, something like a trumpet. It sounds again and the words say, ‘Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter [after this].’ The vision is about things which must be immediately, following this vision. It is not a distant hereafter; but an immediate hereafter. So the door in heaven, the voice as of a trumpet, the invitation to come. How can the apostle John do that except in a vision? In a vision he can rise, and he can ascend, and he can enter in through that door in the skies and see things which he would never see on earth.

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At this point in the book the Premillennialist interpretation departs radically from that of Amillennialists. Superimposing their eschatological structure on the entire remainder of the book, they understand chapters 4 to 19 to describe the great tribulation, the last seven years in the history of the world, prior to the millennium. None of these chapters apply, they teach, to the majority of the gospel age. Furthermore, they are all chronological, a series of events one after another. On what basis do they take this radical approach? Largely because they are looking for a seven-year period in prophecy which they have already presupposed on the basis of their view of Daniel 9. For them, one week of Daniel’s prophecy remains to be fulfilled; there is an interlude between the 69^th and 70^th week which contains the entire church age. Only when the church has been removed does the prophetic clock begin to tick again. For them the calling of John into heaven symbolises the rapture of the church at the start of the tribulation, so that the whole of chapters 4-19 contain no reference to the church. It is an arbitrary interpretation to make John stand for the whole church, and he is called up in order to be given revelation, not to remove him from the earth. This mistake comes from treating what John has already warned is a symbolic book, as if it were a literal description. Premillennial commentators complain about views of the book that see its prophecies as already fulfilled and which therefore rob the book of any future fulfilment. That is a certainly valid concern, but not one that applies to the Amillennial view which sees Revelation as a book of repeating patterns of event throughout the gospel age. The great difficulty with the Premillennial view is that it robs the church of the comfort which God intends the book to deliver right now. If Premillennialists are right, the church can derive little benefit from chapters 4 to 19, other than to look forward to what God will do when all who belong to the church have been removed from earth. Besides, it is a caricature of the Amillennial position to say that it discounts all future fulfilment, as we will see.

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Introduction

Revelation 4:1 Commentary and Bible Study