Smyrna

Armchair Apocalypse: Nicanor Continues His Journey

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Nicanor is the main character in our short historical fiction episodes showing how the Book of Revelation may have first traveled from Patmos in the Aegean Sea in the first century to the churches in Asia Minor—and eventually to the whole world and people in every age since.

During this “Armchair Apocalypse” series, we’ll follow Nicanor on his travels to better understand the Book of Revelation by exploring the people and the times in which it was first revealed.

Nicanor and the Road Beyond Smyrna

The last words of John’s letter still hung in the crowded upstairs room.

“Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer…. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” — Revelation 2:10, KJV

No one spoke for several moments. Below them, Smyrna continued as if nothing had happened. Merchants shouted in the street. Carts rattled over stone. Somewhere near the harbor, a priest called citizens to offer incense for the emperor. Rome’s noise had not stopped—but something inside the room had changed.

At dawn, Nicanor rolled the scroll carefully, wrapped it against the sea air, and placed it inside his leather bag. His next destination was Pergamum. As he tightened the strap, the church’s elder, a gray-bearded man named Justus, handed him bread, dried figs, and a small flask of water.

“John wrote that we will have tribulation,” Nicanor said. “Some in the room looked frightened. Do they believe something worse is coming?”

Justus glanced toward the street. “Something worse is always coming when men worship power. But tribulation is already here.”

He picked up an olive from the morning meal and pressed it between his fingers. “The word John used means pressure—the kind that crushes grapes or olives until what is inside comes out. Rome applies that pressure every day. Honor Caesar. Join the feast. Offer the incense. Call him lord. Most people think it is harmless. A pinch of incense, a few words, and everyone goes home happy.”

“Except those who refuse,” Nicanor said.

“Exactly. A merchant may lose his customers. A craftsman may be pushed out of his guild. A family may lose its home. Some will be imprisoned. Some may die.” Justus looked back toward the room where several believers still slept. “Tribulation reveals what is inside us. Fear—or faithfulness.”

Nicanor thought about the phrase “ten days” from Johns letter. “Does John mean their suffering will last only ten days?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it is a symbol, like much of the vision. Daniel and his friends were tested for ten days. Whatever John means, the message is clear: the suffering has a limit. Rome does not decide how the story ends.”

Nicanor lifted the bag onto his shoulder. “Then how should they prepare?”

Justus smiled faintly. “Not by hiding in caves with baskets of grain.”

He pointed toward the believers upstairs. “We prepare by knowing who we belong to before the pressure comes. We feed the families of prisoners. We care for those who lose work. We teach our children that Caesar is not Lord. We refuse to become cruel when cruel men rule us. And when one of us becomes afraid, the others stand beside him.”

Nicanor looked north toward the road to Pergamum. Another city. Another church. Another place where Roman power demanded what belonged only to God.

Justus gripped his arm before he left. “Tell them in Pergamum what you saw here.”

“What did I see?”

“A frightened church listening to a dangerous letter,” Justus said, “and deciding to remain faithful anyway.”

Nicanor stepped into the waking street. Behind him stood Smyrna, proud, wealthy, and loyal to Rome. Ahead waited Pergamum, where John had written that Satan’s throne stood.

Tribulation, Nicanor now understood, was not merely a disaster scheduled for some later time or distant generation. It was the pressure every empire applied when it demanded the heart, mind, and obedience of God’s people.

The faithful prepared for it by deciding—before the pressure came—whom they would worship.

Armchair Apocalypse: What Is ‘Great Tribulation’

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We’ll be looking closely at questions and answers about “The Great Tribulation” in a four-part series, starting with Part One here.

Part One: Does Revelation Actually Describe a Seven-Year Tribulation?

Ask most prophecy teachers about the Great Tribulation and you’ll probably get a detailed seven-year timeline involving the Antichrist, the Beast, global war, and judgments arriving one after another.

You might even get a chart.

But if we’re going to understand Revelation, we should begin with what the book actually says—not with the chart.

The phrase “great tribulation” appears in Revelation 7:14, where John sees a huge crowd standing before God:

“These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” — Revelation 7:14, KJV

The Greek word translated “tribulation,” thlipsis, means pressure, distress, affliction, or suffering. It was not a special word reserved only for a future end-times disaster. In fact, John opens Revelation by calling himself his readers’ “companion in tribulation” (Revelation 1:9).

The believers in Smyrna were also experiencing tribulation and were warned that some of them would be imprisoned (Revelation 2:9–10). In Pergamum, a believer named Antipas had already been killed (Revelation 2:13).

For those Christians, tribulation wasn’t a theological theory. They lived under Roman authority in cities where emperor worship was part of public life. Refusing to honor Caesar and the Roman gods could cost them friendships, employment, freedom, or life itself.

