Posted on 02/07/2008 7:57:05 PM PST by restornu
IT WAS THE last Sunday of 2007, and I was preparing to substitute for our gospel doctrine teacher, who had just had her second child. The text of the lesson was the book of Revelation, chapters 5, 6 and 19 through 22.
I read of the "golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints" (5:8), and I thought: Wouldn't it be much more convenient if all the images in this book could come with a nice little explanation like that?
And then it dawned on me: Maybe the explanation was given only where the meaning would not already be plain to those John was speaking to.
Isn't it strange that in speaking of the most difficult and obscure books in the scriptures, the Lord or his prophets call them "plain" and "clear" (1 Nephi 13, 2 Nephi 25)?
In that moment, as when you look at an optical illusion and it suddenly reverses, I saw chapters 5 and 6 of Revelation in a new way that seemed to me plain and yet precious.
What if Revelation is not just a depiction of the end of the world? What if it is a revelation of the whole course of "this heaven and this earth" (Moses 2:1)?
John saw in the right hand of the Father a book, sealed with seven seals, and the question was asked, "Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals?" ("Whom shall I send?" (Abraham 3:27))
And in answer came the Lamb, who took the book from the hand of the Father. ("Here am I, send me.") And all the creatures of heaven and earth rejoiced, saying, "Blessing and honour, and glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb" (Revelation 5:13).
The Lamb opens the book, seal by seal, and with each we get an image:
A ruler on a white horse, conquering.
The red horse, ridden by a man with a sword to take peace from the earth.
The black horse of money and commerce, which brings wealth to some and poverty to many.
The pale horse of death by sword, famine, disease, predation.
The souls of those slain for their faith in God, crying out for vengeance.
The quaking earth, the sun gone dark, the moon red as blood.
How are any of these events possibly tied to the end of the world, seeing as how all of human history is marked with death, famine, disease, martyrdoms, earthquakes and other natural disasters, commerce through which some prosper at the expense of others, and men who seek war and conquest?
How could we possibly tell the difference?
But the Lamb who opens this book is the Word by whom the world was made, and so the book is the whole course of mortal life, unfolding from the beginning. Mortality means war, conquest, injustice, famine, plague, earthquake and storm, and the martyrdom of the faithful for their testimony.
In every age of the world, the souls of good folk who died for their faith are told: "Rest for a while yet, until the martyrs of this time are killed as you were" (see Revelation 6:10-11).
When John sees the stars fall from heaven down to earth, and heaven disappears like a scroll rolled up, and every mountain and island moved, could he not be seeing the great vision of creation that was shown to Moses?
Could he not be expressing the experience of the spirit children of the Father, as they fall to earth and find that in this mortal body, the heavens are now invisible?
The "stars of heaven" have become kings and great men, rich men, chief captains, mighty men — and also slaves and ordinary people. And in their ignorance, this world is terrifying, and the idea of the coming of God frightens them, and they hide wherever they can.
But in every age of the earth, the righteous are sought out and found, and they will all receive a heavenly reward, which is gloriously described in chapter 7.
It is the course of human life, all of it, which ends in judgment — in every age of the world.
Seen this way, the book of Revelation is about the end of the world, in the sense not only of its termination, but also of its purpose. Mortality is a life fraught with peril, where evil people seek to conquer and dominate, to kill, to gain wealth at the expense of others; where disease and famine and natural disasters make life precarious; and where the righteous are slain or oppressed for the sake of their faith.
But at the end of life — each life — there is the promise of reward for the righteous.
John's Revelation is not safely contained in the future, where we can regard it with awe and treat it as irrelevant for now.
Rather, it is the story of all of human life, from the council in heaven to the winding up scene, and from our first coming forth as children of God in heaven to our final judgment, where some will rejoice, and others, having rejected the atonement of Christ, must pay the price of their own sins.
I don't suggest for a moment that this insight is the interpretation of the scripture, or even that it is "correct." It was merely what came to my mind as I prepared to teach; and for that day, for that lesson, for that group of Saints in that class, it was what I had to say — with the statement that it was my idea, not to be taken as doctrine.
