How anxious are you about the future of planet earth?
INTERVIEWER: It's big question, and one that apocalyptic films such as the Book of Eli and Legion
have enjoyed exploiting with success.
February 2011 will see the publication of a of a new book looking at John's apocalypse,
more commonly known as the Bible book of Revelation.
The book called Facing the Darkness and Finding the Light is written by author and broadcaster David Winter,
who is here with me this morning.
QUESTION: David - why write another book on the book of Revelation?
Well, it's a fair question because
there are quite a lot of them.
Some of them fairly barmy,
some of them fairly academic, this is neither, I hope, barmy or academic.
I think the short answer is because Revelation,
Apocalypse,
speaks exactly to our age,
which is so like the age to which it was first written.
In the first century AD,
the Christian Church was being persecuted,
it was addressed to them,
they felt under the
oppressive weight
of the political system and the emperor, the empire
they were
physically persecuted but they were mentally pressed as well.
It was also an enormous age of change -
the Roman Empire was everything, but they could see
the crumbling around the edges, there were
huge things going on in the world
very possibly it was written about the time that
Vesuvius erupted
and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum
were destroyed.
It was the first time that
that mountain had erupted in 1500 years.
You can imagine how they felt
very like we do when we confront
things like the earthquake in Haiti.
So they were
in a anxious
time, wondering what was going to happen in the future,
they were not sure about things
and this book was written
to tell them
that there is an answer
and the answer is that
in the life in which you're living now - it's not
some remote answer -
it's about God being at work in the world
in which you life.
QUESTION: You claim in the book that
Revelation is an answer
to the old theory of why can a good God allow suffering
so how does Revelation answer that question?
Well, fundamentally,
we look at the newspapers, you watch the television news
and you listen to the radio, and the thing that strikes you is
that we live in a world that's full of
what we might call 'bad things'.
I mean, on an average news bulletin,
and I worked as a journalist for 30 years, and on an average news bulletin there will be ten to twelve items,
and eleven of them will be bad news.
And the ones that aren't bad news are bad news reversed
like a strike finished or a truce signed in some
long-standing battle. So actually,
we're very conscious of the fact that most of the things that happen in the world
outwardly are bad.
We're also conscious of the fact that most of the population of the world
even in the modern era
have a pretty hard life.
The vast majority of people in the world
don't have much money.
A huge majority of the world
live on the edge of poverty.
And those of us who don't
are aware that those things are going on all around us. We're aware of
things like terrorism,
the threat of war,
nuclear,
will Iran get the nuclear bomb,
North and South Korea and so on, so people are pretty anxious
about the tension of the fact that we live in a world where there are
this many bad things.
But at the same time they're good things
so even
poor people in Southern
Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa for example have
happy times.
They fall in love, they have children, they laugh and sing. So we have this strange mixture.
What the Book of Revelation does
is it takes those two elements
it takes together the fact
that life is good and life is bad, it keeps showing us visions,
dreamlike visions of both -
good life, bad life.
It doesn't say it's one or the other.
It says that
life is both,
and that in the end
that heaven
is a bringing together of reality. It's not, what do they call it?
'Jam to put on your bread
after you die'
- it's the bringing together of these two elements -
heaven is the bringing together of the
good and evil, and the end of evil and the triumph of good.
So, the book of Revelation is a book of hope for people in times like ours.
That's basically what it's about.
QUESTION: And how does that hope express itself in the book of Revelations?
ANSWER: In the Book of Revelation, as I've tried to bring out in mine, you get
this constant series
of scenes -
dreamlike visions,
I suspect they will speak better to modern people,
the people I'm writing for now,
twenty-first century people, than they probably did to people in
say the Victorian era or
the rational era that began in the
18th and
19th Centuries.
I think that
the modern era in which
we like Tolkein
uh... and Harry Potter
and films which are about
visionary things
and horrible things,
disaster movies, we love them,
that it may speak more powerfully
because what we're led through is a series of visions.
And the visions more or less divide, in fact they alternate in the book.
If you read it you'll see that they really really do.
You get a terrible vision
so you get a vision of
four horsement of the Apocalypse on their different coloured horses - plague,
war, famine,
disaster -
riding through the land
wreaking havoc, and then you cut to a completely different vision
it's like another world.
And yet it isn't
because it's sort of on the same stage.
So John, the 'seer', the one who is seeing all this says
'Then I was taken,
and I saw this' and what he saw was
what I'ev called the heavenly throne and up in
the sort of 'control tower' as you might say
sits God on his throne
and alongside him this strange figure
the Lamb with the marks of slaughter on him
and it is
identified is Jesus.
