The Revelation of the Scroll: My Savior's Kingdom, Part One

The Lion has prevailed: Revelation 5

Psalm 2

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

Setting the Stage

Psalm 2 captures perfectly what is about to erupt in cosmic conflict in the Book of Revelation, and from this vivid thumbnail alone, we know that the justice of God is ready to unroll--justice that has been foretold from earth's earliest days when the Lord promised Adam and Eve that the Seed of the Woman would crush the serpent's head. In this first promise of the Messiah, we see that the justice of God allows mercy for the redeemed but no mercy for evil. Rather, we would see that the mercy of God demands justice in the Day of the Lord--as surely as the emerald rainbow circumscribes the throne.

Camouflaging the sheer terror and majesty of this scene has been the pervasive teaching that the actors in Revelation 4 and 5 are the raptured Church and that the action features their praise around the throne for deliverance from the wrath of God during the Tribulation. As the scroll unrolls the timeline, they sing their worshipful relief.

Clearing the Stage

Jumping to conclusions that any body of worshippers around the throne must be the church severely mars the sheer beauty of this scene. Contrary to common belief, the language of the text and the clarity of simple logic demand a reset if we are ever to grasp the magnitude of the conflict John envisions along with the twenty-four elders around the throne.

So we must begin with the facts, and this requires examining the vocabulary. The Greek word for "elders," presbyteros, not only always denotes specific male governance in the New Testament Epistles; it never refers to the Church. But to force this linguistic leap becomes even more troubling when pop culture argues that the Church must be raptured in Chapter 4 ("Come up here") because the word "church," or ecclesia, is not mentioned after Chapter 3. By that reasoning--if we play by the same strict vocabulary rulebook--then neither can the Church be present in Chapters 4 and 5. And yet how can we argue that the Church is not present after Chapter 3, when the word "saints" abounds in the Book of Revelation--so much so that pre-tribulationists themselves have invented a novel term found nowhere in the entire Bible: "Tribulation saints"? Clearly, the text of Revelation demands that we recognize the presence of millions upon millions of saints present during the Tribulation.

To argue that these saints do not belong to the Church is not a conclusion warranted by faithful exegesis. It is an assumption claimed through doctrinal eisegesis. But it is a problem that simple logic confronts as impossible. If we will not allow the word "saints" to stand for the Church all throughout Chapters 4-18, when "saints" is a clear synonym, then neither can the word "elders" denote the Church in Revelation 4 and 5, when "elders" is never a synonym. Not only does the word "elders" never specify the Church; the word "saints" always does. We cannot play word games without betraying undue bias. But beyond this, clear logic further reduces this undue bias to absurdity: if we say that the Church is not present in Chapters 4-18 because of a missing magic word, then neither is it present in any of the many Epistles where ecclesia does not appear.

But we have even more logical problems created by the hasty generalization that the raptured Church is present in Revelation 4 and 5. We have a non sequitur--"if this is true, then this must be true": if the dog is barking, there must be someone at the door. It is never good practice to assume the truth of one fact by the absence of another: to say that the Church must be raptured because it does not appear in Chapters 4-18. But a non sequitur here--"non sequential thinking"--also results in the fallacy known as argumentum ad ignorantiam, or an appeal to ignorance. Embracing either of these two related fallacies creates a logical void that can be filled with almost anything but the truth. But the truth is that a second thought will find several other logical explanations.

Suppose we do wish to fill the apparent void of the "missing" word ecclesia in Chapters 4-18: we need only look back to the purpose of its use in Chapters 2-3. Clearly, Christ is speaking to seven corporate churches in Asia, each identified as an ecclesia. Yet it does not follow that Christ is always addressing the entire ecclesia. On the contrary, if we trace the pattern within Christ's address to each church, we will find His consistent exhortation to individual believers with the command to overcome--and to overcome specifically the vices of a corrupt church! The logical relationship between church and saints is not only obvious; to separate this relationship is unnatural--unless the separation in itself is necessary to distinguish the behavior of the one from the other. History proves that five of the churches did not survive, although individual believers from each church likely remained true to Christ.

To say that the absence of the collective noun--ecclesia--proves also the absence of any individual components is to deny the components that make the collective noun possible. We cannot have a church without saints, but we do have saints without a church in Revelation 2-18. Logically, the reason ecclesia does not appear in Chapters 4-18 is that the Church as an institution has ceased to exist during the Tribulation with the rise of the Beast and the False Prophet, who impose a one-world religion. As we have already seen, this by no means indicates that individual saints cease to exist, for millions of them will indeed be martyred for Christ during the Dragon's rise to power. It is nothing but a word game to argue that the believers present during the Tribulation do not belong to the Church merely because the word ecclesia does not institutionalize them. The Lord Himself defines each Spirit-filled believer as the temple of God. We see this reality present-day in countries where Christianity is illegal.

