You have to take the Bible literally. That’s what I was taught growing up. It was an understandable concern to avoid the nineteenth and twentieth century theologies which wanted to transform the historic Christian faith, based on events attested to in the Old and New Testaments, into metaphor for the workings of the human mind or spirit. My teachers rightly wanted me to hold onto convictions that God created the heavens and the earth, that Israel was redeemed out of Egypt, and that Jesus Christ died and rose again for the salvation of the world.
The problem with the literalness I was taught was that it was naive and fairly oblivious to the fact that the writers of Scripture often used image and metaphor to talk about the actual saving events they had experienced. Without believing that Jesus was in any literal sense a four-legged animal, they called Him the Lamb of God or “the Lamb who was slain,” as we read last week from Revelation 5. Scripture is like our own day-to-day speech, literal description and reference interlaced with constant use of conscious and unconscious metaphor which helps us communicate and understand the world we talk about together.
Failure to distinguish metaphor from literal speech is the subject of many jokes. This recent Beetle Bailey cartoon turns on Zero taking “teach you a lesson” literally when Sarge is using it metaphorically. Unfortunately, a number of people fail to see that their “literal” interpretations of Scripture are nearly as laughable as Zero’s literalness.
Revelation 7, our text for this week, has invited any number of “literal” interpretations which have failed to grasp the use of imagery and metaphor and have therefore led to laughable and even sad misinterpretations. Much of the dispensationalist eschatology, which many evangelicals still embrace and is reflected in the Left Behind series, arises out of mistaken literalist understandings of this chapter.
Modern Christians should have gotten the clue not to take the imagery of Revelation 7 literally in the first verse as it pictures 4 angels standing at the 4 corners of the earth. Unless we are prepared to embrace a flat, square-shaped understanding of our world, we have to abandon slavish literalness from the outset.
The particular image I’m focusing on this Sunday is the number which appears in verse 4, 144,000 “sealed” servants of God, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. Dispensationalists insist on both the literalness of the number and of their literal descent from the tribes of Israel. A much more sensible understanding reads this as a symbolic number of the redeemed from, as verse 9 has it, all the peoples of the earth. Their connection with Israel is as the spiritual completion of the fullness of all that God meant Israel to be, as Paul argues in Romans 9. The “new Israel” is all who believe in Jesus, whether Gentiles or literal descendants of Israel.
In any case, it’s impossible to get a literal 12,000 from each ancient tribe of Israel, since 10 of those tribes ceased to exist in any real form in the 8th century B.C.
So that intriguing number 144k is a picture to talk about the fact that in Christ God will complete the full number of all those who will be saved. It’s neither a literal total number of faithful believers (as Jehovah’s Witnesses teach), nor a literal number of Jews who accept Christ during the “Tribulation” (another bit of imagery from verse 14 that combined with time images drawn from other chapters is supposed to be a literal 7 years long). The 144k is the same multitude from every nation that is gathered to worship God and the Lamb and who are blessed with eternal joy and peace in their Lord’s presence.
The book of Revelation is not so hard to understand when one dispenses with the needlessly complicated burden of systems that hold up the pretense of literalness while failing to see that their own doctrines are irreducibly committed to metaphor and imagery whenever it suits them. Freed from such silliness, Christians are much more able to read this book with a spirit of genuine hopefulness rather than a morbid curiosity. Thanks be to God for giving us these images to refresh us along the way.
when an angel holds back the 4 angels at the 4 corners of the world (hard to take this as a literal description) in order that the 12,000 per tribe of israel be sealed, the intervening angel does so because the 4 are ready to do great harm to the earth.
what do we make of this catastrophe? about to happen? end times? poetic description of the xtians’ battle with rome? consolation to those already martyred? did they think the world was about to end? hard to read the whole nt and not think that they did. how do we deal with that? does xtian faith, and faithful bible confidence depend on each generation anticipating an immanent ESCHATON!!!!!! i do believe in disaster preparedness, but not disaster as centerpiece of good news.