Wednesday, May 25, 2016

A Pre-Tribber on interpreting Revelation Chronologically

They and various forms of "Mid-Trib" like me seem to be the only ones inclined to take it Chronologically.

https://gracethrufaith.com/ask-a-bible-teacher/reading-revelation-chronologically/


Reading Revelation Chronologically


Q. John’s gospel is the least chronological of the four gospels. Events are out of order and a very unequal amount of verses are applied to certain events versus other events in Jesus’ life. So it would seem unlikely then that John’s book of Revelation would be completely in time order. Perhaps some parts of the Revelation are chronological, and others are placed thematically. This is a critical issue, since from reading your material it appears the primary basis of your belief in pre-Trib is because Rev 4 & 5 in chapter order precede the rest of the book. Can you please enlighten me as to how you see it and why?
A. I’ve read lots of opinions about whether the Revelation is chronological or not, and the only exceptions to a chronological reading that makes sense to me are;
1) John could only write about one thing at a time so there are places where multiple things are happening together and he could only describe them one at a time,
2) where he brought a particular subject to its conclusion before back tracking to pick up another train of thought, or
3) where he’s providing some background to help us understand something. These are all obvious. Otherwise, I don’t think it makes sense to depart from a chronological reading.
It’s not fair to compare the Revelation with John’s gospel. In the Revelation John was essentially “taking dictation” from the Lord, and the writing style is so different that some scholars debate whether he even wrote it.
Finally, there are several much stronger proofs for a pre-trib rapture that make a chronological reading of Revelation unnecessary to support the case for one.
My first objection is that taking it chronologically inherently helps Pre-Trib, Pre-Trib sees The Rapture not in Revelation at all so really it's chronology should be irrelevant to them.  I see it clearly in the middle of the book, from the latter part of Chapter 11 through chapter 14, with the key moment being The Rapture of the Man-Child.

1), His intent was clearly to try as much as possible to write things down as he saw them.

2), Certain subjects ARE clearly scattered about, the book is clearly not organized by subject, even The Beast gets a reference before his formal introduction.

3), This I assume is mainly about the mystery of the Seven heads, and maybe the various time statements.

The reason Revelation's Authorship confuses people is indeed because it was really written by Jesus with John as his stenographer.  It's actually wrong to say Jesus wrote none of The Bible.

Since Jack Kelly knows John's Gospel is the least Chronological, I wonder if he is wiling to admit Jesus ministry wasn't three years but only one tops.

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