In this view, the seeming inclarities of the book of Revelation, as of Isaiah, are not by design. The Lord does not give us revelations to obscure the truth or to confuse us.
All revelation is translation. It begins with pure knowledge, communicated by the Spirit of God to the spirit of one of his children. The spirit apprehends as it has the capacity and is filled with light.
Immediately, though, the truth that was seen must be passed from the spirit into the human brain, which cannot comprehend it. The human can only understand based upon the images he has seen, the stories he already knows, his understanding of how the world works and why things happen as they do.
It is like the dream that is so vivid as you begin to waken; you are excited by it, but even as you attempt to remember it, the dream fades and slips away, until you are left with a phrase or a single image which, by itself, has lost its power and vividness. A shard of a broken urn.
By the help of the Spirit of God, revelations do not recede entirely; but the human brain cannot contain pure knowledge, and so all that is left is a translation.
And then the prophet faces yet another difficulty: What the Spirit has helped his mind comprehend, he must now translate again into language that can be understood by people who have not had the vision he received.
The Spirit of God can only work within the language that is in the prophet's mind; and what good would it do to give him a clearer, better language if there is no one else who speaks it?
The words on the page become obscure and subject to malicious or erroneous interpretation. The plain language can now be twisted by those eager to deny the meaning.
That is how a statement as plain as "Love your neighbor as yourself" can be twisted to mean its opposite, that you must "love yourself first."
The words are not a code to be unencrypted, nor a mystery to be viewed with ignorant awe. They are a man's best attempt, aided by the Spirit of God, to translate pure knowledge into human language.
And when they are read with the help of the same Spirit, their meaning to each reader at each moment comes clear. Moments of illumination come as we need them, in answer to our prayers.
We are not given, individually, a master code that can then be passed on to the whole world as the final meaning of a passage of scripture. If such a code could exist, the scripture itself would already be that code, open to all.
What we are given is as much of the truth as our minds can hold, as much as we need in order to accomplish the purpose the Lord has for us at this time. So the prophets, seers and revelators are given their understanding for the whole world in their times of service, and teachers for their classes in one lesson, and parents for their children at one moment in their lives.
"Then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven" (D&C 121:45).
In his imperfect language, that is what Joseph Smith is describing: how pure knowledge condenses, as it were, within our soul — our spirit-and-body. We try to put it into words, but only those who are also awake to the Spirit of God are able to receive the same meaning.
The mere words on paper are not, in themselves, "the word of God." Scripture is more the placeholder, the bookmark into the word of God. From the words alone we can indeed learn much that is important and true, but we must lay hold on the text with faith and virtue and prayer before the Spirit of God is likely to open to us some portion of what the prophet saw and attempted to tell us when he wrote.
This is what the world misunderstands. Our religion is as scientific as science, and proceeds by the same method. You have an account of why things happen and what they mean, and then you perform experiments to test your understanding and improve it.
Your account must be public, and able to be tested by anyone. And with our religion, this is absolutely the case. We devote ourselves to trying to bring people to make the test.
But the experiment is performed by living your life according to a clear pattern, and those who refuse to perform the experiment will never know the result of the test. "With a sincere heart, with real intent," those are the conditions of the experiment, and those who will not meet the conditions will always stand outside and declare that the believers have deluded themselves.
They simply do not know what it feels like to have pure knowledge distill upon their souls. All they ever see are the translations — the best that could be done, but never more than a poor approximation, as the prophets themselves repeatedly declare.
Thank you for your respect!
Be of Good Cheer!
agreed. It will be nice to see a dissipation in the attacks on Mormons now that Mitt is no longer a threat to some on FR.
Ponder On!
PUH-leeze! The Book of Revelation is a St. John the Devine nightmare which no one can adequately interpret, at least to my satisfaction. It almost never made it into the Bible and probably should have been shelved with the others: "Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Thomas, etc." and others that didn't...
I truly wish "people of faith" would get a grip on reality and realize that the world, like the universe, took a lot longer than six 24-hour periods to make, that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and lived in its belly for three days, or that Samson couldn't have slew an entire army of Philistines with just the jawbone of an ass...same goes for Jesus coming over the America after his crucification to preach to Nephites or Laminites.
