We generally perceive Advent as a preparation period for Christmas, that is, Jesus’s historical first cominarrivesabout—the Therefoworld’s end. However, we were taught in religion that the Advent season is also about the second coming of Christ, when he comes at the end of the world. Can we see a connection between the Apocalypse and Advent?
Yes, it can be linked. I recently wrote an article for our diocesan magazine where I looked at Advent about the second coming of Christ. It is true that during Advent we are very focused on his first coming, which has already happened – so we can remember him as much as possible and give thanks for him – but perhaps it is even more important to remember Jesus’ second coming in the liturgy.
Whether it will be during our lifetime or when we will find ourselves in front of his face after our death, it is always about the fact that at some point we will have to give the account of our dalliances, and therefore it is necessary to prepare for it.
Even the Apocalypse ends with the words: “Come, Lord Jesus!” The Church calls for Jesus Christ to come as soon as possible. And that is Advent.
Most religious laymen probably consider the book of Revelation of the Apostle John to describe the world’s end. But is it really so?
This is the general opinion of the people; many open it wanting to see the hardships and horrors it mentions. Many people then refer to these descriptions in connection with events that are happening in the world, as if the only meaning of the text was to predict this event that occurred almost 2000 years later.
However, when we delve into the symbolic language of this book, we will understand that it wants to describe the whole of human history from the perspective of Easter, that is, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So, it is not a description of the end of the world, although it is also there.
Well, even the end of the world is not presented in the Apocalypse as a description of what it will look like. Still, instead, it is about the fact that history will reach its end one day and move to the new Jerusalem, to the community of love, where there will be no death, sin, or suffering.
We’ll get to that end of the world later in the interview, but tell me about it personally – why did you choose the Apocalypse to study when there are so many disasters? For some, it might even be a depressing read.
Paradoxically, the hope flowing from the Apocalypse appealed to me. The topic of my bachelor’s thesis was the sources of hope in the Apocalypse, focusing primarily on the end where there is a new heaven and a new earth, the symbols of the river of life, the tree of life, and communion with God.
“It doesn’t work like a person receives an external sign and changes their actions based on it, as some people have told me they will be chipped and go to hell.’
It fascinates me that this book is meant to give suffering Christians hope that God is in control. However, by describing their suffering in the world, it is full of all kinds of horrors, but above them is God, who is in control.
What should we know about the book itself before we start reading it? That is unless we are among those who open it because they want to study what it will be like at the end of the world.
When we go to read the Apocalypse, we must know that we have a book that uses symbolic language before us. Without this information, we cannot even begin to read it.
Everything that is found there is expressed in the literary genre of the so-called apocalyptic. It is a particular style of expression through various dreams or visions, in which the author is accompanied by some heavenly intermediary, most often an angel, who accompanies him from one place to another and explains something to him.
Apocalyptic is also typified by the contrast between angels and demons, spiritual struggle, and tries to answer the presence of evil in the world, the final judgment, and the question of eternal life.
David Taniers: Saint John wrote the Book of Revelation in 17th century.
It is not that John woke up and wrote down his dream, or that he described the vision that he saw before his eyes. Everything in the book is well thought out, it is a literary and theological work that is meant to encourage the readers of the book.
If we do not realize this, we will be like those who interpret the Apocalypse based on a literal understanding and try to fit misunderstood things into some events in the world.
So John did not describe what he saw?
Exactly, with the greatest probability bordering on certainty, Ján did not see those facts.
Things that he had thoroughly thought through, prayed over, and experienced with God, he wrote guided by the Holy Spirit in the form of a vision as a message. So let’s not imagine that he picked up a pen after seeing it all before his eyes. I repeat, it is a literary style typical of other works of that time.
Okay, but unlike the events of the Gospels that he experienced firsthand, how did he know the things he described in the Apocalypse?
From his culture and mustJán wrote itthe Old Testament. Almost all the images in the Apocalypse come from Judaism and the Old Testament. For example, when we want to know what the number seven means, we have to go to the Bible and see what it means. In addition to John’s Apocalypse, there were many similar apocalyptic works at the time that influenced each other.
