Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick out the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen.
Welcome. Please share Bleeding Daylight episodes through social media and word of mouth so that more people can kick against the darkness. You'll find our social media links at bleedingdaylight.net As you listen, think about who you'll tell about this episode. A Church Called Tov, the Jesus Creed, Kingdom Conspiracy. These are just a few of the books that today's guest has written. Today we'll discuss his most recent
My guest today is the author or editor of around 80 books. Perhaps his most well known book The Jesus Creed has become a favorite for many 1000s of readers since its release around 20 years ago. Scot McKnight is a bestseller recognized authority on the New Testament, early Christianity and the historical Jesus. His most recent book written with Cody Machet, is titled Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a
Dissident Disciple. It seeks to untangle the many interpretations of the final book of the Bible, which has caused frustration and fear for many people over hundreds of years. Scott, thank you so much for your time on Bleeding Daylight.
Well, thank you very much for inviting me, and it's wonderful to be in Australia. We've been there a few times.
Oh, good, good. Revelation seems to be a book that many Jesus followers avoid, because it's hard to get a handle on it. Then on the other hand, it's been used by others, who take advantage of the uncertainty in some of the language to further a particular agenda. How do we begin to get a grasp on what God is really trying to say to us through this book?
Well, Rodney, I tell my students, that they are reading the book of Revelation the best when they're reading it as if they were reading the Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter,
I will have to admit, I have not read the Lord of the Rings. I've read one and a half volumes three different times and never gotten past it. But I've read Chronicles of Narnia several times to my kids, when you read it as a drama, as a story that has a plot, you're far better off reading it that way, then if you're trying to figure out whether Vladimir Putin is the Antichrist, and whether the battle with Ukraine is going
to become the battle of Armageddon, and whether Israel and United States and what place they play in all this, I think that destroys the drama of the book of Revelation. And people miss on how to read the Bible.
It is interesting that people will try and put their own interpretation on these things and look for elements that they see in Revelation, and cast them into today. I certainly remember years ago that Henry Kissinger was touted as the Antichrist, and then there were others. And we've heard that right back throughout history. And it seems that people are constantly looking for, who do we tag and sort of bring in almost like
a, a TV serial, where the part of the Antichrist will today be played by? Why do you think that is? Why do you think we go looking for that in Scripture?
This is really an interesting thing for me, Rodney, and this, I think, is the magic line that you don't want to cross. And that is this. First of all, Revelation's prophecy. So people think that's predicting things that are going to come to place in the future. But if you read the book carefully, and have any sense of the first century, you realize it's talking about Rome, it's talking about seven churches in
Western Asia Minor. And it's talking about Nero at times. But here's here's the thing. I think that people get half of the message right, when they begin to wonder now, Henry Kissinger wasn't the issue. Gorbachev wasn't the issue. But let's just say right now that you think it's Putin, or in the United States, there's some people think it's Donald Trump, and there's other people who think it's Joe Biden. I think every country
has this but here's the point. And this is really important. When you begin to see corruption in any political leader, you are beginning to read the book of Revelation. Well, because the book of Revelation, especially chapter 17, through 18 provides a really nice sketch as it were. It's brutal. It's about the horror of Babylon. It's about Empire, it's about all the nasty things they do. But that becomes a really good starting
point for perceiving corruption and empires. And suddenly, it's not that we're predicting Putin, or Trump or Biden, or whoever. All of a sudden, we're beginning to realize that this Bible gives us categories by which we can discern Imperial corruption, power plays, immoralities, idolatries, etc, militarism, violence, persecution, all of a sudden, we begin to see things from the book of Revelation that allows us to critique,
let's say, political powers and discern how we as believers, as Christians should live in a world when the political powers are corrupted by Babylons ways the rise of Rome. Is that clear?
I guess it is, because we're looking at Scripture. And so much of scripture we say this was written 2000 years ago or further back, depending on what part of the Bible we're looking at. And then we
say, but this is still applicable for today, right? Throughout history. And if I'm hearing you, right, what you're saying is what is in Revelation has been relevant to us, right? Throughout history, and there are shades of that, as we go through, and these are teaching us not what to look for, but how to live in these times.
