Tag: Revelation

In the Box: New Titles from New Growth Press & IVP

~ Bob Hayton ~ Leave a comment

“In the Box” posts highlight new books I’ve received in the mail.

I periodically showcase new titles that arrive at my doorstep in posts like this. Today’s post highlights two books that I am eager to read. One is an award-winning book to help both parents and youth ministers in reaching teens, and another is a biblical theology of the book of Revelation.

Alongside: Loving Teenagers with the Gospel by Drew Hill (New Growth Press)

This book stands out, both for its content and flashy design. As a parent of three teenagers I am motivated by the subject matter. And once I heard that this book was selected as a finalist for the ECPA Christian Book Award, I knew I wanted to get my hands on a copy and feature it here on my blog. I look forward to interacting more with this book in the near future.

To learn more about this book, you can watch the book trailer, or visit www.AlongsideTeenagers.com. You can purchase this book, by checking out the book’s product page at Amazon, Christianbook.com, Westminster Bookstore, or direct from New Growth Press.

All Things New: Revelation as Canonical Capstone by Brian J. Tabb (IVP Academic)

This book intrigued me in part because I know the author (sort of). I took a class on Hebrew that he co-taught several years ago at The Bethlehem Institute (before it became Bethlehem College and Seminary). Brian Tabb now has a PhD from London School of Theology and is academic dean and associate professor of Biblical Studies at Bethlehem. Beyond my brief connection with the author, this book appeals to me on its own merit. It approaches Revelation as a capstone of the canon, and is in IVP’s excellent New Studies in Biblical Theology series. I love reading biblical theology and am looking forward to digging in to this promising book.

To learn more about this title, check out the book’s product page at Amazon, Christianbook.com, Westminster Bookstore, or IVP Academic.

Disclaimer: My thanks go out to both New Growth Press and IVP for review copies of these titles.

Sermon Download: Heaven’s Rest (Revelation 7:9-17)

~ Bob Hayton ~ Leave a comment

This past Sunday I once again had the privilege of delivering the Sunday morning sermon, as a stand-in for our pastor. My theme this time was heaven, and the rest we can look forward to after our experience as strangers and pilgrims on this earth. Revelation contains a special blessing for those who read this book (Rev. 1:3), and I certainly felt blessed as I studied the book and especially my text, which was from chapter 7. I trust this message will be a blessing to you all.

If you don’t have time to listen to the entire sermon (46 minutes), please do look over my notes.

Place: The Heights Church, St. Paul
Date: Mar. 17, 2019
Title: Heaven’s Rest
Text: Revelation 7:9-17
Notes: Download PDF
Audio Link: Click to visit the sermon audio download link

“God Dwells Among Us: Expanding Eden to the Ends of the Earth” by G.K. Beale and Mitchell Kim

~ Bob Hayton ~ 1 Comment

God Dwells Among UsChristians who love the Bible, should love biblical theology. More than any other discipline, biblical theology has the power to take the student on an exciting journey into the overall meaning of the biblical text. Early on in my study of biblical theology, I was told about the transformative power of one particular book and one particular biblical theme. That book was The Temple and the Church’s Mission by G.K. Beale (IVP). Eventually I read through that book and now agree with all the praise that was heaped upon it.

Beale’s work on the temple, showing how that theme is developed from Eden all the way to the New Jerusalem, can be truly transformative. Beale is not the only scholar to uncover this biblical theme, but his book perhaps more than any other, has advanced our understanding of all that is meant by God’s pledge to dwell with man in a visible temple.

The one drawback to Beale’s earlier title was that it was quite difficult to work through. Beale is exhaustive in his treatment of primary and secondary literature. He builds cases for each of the NT allusions he finds to OT passages. He interacts with the second temple Judaistic writings in his effort to understand what the people of the Bible’s day would have thought when they heard various images and themes about the temple. All of that reads more like a theological tome than a helpful and practical book for church use.

Finally, Beale has updated his original book and simplified it. Many thanks are due Mitchell Kim, a pastor who has used Beale’s material and also developed his own on the same theological topic. Together (and with the help of IVP) they have created a readable, shorter version of Beale’s original title, and even advanced beyond that book with more fully developed application of this theme for practical church ministry.

This new work, God Dwells Among Us: Expanding Eden to the Ends of the Earth by G.K. Beale and Mitchell Kim (IVP), is going to be my go-to book to give people interested in biblical theology. It applies biblical theology for the church and will be useful for lay teachers, pastors and Bible students everywhere.

God Dwells Among Us is well written, clear and concise. It provides numerous applications, and takes the time to show how the interpreters arrive at their conclusions. The book does not directly take on dispensationalism, but does explain certain assumptions which may provide a reason as to why many modern Christians have not seen the full nature of the temple theme as applicable to Church today. This volume also doesn’t tackle all the questions posed in the bigger work. It doesn’t directly deal with Ezekiel’s temple all that much, and it doesn’t major on ancient cosmology as a way of understanding the Eden = Temple image. You will have to get the larger work for those questions.