Do biblical scholars have an answer to the question of why John wrote it?
There is a whole debate about which John wrote the Apocalypse. (Smile.)
We know that it was written by Ján, because he himself signs his name like this in the book, but we cannot say with certainty which Ján. From the first tradition from some church fathers, we have identified this John with John the Evangelist, but there are also traditions that say that he was not John the Evangelist.
“Everyone is interested in the number 666 and also the 144 thousand, but I also get questions like: What part of the Apocalypse are we in today, 2023?”
People casually know that the Book of Revelation features a beast and its number 666. But why are there two beasts in the book?
The devil does everything contrary to God. So when, for example, God appears in the Trinity, the devil is also formed into the so-called the demonic trinity – so there is a dragon, a beast from the sea, and then a beast from the earth.
As it were, the dragon is the opposite of the Heavenly Father: someone, the beast from the sea, represents this, who surrenders his power and gives it to the beast rising out of the sea as the antitype of the Son. Roman ships used to come to the island of Patmos from the sea. The Roman Empire is a symbol of corrupt power based on self-indulgence – this is represented by the beast from the sea.
When the author of the Apocalypse turned to land, there he sees a beast coming out of the earth as the antitype of the Holy Spirit, who causes people to worship the first beast, makes great signs and marks people with his mark. Various pagan religions, cults that do not worship the true God, were present on the mainland.
These beasts are like ambassadors of the devil; each has a role to play, but all three work together. By the way, beasts are not something new in the Apocalypse, because in the Book of the Prophet Daniel, which is a typical apocalyptic book of the Old Testament, we find four beasts and describe them with similar characteristics as in the Book of Revelation.
The number of the beast is 666. Almost everyone knows that.
It is very important because it is attributed to everything possible. In chapter 13 we read that the beast from the earth gives a mark on the forearm and on the forehead of those who belong to it. This is the opposite of God marking his servants on the forehead earlier in the seventh chapter.
God has set apart his people in the sense that they have decided to belong to me and are mine. So the beast goes to mark his own. But it doesn’t work in such a way that a person receives some external sign and changes his actions based on it; as some people have told me they will be chipped and go to hell. So how to understand it?
When a person acts like a beast – which is represented by the mark on the hand – and when he thinks like a beast – this is the mark on the forehead – then the beast recognizes him and marks him as mine.
And on the contrary, when a person desires to think and act like God, he gets a sign on his forehead that he belongs to him. We Christians receive it already at baptism; it is an indelible seal of the Holy Spirit, which we can confirm with our actions during our lives or deviate and lean to the side of the beast. Again, the mark is a spiritual mark, not a physical one – no external chip.
And the number 666 itself?
The number six “wants to be” like a seven, but it didn’t get there. Seven means fullness, so six is similar to it but incomplete. It is the number of imperfection and incompleteness. And when something is multiplied three times in the Apocalypse, it means par excellence, so three sixes mean the maximum imperfection we can imagine.
Satan as a dragon (left) bestows power represented by a wand on a beast rising from the sea in a detail of a panel of the medieval Apocalypse tapestry in Angers, France.
Although the devil does everything to resemble God, he remains only that great imperfection.
How should believers behave when they receive the three sixes, for example, on a car brand or a phone number?
In that case, it can be taken as usual because a number is just a number, unless we ourselves give it a value. Because even Ján chooses average numbers, which he uses to express something with them.
The problem arises when we identify with it. For example, when I identify with the beast’s actions in the Apocalypse and get 666 tattooed on my body. However, when the system randomly generates it somewhere, it doesn’t mean anything, just one of the numbers.
Sure, if there’s an option to not have that number, I’d rather change it so I don’t confuse others who might think I’m admitting to it.
From the Apocalypse, the number 144,000 is still very widespread, which speaks of the number of the sons of Israel marked from all the tribes.
Many people still think that so many should be saved, which makes no sense. It is about symbolism and calculation: 12 x 12 x 1000. This number represents the combination of the people of the Old Covenant (twelve tribes of Israel) and the New Covenant (twelve apostles); the thousand is the number of Easter or resurrection.
