How an Apocalypse Works

I want to talk briefly about the genre of eschatological apocalyptic literature and some of what it does and does not mean.

To put it simply, very simply—an apocalypse pulls back the veil between our world and God’s view of our world. Although we have a way of looking at things here, aka “the way things are”, an apocalypse reorients us to see events, governments and people more the way God sees them and so you get humans and governments described not the way they look to us but the way God sees them. An apocalypse is somewhat of an angelic guided tour through God’s view of our current reality and struggles, and will function to show us the benefits of overcoming and penalties of falling away. I guess the best way to describe what is and is not an apocalypse is by sharing a few dreams—one of which would qualify as apocalyptic but not as eschatological apocalypse as it was not about the last days and two will not, even though they have many of the same elements.

So, first dream, not a fully realized apocalypse but having the same revelatory elements and symbolic language, greatly abbreviated:

I was in church, watching myself up on stage being sexually violated by the Pastor. He looked like a monster. People were watching and throwing money at him, financially supporting his actions.  (2004)

Okay, no angels in this dream but it was revelatory during a time when I felt completely rejected and abandoned by my church family after the Pastor launched a smear campaign against me, lying about the contents of a letter I had written him privately. As I mentioned, there was no angel saying anything like, “Look at this…” and there was no call for me to endure and be faithful. This was simply a dream showing me what the situation looked like from God’s point of view—with the Pastor was violating me and by continuing to pay him while knowing what was going on, the congregation as complicit. This is very simple, nothing complicated, but you needed the context of my life to understand the trial I was enduring at the time. Without the context, the dream could mean a lot of other things. It helped me to endure the abuse that God had previously told me to bear quietly. This served to show me that although it seemed like the pastor was getting away with it and maybe God was playing favorites, that nothing was further from the truth. So, although we have the over-the-top imagery of an apocalypse, it also lacks many elements you would find in an actual apocalypse. Let’s fast forward to a more recent dream during the days of social media:

I saw people slaughtering and butchering others and turning their bodies into paint. But the paint had no color, it was beige. It was lifeless. How could so much blood and violence not be obvious in the final product? (2021)

Again, no angelic figures but the symbolism is again monstrous and horrifying. That’s how symbolic language works. Are people actually doing this? No, but this is how God sees the slander going on on social media walls (which is where paint goes, right?). People are butchering one another and plastering it all over their walls and it looks absolutely normal (beige) to us and even boring when it should be horrifying. Now, without the social media context, someone might mistakenly interpret this dream in such a way as to believe that people are actually committing murder and turning the bodies (it wasn’t just the blood) into paint and we will end up with a desperately lurid conspiracy theory on our hands. But this is how God communicates in dreams. The imagery is always more severe than what we see on the surface in real life. So, this is a wake-up call to see what internet slander looks like from God’s point of view—all the gossip about other people and generally posing as something far more righteous.

This next one actually qualifies as an apocalypse, albeit a personal one and not for the world or the end times and therefore not an eschatological apocalypse. And again, without the personal context of a specific event in my life, it is meaningless. To make it easier, we were living out in the country at the time.

I was standing on my porch, with Mark, and a farmer driving an old truck was barreling onto my property, almost hit my above-ground septic tank and as he turned toward the chicken coop, I realized that he was “driving like a damned fool.” The back of his truck, I noticed, was full of dilapidated chicken coops and he dumped them unceremoniously on my property. It was then I noticed that Mark was carrying me in his arms but then I realized it was not Mark but the Lord! The farmer sped off, never even bothering to acknowledge my presence. We went over to the chicken coops, looking for anything of value but all we found was chicken…um…poop. Lots of it…I found myself on the farmer’s property and there were a lot of tourists and spectators there. Farm animals but trapped in cages. The ground wasn’t solid, but deep mud and probably manure. I saw a man and I realized he was an angel and so I asked him, “What must I do?” He told me that if I engaged the farmer that I would have to do it on his own turf and I would come out filthy but if I refrained then I would come out clean. Suddenly, I was in a house, impeccably clean and gleaming white on the inside, and in every room there were spotless white bathrooms. There were maybe five of these bathrooms—no matter where I went in the house, there was a place where I could get cleaned up and stay clean. (December 2015)

So, in this one, although it does not concern eschatological concerns (last days) it had the other trappings of an apocalypse. It had a personal encouraging encounter with Yeshua/Jesus. It had an angel giving me guidance. It had a warning of what would happen if I was not faithful to the commandment I had been given as to how to handle the situation (that I was still ignorant of in real life) and encouragement as to specific promises of what would happen if I did obey. A situation that had not happened yet (well, it had but I would be unaware for a few more hours) was being portrayed in a revelatory way where I could see how God viewed it. It functioned to let me know that I was not alone and the situation was not going unnoticed. We all need this from time to time, right?

