The Purpose of Revelation

By nature, humans want to know what’s next. We want to know who will win the Superbowl and when the next season of our favorite TV show will be released. We want to know if so-and-so is having a boy or a girl. We wonder what we’re getting for Christmas and where we’re going on vacation.

We are always looking ahead. The future is a fascinating and terrifying thing, and we’re utterly obsessed with it.

What do you spend most of your time thinking about during the day? Probably the things you need to get done or want to do. You think about where you’re going in five minutes and what you’ll be doing in five days. We plan our lives out because we have an unrelenting need to prepare and be reassured.

Go to grade school, graduate high school, go to college, find a job, work, work, work, retire. Everything is about the future.

Where are you going?

People walk down all sorts of avenues to try to understand their future. They consult psychics, palm readers, horoscopes, and tarot cards to unravel time.

But the hope of the Christian is made alive in Christ. The book of Revelation, which we will be discussing in-depth over the next several devotions, is called ‘Revelation’ because it is God’s disclosure of the future. It is, really, the revelation of life, given to Christ by God, and then entrusted to the disciple John.

This book has eluded scholars and theologians for centuries, as it is one of the most difficult books of the Bible to comprehend. There’s a good reason for this: we are not meant to understand these things fully until Jesus returns. Even so, God leaves us with one final narrative that exposes, in part, the events of the future. Never has there been a prophecy or profession that’s so detailed or one that has foretold events so far in advance than the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

What is the purpose of the book?
To remind us that in the end, He wins.

People have tried a thousand different ways to predict the future, understand it, and even change it, but there is only One who predicted it correctly, knows it fully, and who will win this war without question.

The purpose of the Revelation of Jesus Christ is this: to remind the bride of Christ that the end has already been decided, and the Bridegroom has won.