Revelation does mention periods of 42 months, 1,260 days, and “a time, times, and half a time.” Each equals approximately three and a half years and draws from the symbolic language of Daniel. What Revelation does not do is combine two of those periods, call the result seven years, and name it “the Great Tribulation.”

The familiar seven-year scenario comes from connecting Revelation with a particular interpretation of Daniel’s seventieth week and several other passages. That may be a valid theological argument, but readers should know that the complete system is assembled from several texts. It is not plainly laid out in Revelation.

So What?

John’s first readers probably weren’t calculating how many years remained before suffering began. They were trying to remain faithful while suffering was already happening.

That changes the question. Instead of beginning with, “When will the Great Tribulation happen?” perhaps we should first ask:

What did tribulation mean within the Jewish and biblical world John’s readers already knew?

We’ll look at that in Part Two.

Armchair Apocalypse: Nicanor And The Horsemen

Rick TryonLeave a comment

Nicanor is the main character in our short historical fiction episodes showing how the Book of Revelation may have first traveled from Patmos in the Aegean Sea in the first century to the churches in Asia Minor—and eventually to the whole world and people in every age since.

During this “Armchair Apocalypse” series, we’ll follow Nicanor on his travels to better understand the Book of Revelation by exploring the people and the times in which it was first revealed.

Nicanor heard the horses before he saw them. Hooves struck the hard Roman road north of Ephesus, and he instinctively moved aside. Four Roman soldiers appeared around the bend, mounted and armed, their cloaks shifting in the afternoon wind. Nicanor lowered his eyes and pulled his own cloak tighter around the leather-wrapped scroll hidden beneath it. John’s Revelation. If the wrong Roman decided to search him, his trip to Smyrna could end considerably sooner than planned. As the riders passed, however, another image flashed through his mind: four horses—white, red, black and pale.

Nicanor had lived long enough to know that armies rarely arrived alone. He remembered soldiers entering a village when he was younger—the shouting, terrified families, grain taken from storerooms, animals slaughtered, fields abandoned. Conquest came first. Then violence. Then hunger. Then death. Suddenly John’s strange vision didn’t seem strange at all. The white rider went forth conquering. The red rider took peace from the earth. The black rider carried scales while food became ruinously expensive. And the pale horse followed them all, carrying the simplest and ugliest name imaginable: Death.

People hearing Revelation in the churches of Asia Minor didn’t need a prophecy seminar to understand that sequence. Rome celebrated military conquest, while the feared Parthians beyond Rome’s eastern frontier were famous mounted archers—the sort of warriors John’s bow-carrying horseman could immediately bring to mind. War could devastate crops and disrupt grain supplies. John’s black horse described wheat costing about an entire day’s wage for a day’s food. Imagine working all day just to buy enough bread to survive until tomorrow. That wasn’t spooky symbolism to John’s audience. It was nightmare economics.

The soldiers disappeared down the road, leaving only dust behind them. Nicanor finally exhaled. He understood something modern readers sometimes miss: John wasn’t inventing monsters to scare people two thousand years later. He was taking realities his first readers already feared—conquest, bloodshed, famine and death—and turning them into four unforgettable riders. The imagery also reached deeper into Israel’s Scriptures, where sword, famine, pestilence and beasts were familiar images of judgment.

Nicanor touched the scroll beneath his cloak and continued toward Smyrna. Rome looked unstoppable. Its soldiers rode the roads. Its emperors ruled nations. Its armies conquered kingdoms. But in John’s vision, even the horsemen didn’t ride whenever they pleased. The Lamb opened the seals. That was the real message.

Nicanor smiled.

Rome wasn’t running history after all.

Armchair Apocalypse: Nicanor And The Antichrists

Rick TryonLeave a comment

Nicanor is the main character in our short historical fiction episodes showing how the Book of Revelation may have first traveled from Patmos in the Aegean Sea in the first century to the churches in Asia Minor—and eventually to the whole world and people in every age since.

During this “Armchair Apocalypse” series, we’ll follow Nicanor on his travels to better understand the Book of Revelation by exploring the people and the times in which it was first revealed.

The last words of John’s Revelation still hung in the cramped upstairs room in Ephesus. Oil lamps flickered against plaster walls as perhaps twenty believers sat shoulder to shoulder—Jews, Greeks, slaves, merchants, men and women. Jacob ben Ezra, the church elder, had read John’s letter aloud in Greek, and nobody had checked the time. They had heard about beasts, Babylon, persecution, judgment—and a slain Lamb who ultimately conquers.