Together, the number one hundred and forty-four thousand indicates all the faithful people of God in their maximum development in the Church, that is, there are all who belong to God and who are saved, throughout the whole of human history.
When you mentioned the thousand, that is also interesting, because in the 20th chapter of the Apocalypse, a period of a thousand years is said, during which the devil was bound.
It is a difficult topic; there were different interpretations of it. The so-called millenarianism tries to point out that it is a thousand years from the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then the end of the world will come, but we know that this is not the case and that it did not happen.
“When we want to encourage someone, we don’t show them a horror film, but we show them hope. Although the book also describes difficult things, it is from the perspective that it is not out of God’s hands.”
Once again we have before us a symbolic number, the number of Easter. We can understand it as the time of the Church on this earth. The devil was already tied to the cross when Jesus died and rose from the dead, but he is still allowed some action. It was common in the Roman Empire to spare the main enemy and not kill him immediately so that he could have a public trial and then execute him in front of everyone.
So it is with the devil: he was released only to be swept away definitively to hell at Jesus’ second, glorious coming, and the thousand years mark the time of the Church on this earth during which he is allowed limited activity.
In the beginning, we talked about color symbols…
Colors are important. For example, when we go to the fourth chapter, we find there four riders on horses.
Horses symbolize a power that is greater than humans. The first rider sits on a white horse. White is a positive color, the color of resurrection, and in chapter 19 the rider on the white horse represents Jesus Christ. So the first to go is apparently Jesus.
The other horse is red – the color of blood or violence; it means something we cannot control. Next was the black horse, which is also a negative color of death and suffering, and then there is the color fawn, pale in some translations, meaning plague or some kind of disease.
The three horses are the different ways of man’s death, but before all of them, Jesus rides on a white horse, representing the resurrection that embraces all, regardless of how a man dies.
A well-known image is the “woman clothed with the sun”, which is generally understood to be the Virgin Mary. But who does the “woman sitting on the scarlet beast” symbolize?
Even with the woman dressed in the sun, it is not so clear. Many people only understand her as the Virgin Mary, and we can really see her in her, but that is not the first meaning of the image.
The first meaning is God’s people who are clothed with God’s graces. We know it, for example, by the twelve stars, because twelve is the number of God’s people in the Book of Revelation.
God’s people bring the Messiah to this world, and the devil persecutes God’s people. Of course, the Virgin Mary is the perfect representative of God’s people, but John sees God’s people in the woman clothed with the sun, and in the prostitute sitting on the beast in the 17th chapter, she sees the anti-God’s people, that is, the people who do not consciously want to belong to God.
Why is he depicted as a harlot?
When Israel was unfaithful to God, for example the prophets Ezekiel, Hosea or other prophets presented her as a prostitute. In the Apocalypse, it symbolizes the whole people who do not want to live according to God’s commands, but only according to their own desires.
Does Babylon also represent an unfaithful people?
The Babylonian captivity was a trauma for the nation of Israel, essentially the most significant crisis they had experienced up to that point. Babylon represented the people who did not allow them to live their religious faith, who distanced them from the meeting place with God, from Jerusalem.
So, if they are to describe a people who oppose God in general, they give it the symbolic name Babylon.
Let’s talk about the structure of the book. At the beginning there are letters to the churches, should we take it only as an introduction or is it significant?
Biblical scholars divide the Apocalypse into two unbalanced parts, the first is the first three chapters and the second is the entire rest up to the 22nd chapter.
In that first part, Jesus appears in glory to John to show him he is in control. In his right hand he holds seven stars, which are seven representatives of church communities. This vision of the first chapter is necessary for John to receive the message that will follow.
A woman clothed in the sun. Clarence Larkin: The Book of Revelation (1919).
In the second and third chapters, Jesus tells John to send a message to seven church communities; seven is like fullness, meaning that Jesus turns to the whole Church and calls it to repentance through his word. So the first part talks about the formation of the Church through the word of God.
