Revelation

Before I begin, here are a few people's blogs that I have found very intriguing:
Andrew's Blog
Erica's Blog
Kerry's Blog
These are only a few, but if you're looking for something good there is a start.

So, the book of Revelation, it's big, scary, confusing, and no matter what you say about it everybody says you're wrong about something. I've read Revelation a few times in my life, and a great deal of what you get out of it depends on both what you are looking for and what actually sticks out in your mind.

As we've said in class, the book is just too jumpy and imagery oriented to get much unity out of it. And anytime you get something like this what you get out of it is going to be vastly different from everybody else. Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, a great deal of what you get out of it depends on what you're looking for (both consciously and subconsciously). If you go into Revelation intending to find clues of when the second coming and the end of the world are going to come then sure enough you'll find quite a few. But, I would contend that if you tried hard enough you could pull out an argument for just about anything you wanted thanks to the extremely elaborate imagery. Secondly, what sticks out to you will also alter what you get from reading Revelation. For instance, if "The 144,000" sticks out in your mind you'll pay a lot more attention to that, where as somebody else may be intrigued by the 7 seals; or even more specifically, if somebody is intrigued by the relation of numbers. That person may find some sort of divine link between the number of horns and the number of heads on the beast. Where as a person who doesn't really care about the exact numbers and their meanings may treat that same information with an "Oh, that's nice" mentality.

I guess, my real point here is that Revelation really has no specific meaning. Sure, it deals with the end of the world and various things associated with that, but the specifics are all blurred for us. And whenever you leave meanings blurry and up to the reader you get an infinite number of interoperations. So, a very simple yet true answer to the question "What does the book of Revelation mean?" would be this: Depends on who you ask.