Podcast: Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of the Book of Revelation (Nancy Guthrie)

May 02, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Understanding Revelation

In today's episode, Nancy Guthrie discusses why the book of Revelation is actually more accessible, more timely, and more encouraging than you probably know.

Blessed

Blessed

Nancy Guthrie

Blessed, by bestselling author and speaker Nancy Guthrie, gives individuals and small groups a friendly, theologically reliable, and robust guide to understanding the book of Revelation.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:03 - Feeling Intimidated by the Book of Revelation

Matt Tully
Nancy, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Nancy Guthrie
I’m so happy to be with you and your listeners. This is fun!

Matt Tully
We get to do this in person today, which is very special.

Nancy Guthrie
I know! That’s pretty cool.

Matt Tully
You’re a well-known Bible teacher, you’ve written many books—including many Bible studies—you speak at conferences around the world and throughout the US, you’ve even had a podcast called Help Me Teach the Bible. But even with all of that experience in the Bible under your belt, can you resonate with what most of us tend to feel when we think about the Revelation, namely, a sense of intimidation?

Nancy Guthrie
Absolutely! My book is just coming out and I’m still thinking to myself, I can’t believe I did this! Maybe it was crazy of you to do this. I well remember about fifteen years ago when we were going to study Revelation at my church and they asked me if I would help to teach. I just wanted to say no. I thought to myself, Well, maybe I should read the book before I say no. I started reading it and right there at the beginning in Revelation 1:3 is this promise that those who read and those who hear and keep what is written in this book will be blessed. I just remember thinking to myself, Is there a blessing from God that I would ever want to just say, ’Nope! Don’t need that.’ Maybe I need to invest myself in seeking to really hear this book. But getting back to your original question of are people intimidated and am I intimidated, I think I have to blame something about our modern culture and its approach to Revelation. I don’t know if it’s always been this way, but in my growing up years and in recent years so much that is presented about Revelation is so fraught with controversy and with this futuristic prophecy—charts, strange pictures. There is so much about it that can really be off-putting. Honestly, as I approached Revelation I wanted to get at what is the message of this book that is clear and understandable. That was my aim. I actually think, Matt, that I started in fearing that I wouldn’t be able to understand it, let alone teach it to someone else.

Matt Tully
So, even as you started studying and writing for this book you still weren’t confident that you could totally grasp what it was saying?

Nancy Guthrie
I wouldn’t say that because I am convinced of the perspicuity of Scripture.

Matt Tully
That’s a big word you just dropped there. What does that mean?

Nancy Guthrie
I am convinced that Scripture is understandable for the ordinary person. The Bible wasn’t written for scholars. What’s amazing about the Bible is that it has such depth, it’s so beautifully and well-written that actually it presents a challenge to the greatest of scholarly minds. I think of the Bible as the one book that is worth spending a whole lifetime seeking to understand. I fully believe that if I do spend a lifetime studying it, I will never get to a point where I so totally own the thing, that there’s nothing left to learn or discover. And it’s a living book; it’s alive!

Matt Tully
And you have kind of spent a good chunk of your lifetime devoted to studying the Bible and teaching the Bible.

Nancy Guthrie
And I just have so much to learn.

Matt Tully
I can imagine some people thinking, Maybe she would be getting to the point where now she feels a little bit like she’s tapped it out and is getting a little bit bored with that work.

Nancy Guthrie
No, no, no. Revelation was thrilling for me to dive into. As I said, I was afraid that maybe I wouldn’t be able to understand it. When I say that, I’m talking about understanding it well enough and confidently enough to then present it to someone else confidently.

Matt Tully
That’s a whole other level.

