12th June 2019

UNDERSTANDING THE BOOK OF REVELATION DOESN’T REQUIRE A REVELATION!

There used to be a lot of itinerant Bible prophecy teachers. A lot! There’s not that many now. Some of them have migrated to Christian TV and give ‘prophecy updates’ which commit the same error that most of the itinerant Bible prophecy teachers were making. Their error? Rather than starting with the Bible and exegeting it (getting out of the Bible what God put intended to be taken out of it), they start with world events and then read them into the Bible! This is the opposite of exegesis and is known as eisegesis. We used to describe these prophecy teachers as having a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other! (With the demise of newspapers that doesn’t quite work anymore.) Some of these Bible prophecy teachers would claim a special divine revelation supposedly giving them accurate understanding of future events based on what God showed them from the Book of Revelation. Without exception, all of them have been wrong! You don’t need a revelation to understand the Book of Revelation – or any book of the Bible for that matter – you may receive illumination from the Holy Spirit, but that will have more to do with the application of the text than its interpretation. By using the principles of sound hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) we can exegete any book of the Bible – especially the Book of Revelation. To read more about this issue, have a look at my accompanying article … [READ]