AS A NEW CHRISTIAN recently converted from atheism, I eagerly hurried through Paul’s letters, reaching Revelation as soon as possible. Once I reached it, however, I could hardly understand a word of it. I listened attentively to the first few “prophecy teachers” I heard, but even if they had not contradicted one another, over the years I watched as most of their detailed predictions failed to materialize.
Perhaps six years after my conversion, as I began to read Revelation in Greek for the first time, the book came alive to me. Because I was now moving through the text more carefully, I noticed the transitions and the structure, and I realized it was probably addressing something much different from what I had first supposed. At the same time, I catalogued parallels I found between Revelation and biblical prophets like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. I also began reading an apocalypse contemporary with Revelation, 4 Ezra (2 Esdras in the Apocrypha), to learn more about the way Revelation’s original, first-century audience may have heard its claims.
Yet even in my first two years as a Christian, Revelation and other end-time passages proved a turning point for me. As a young Christian, I was immediately schooled in a particular, popular end-time view, which I respectfully swallowed (the particular view is not of consequence to the point of this story). But as I kept reading the Bible in context, I found myself increasingly uncertain of what I had been taught. A visiting evangelist, recognizing my dilemma, patiently set aside an afternoon in 1976 and took me through every argument he had for the popular view. But at each point I examined the context and showed that his view did not fit the text on which he based it. Finally, exasperated, he exclaimed, “Who do you think you are to disagree with this view? All men of God hold this view—Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and all the others! You’ve been a Christian less than two years!” I realized that he was right; who was I to question all these men of God, no matter what I thought I saw in the text?
A couple months later, I visited a church where the pastor began teaching about the end times. He began articulating the very view I thought I had found in the text myself, and noted that it was the dominant view through all of church history: the view of the early church fathers, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and others. He also named some prominent men and women of God in our time who held this view. Meanwhile, the view that others had insisted I believe had been discerned in Scripture by no one until a century and a half before. That day I decided I would never believe anything anyone told me the Bible said without checking it out for myself. I decided I would study and research every matter before teaching it to anyone else. It was in a sense at that time, around age sixteen, that I started on the quest that led me toward biblical scholarship—not because I was interested in simply knowing all the views held by various scholars, but because I wanted the best tools for understanding the Bible’s own message.
Over the years, that one issue became less a matter of controversy for me as I recognized more and more of Revelation’s message that today’s church needed to hear. God wanted to wake up his church to his agendas, to care about the things that mattered to him (like evangelizing the world or meeting human need) rather than the things that mattered to most of us (like making ourselves as comfortable in this world as possible). I continued to save my research on Revelation and to preach and teach from the book.
After I had finished a Matthew commentary and was in the midst of a commentary on John, I felt as if the Lord wanted me to contact Zondervan and suggest to them writing a practical, pastoral application of the principles contained in Revelation. Being so busy with John, however, I decided to wait until later in the year to contact them. But before that time came, Jack Kuhatschek from Zondervan called and asked if I could work on a New Testament commentary for them in the NIV Application Series.
“I am pretty far behind on the John commentary I am writing right now,” I noted hesitantly, though I would have counted it an honor to write for that series. “What book of the New Testament is it on?”
“Revelation,” he replied. I immediately recognized the Lord’s providence in the invitation from Zondervan. I pray that this commentary will prove in some way worthy of such an important assignment.
I appreciate my editors at Zondervan who have invested a great deal of time into this volume, especially Jack Kuhatschek, Terry Muck, Scot McKnight, and Verlyn Verbrugge. I am grateful to my classes that allowed me to “test out” this material on them: my class on Revelation for the Center for Urban Theological Studies (CUTS) in Philadelphia, my classes on apocalyptic literature and Johannine literature at Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina, and my International Institute of Christian Studies (IICS) students from various institutions in and near Jos, Nigeria, who allowed me to teach them the “Bible backgrounds” part. I am also grateful to Emmanuel Itapson, my assistant and dear friend, who graded the Revelation class at CUTS.
Due to space constraints, I had to omit some of my material and much of my documentation, but I hope the present commentary will nevertheless prove useful. In the application sections most of my secular citations come from one or two news magazines; I should note that this is not intended to endorse these over others but to admit that, for economic reasons, I have only been reading one regularly in the past decade and chose to cite the one whose information was already in my files.
Craig S. Keener
Easter, 1999