Nancy Guthrie
Exactly. But here’s the thing I discovered: While we might think the biggest challenge of Revelation is going to be understanding it, I think actually the biggest challenge of Revelation is that we do understand it. The biggest challenge is then to make the adjustments in our lives that are needed to live in light of it, to do just what it has said there in Revelation 1:3 where it says blessed are those who read it and those who hear and keep what is written in it. So, that hearing and keeping it—that was a big part of my book. I think people think of Revelation as a book that isn’t practical. Maybe that’s another reason that they avoid it. I actually think Revelation is incredibly practical for anyone living in the first century or living in this century, for anyone who is ever tempted to cower in the boldness of our witness and in our allegiance to Jesus Christ. This book is for us. It’s calling us to patient endurance, to be willing to risk everything on allegiance to Christ. It’s for us in terms of its call to refuse to compromise with the world. John’s original audience was living where there were certain comforts that came with just going with the flow with Rome, giving a token to the pagan gods in their business lives. It would just be easier to just go with the flow with that. Revelation is calling them to not compromise. But isn’t that us? Aren’t there lots of ways we could be tempted to just not rock the boat when we think it’s not really that big of a deal? I think Revelation convinces us otherwise, that we really have to examine our lives for compromises that we’re making for our material comfort and to be accepted by the world. I’ve just found Revelation to be personally incredibly challenging.

08:11 - Do Blessing and Revelation Go Together?

Matt Tully
Even the title of the book that you chose, Blessed, is maybe a theme (the idea of blessing in the book of Revelation) but it’s not the first thing that we think of when we think of this book. We think of a lot of other stuff.

Nancy Guthrie
Well, I hope you do now!

Matt Tully
Now we do! Read the book and you will. Explain a little bit why you think that idea of blessing is so central to this book.

Nancy Guthrie
I have a couple of different answers. First of all, when we think about beatitudes, our first thought is Matthew 5. Well, Revelation has its own set of beatitudes. If you’ve been in Revelation at all, you’re not surprised to learn that there are actually seven “Blessed are those” statements which are very similar to Matthew. There’s the first one: “Blessed are those who read, those who hear and keep what is written in this book.” We’ll read later, “Blessed are those who die in the Lord.” That’s even kind of counter-intuitive in terms of the way we think about blessing. “Blessed are those who have washed their robes, who have been invited to eat from the tree of life.” Blessedness is at the heart of Revelation. To me, in a sense, it makes sense that the Bible would end with a book about what it’s going to mean to enter into blessedness, because I think about the way the Bible begins. The Bible begins in Genesis 1 where over and over again as God creates, he blesses it. He calls it good. You get this sense that the original creation was just an atmosphere of blessing. But then the big crisis of the Bible happens in Genesis 3, and it’s defined how? By a curse. The opposite of blessing. Now, we’re also given hope for how this curse is going to be dealt with. When the curse is put on the serpent and he says, I’m going to put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your heel and you will crush his head. We discover that the way this curse is going to be dealt with is through the suffering of an offspring of the woman. So, throughout the Bible we’re watching for that person. We’re also watching for and asking, Is the atmosphere of this world now consigned forever to being cursed? And then we get to Genesis 12 and we discover no, because God goes to this one man, Abraham, and he says, I’m going to make your name great. I’m going to bless you. And I’m going to bless those who bless you. I’m going to give you a land and through you all the families of the earth are going to be blessed. Oh! So now we discover how this is going to happen; it’s going to be one of his offspring. We discover that God hasn’t consigned the world to curse forever. He’s breaking into it with blessing. But as you continue to read the Old Testament, it’s still . . . in fact, the Old Testament ends with the book of Malachi, with the word which could be translated “cursed. When the Old Testament ends, the curse has not been dealt with. It’s most clearly in Galatians 3 when it says that Christ became a curse for us so that we might enjoy the blessing of Abraham (Gal. 3:13–14). On the cross we know Jesus has done everything to deal with the curse, and yet we still live in this world impacted by the curse. We get to Romans 8 and we find that all creation is longing, groaning, and waiting for the revelation of the sons of God. They’re waiting to be set free from this bondage to corruption—in other words, set free from the curse. When we get to the book of Revelation, we’re finding out here that this is what it’s going to take. This is what the world is going to be like, and this is who the people are who are going to enter into the blessing that God has been at work to bring about ever since the curse happened in the garden of Eden. So, we find out who are the people who are going to be blessed. We see again and again that they are people who have taken hold of Jesus Christ by faith, the Christ who lived and died and rose again. They have bound their lives to him and the Spirit has bound them to Christ in such a way that their lives reflect the suffering of the present life, and will reflect the glory of the future life of Jesus. The book of Revelation ends with a picture of the new creation. All of the ways it describes the new creation fill us with a sense of what it really means to be blessed. It’s going to become the environment that we live in for eternity future. We read in Revelation 22:6: “No longer will anything be cursed.” The curse is gone for good. Blessing is this new environment that we will live in. I suppose that’s part of why I named the book Blessed because it does contain these seven statements of blessing.