They knew Rome’s power firsthand. When John wrote of an arrogant empire demanding allegiance and persecuting God’s people, they didn’t need a prophecy chart. They knew what oppressive power looked like. And when they heard Christ say, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” they understood that following Jeshua the Messiah might actually cost them theirs.

By sunrise, Nicanor was preparing to leave. He pulled a rough wool cloak over his knee-length tunic, tightened his leather sandals, and secured John’s precious scroll inside a leather wrapping beneath his cloak. Outside, Ephesus was waking up. Merchants shouted in Greek along its broad marble-paved streets. Carts rattled over stone. Sailors called from the harbor. Somewhere beyond the rooftops towered the magnificent Temple of Artemis—a constant reminder that Christianity was definitely not the hometown religion.

Jacob walked with Nicanor toward the road leading north. Before they separated, the elder lowered his voice. “John warned us that many antichrists have already come.” Nicanor knew the words from John’s teaching. An antichrist wasn’t merely some mysterious supervillain waiting thousands of years in the future. John had warned believers about deceivers already operating in their own world—people denying Christ and opposing the truth. “Even now are there many antichrists,” John had written (1 John 2:18 KJV). Jacob gripped Nicanor’s shoulder. “Watch whom you trust.”

Nicanor understood the danger. The scroll hidden beneath his cloak contained language about beasts, kings, Babylon, judgment, and a kingdom that would outlast every earthly empire. To believers, it was hope written in symbols they could recognize from the Hebrew Scriptures and their own world. To Roman authorities who understood its implications, it could sound dangerously subversive.

The Emperor demanded loyalty. John proclaimed Jesus Christ “King of kings, and Lord of lords.” If the letter were discovered and interpreted as defiance of imperial authority, Nicanor could find himself standing before a magistrate—and giving the authorities another excuse to investigate the churches receiving it.

Nicanor tightened his cloak and started north along the Roman road. Behind him, the noise of Ephesus slowly faded. Ahead lay miles of dusty road, roadside shrines, inns, merchants, soldiers, strangers—and plenty of opportunities for the wrong person to ask the wrong question. Beneath his cloak rested a message Rome could never completely suppress: Empires fall. In the end, every knee will bow, not to the Emperor, but to the resurrected and returning Jesus Christ. Evil loses. God wins. Somewhere farther up the road another small gathering of believers waited to hear the Revelation.

Smyrna.

Armchair Apocalypse: Revelation Mail Call

Rick Tryon1 Comment

Before we imagine dragons, beasts, and mysterious numbers, picture something much more ordinary: a guy walking down a dusty Roman road carrying a scroll.

Most people picture Revelation as a mysterious book that somehow dropped out of heaven. It didn’t. It arrived by mail. Well… first-century Roman mail.

A Scroll Written in Greek

The Book of Revelation was almost certainly written in Koine Greek—the everyday language spoken across much of the Roman Empire. John didn’t type it on a laptop or print a paperback. It was carefully handwritten with ink on a long papyrus scroll.

The Original Delivery Guy

After John wrote Revelation while exiled on the island of Patmos, someone he trusted—possibly a Christian or recently converted Messianic Jewish messenger or elder—likely carried the scroll across the Aegean Sea to Ephesus, the first church listed.

From there, the scroll would have traveled in the order given in Revelation:

Ephesus → Smyrna → Pergamum → Thyatira → Sardis → Philadelphia → Laodicea.

That’s basically a giant postal route through western Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).

At each church, the believers would gather in someone’s home, and one person would stand up and read the entire scroll out loud. Yes… the whole thing.

Imagine hearing Revelation for the very first time with no chapter numbers, no study Bible, and no YouTube prophecy channel telling you what every beast supposedly represents.

“Don’t Add or Take Away”—Why So Serious?

Revelation 22:18 says:

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” (KJV)

John wasn’t warning people not to make notes in the margins. He was warning against changing God’s message.

Since churches depended on handwritten copies, someone could intentionally—or carelessly—alter the text while copying or reading it. John makes it crystal clear: Don’t edit God’s Word to fit your opinions. Don’t soften it. Don’t improve it. Don’t weaponize it. Just pass it on faithfully.

How Long Did It Take?

The entire journey probably took several weeks, perhaps one to two months, depending on weather, sea travel, road conditions, and how long the messenger stayed at each church to read the scroll and allow scribes to begin copying it.

Today we can read Revelation in seconds on our phones, but the first Christians had to wait patiently for a single handwritten scroll to arrive—and when it did, they listened as though God Himself were speaking.

So What?

We don’t have to wait for the letter to arrive. We already have it at our fingertips, 24/7/365.

So, lets take our time and first try to understand what Revelation was saying to the people it was originally written to. If we are patient enough to do that, then we can begin to understand what Revelation means to us today.