Mysterious Manuscripts
Revelation Might Seem Strange, But It Has Surprisingly Practical Advice
The book of Revelation is filled with strange images: A great red dragon, beasts from the sea and land, the bowls of God’s wrath, a great whore, an apocalyptic battle, and the final judgment. When the seventh trumpet blows, we learn of God’s plan “for destroying those who destroy the earth” (11:18).
Hollywood has made many attempts to explore the mysteries of the end of the world. In the movie This Is the End, Los Angeles is destroyed by earthquakes, cannibals eat survivors, and the righteous are transported to heaven in beams of blue light.
Jokes about the end-times are included in the comedy Ghostbusters, in which a character says, “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes … The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!”
Yes, the book of Revelation is a mystery. There may not be any “dogs and cats living together,” but the book contains four horsemen of the apocalypse, a red dragon, and beasts from the sea and land. We scratch our heads and wonder what it is all about.
The Voynich Manuscript is also a mystery. Housed at Yale University, it has baffled scholars for years, while also attracting the attention of conspiracy theorists. No one knows how old it is, although the parchment and the ink look like they are from the Middle Ages.
Here is a description of the manuscript, from The Atlantic magazine: “Flowering through the indecipherable script [are] otherworldly illustrations: strange, prehistoric plants with leaves in dreamy geometrics; oversize pages that [fold] out to reveal rosettes, zodiacs, stars, the cosmos; lists of apparent medicinal formulas alongside drawings of herbs and spindly bottles.” As strange as anything you would find in Revelation.
The manuscript gets its name from a rare-books dealer named Wilfrid Voynich. He acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy in the early 20th century, and then it passed through several hands until it was donated to Yale in 1969.
Several generations of experts, including a Second World War codebreaker, have tried to unlock its secrets without success. But now, a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to solving the manuscript’s mysteries. Lisa Fagin Davis has found that the book was probably a community effort — the work of five different scribes, not just one. In addition, it was not a precious treasure but was a book that was given heavy use in a community. She believes that it was meant to be flipped through and used, like a manual of anatomy or an almanac of the stars.
The same is true for the book of Revelation.
Contrary to popular opinion, destruction, doom, and damnation are not the final word in Revelation. Instead, the book ends with a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and the restoration of the Garden of Eden. Revelation has surprisingly practical advice for life today.
The conclusion of Revelation is the promise of a new relationship with God, one that is both intimate and eternal, in which people live in harmony with God and with all that God has made. This bond is a restoration of the original creation in Genesis, and it contains the best of numerous biblical images — a new heaven and earth, a city, and a garden.
Despite its accounts of apocalyptic warfare, Revelation is not intended to scare us. Instead, it provides a message of comfort and hope, written by the Christians of the first century to the Christians of any era, including our own. The book is not a precious treasure on a shelf, but rather a manual for us to flip through and use.
So, let’s do it. When we turn to the twenty-first chapter, we find a new heaven and a new earth. As the chapter begins, John sees “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (v. 1). This new creation is one in which the past is forgotten, and even the sea, which is a symbol of watery chaos, is “no more.” This transformed creation fulfills the hope of the apostle Paul that “the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay” (Romans 8:21).
When we use Revelation as a manual for Christian living, we discover that it is speaking to us today. In so many ways, we are struggling with a creation that is enslaved to decay. We look around and see decay in the fouling of air, land, and water, and in the climate change that threatens our future. We look at our relationships and see sinful brokenness between friends, colleagues, spouses, and family members. We look inside ourselves and see the deterioration of our morals and aspirations.
Fortunately, Revelation gives us a vision of a place in which the past is forgotten, chaos is no more, and creation is free from enslavement to decay. That’s a world we all want to live in. We are given hope in Revelation’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth. In this place, creation itself will be liberated from deterioration, redeemed from sin, and moved into a right relationship with God.
Next, we find a city. John sees “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). New Jerusalem is the new relationship that God has made with the followers of Christ, a bond as loving and faithful as the relationship between newlyweds. This holy city is the beautiful place where God and humans will live together eternally, a city that comes down to earth instead of remaining in heaven.
In this city, the voice of God speaks from the throne, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (v. 3). God is making clear that he chooses to live among us, his people, in a restored and renewed paradise on earth.
The loving heart of God is revealed in this passage, as it promises that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (v. 4). The images in Revelation are as beautiful and life-giving as any of the dreamy plants, leaves, herbs and stars of the Voynich Manuscript.
God then says, “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life” (v. 6). This gift of life-giving water reminds us of the importance of fresh, clean water for the continuation of life on earth. It also points to the importance of the spiritual water given by Jesus when he speaks of “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). In the city of God, good water is needed for life, both physically and spiritually.
Finally, Revelation speaks of a garden — a Garden of Eden, restored in the center of the city. It begins with “the spring of the water of life” in chapter 21, and then continues with a description of a garden in chapter 22. This is a powerful message about God’s desire for the human world to exist in harmony with nature. This garden in a city serves as biblical support for practicing creation care today.
When we use Revelation as a manual for living, we discover that God wants harmony in his new creation: Harmony between people and God, harmony among human beings, and harmony between the garden and the city. We catch a glimpse of this when an angel shows John “the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city” (22:1-2). This reminds us of the Garden of Eden, in which a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.
Now, on “either side of the river is the tree of life” in New Jerusalem, and “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (v. 2). This is the place where creation is renewed, brokenness is repaired, and curses are removed. The message of the garden is that God wants to heal our world.
We participate in this healing work whenever we show compassion to a hurting neighbor, provide shelter to a homeless family, mentor a troubled teenager, or work for reconciliation between fighting family members. We make good use of this mysterious manuscript whenever we embrace its vision of harmony and bring it to life in the Christian community. Revelation is meant to be used by us as we try to align ourselves with God’s goal for human life — new heaven, new earth.
When Lisa Fagin Davis first saw the Voynich Manuscript, she thought: This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. We should say the same about the book of Revelation.