Right in the heart of the
control room of the Universe
is a God of power
and a God of meekness,
and God who is
in control, and a God who also suffers with his people.
The Lamb
represents the suffering of God,
not only our suffering.
And surrounding
God and the Lamb are
the saints and the angels
prayers being offered and the incense rising from the altar.
And lo and behold, just as you think 'that's all great isn't it'
we're back with the beast from the pit
and locusts with human faces
pouring our from this bottomless pit wreaking havoc again. Natural disaster,
mountains exploding,
but when you've seen that, and that's awful, the sea turns red and so on,
we're back in the heavenly throne room again
and God on his throne,
and next to Him
the Lamb.
And you learn that the Lamb has got some power
He's got a scroll that contains
the story of the world in his hands, and
He can open it
nobody else can
so we realise that actually
things aren't out of control,
that this is the same world
as the one that's suffering
and you get a series of these and they go on and on
and then eventually
these wonderful visions culminate in a final vision which is the bringing
together of everything
in the New Jerusalem.
In the New Jerusalem,
once evil has been done away, we find out that in the end
God's purposes,
that there will be mercy, justice, love
that the Lamb is the Lamb
upon the throne,
and that the
crucified Lamb
is actually
King of Kings and Lord of Lords, we know it from the Messiah -
The kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord, and of
His Messiah, and he shall reign for ever and ever.
So you have this wonderful picture at the end
and you realise that
this is for everybody.
The final vision is
universal.
The nations being their
glories into the city
and it's a beautiful city.
This is a city - it's got a wall around it
to keep evil out, but the dates are open,
they're open day and night.
Anybody can come in and go out.
And the last word of the whole
book of apocalypse, Revelation,
of this scary scary book is that
anybody who wants to can come and drink the waters of life - anyone is welcome.
So right at the end there is this final invitation
come on,
come on in, drink the water.
So I think it's a
fascinating
exciting
scary, encouraging,
brilliantly inspiring book actually.
QUESTION: I guess the
images that most people will identify
with book of Revelation are
666, the beast,
armageddon, etc
the AntiChrist.
Who is the AntiChrist, David?
ANSWER: Well, that's intruiging because
what most people know is 666 -
the sign of the beast.
The great thing is we do know what that is
because this is a game play with numbers and letters.
Most of us know that Roman numbers aren't numbers, they're letters,
you know XXIV and so on.
Well, when you translate
666
it's called gematria into letters
and then
you do the same translation
into
Arameic - the language that
the Jews used at the time,
you actually get Nero Caesar.
So the Beast is actually the Emperor.
And Babylon,
which is referred to all the way through - the great Babylon is the
evil
whore, this is the wicked Kingdom
is Rome.
So it's Rome and its' Emperor
that this is the coded language for,
because that was element of persecution
that was going on, and it was the all-powerful Empire.
It looked like
Rome would be forever but
Apocalypse says 'No it's not,
its days are up,
its days will end'.
If that were all it were about
then we could have thrown that book away
when the roman empire collapsed
in the 5th / 6th centuries
but no of course not
because there's always another one,
there's always another source of
power in the world.
That's political power,
then Revelation also has a go at commercial power,
a whole brilliant chapter on the
exploitation of people by commerce
that they will even sell people's lives
to make money.
So you see all the different powers that are still there.
Ok. Apocalypse / Revelation is a judgment of Wall Street, the City of London,
you know, the Hang Seng, all those powers.
And we've seen what they can do to us in recent years. it's a judgement of those who want military power
to dominate the world, it's a judgement of those who want to exploit other people. It's the book that takes
life as it is and says that it all comes under the judgement of God.
But out of the judgement will come good not bad.
QUESTION: Ok, you've said that we're in an anxious age.
If you could put into one sentence the message out there to the people today who are living in anxiety,
from the book of Revelation, what would that one sentence / two sentences be?
ANSWER: Well, I suppose, that God is still on the throne.
The book of Revelation was a tremendous
help to Christian in China
during the time of the cultural revolution,
when they were being persecuted.
And there was a great book that meant a great deal to them
and in English the title was 'The Lamb upon the throne'.
And that's Revelation. Now isn't it interested that of all the things in the Bible that they looked to
to sustain them
it was this notion that
it isn't actually out of control.
And that life,
because we know it is a mixture of joy and sorrow, of pain and triumph,
of good and evil, the life we live now is that
but that will eventually
be subsumed into
the Kingdom of God.
It's ok, God knows this is how it is.
God himself
through Jesus
has experienced those things as well. They're a wonderful mix.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much, David Winter.
Facing the Darkness and Finding the Light is published in February 2011 by BRF, priced 6.99 (GBP).
To find out more visit www.brfonline.org.uk.