The Bible’s bookends – in reverse order
Post 2 – 13 May 2019
The Spirit War begins with a battle fought in eternity past. The Archangel Michael led angels faithful to the Lord Creator to victory. Those defeated were rebel angels pledged to Lucifer, their leader and the mightiest of them all.
Why begin this post with Revelation (aka the Apocalypse), the last book in the Bible, instead of Genesis? After all, the first words of the first book in the Bible are “In the beginning…” Opening with that phrase, Genesis describes how God created the universe, the earth, and men and women.
Revelation is before Genesis because the eternal was before time, the Godly before the physical.
The Bible is progressive in the classic, non-political sense. It adjusts its portrait of God’s nature in accord with humankind’s evolving ability to approach this greatest of all mysteries. When Genesis speaks of the beginning, it is of physical creation and time as we know it.
After Adam and Eve fell, a loving Father God turned into a vindictive “tooth for tooth, eye for eye” taskmaster God. He then raised up and disciplined the Hebrew nation, only to seemingly abandon them to their enemies for their failures. After the Jews were reduced to a conquered people, Jesus of Nazareth emerged from among them. To the dismay of His followers, the anticipated conquering Messiah King proclaimed a kingdom “not of this world,” and was killed by his enemies.
Jesus Christ completed a totally unanticipated change in the God-humanity relationship through selfless giving. Giving to the point of death on a cross. Giving to restore God as our loving Father. Giving so that men and women can once again become God’s children.
After dying on the cross, Christ rose from His grave, alive forever. The change forged by Jesus in humanity’s relationship with God is, in itself, evidence that the Bible is truly the Almighty speaking to men. No man could have made it up, if only because of the limited time perspective of a human life. But God revealed it, through dozens of human authors over 1500 years. Many Bible authors didn’t understand what they wrote, or to what period of history it would apply. But as a final seal of authenticity, it all came together in hindsight. Passages written centuries before proved uncannily accurate in describing Jesus Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection.
By the end of the Bible, readers have been led through a progression in their concept of God. Now, we come to Revelation. This last book places human, time-anchored history in the context of God’s transcendent, above-time-and-space reality.
The Book of Revelation includes a prequel of how evil arose in the cosmos in eternity past. Also a sequel of how Jesus Christ will complete his victory over Satan and all things evil in earth’s end times.
The Apocalypse at first seems not to fit into the New Testament. Up to this final book, the entire second part of the Bible is human-centered. It starts with four different histories of the life of Jesus. These are followed by adventures of or letters (epistles) from His followers. All characters are real men and women who walked this earth, either eye witnesses or contemporaries of Jesus Christ.
With Revelation, there is a leap in time to sixty years after the Messiah ascended to heaven. The Apostle John, who wrote the fourth gospel about Jesus, is now a very old man. He is a prisoner of faith in an Alcatraz-like island penal colony.
In the Apocalypse a super-human Jesus visits Old John at his island prison. Christ’s appearance is so dazzling that he has to identify Himself. “I am the First and the Last, the Living One. I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of Death and Hades.”
Glorified Jesus then takes John on a magical mystery tour. Speaking of both the pre-historic past and of a far away future, Revelation is fantastic and symbolic. It’s style is similar to the mystic books of the Old Testament. There is nothing like it in the New Testament.
Up to Revelation, New Testament Jesus appears as his contemporaries experienced Him: fully, 100% human. Then in the Apocalypse, He takes on many forms. Among the most important is a sacrificial Lamb that had been slaughtered but is now alive again. By His sacrifice, the Lamb has won the right to break the seals of heavenly scrolls. These reveal the destiny of humankind, and of Earth. Lastly, after the terrible tribulation period still ahead for our planet, Jesus is the conquering Godly horseman.
When all seems lost in earth’s end time, Jesus Christ appears mounted on a white steed. He leads the charge of His heavenly host and saves his chosen ones. Jesus vanquishes His human end-time enemies and the Devil, casting them into the Lake of Fire.
The Apocalypse is as much about the past and future as it is about Old John’s time. It tells us where the Devil came from. By backing up in the spirit dimension to before physical time, Revelation presents a prequel, of the great battle between Michael’s and Lucifer’s angels in eternity past. When Lucifer lost, he forfeited his Light Bearer name. He became Satan (the Accuser) and the Devil (the Adversary) – God and humanity’s most fearsome enemy. Satan’s defeated followers, one third of all angels, became his demon army.
Quotable Quote
“We have come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall.”
J.R.R. Tolkien – Author of The Lord of the Rings
Now let’s focus again on beginnings described in Genesis, this time within the context of Revelation. Genesis does not describe God creating the world out of non-existence. He does not command “Let there be Light” into nothingness. The second verse of Genesis says “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
There was something there before God’s words triggered the Big Bang and the creation of our universe. In The Spirit War, this initial formless and empty earth was part of what was left after the Battle of Angels. Enveloped in darkness, pre-time earth was a devastated remnant of a physical creation that God replaced by our present universe.
The Bible is so cool in presenting our physical world within a cosmic, eternal background. Genesis within the context of Revelation. The first book starting from a point within the last book. Physical creation as only one part of God’s multi-dimensional timelessness.
It’s almost as though the Bible’s author, God, was a human writer plotting a strategy to hook His readers. Let’s see now. This work will be a collection of books about men and women and their relationship to me. So, to get their attention, let’s start the first book at the point where they, humans, come into the story. I can fill readers in on the cosmic good versus evil background in the last book, by means of a prequel. And, to keep them interested, that last book should also include a sequel about how it will all turn out in the end.
