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Revelation 4C
Manage episode 434244929 series 3593154
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Many Christians consider Revelation to be a mysterious and even frightening book of scripture. Some avoid studying it, and among those who do try, many find it confusing. Why does the book confound so many and give rise to so many conflicting interpretations? The answer: because it's the final book of the Bible.
The Bible with its 66 books can be compared to a novel having 66 chapters. Like a novel, the storyline builds from front to back, with the characters, themes and plot elements introduced early and developed across many chapters. Obviously, the Bible doesn't read like most novels, but it was intended to be understood as a single work, and it did have a single Author.
Now consider what would happen if you selected a novel from the shelves of your local bookstore and decided to read only the final chapter. How much of that final chapter would you understand? Most likely, you would be thoroughly confused. Naturally, only after reading the entire book would the final chapter make any sense.
Likewise, we could see Revelation as the final chapter in God's 66-chapter novel called the Bible. In the same way that we must read a novel cover to cover before understanding it properly, so must Bible students have an understanding of the Bible's first 65 books before they can truly understand its final book.
Under these circumstances, a verse-by-verse teaching of Revelation would be a challenging endeavor. How do you teach the last chapter in a novel when you can't be sure your audience has studied the first 65 books? The answer is simple: you teach them the entire Bible!
Consequently, our Revelation study examines not only the 22 chapters of John's vision, it also covers relevant sections of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Ruth, Kings and Chronicles, Job, the Psalms, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the minor prophets, the Gospels and the Epistles. Virtually every book of the Bible will be consulted during our in-depth course, leading many VBVM students to say that our Revelation study is an attempt to teach the entire Bible in a single course. We know no other way to do it!
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