Yes. So for instance, Cody Matchett and I make the idea of the claim that Babylon is timeless, that Babylon is always with us. It's not just a first century empire. It's the presence of empires in the whole world. So I, as an American, can look at Washington, DC. And I can ask the question, is Washington DC, against the way of God? Is Washington DC? opulent? Is it furthering capitalism in its great sense of
greed? Is it murderous, and the United States? There are times that it is is it all about branding now, our former President Donald Trump, was a Brander par excellence Make America Great Again, this was his line, which he sort of took from Ronald Reagan, but anything in the hands of Donald Trump would distort. But militarism is one of the characteristics of the United States. So I sit here and read the book of Revelation,
and say, Yes, we are like Babylon, we are economically exploitative of other countries. I don't have to spend my time criticizing Vladimir Putin, although I can for his violence in his invasion of the Ukraine. And I think that there's plenty of categories for me to begin to analyze the government in which I live, the state government in which I live, the local government, I think our local governments
pretty, pretty easy, pretty good people. But also, I begin to see the traits of Babylon, in churches and Christian institutions. And all of a sudden, instead of speculating about whether someone is the Antichrist, I have, in a sense, a hermeneutic, a way of reading, our political government, our politics, our use of power in the world today. And to shine it against or let the light of the Lamb of God shine against our
politics and our use of power. And I can discern the presence of Babylon, I can tell you as an American, and I like my country, we've got plenty to repent of,
When we start reading the book that way, rather than just pointing outside of ourselves and saying, they are the bad guys, we get to start to say, well, am I partaking in this? If this is a regime that goes against scripture, if this sense of greed, if this exploitativeness that we see not just obviously in the US, but throughout many nations? If we see this as part of what's described here, then we need to say,
Well, what's my part in it? How willing Do you think we are to take that on for ourselves?
Broadly, this is really good because it revelation has, you know, it has several parts like chapter ones and kind of an introduction, chapters two and three are letters or so called messages, at least to seven churches. And in those messages in those letters to those churches. John, the author points out sins that are present in some of these churches, and the sins that he points out are the sins that you find in
Babylon in chapter 17, and eight thing. And so all of a sudden we say Babylon is creeping into the churches. That's what John wants them to see. So the language that Cody and I developed is that John wants Christians to become doubled dissidents, dissidents of Babylon. That is Rome in the political or public level, and dissidents of the presence of Babylon in the local church. We need to be double dissidents, not just
critics of politics, but also critics of the church when it fails to follow the Lamb. And when it begins to look like Babylon, you know, most people in the world probably who follow the church will have known about the Crystal Cathedral in California, or they know about some of the opulence and the salaries of some of the pastors in the United States. If we would have been reading the book of Revelation, not as speculation
about some future Antichrist, and what part Israel is going to play and what part America is going to play and what part the European Union is going to play. And don't think that I don't realize that this, that the southern hemisphere has been totally ignored. And all this stuff, because it's so American, and European centric, that it ignores most of the world in thinking about the book of Revelation, which is just
pathetic. But instead of doing that we have failed to read these books well enough to recognize that these books, this book is for us, it helps us see power mongering and political corruption in our world with with fresh eyes.
One of the paradoxes that we see in Scripture is that if we are to understand what this ancient book is saying to us today, and its relevance today, we actually have to go back in time and start to grapple with how the original hearers, or the original readers would have experienced that, tell me about that.
This is a big topic. To understand anyone, we have to understand their context, to understand a text, we have to understand its context, you can't read Charles Dickens, the way you read, Martin Luther, the way you read Augustine, or the way you read, let's say some Egyptian text, every text has its own context. And we have to respect that. And when we respect that we are treating a text, we are treating the
author, we are treating the person of that text with love and respect. So the book of Revelation is often called an apocalypse. And apocalypse is a form of Jewish literature. And by the way, there's endless discussions about what an apocalypse is in Jewish literature, but I'm gonna say, it's like the Jewish literature that's called apocalypses. It is an unreal unveiling a revealing an apocalypse of God to the people
through a prophet. And that's what John is, he's a mediator of revelation that he hears and sees. And God Commission's him to send this to these people. And throughout the text, there's all sorts of things going on in the text that connect to the ancient world. The letters to the seven churches, connect to those local settings like Sardis, you can go to SARS, today, you can go to Ephesus today and you can kind of feel
what's being said in the book of Revelation there. Even the Revelation Chapter 12, you got the snake and you have ancient dragon, you have all these things from the ancient world. It's meant to be read in that time, and in that way. And I learned when I was in college, a German German sentence that I just love to repeat. Ville Stein does still do firstaid most indictors Lonegan, and that is, if you want to understand a poet, you
have to go to the poets land. And those who are specialists in Shakespeare know all about his world didn't even know who he is, obviously, those who study Martin Luther want to know about the Reformation in the Catholic Church and what was going on. So we have to study the book of Revelation in its time. And what I have learned is that the book of Revelation is timely, as all get out in the first century. But there is a
dimension of the book of Revelation that is timeless, it still speaks. We listened to it in the first century carefully, and all of a sudden, we realize, hey, that's just like us and great writers, like Homer, like Virgil, like Escalus and They talked in the ancient world, but we recognize ourselves at times in their characters. And that is the genius of good writing. And the book of Revelation has that sort of genius. I've tried to answer that question. I liked the question.