14:24 - Our Vulnerability Has an Expiration Date

Matt Tully
I love that. You just provided us with this really wonderful summary of salvation history, going back to the garden—which, as a side note, just a couple of books ago with Crossway you wrote a book called Even Better Than Eden. It is unpacking some of these things back in the book of Genesis, and now you’ve put the other cap on the end of this with this book on Revelation. I want to talk about that curse a little bit more. You have this line that’s kind of deep in the middle of this new book that really stood out to me as maybe particularly timely today. You write, “We are bombarded by scenes of bombings in the heart of major cities, refugees risking their lives to escape poverty and danger, news reports about deadly viruses, killer bees, natural disasters, polluted waters, nuclear weapons, cyber-attacks, and civil unrest. And we know we’re vulnerable.” Obviously, that rings so true right now in our world today. But then you go on to say, “But that vulnerability has an expiration date.” Help us understand how the book of Revelation speaks to that.

Nancy Guthrie
I don’t remember writing that, so I’m glad you read that to me. I almost feel it anew as good news because it’s true. Even now with what we’re seeing on the news every night, I can almost not bear to see some of what’s going on.

Matt Tully
To be clear, you wrote this probably over a year ago before the most recent conflict.

Nancy Guthrie
Yes, I was writing it in the middle of the pullout in Afghanistan. I had a friend that I had met a couple of years before who was a pastor’s wife. She and her husband were running from the Taliban. Honestly, I often thought that they would not make it out alive during that time-they were hiding and getting shot at. That made the whole message of Revelation and the bold allegiance for Christ perhaps costing a person his/her life made that very real to me as I was reading that. Getting back to your question about that picture and the beautiful promise that that kind of vulnerability has an expiration date, we live in a world that is filled with so much cruelty and injustice and suffering. And honestly, through a lot of Revelation we see just more of that—the unjust way that believers are slain for their allegiance to Jesus.

Matt Tully
For a lot of the book, as you read it afresh, for a lot of the book it seems like God’s enemies are prevailing.

Nancy Guthrie
And that’s a fascinating thing about the book because that’s how it looks from a human, earthly standpoint. But one of the big moments of Revelation is what it’s giving us in this vision is it’s presenting it to us from heaven’s vantage point. It wants us to understand that what looks like defeat to the world is actually victory. We actually need Revelation to show us that. By that I mean the book as well as the larger reality of we need divine revelation to reveal to us that this world is not all there is, and this life is not all there is. Over and over again in Revelation it’s calling people to overcome. It speaks of those who overcome, those who conquer. What’s mystifying is that these people who overcome, quite often in Revelation they’re being slain. If you’ve got only the world’s vantage point to look at that from, that just sounds like it cannot be victorious. But that’s what Revelation says, that no, they are actually the ones who overcome. And on what basis? Because while they may lose their life in this world, Revelation shows us a picture of them being protected under the altar of God, them being sheltered by this Shepherd, by them calling out to Christ saying, How long until you deal with this evil? How long until we are vindicated? And then we get this picture of Christ coming to accomplish that vindication. We hear them celebrating his justice and righteousness, that finally he is vindicating their deaths. We get to see him come as a victorious king as he cleanses away the evil in this world and then bring his people into this new creation. When you get to the descriptions of the new creation—I’m especially thinking about Revelation 21. John uses a number of images that have been used throughout the Bible to describe the new creation. All of them show us the realities of that from a different angle. He shows it to us in terms of a marriage, in terms of inheritance, in terms of a city and a temple and a garden. As we look at this city, and it gives us all this detail about it—the walls of the city and the foundations of the city—you get the sense as you read it that this will be a perfectly secure city. He says evil is never going to enter it. That makes us think about the first garden, that something evil entered it. Adam and Eve were vulnerable there. They were vulnerable to evil, to deception, to death. But here we learn about this new garden/city/temple (as Greg Beale would call it), and when we enter into this place all the imagery that John uses in Revelation 21 seems to communicate to us a profound security. We realize that the vulnerability of life in this world as it is now does have an expiration date because we’re going to enter this new creation where nothing will ever harm God’s people again.