The book includes a helpful discussion on typology and is much more fully developed, pastorally, than the older work. I appreciate too, that the punchline and the take-home application, are not saved for the end, but over and over throughout the book applications are made to the NT understanding of the OT teaching on the Temple and how this applies to us today.

I highly recommend this book. This is a must read theology book for everyone!

Book Trailer:

To learn more about the book, view this brief video of Greg Beale talking about this book.

Pick up a copy of this book at any of the following online retailers: Westminster Bookstore, Amazon, ChristianBook.com, or direct from IVP.

Disclaimer: This book was provided by InterVarsity Press. The reviewer was under no obligation to offer a positive review.

On Approaching Revelation Literally

~ Bob Hayton

I’ve been thinking about the relative merits of approaching the book of Revelation with the aim of taking all the visions and judgments literally as opposed to symbolicly. Rev. 1:1 does say that John has a message for us to know, but it says more than this. This message was “signified” to John (this is the alternate reading in the footnote of the NASB, the main text has “communicated”). The word for “signified” is semaino, which means to “communicate by symbols.” So John in effect is answering our question: he is telling us his book communicates via symbolism.

For more help on the question of how to approach Revelation I turned to Invitation to Biblical Interpretation by Andreas J. Köstenberger and Richard D. Patterson for help. Their book is endorsed by a wide assortment of conservative evangelical scholars and is the best work on hermeneutics I’ve ever read. (Read my reiew here.) I found their comments on this question insightful.

What could be wrong with interpreting apocalyptic literature such as Revelation literally? The main problem with such an approach is that it inadequately considers that the literary genre of a given text establishes the rules for how it should be interpreted. Meaning is intrinsically bound up with genre.119 It follows that genre provides a context assigned by the author to communicate meaning. We have already shown that the genre of Revelation is prophetic-apocalyptic. The apocalyptic genre, by definition, is highly symbolic and not intended to be interpreted in a literal manner. For this reason, a rigid literal interpretation or literalism may actually obscure the author’s intended meaning rather than expose it. Kevin Vanhoozer correctly poses a distinction between the literal sense and literalism.120 If the interpreter is concerned with authorial intention, the literal sense must not be reduced merely to letters, langue, or locutions. Vanhoozer contends that “literalistic reading is less than fully ‘literal’–that it is insufficiently and only ‘thinly’ literal–insofar as it ignores the role of authorial intentions and communicative acts.”121 What Vanhoozer means by this is that the literal–but not the “literalistic”–sense is what the author intended to convey by a given text; this, in turn, is especially true for figurative and symbolic language. In other words, if Revelation is prophetic-apocalyptic in nature, ascribing literalism to its numbers, proper nouns, and other images may actually prevent a proper understanding of John’s intended meaning.122 A more profitable hermeneutical approach is to reverse the interpretive order by placing the symbolic in the foreground while shifting the literal into the background. Thus, rather than positing the dictum “When the literal makes sense, seek no other sense,” we suggest that a better maxim in interpreting apocalyptic is “Start out with the assumption that a given statement or image is figurative rather than literal.”

G.K. Beale makes a strong case for the primacy of the symbolic over straight one-to-one literal correspondence.123 He argues that semaino in Revelation 1:1 conveys the idea of “communication by symbols,”124 noting that the normal usage of semaino in Scripture implies some type of “symbolic communication.”125 Since Revelation is a symbolic means of communication, the literal approach for interpreting the “plain sense” of the image may actually distort the intended meaning of the text. Beale maintains, “Of course, some parts are not symbolic, but the essence of the book is figurative. Where there is lack of clarity about whether something is symbolic, the scales of judgement should be tilted in the direction of a nonliteral analysis.”126 For reasons such as these, the symbolic plane should be considered primary while care should be taken not to reduce the meaning of symbols to something exclusively spiritual.

(pg. 550-551)

Footnotes
119 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 236.
120 Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 310.
121 Ibid, 311.
122 Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 90.
123 Beale, Book of Revelation, 50-55.
124 Ibid, 52.
125 Ibid, 51. See the discussion of the allusion to Daniel 2:28-30 (LXX) in Revelation 1:1.
126 Ibid, 52.

The authors go on in their book to explain how Revelation itself, through John’s extensive use of the Old Testament (quoting and alluding to OT Scripture, as well as making use of well known OT symbols), helps us when it comes to discerning when and where symbolism exists and how to interpret it.

For my part, knowing that the author intended his book to “communicate by symbols” (Rev. 1:1) as an apocalyptic book, requires me to take this into account as I approach this great book.