Editorials
revelation as a mirror
To many Christians the Book of Revelation reads like Alice in Wonderland
meets Star Wars – bizarre characters, other-worldly images and scary portent.
What are we to make of a dragon with seven heads ready to devour the child of
the Woman Clothed with the Sun, a blood-spattered lamb opening seven seals
on a scroll, a Holy City descending out of heaven? But we are not detached
spectators, left to marvel at these special effects from a safe distance. This is a
story for us and about us. Plunging into the symbolism may seem like a Fun
House mirror, distorting the way we see ourselves. But now that we have the
revealed internal sense to guide us, Revelation is every bit a mirror – reflecting
who we are, and illuminating where we need to be.
The literal Book of Revelation is abstract and inscrutable – like a complex
painting that invites interpretation but defies consensus. Scholars have
struggled through the ages to make sense of it all – their efforts sincere but
doomed because only the Lord can reveal the spiritual meaning. We in the
New Church are blessed to have that revelation – to know that it describes
both a judgment on the world and on the state of the church within us. And
that beyond all those dark and scary images is not the destruction of our planet
but the promise of “a new heaven and a new earth” coming as “the bright and
morning star” of hope and triumph.
The concept of Revelation as a prophecy of the Last Judgment is common
in Christianity. Generally it is understood as the cataclysmic end of creation,
of earth destroyed by fire. The dead rise up for judgment, with the evil cast into
hell and the good taken up into heaven. We know that this judgment actually
took place in the spiritual world in 1757, that spiritual freedom was restored
so that we are free to choose between heaven and hell, but that the fallout from
the judgment still ripples all around us.
This judgment is known as the “apocalypse,” but the root of that word
is not to destroy but to uncover or reveal. That is just what we are given in
Apocalypse Explained and Apocalypse Revealed – a spiritual revelation not
about fire and chaos but a peaceful and inspiring image of a new heaven, a
new church, a whole new world.
What is most significant about the Last Judgment and the Second Coming