SUMMARY

THE SUMMARY

 

Some authors close their books with a last chapter called a "summary", or perhaps "epilogue", or just "last words". As I understand it, the meaning of all of these words is more or less the same thing. They are trying to sum up the intended content of their book in one brief chapter. I have recently been spending some time in the book of Revelation, and consider it to be God's summary of His book, the Holy Bible. I often refer to the Bible as the "Manufacturer's Manual", and compare it to the manual that always comes in the dash of a new car. This manual gives you all the information you need to operate this car properly, in order to obtain "optimum performance" from it throughout the life of the vehicle. I see Revelation as God's attempt to sum up the entire content of His book in one chapter. In (Rev 1:3) from the NLT we read "God blesses the one who reads the words of this prophecy to the church, and He blesses all who listens to the message and obeys what it says, for the time is near". My question is why do we not do that? The reasons are varied I'm sure, because many false prophecies and strange doctrines have been birthed from its pages, by people with a natural mind. And Paul has a word for these people in (1 Cor 2:14). But we shouldn't allow the actions of a few so-called prophets, or people with weird interpretations of parts of Revelation, to keep us from taking advantage of the truth it contains.

 

Revelation is not a book like Acts, which can be read in a chronological fashion, because Acts is like a history book, but Revelation is a series of prophecies or visions given by Jesus to His servant John.

(Rev 1:1-2) These visions often overlap, and are sometimes like different views of the same event. Therefore the chapters do not follow each other in the normal way! This is critical to know, and requires careful study of other scriptures pertaining to the same topic being discussed, and discernment from the Holy Spirit when reading this book. There is such a thing as the gift of the Holy Spirit referred to in (1 Cor 12:10) as the gift of "discerning of spirits". I understand this to be the supernatural power to discern what spirit is behind any type of utterance. Apparently there can be three sources, 1/ The Holy Spirit, 2/ The human spirit of the person involved, or 3/ A demonic spirit from Satan's kingdom. So this gift operating in our churches today could well be the most important of all the spiritual gifts mentioned. Jesus warned us that there would be many false prophets in the last days! (Matt 24:4,5,11,24)

Sincerely submitted.

Dave Jamer