21:20 - How to Approach Apocalyptic Literature

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful segue into one of the dominant things that makes the book of Revelation so intimidating to us—these visual pictures that we get in this book. The picture of a city coming down from heaven, this massive city. So often we spend all of our time trying to figure out how many miles across would that be, or is it a cube or some other shape? Yet, we maybe miss the deeper significance that’s there and that’s actually the point of these images. That brings us to this genre of the book of Revelation: the apocalyptic genre, as it is often called. What’s the deal with that? How should we approach this genre and the unique, vivid imagery that we see there? What is the baseline understanding that we should have as we start reading?

Nancy Guthrie
The bottom line is that we realize this is going to require some different skills from me as a reader than just reading historical narrative of the gospel, or even other letters and epistles. With those we have to trace an argument, or with narrative we have to plot out the storyline and find the crisis and the climax and how it resolves. In Old Testament poetry we’re looking at parallelism and those kinds of things. So we are bringing some skills. We know that we don’t read a blog post the same way we read a dictionary. We’re adept at the fact that different types of literature require some different reading skills. Our challenge in Revelation is that with apocalyptic literature, we’ve never read that before.

Matt Tully
We’ve don’t write this very often.

Nancy Guthrie
Yeah, we’re not very familiar with it. There are certainly some apocalyptic portions of the Old Testament, but it means we have to invest ourselves a little bit.

Matt Tully
We’ve got to do some work.

Nancy Guthrie
We’ve got to do a little bit of work. Although the truth is if we’ve been reading the Bible up to this point, we’ve actually seen symbolism before. I think about John’s Gospel where Jesus has all of these “I am” statements. He says, “I am the vine.” Is he saying he is a vine? We’re not taking that literally. What does he mean by that? “I am the door.” “I am the bread that comes down from heaven.” He’s using this imagery to communicate something about his person and work. So, actually we have used some symbolism before in the Bible, but let’s be honest; some of it in Revelation is stranger and more unusual.

Matt Tully
Yes, there are lots of eyes.

Nancy Guthrie
Lots of eyes, lots of beasts, a dragon, and all of this. A key thing to understand the imagery in Revelation is use your cross-references. Like, John didn’t just make this up. This reality has actually been described before by one of the Old Testament prophets. You’ll see it in Daniel or Ezekiel.

Matt Tully
How central is the Old Testament to the book of Revelation?

Nancy Guthrie
Essential! We really can’t interpret Revelation rightly without going to the Old Testament. When you read through the book of Hebrews, all of those quotations in the Old Testament are kind of set out for us. The writer maybe tells us where they came from. The tricky part about Revelation is it’s not so much quotes from the Old Testament, it’s more illusions. You have to be ready to pick up on that. Probably John’s first readers were more immersed in the Old Testament, so they might have recognized them a little quicker than you and I will.

Matt Tully
It requires a familiarity with the Old Testament. Maybe that’s one of the most practical things we could be doing. If you want to better understand Revelation, make sure you know your Old Testament.

Nancy Guthrie
This is the beautiful thing about having a Bible with cross-references. Do you happen to know anybody who publishes Bibles, by the way, Matt?

Matt Tully
I’ve heard of a few somewhere around here.

Nancy Guthrie
This is the beautiful thing about cross-references! Use them when you are studying the book of Revelation because there are a few places in Revelation where that’s going to be the key that unlocks the door to understanding of why that’s being said there, or why that imagery is there. Seeing how it was used and what it meant in the Old Testament is going to guide you into a right understanding of what John is communicating.

26:23 - Why Is the Number Seven So Significant?

Matt Tully
That speaks to other tools that are out there, whether they are books, commentaries, or study Bibles, there are so many resources available now to all of us listening here to better understand some of these things. One of the other things that is prominent in the book of Revelation that you have already referenced is this number seven. Can you comment on what it is about the number seven that is so significant? What role does that play in our understanding of this book?