Logical reasoning and linguistic analysis would both conclude that--because individual believers are referenced as "saints" in Revelation 4-18, using the exact vocabulary found throughout the New Testament--these saints belong to the Church as much as any believer in church history ever did. There simply is no exegetical problem at all with the vocabulary in Revelation 4-18; nor does the vocabulary of Revelation 4 and 5 allow reinterpretation inconsistent with the New Testament as a whole. The problem is entirely one of eisegesis in forcing conclusions that textual evidence does not allow. Therefore, if we assume that the Church must have been raptured in Chapter 4 because it does not appear in Chapters 4-18, we do so fallaciously. The first half of that statement--"the Church must have been raptured"--is not logical, and the second half of that statement--"it does not appear in Chapters 4-18"--is both logically and linguistically false. The court of public opinion does not get to tamper with the evidence.

The assumption that the Church must be raptured before the Tribulation links also with the fallacy of begging the question that we must be raptured to escape the wrath of God. Not only does Peter remind us that judgment begins at the house of God (1 Peter 4:17); reading the entire Tribulation as the wrath of God proves unfounded. Not only does the wrath of God not begin until the opening of the sixth seal; we see in Psalm 2 the perfect picture of man's wrath against the Son as preceding the Son's final wrath and consequent reign. The greater majority of the action in the Book of Revelation focuses on the wrath of man against the imminent governance of the Lion-Lamb of God.

Finally, we remember that the entire Book of Revelation was sent to the Seven Churches of Asia, making the Church the immediate and most urgent audience of the message that the book contains. We read this urgency to imply that the Church must prepare for the storm to come.

Watching the Scene

It is not difficult to set aside these false assumptions linguistically or logically, despite the difficulty of setting them aside psychologically. But exactly here we commit to strict textual integrity and apply all the same reading strategies that serve us well in any text of Scripture. If we accept the simple Occam's razor rule of interpretation--that the most obvious reading is the correct one, unless symbolism consistent with itself requires us to look further--then the elders are indeed elders, and their presence here is immeasurably significant.

The thematic richness of their executive function before the throne requires us to understand that this is not a scene of worship for an event that has occurred chronologically before the Tribulation. It is a scene of worship for a vision revealed logically before the Tribulation--a vision showing the absolute certainty of the grand finale. The Alpha and the Omega who sees the end from the beginning is here showing John the end before the beginning in a device known to apocalyptic literature as prolepsis. When we consider the impact of this structural and thematic device--that no conflict onstage can alter the climax and the resolution--then we shout "Hallelujah!" like the seven days of shouts around the walls of Jericho before they came tumbling down. In the cosmic plan of redemption, history's greatest battle has already been won.

Every bit as intriguing as this vision of the ending before the beginning is the fact that the ending actually causes the beginning. Educators call this backplanning in which the assessment is designed before the unit. When we look again at Psalm 2, we see the text exactly this way: "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?" (Psalm 2:1). The answer is because they will not "kiss the Son," whose Kingdom is imminent. Their rebellion is not an action but a reaction. And their rage--consider how they set themselves in counsel together in a one-world government--denies that the government rests upon His shoulder (Isaiah 9:6). And not only does global rebellion against the rightful Son not conquer the Son; it triggers its own doom. The irony of poetic justice could not be greater.

And when we understand that the vision here in heaven unrolls this yet-unseen film footage, we know that the elders worshipping around the throne watch the fulfillment of their own executive function in their Savior's Kingdom. And at least eleven of these twenty-four elders, believed to be Christ's Apostles, did indeed endure the rage of this growing coalition of kings. And yet here they throng God's throne. Imagine the very kings of historic execution attempting to steal the crown of any of these twenty-four elders now! What is a king of Satan's before an elder of Jesus Christ?

What is a diadem before the stephanos of suffering? And exactly here we return to honest exegesis of the Greek vocabulary. The word used here for "crown" in itself restricts who these elders are. The stephanos is the victor's crown--not the inherited diadema--cast triumphantly before the throne. This victor's crown has been hard-won indeed: these elders have overcome the worst that kings can do. The Apostles' roll call alone reads like this in their summons to glory:

• James, the Son of Zebedee, beheaded with the sword of King Herod Agrippa I

• Simon Peter, crucified upside down during the rage of the Emperor Nero

• Paul of Tarsus, beheaded outside of Rome under permission of Nero

• Andrew, crucified on an X-shaped cross, bound by ropes, taking two days to die

• Thomas Didymus, run through with spears by four soldiers

• Philip, tortured, bound, and crucified upside down

• Bartholomew (Nathanael), flayed alive and beheaded

• James, the Son of Alphaeus, crucified

• Simon the Zealot, sawn in half

• Thaddaeus, beaten with clubs and shot with arrows

• Matthew, slain with a sword or an ax to the back

• John, the only one to die a natural death after surviving being boiled in oil with no burns

A raptured Church rescued from Tribulation has no stephanos to cast before the throne. But the twenty-four elders do. And although each of them remains unnamed in glorified anonymity--for there are no celebrities around the throne--each knows exactly what it means to come out of Tribulation. For even the Twelve Patriarchs foreshadowed a people who were born in the iron furnace of Pharaoh's Egypt and whose male heirs were thrown to the crocodiles daily year after year.

Imagine suggesting to any of them that they symbolize a Church singing for joy at having been raptured without tribulation. They will ignore this insult to themselves with a sobering look to the Lamb who bore hell's worst for each of them.