Revelation 5 offers one of the best “You’ve Got Mail” stories ever. The people were discouraged and in dire need of a good word. Whether faced with open hostility, subtle pressure to conform, or a poverty of faith, life made less sense all the time under the Empire. Like all oppressed people, they were crying out for an interpretive word when the meaning of their lives felt hidden to them. God saw what was going on and sent them a word of hope.

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Tags: Rightly-Ordered Creation, Letters, Lamp Power, Revelation 5, Rescuing Revelation

The Bible can be pretty messy. When reading its pages, it doesn’t take long to be baffled, especially by the tense and violent parts. As author Peter Enns asks, what do we do when the Bible doesn’t behave the way we think a holy book should? It can be hard to take it seriously.
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Tags: Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, Martin Luther King Jr., Rescuing Revelation

By now you’ve discovered that we are not reading the book of Revelation literally. How then are we supposed to understand the graphic and powerful images in this unique book? If we let the images impact us like a graphic novel or a vivid painting, they can begin to communicate deep truth. Who knows, maybe they’ll even transform us like they did for the first century audience.
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Tags: Graphic Novels, Guernica, Audience for Revelation, Vernard Eller

How quickly we reach for instructions to operate technology or assemble Ikea purchases, but when it comes to navigating baffling books, we assume we can jump in with little or no guidance. What better way to begin our study of this profound book than with a User’s Guide.
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Tags: Literary Criticism, Historical Criticism