Think Wink.

Man if it didn’t happen again. One of my favorite Bible teachers, Chuck Swindoll, has just started teaching on Revelation. On my way to MBTS to double check my status with payments and everything, I heard him teach on the vision of Christ in Revelation 1. I like what he had to say because almost everyone agrees on the symbolic meaning of what John sees in the vision.

Something struck me in his teaching. He was saying that the visions John saw in the Revelation he had in the 1st century were describing things seen in the 21st century. That is a very peculiar statement to me. Many Christians today assume that the last book of the Bible was written to our generation or one that will follow. However, I ask if that is the audience John had in mind for his writing? Swindoll made sense when he talked about trying to take a 1st century Jew living in a Romanized/Hellenized world trying to describe a toilet or electricity. Indeed, John would have had problems in doing that.

One important factor when interpreting a text, as I learned in my methods of biblical interpretation course, is to identify the audience that the author was addressing. Then you can go and research that audience to see how the author’s words would have fit that place. Paul would not talk to the church in Rome as he would have the church in Galatia. They are two separate churches from separate backgrounds and cultures.

The question I pose to you guys at this blog, and any who read this post, is who is the intended audience of John’s apocalyptic writing? I ask that you use Scripture to back up your position, whether futurist, idealist, historicist, or preterist.
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