Season 3 Podcast 56 Letters of John to the Seven Churches Pt VIII Thyatira
Letters of John to the Seven Churches, Pt VIII: Thyatira
One way to read the Book of Revelation is to treat it as a chiasm. Chiasm is a form of Hebrew poetry in which the end is a repetition of the beginning. In other words, the first three chapters of the Book of Revelation are repeated in the last three or four chapters of the Book of Revelation. It takes the form of ABCCBA. It isn’t an exact repetition. That would be meaningless. The information is in the differences.
However, you will find similar phrases, but more importantly, you will find that the images of the end of the Book of Revelation are the key to understanding the images of the beginning of the Book of Revelation. They are mutually dependent. One is incomplete without the other. I am going to use chiasm to analyze the letter of John to the church of Thyatira.
First, we are working with two time periods. The first three chapters relate to the seven churches in the first century AD. They are actual churches in actual cities that have been proven to exist during the first century AD. The letters, though addressed to real people, speak of a future time.
The last four chapters of the Book of Revelation occur in that future time. It is two thousand years later, at the beginning of the Millennium, during the Second Coming of Christ. Among other things, we know that because the description of Christ in Chapter One describes Christ as he appeared to John shortly after his resurrection, and the description of Christ in Chapter Nineteen is clearly the Christ of the Second Coming. The images tell everything.
The two time periods are very clear. The first time period, or the period in which the seven letters were written to the churches, occurred sometime during the first century AD. Christ has been crucified and resurrected. John, one of the first apostles, is a prisoner on the isle of Patmos, so we know that the vision occurred between 35 AD and 100 AD, probably toward the latter end of the century. The church is rapidly growing among the gentiles and clashes with Roman idolatry and idolatrous practices.
The vision of John, however, is not limited to the first century AD. It covers the entire history of the world. Therefore, the first part of Revelation refers to the Christian church of the first century. The latter part of Revelation refers to the Second Coming of Christ, two thousand years later, at the beginning of the Millennial reign prophesied by Isaiah and John and carries us to the end.
The only way we can understand the imagery of the letters is to keep in mind both time periods.
In Revelation 2 & 3, Christ is talking about what will come. In Revelation 19-22, Christ is talking as if the future has already come. It is a truly brilliant transition, and the blessings are even greater than the church had imagined for Christ gives more details.
I shall refer to the first three chapters of Revelation as The First Century AD and the last chapters of Revelation as the Millennium. I shall connect the two time periods through the use of parallelism. In other words, with Linda’s help, I shall quote directly from the letter to the church of Thyatira in the period during the first century AD. And through the use of parallelism, meaning the repetition of images, I shall select those passages of scripture from the end of Revelation that point directly back to the letter written to the church of Thyatira.
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