In the second part, from the 4th chapter, Jesus invites the whole world to conversion, but no longer through his word, because the world does not know his word, so he invites him through various events and happenings in the world to repent.
Shouldn’t we understand the book’s second part as a description of the end of the world, but rather as the history of salvation?
Basically, we have very little about the end of the world, only at the end. If we talk about the second part of the Apocalypse, we first follow the description of the heavenly hall, it is the entire fourth chapter. God sits on the throne and has everything under his feet and under control.
In the fifth chapter, the Lamb enters, and receives from God the Father, sitting on the throne, a scroll, which apparently contains the entire history of human history. He has to start breaking the seals because each reveals something about the functioning of the world. We understand that only Jesus Christ, by dying and rising from the dead, can give meaning to what is happening in the world.
For example, if we take the twelfth chapter, we see there that the woman clothed with the sun is presented as pregnant, so it is a tense expectation of the Messiah. This is how he presents to us the people of the Old Covenant, who are waiting and preparing for his coming.
This is followed by the birth of Jesus Christ, after which this woman goes to the desert and is nourished by God there for 1,260 days. It is symbolic – three and a half years (half of the number seven) represents the limited time of this earthly pilgrimage.
I want to show that in just one chapter, we have the people of the Old Covenant, the coming of Jesus, and the people of the New Covenant. So those situations do not describe the end of the world, but all the tension between good and evil, between the devil and God’s people, during every single epoch.
Is there anything in the Book of Revelation that can be grasped regarding the end of the world? Something handy?
For example, we also hear about judgment.” in the apocalyptic parts of the Gospels. However, it should not be forgotten that in the Book of Revelation everything is expressed symbolically, not literally “as it will be”.
In the Book of Revelation we also have the final battle described, when the devil in the form of a dragon comes out again with greater power to mobilize all the nations to seduce them. He gathers all the armies and the people who want to cooperate with him in the fight against God’s people and surrounds them, but fire comes down from heaven and consumes them all.
So, before the final battle, God will solve it all. Then the book describes a white throne and the one who sits on it begins to judge. And it is written there: “Earth and heaven fled before his face, and there was no more place for them” (Revelation 20:11).
So this could be a concrete element of the end of the world, which speaks of the fact that at the end there will be a final judgment on evil and its condemnation. Other verses describe only the heavenly Jerusalem, that is, the communion of the people with God.
Well, that new Jerusalem is something do not find in,h abundance in other biblical books.
What does it tell us about heaven?
It describes a joyful community in the form of a city. It acts as a continuation of the Book of Genesis, that is, after God created paradise and placed man there, after his loss and all that drama of human history, God again created everything anew and even differently, renewed, in the form of a city, in the center of which is the Lamb and river of life.
But even here you can’t grasp something concrete in the sense of what it will be like in heaven, right?
No, no, it still remains in the spirit of the Gospel words that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him” (2 Cor 2, 9).
In the Apocalypse we read about the principles on which heaven will be built, for example, that God will be in the midst of his people and everything will be animated by something like a river of life, which is the Holy Spirit, but we cannot find there how it will work. That remains a mystery.
From the beginning, did people tend to associate the descriptions in the Apocalypse with current events?
It seems so. In the first centuries, the Book of Revelation was interpreted in the spirit of Easter, but even then it was read in the light of events in the world and its texts were explained from a historical point of view, for example, for everyone, the beast was the Roman Empire.
The turning point came when scenes from the Apocalypse began to be painted and depicted; this brought even more confusion and less understanding of this book.
Why?
Because those symbols should be interpreted one by one. When the Lamb has seven horns, it means that he has the fullness of power. When it has seven eyes, it means the fullness of knowledge. It’s Jesus, but I can’t draw the whole thing, or it will turn into a monster. As the symbols of the Apocalypse began to be painted, people were only left with the monstrous image.
At the same time, for Christians at the time when this book was written, it was a book of encouragement to be able to remind themselves that they may suffer and be persecuted now, but Jesus is in control and invites us to persevere in trials and secure the crown life. That is the message of the Apocalypse.