Nancy Guthrie
Numbers have a lot of meaning throughout Scripture, including here—and especially here—in the book of Revelation. If you think about seven, where is the first place we see seven? In Genesis. The seven days of creation. It’s this sense of completion, of perfection. It makes sense that the last book of the Bible, where the story is coming to completion and we’re entering into perfection, that a lot of things are going to come in sevens. So, there are a number of ways to outline or organize the book. It’s probably not surprising that you can divide it up into seven sections. As you get into Revelation you’ve got seven seals that get opened, seven trumpets that are blown, and seven bowls of wrath that are poured out. In all of these, what’s being communicated is this sense of completion and leading to perfection. Going back to the title and the beatitudes—the fact that there are seven—even that would say to us that these things are leading into perfect, ultimate, complete, pervasive blessing. Not just an occasional one, but a fullness of the blessing that God has intended for us all along.

28:41 - Introducing a New Podcast on Exploring Revelation

Matt Tully
This new book, Blessed, is available now, but we’re also excited to announce today that we’ve been working on something else with you for a few months now. It’s a brand new podcast—released by Crossway and featuring you—where you are exploring the book of Revelation through some pretty interesting conversations that you’ve been having. Tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing with that.

Nancy Guthrie
This has been so much fun! Over the recent months as I have traveled around to different places, I have sat down with some of the people that I have learned the most from, admire, and who I think have a lot to contribute to anyone who wants to go beneath the surface and really grasp the book of Revelation. A number of these people I’ve talked to have written incredible books that have been helpful to me in terms of understanding Revelation. For example, Tom Schreiner, who has just written The Joy of Hearing. He also wrote about Revelation in the Expository Commentary Series, which I found helpful. To get to talk to Vern Poythress who I just admire so much—he could probably sit down right here and just quote the whole book of Revelation. Do you know that at one time or another he has memorized every book of the Bible?

Matt Tully
I did not know that. That is remarkable. He’s a remarkable man.

Nancy Guthrie
Yes, and he wrote a fabulous book on Revelation, and he’s written a number of other resources on it, especially on that idea of how to organize it. So, it was fun to get to talk to him about that, and a privilege. To talk to Jim Hamilton about the promise-shaped patterns that are in Revelation was a joy. I loved talking to John Gibson. I heard him say this statement a long time ago—and I’m going to botch it, so you’ll have to listen to the podcast episode for it. He talks about Genesis being the story about a new creation for God’s Son and his bride to live in an eternal sabbath rest—it was something like that. Then, when you get to Revelation, that’s all restored. That comes to its full fruition. Just as we saw in Genesis, it comes about in Revelation. So, it was fun to talk to him about that. I talked to Russell Moore about courage because just having watched his life over the last few years, his refusal to compromise; that’s an important call in the book of Revelation—just courage for a bold allegiance to Jesus Christ. I’ve not only seen it in his life but also I know he knows and loves the Scriptures, so it was fun to talk with him about that aspect of the book of Revelation. I talked to Karen Ellis, who works with persecuted peoples all over the world, about this element and aspect of Revelation that is all about persecution. I wanted to know what the book of Revelation means to persecuted peoples. How does this picture of people crying out for vindication strike persecuted peoples? How should that impact how we think about modern-day persecuted peoples? The last interview I actually did just last week with Greg Beale. I wanted to talk with him as someone who once embraced dispensational theology, which I think a lot of us come to the book of Revelation and maybe we’ve never heard that term—dispensational—but maybe we grew up with an approach to Revelation that was based on dispensational theology. It’s been so dominant in Christian media over recent centuries, so it was fun to just talk with him about leading a discussion about the book of Revelation, where are the tricky points going to be, and what should we keep in mind in that regard. So, a lot of really fun conversations with—oh! I forgot about Andrew Sach, my conversation partner in the UK, who talked about what we just talked about, especially in terms of the Old Testament. He’s one of the most creative Bible teachers I’ve ever sat under. I listened through his sermon series on Revelation while I was writing this book, and I found it helpful at numerous points. Anyway, I hope other people enjoy them as much as I enjoyed them, because I really loved having these conversations.

