“REVELATION: DOES IT DESCRIBE OUR DAYS?” SERIES
#3: “What I Believe About the Book of Revelation”
INTRO:
Through my years in the ministry, I have never been very strongly drawn to the
book of Revelation. I’ve had an opinion about it for quite some time, but my view of it
consisted more of what I didn’t believe about it than what I did.
I have never bought into the Dispensational Premillennial view that produced the
“Left Behind” series. It seemed too much like something from the SyFy Channel for me
to take it seriously, even though a number of my brothers and sisters in Christ and
fellow preachers sincerely believed it and do now.
I also have never bought into the Post-Millennial view. I just can’t see this old
world getting better and better until we usher in the kingdom of God. I don’t see that
anywhere in John’s Revelation.
I can see the historical part of Historical Premillennialism. As a student of
history, I see a lot of the events described in Revelation that I can identify as actual
history – many of them that occurred before the end of the first century.
And while I can see some of the Preterist view, I just can’t believe that John was
writing about such a limited period of time as the forty years from A.D. 30 when the
church began and A.D. 70 when Jerusalem and the Jewish nation was destroyed.
So, after all these years, I have decided that the Amillennial view is the one I vote
for as being closest to the true meaning of what John wrote. It allows for historical
identification of past events and provides the best explanations for future events.