Today’s reading: Deuteronomy 10; Revelation 10-11
Today’s chapters in Revelation are just making me think about how much we need to be okay with not having all the answers.
If you ask anybody who has known me for more than 20 minutes, they can probably tell you that I am the kind of person that likes to have all the answers. I can be insatiably curious and that often drives me to learn about things simply for the sake of slaking that curiosity, which means I tend to have a lot of generally useless knowledge rattling around in my head. Part of this for me though is that I don’t just want to know facts, I want to understand how things work well enough to be intellectually satisfied. I don’t need exhaustive knowledge, or even enough grounding in the material to be able to teach it or debate with someone about it, but I do want to understand it well enough to have an informed opinion about it.
I feel like God has been teaching me lately to be okay with not having an answer for everything. Listening to The Naked Bible Podcast, with Dr. Michael Heiser, I have been pretty roundly challenged on this point. Heiser was an absolutely brilliant biblical scholar and was the kind of man who has forgotten more than I will ever learn. And yet, when certain topics or areas of study came up, even biblical or theological areas, he was perfectly content to admit his ignorance and move on. I remember one episode, for example, where they were talking about a conference focused on apologetics and theology. He mentioned that as a biblical scholar he doesn’t ever really get into those waters because they are more rooted in the philosophical out-workings of biblical teaching, and as a biblical scholar his job was to dig into and understand the texts and sources better to inform that work done by others.
His humility and willingness to admit he didn’t know something without feeling like that was a problem that needed resolved has personally been really challenging and convicting. But I have also found this to be really impactful to my reading of Revelation as we’ve been going through it lately.
In the past I have spent a decent bit of time studying the different systems that people have put together to try to explain Revelation. To be honest, I don’t really like any of the systems. All of the systems make assumptions that aren’t necessarily warranted in Scripture, and then try to weave together a tapestry based on those assumptions, as well as other assumptions about how the book itself is written, like whether we are cycling over the same events 3 times from different viewpoints or whether these are all distinct events, some combination of those options, or something else entirely. There are certainly some things I find compelling in each of the different major systems, but there are also things I think are either overstated or unwarranted in each of the systems. But, since I always felt the need to have an answer, even though I never felt satisfied with any of the systems, I felt like I had to pick one and then interpret/understand Revelation according to that system.
Having started moving away from that perspective though, and being more okay with a lot of ambiguity in what I am reading, I feel like I am noticing a lot more as I am reading it because I don’t have to understand it in a specific way to fit the system. But I’m not just rambling about this today to tell you where I’m currently at in my thinking, but also because I am increasingly convinced this is where God Himself would have us land.
In Revelation 10 John tells us that he hears the seven thunders sounding, but then before he can write what he heard from those seven thunders, he is told to seal up what was said by the thunders and not write it down. Then, in the immediately following verses John tells us that an angel declares that in the day the last trumpet sounds, the mystery of God will be fulfilled.
The fact that we are explicitly told that there are pieces of this puzzle which were revealed to John but kept from us, and that the mystery of God will not be fulfilled until the day the last trumpet sounds, which seems pretty clearly to be an end times event, indicates to me that God doesn’t want us to have a clear picture yet for whatever reason.
Trying to dig into it until we can declare we fully understand Revelation and have all the answers seems foolish in this light. If God intentionally veiled it because He doesn’t want us to have all the answers, are we really so arrogant as to think we are smarter than He is and found the clue He meant to keep hidden but accidentally let slip into the Bible? Or is it that God didn’t mean for it to be so cryptic but didn’t realize how dense Christians throughout history were going to be to not put the pieces together that He made so obvious? He either wanted us to be able to piece together a full end times timeline/scenario or He didn’t. And if He has veiled it, my bet (and I fully admit I could be wrong about this) is that it is not solely veiled to us, but also to the spiritual powers and forces that are going to be losing their domain and cast into the lake of fire on that last day. And are we really so clever that what Satan and his angels are unable to uncover, we can fully know?
To be clear, I’m not saying that there’s nothing in Revelation we can understand, nor am I saying that there’s no value in studying the book of Revelation. But I do think there is value in recognizing that if God wanted us to have all the answers He would have given us all the answers, and approaching this book okay with the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in it’s pages and prophecies will go a long way in helping us glean what God has for us in these pages.
I feel like this post is more rambly than most, so sorry about that. This is just something that has been on my mind a lot lately in general, and even more so as we have gotten into Revelation, and after reading God telling John to not reveal to us what he was told, it just seemed like a good time to talk about it.
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