In its wonderful “Companion” series at Cascade, David Mathewson, from Denver Seminary, has a splendid and accessible study of the Book of Revelation. His book is called A Companion to the Book of Revelation.

Here’s a reality: lay people across the board think about Revelation through the grid of dispensationalism as taught in the Scofield Bible and in Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism (formerly “Dispensationalism Today”), along with Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come. WMBI and other media have pushed or assumed or had speakers who pushed or assumed dispensationalism, and then along came Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series of books – raise your hand if you’ve read at least one of them! Those books made it because of Scofield and Ryrie and Dallas Theological Seminary and Moody Bible Institute and Biola. Plus the many well-known speakers who dropped occasional comments about Israel and the church and America and the modern state of Israel… and we’re off and running for this blog post and series.

Add to this another reality: NT scholars, apart from those at specific institutions that still require some kind of dispensational eschatology and hermeneutic, operate in a completely different – call it apocalyptic – world. The two talk a different language. Among such there’s little talk of the rapture or the millennium or the state of Israel’s becoming such being something connected to the Bible. They don’t think of the Book of Revelation along the lines of what most people in evangelical churches believe.

At all.

Image: Cover Photo

So, enter David Mathewson’s new book, and we’ll get to his eschatology as the series progresses, but for now I want to zero in on a wonderful chapter that explains the Main Stage Players of the Revelation. Until one adopts the Stage for reading Revelation one will not understand it. One must adopt, in other words, a cosmology of what’s going on in the Kosmos!

The Protagonists:

  1. God, the one seated on the throne
  2. Jesus Christ – Son of Man, Alpha and Omega, King of kings, Lamb, Judge
  3. The Spirit – seven spirits and inspirer of the visions
  4. Angels – zooming in and out of scenes
  5. The people of God, the church – for whom the stage is set: 144,000, 2 witnesses, etc.

The Antagonists:

  1. The Dragon, Satan
  2. The two beasts
  3. Babylon (Rome)
  4. Those who dwell on the earth
  5. The nations
  6. The earth itself

If you don’t embrace that cosmology, this book makes no sense. If you do, it can make sense.

However, for it to make sense, you must also see the world through this cosmology in such a way that you have interpretive grids in place that permit you to interpret the world around us.

Stay tuned. The Stage is now set.