With all of this,
what must be discerned is that the Revelation is not necessarily here looking
to a future event in the sense of a prediction. Rather, in the midst of a
world dominated by Rome, its Caesar, its armies, and its self-exaltation, which
is the same world in which Jesus has undergone Rome’s greatest punishment and
assertion of its own authority and claim to all-encompassing dominion and been
resurrected from the dead, and in which the kingdom of the Creator God is said
to have been on the march through the Gospel proclamation of Jesus as the true
King of kings and Lord of lords (rivaling Caesar’s claim), what can be seen
here in this apocalyptic triumphus of Jesus is a confirmation that the God of
Israel, through His Christ, has already conquered the conqueror (whoever and
whatever that conqueror may be).
Not only has Rome and
its supposedly divine ruler been judged and defeated, but the power that stands
behind Rome, which was that of death, has been judged and defeated as
well. Therefore, the church of the Christ (in the first century and
indeed for all time), to whom the work of Revelation is addressed, need not
fear any temporal claims to power or persecution. Those who claim
allegiance to the world’s true King need not be downcast, though they may find
themselves in the midst of oppression and persecution, and even though they may
experience a continuous flow of evidence that seems to run contrary to their
claim.
Most definitely then,
with Rome squarely placed within the Creator God’s purview as the entity that
has fallen under His judgment, which was evidenced by the author of Revelation co-opting
the familiar language of the Roman “triumph,” followers of Jesus must not
celebrate the idea or ideals of Rome, nor can they allow the church of the Christ
and the kingdom of the Creator God to become identified and co-terminus with
Rome and its ways. Doing so would mark a failure on the part of the
church. One of the larger points that is being made throughout
Revelation, as one puts aside futurist concerns and grapple with the message of
the Revelation as it is addressed to real people in real churches in real
places in a real time in history, is quite well-demonstrated by the triumphal
scene of the nineteenth chapter.
Indeed, as the Roman
“triumph” is merely a parody of the “triumph of Jesus,” so too is any earthly
empire, together with its ideals or ideologies, nothing more than a poor parody
of the empire of the covenant God that has been somehow and mysteriously established
and which also is to come. Here then, it is possible to read the
Revelation’s “triumph of Jesus,” doing so as an understanding hearer of the
first century church, and then make the appropriate response in applying the
words to the situations of any day, so as to shape a response to the world with
its rulers, its empires, and its gods. All of Revelation asks to be read
in this way, so that abiding concerns about some time in the distant future
while reading the work, quite simply, are well out of play.
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