As in any apocalypse, the oppressed have an ally in God, and the oppressors are shown to be condemned, foolish, and able to deliver nothing but chicken poop—no matter how much of a crowd they draw or how popular they are. The fact that chicken poop, in coarser language, is also a euphemism for cowardice, there’s that too. God loves a good pun and the Bible has more than one instance of a very coarse pun or rebuke (Ez 23:20, anyone?).

In context, someone had uploaded an attack video against me where they described me and my research to a “T” so that it couldn’t be anyone else, without naming me (that might be the cowardice part), and lied about my intentions in doing the research and just engaged in ruthless character assassination against me (again, delivering the chicken poop to my property). Now, without that dream, I would have retaliated and would have felt right to do so. Just being honest. And God knew it. So, like Daniel and Revelation and other apocalyptic literature, I was given God’s view of what was going on and encouragement to endure quietly with the warning that if I did not, I would come out the worse for it and if I did then I would come out squeaky clean—regardless of any short-term damage (and there was some) and inconvenience. Plus, it hurt like the dickens and was humiliating because he had a huge following and I was barely getting started in ministry.

So, when we come to Revelation, which is a full eschatological apocalypse because it goes from the immediate situation of the congregations of Asia Minor dealing with various challenges in being either persecuted by or allying themselves with Rome (and both of those are problems, they just require different responses) to future victory, we have the same things. But without context, they can easily be misinterpreted to be literal—like the locusts and the horsemen and the beasts. But how would these images have translated to the original audience that we see the letters specifically addressed to? If we don’t study the original context, we are going to go wild with a bunch of kooky interpretations that need to be revamped on a regular basis. And that’s just bad eisegesis. Fortunately, we know enough now that we can discern, in the words of one of my favorite scholars, that even a low level Roman official with mediocre intelligence could have read Revelation and understood the attacks against Rome herself and, specifically, Nero.

Taking an apocalypse too literally is to miss the point. And so is taking it out of the immediate historical reality. After all, no one drove their truck onto my property, and they didn’t actually dump a bunch of old chicken coops. I am sure the ground at their place is not literally ankle deep in mud and muck. I am sure they don’t have farm animals on display in cages. And no, I have never been on his property, nor have I even been in a house that clean with so many bathrooms. The important thing was the message, the clarification, the warning and the promise and what it meant to my walk. It was a pseudo-apocalypse for me and my promised endgame of coming out of it clean, which, even if you were one of the people watching and spreading that video around, you must know by now that I came out of the entire situation clean and unscathed and even vindicated in that research he wanted to destroy me over. The guy who did it? Not so much.

In the same way, Revelation is a message to churches in the midst of trial and temptation that no matter how things look to them on the ground now, God sees the situation differently and is calling them to endure with faithfulness and integrity and a spotless witness. And a further promise that in the future there will be vindication and victory, even if they are not alive to see it.

Can we glean and benefit from Revelation? Absolutely. Can anyone glean from the dreams I had if they are going through something similar? Absolutely. But only when not deprived of the original situational context. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a story of nuclear weapons and apache attack helicopters and miss the point of the apocalypse entirely.

God wins. He sees the injustice. Be faithful. Endure to the end.

This is part 2 in a series on Revelation. Part 1, concerning the two witnesses is linked here.

If you read the Reading list from part 1, you can add three more books to it

deSilva, David Discovering Revelation: Content, Interpretation, Reception (Discovering Biblical Texts (DBT)) (2021)

Witherington, Ben Revelation and the End Times Participant’s Guide: Unraveling God’s Message of Hope (2010)

.                          —Jesus, Paul and the End of the World (1996)