I think he got there, too. That's good. I mean, the interesting thing is you're talking about good writers and people who are able to write well, with something that we can still recognize ourselves in that, and yet we look to Scripture, and we're looking at a different genre. And in fact, especially with, with John here, because what he's bringing forth, he says, is coming from a vision. So it's
almost like he's not writing it. We know that in the Scripture, it's, it's actually a mixture of what God is imparting, but also this vision. So how do we deal with that as a vision that God is giving to John in this time,
when I sat down to write this book, I wrote to two expert scholars in the ancient Near East, and in apocalyptic literature. And I said, when you hear John, of the book of Revelation, say that he saw something, do you think he actually saw something, or that it was something that he saw in his imagination that God was using to speak to him, in other words, was something catchable by a photograph or something like
that? Both of them wrote back immediately said, it's imagination. But it is an imagination that has been disciplined by Scripture. And that, John, in a sense, he doesn't ever use the word that he's
dreaming. But it's like a reverie of sitting on Patmos, the island. And God speaking to him through the visions that are caught in his head and in his brain, and in his mind, and in his spirit, that he writes out. And as he writes it out, the language that he finds for this for these visions, is the language that you find in Daniel and Ezekiel and Isaiah, Zachariah, it is the language of prophets of Israel, it is the language at
times of the apocalypse is of the Jewish world. And at times, he's he's connecting even to the Greco Roman world with some of its images. I was quite surprised that both of these scholars, they're both evangelical types, at least, love the Bible, Christian people who go to church all the time, and Creech and stuff like that. But both of them immediately said, No, this is imagination. This is a vision in his head, probably not a
vision that was caught on a screen. And it was always a reverie. I believe that John says, I saw over and over and over. And we have to interpret what seeing means. I think a lot of people think well, if he said he saw it, he saw it. So it had to be something external to him. Well, I'm not sure that that's how apocalyptic work literature worked. I don't think that these were always extra material, extra body visions that were
out there that they saw, but that they perceived, saw them in the sense that their imaginations took them there. And one of the greatest things that my students have learned, student after student comes to me and says, When you told us that we need to read the book of Revelation with imagination. It lit the book up for me, and I love the book of Revelation now. And formally, I didn't even want to read it. But
I see the power of imagination. And I sometimes just stop in class and say, Now look, I want you to all close your eyes. I want you to put all your notes down, and I want you to write a word. I'm going to read Revelation 12 to you. And when we're done, I want you to tell me what you saw, what were the colors, etc. And they love it. They see it, they see what John is trying to do. And it's when they envision this stuff, that
they suddenly catch what John is doing, and here's, here's something robbed me that many of us have felt. I grew up in a world of reading Well, I came of age in college and seminary, etc. And I read The Chronicles of Narnia. I loved the images of Peter and Eustace in my head of Reepicheep. When the movies came out, of course, I had to watch them. I didn't like their sketches of them, because I had a different vision. And I
think if John thought we were going to try to draw his images, I think John would say no, please don't do that. You will forever be ruined, and what the book is all about. You need to use your imagination. John was in imagination. We need imagination to read this book,
we talked about the fact that when we're reading Scripture, we need to go back to what the early readers or the early hearers of these words might imagine, and that they are written in a time and place
and still have relevance, then throughout history, we also need to recognize that your book, Revelation for the rest of us is written in a time in place and reflect certain things that are going on. Now, what's going on at the moment, we see and I know that this is very much in the US, but it is creeping around the rest of the world is this divisiveness, where people will hitch themselves more than to Jesus, they
hitching themselves to a political ideal that they think reflects Jesus. Do you think there's something in Revelation for us that can speak into that sort of setting?
Rodney, I think that's the heart of the book of Revelation. Right? What you just said, is hitching ourselves to political powers, is Babylon. We need to avoid letting ourselves be seduced into serving and giving allegiance to the powers of this world, because we're called to follow the Lamb. And our allegiance has to be to Jesus. Now, of course, we're citizens. So we want to function as a good citizen.
And in the sense we have, we can be patriotic, and we can serve our country in the ways that we think are appropriate for Christians. And we're going to recognize that Christians differ with one another. But when we hitch ourselves when we become Allegiant, to the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the social democrat party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Conservative Party, when we hitch
ourselves to that, we are playing the game of Babylon. Rather than living the way of the lamb that Jesus calls us to, in this book,
We do have the opportunity to read through and, and start to see ourselves in Revelation, if we read it in this way, if someone is going to pick up a copy of this book, how do you think it's going to help them going forward?
