Adriana, a football fan, wrote a letter to her friend who also really liked following and watching football games. In the letter, Adriana described a high school football game she went to recently like this:
“It was raining cats and dogs as if the sky had sprung a leak, but the game marched on as if the gridiron were Noah’s front yard. The quarterback was trying to thread the needle through a secondary playing tighter than a drum. Some of the fans were hollering that the offense needed to stop shooting themselves in the foot with their false starts and do a better job of establishing the run.
By the second half, the field had turned into a mud pit worthy of a hog-calling contest, and the players were slipping and sliding like greased lightning. The defense was bringing the house with all-out blitzes on three straight downs. Finally, midway through the fourth quarter, our junior kicker split the uprights. The score held, and that missed point-after attempt in the first quarter didn’t come back to haunt our squad.”
If you aren’t familiar with American football, then Adriana’s report on the game would be kind of confusing to you.
Now just try to imagine how strange and confusing that letter would sound to a young girl in a little fishing village in a faraway country who knew nothing about America, football, or the figures of speech in the English language, like “shooting themselves in the foot.” That young girl would have to see everything through the eyes of the friend Adriana wrote the letter to in order to understand its meaning.
The Book of Revelation
Have you ever heard about the Antichrist, or the mark of the beast, 666? How about stars falling from heaven, earthquakes and wars, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse at the end of the world?
Those are all images from the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, which is full of strange language, numbers, and symbols that some say foretells what will happen at the end of the world.
Here we are in modern times reading Revelation kind of like the young girl in the faraway fishing village reading Adriana’s letter, not really understanding that “raining cats and dogs” doesn’t mean that thousands of cats and dogs are actually falling out of the sky.
So, what do all of those weird visions and scary beasts and such we hear about in stories about the end of the world actually mean? Is Revelation a play-by-play, exact preview of what’s going to happen to us at the end of the world?
Nah.
Next, we’ll take a closer look at it all.