Please ping me to this thread every time. It is the only place where I feel safe on FR anymore. It is safe, right, from the bigots?
Obviously not, see Post #4
I can’t help but wonder how accurate our record of John’s revelation we have is. As it was transcribed (and perhaps translated to Greek) the people doing so must have found the text odd. How many of them thought ‘Oh, that must be a mistake there’ and took it on themselves to ‘fix’ it? How many comments by others became incorporated into the text?
Also, it seems to me that this same revelation has been given to many prophets over the ages. Lehi and Nephi were shown the same revelation and told to leave John to make the record of the most part of it. Moroni said he saw our day, and he might have seen it to the end as John did etc. etc.
Another thing I recently noticed linking Nephi and John’s revelation is in Rev 2-3 John mentions the ‘tree of life’ and also of the ‘synagogue of Satan’ ie: church of the devil. Even though Nephi and John related the experience in very different ways, there is overlapping imagery.
And just so you are aware, I don’t know of anyone who thinks that the earth was created in 6 - 24 hour periods. 2 Peter 3:8 tells us that a day equals a thousand years in the Lord’s time.
Very interesting. Some day it all shall be shouted from the rooftops.
***or that Samson couldn’t have slew an entire army of Philistines with just the jawbone of an ass***
You have never met my worthless brother-in-law (If you know him he probably owes you money). When he begins to talk you realize how the Philistines were slain with the jaw bone of an ass.
I saw #4 but it was so mild compared to what I’m used to on FR that it didn’t really offend me.
I have a friend who is a Baptist minister...He is an intelligent man with a doctorate in divinity; but he will tell you that the world is only 10,000 years old and that he believes the Bible to be the literal word of God.
I believe Mitt Romney to be an intelligent person. He is a graduate of Harvard and got into college at Stanford. I cannot in my heart believe that he has not had plenty of doubt about the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.
I call myself a Christian and regularly attend church but I am also a just a bit to the right of John Shelby Sprong in that I believe in God; believe that Jesus was crucified yet, honestly, I am suspicious that everything in the Old and New Testaments are factual.
I did some years ago experience a presence of the Holy Spirit but I believe that it was due to a personal tragedy that I was going through at the time. If there truly is a God, and He is truly loving and forgiving then, then He also must be for everyone; and everyone will get to Him eventually even after death, and religion (which I also believe to be responsible for wars, bigotry, and a lot of the world's misery) was not part of His intention for us.
Do you doubt the bodily resurrection of Jesus as being an actual event in space/time...the same as my typing these lines is an actual event in space/time?
Sometimes. It is facinating to me that born-again fundamentalists, Mormons, JWs, some RCs and others of "pure faith" can be so certain and never admit to having doubts.
See #14
Then you are really an evangelical Christian?
Is that what you’re saying?
Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen.
You make a stand on faith. You base your acts on faith. In other words, the faith becomes reality, and you act on that reality.
Doubts are simply set aside as you go about acting on faith.
I'm saying that I don't know...I believe in God (or a higher power) by the evidence of pure logic as I cannot conceive of a universe being created without purpose (through the Big Bang with "someone" lighting the fuse). I believe in a historical Jesus and believe he convinced a lot of folks that he was indeed a deity. I also know that a lot of harm in the world came from people of organized religions and I do not understand how intelligent people (in the case of this thread, Mormons) can blindly accept the dogma and visions of a 19th Century man who was clearly, IMPO, mentally disturbed. (I don't mean that to be disrespectful bigotry, I have had the same discussions with RC's believing in the diety of the Virgin Mary and her bodily assumption into heaven, also with evangelicals believing that a snake actually talked Eve into biting into an apple...I don't really care what people believe; my grandson believes in Santa Claus and Easter Bunny but I still love him.)
The Serpent and Eve.
Without getting into the difference between that creature and a snake, we are left with that story being the basis of “sin entering the world.”
Your last post did not sound like you have committed to Jesus Christ as your king? Is that true?
If you are asking: "Have you been saved?" My answer is I do not know.
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