33:17 - The Message of Revelation

Matt Tully
They really are remarkable. I think as you even indicated in sharing a little bit about the different conversations you had, some of them are very focused on the exegesis and getting into the weeds of the biblical theology, but then others are looking at some of those more applicational elements to this book. As you’ve said, that’s such an important piece of the puzzle. If we miss that, we really are missing the real message here. That’s a great way to end with a final question for you. I want to read a quote from the book and then have you explain that to us a little bit more. You write, “If we can explain every symbol, identify every Old Testament allusion, and trace every connection but are still intimidated by the world’s opinion of us, still enamored by the world’s wealth, still attracted by the world’s comfort and pleasure, then we will not truly have heard and kept the book of Revelation’s message. We will not have truly understood and embraced the book.” Unpack that for us.

Nancy Guthrie
I was thinking about the average person who participates in Bible study. With a book like Revelation, I think it can be so easy to come to it where you brought your mind, and you just want to figure out every symbol, nail it down, and get all of those references. It can be an endeavor of just the mind. Let me tell you: I am all for an endeavor of the mind when it comes to the Bible.

Matt Tully
Right. You have to be ready to think.

Nancy Guthrie
Be ready to think! This is what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. So, the mind is important to figure things out. But . . . with the book of Revelation—and the whole of the Bible—to come to it and just have this great knowledge about how to parse it out and what it means, if it’s not changing us on the inside. So much of Revelation is a call of repentance. When I think about all the letters to the seven churches, he keeps calling us to repent. He’s pointing out the problems, these problems of compromise and shrinking back in the face of persecution. As we come to Revelation, I just want people to, along with me because I want this for myself as much as anybody else who is reading it, that as much or more than simply understanding it, I want it to challenge me to the core in these areas of my life. It has me thinking more and more about the boldness vs. sometimes the timidity of my allegiance to Christ. It really has me thinking about money, because when you get to the sections about Babylon and all the comfort that our money buys, I think Revelation really challenges us in that regard. Throughout the book, all of the ways that they would have been tempted to compromise with the world, the world is such a character in this book in terms of the world’s ways. When I say “the world,” a world that is set against Christ, that is set against God and against God’s people, and yet is so alluring. That’s the amazing thing in the book of Revelation: we see this Babylon the great sitting on many waters, and she’s quite alluring. I think anybody who reads it knows that the world is alluring. It’s comfort, it’s material wealth. It’s described in all these ways of beautiful clothing and jewels. It is a temptation to find our home in it, to find our purpose in it, to value it, to trust that it’s what’s going to bring us the “blessedness” that we really long for. So, I do hope that when people read Revelation I hope their minds will be stimulated. I hope over and over again they will read something and think, Wow! That’s more clear to me now than it was. I’ve got a little bit more clarity about what that means or what that represents. Yes, I hope that happens. But what I really long for is that people would finish the book and that they will have heard and heeded its call to bold allegiance to Jesus Christ. I’ve got to say that it’s not just in other parts of the world where it’s getting harder and harder to boldly align ourselves with the person of Jesus Christ and with the holy life that he calls us to. That’s getting more and more challenging. So, we need to heed that call, and we need to heed that call to refuse to compromise with the world. It’s going to cost us, and we may discover that the world—one of the terms it uses in Revelation 11 is that the people who are bold witnesses for Christ get trampled, and the world celebrates that they’ve been trampled. The exchange presents like it’s Christmas day. We shouldn’t be surprised if that’s how the world treats us. That’s why Revelation holds out blessedness. It’s seeking to convince us that that is just a short-term loss. A short-term loss looks like defeat. But at the same time it says that we might be trampled, it says that just like our Savior three days later received the breath of life again, so will we. It holds out to us this promise of resurrection life and a life of blessedness that is so far beyond what this world could ever deliver to us. And what it delivers to us we can be sure will one day be taken from us. But instead, it holds out a blessedness that can never be taken from us, that we’ll get to enjoy into all eternity. I just got to say that’s the kind of blessedness I want.

Matt Tully
Nancy, thank you so much for helping us to see a little bit more clearly how this incredible biblical book that we are so often intimidated by, that we neglect it to our own loss. Thank you for helping us.

Nancy Guthrie
Thank you.

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