Okay, I think the book of Revelation teaches us a couple of things. The first thing it teaches us, I believe, is wisdom, the wisdom to recognize the corruption of powers at work in our world, that ultimately stem from the dragon from the evil one. The second thing is it teaches us to become a witness, a witness of our own experience of God, our own experience of following Jesus Christ, our own experience
of living in this world as a Christian, trying to. And the third thing it teaches us Oh, okay, so that's our experience. But it also teaches us to speak up and speak out. As a witness, we not only tell of our own experience, but we have to learn to speak up Jesus is the faithful witness. And people die in the book of Revelation because of their witness. They follow the Lamb. The third thing is the book of Revelation
teaches us worship. Worship in the book of Revelation is, I think, a deeply unappreciated dimension of the Christian life. There are at least eight songs now scholars in the book Revelation debate, whether there's some fragments of of songs, etc. And some think there's many as 16 songs revelation, but there's basically eight in most Bibles printed today. The songs are in poetic. They show up poetically in the in
the text, rather than looking like prose. This is what I think happens in these songs. These songs are filled and sort of fill the pages of the most gruesome chapters of the book, chapter six to a team. And in those chapters, there are sudden interruptions that are often called interludes or interruptions, where all of a sudden, you get a vision of the people in heaven, worshiping the lamb. I believe that these
are lessons, as someone was reading the book of Revelation to people they couldn't read, they didn't have a copy of the text. They didn't have it on their phones, obviously. They had to listen to it being read. And suddenly the author, the reader of the text, would start giving a song and reading a song from a chapter that we have in our Bibles today. And those songs were songs of praise to God to the lamb. And at the same time,
They were subversive, and resistance songs against the way of the dragon, and the way of Rome and the way of Babylon. If we live the songs, and we sing these songs, these songs form us into people who resist the way of the dragon, who follow the way the lamb. And suddenly, we become agents of the lamb in our world, because we are worshiping the lamb. Those three words really matter to me wisdom, witness and worship.
When I look at the reviews that have been placed on your book, it's interesting that again, people seem to carry forward what, what their current thinking is. And so there are some absolute glowing reviews of this book, Revelation for the rest of us a prophetic call to follow Jesus as a dissident disciple. But there are also those who are obviously seeing this through another filter. And there's been a couple of
people that accuse you of just being critical of the political right, how do we start to move away from just seeing things through our filter? I mean, you've stated in the past that you aligned to no political party. But if when reading from that point of view, we're going to see, whatever we want to see how do we start to remove that veil, to start to read what's really there in the text both in, for instance, your book, but especially in Scripture,
it's an interesting because I've been pretty critical in my career, against the political left at times. And in this book, I leaned, clearly, some more critical of the political right, partly because Donald Trump was in everybody's mind. But also, they forget that I have a whole chapter in a long appendix about progressivism, and I'm critical of progressivism, but I couldn't really find a
place that would fit in the book, because it would make a chapter way too long. But I am happy to be a person who has the right to think I'm too nice to the left. And the left think I'm too nice to the right. And the right thing, I'm critical of them and the left think I'm critical of them. I think what happened for me in this book is the book of Revelation leans against the right, it leans against the characteristics of
government, that the conservatives in the United States have favored. I feel like I just let the text say what it says, I wasn't trying to be pro progressive or pro left. I wasn't trying to be anti right. But if the text is against economic exploitation, okay. In the United States, the Republicans are the ones who are more enamored with money than the Democrats. Now, I'm not going to say that they're the that either of them is
completely innocent. And the political right in the United States favors militarism. Well, these are two of the major problems with Babylon. So I called it the way I saw it. And at times, I've been critical of the right and at times, I'm critical of the left, then people can say what they want, you know, when you write and nobody criticizes you, you probably didn't have anything to say.
Well, there certainly is plenty to say in Revelation for the rest of us. Who do you think would be the main target for this book? Who are the people that are going to read this and actually apply it to their lives?
I'm really hoping that pastors, preachers, teachers, students in seminaries have theological interests, will read this, in a sense as a textbook, an introduction to a different way of reading Revelation, and a more Thiele political approach. I'm also hoping that people who are driven by the dispensational, or the speculative approach, they're asking the question, who in our modern world, fulfills
the vision of the Antichrist or the beast from the sea, in the book of Revelation? I hope they read it and are challenged and get angry with me and I get under their skin. Because I'm reading it in such a different way. I hope they will. Listen to what I have to say, because God knows that I have listened to them my whole life. And they're in my background all the time. So I'm hoping they will get it. But mostly, I hope lay
people will read this and say, I'm going to pick up the challenge to live in the way of the lamb and challenge the way of the dragon. As I see it in our world today. I want to read the book of Revelation afresh and I'm going to say this book has as much value for our society today,
Scott, I want to thank you for all your writings over so many years but especially this new book, which I think will shed new light for many people revelation for the rest of us a prophetic call to follow Jesus as a dissident disciple. I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that you can find the book and other places that you can find Scott and his writings. But Scott, thank you so much for spending time with us today on Bleeding Daylight.
Well, thank you so much, Rodney, for having me, and again, I love to hear that Australian accent.
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