Again, in the end, following this terrifying series of events (the Tribulation), and the battle of Armageddon that is the ultimate, bloody war of good versus evil, and Satan being bound and sealed in the bottomless pit for a thousand years, there is, according to Revelation 21:1, “a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE BOOK OF REVELATION
Whatever your beliefs about the end of days, I hope that if they’re primarily based on the biblical book of Revelation, you’ll keep those potentially disturbing pages in accurate historical context.
There’s not even unanimous agreement among scholars and theologians about the actual author of the book of Revelation. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume it was written by the apostle John, who’s most often given credit for it.
John was born in Galilee around AD 10 to 15, the son of Zebedee and Salome. He and his brother, James, were pursuing their father’s trade as fishermen when they became disciples of Jesus. It was John who stayed with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of the Crucifixion, John who stayed with the dying Christ when all the other disciples had left, and John to whom Jesus entrusted the care of his mother Mary after Jesus died.
It was also John who, along with the apostle Peter, was convicted of “activities subversive to the authority of the land”—specifically, the Roman emperor Nero and his successor Domitian, who declared themselves “lord and god” and persecuted anyone who refused to comply with that declaration. Nero, in fact, was responsible for the first documented case of governmentally supervised persecution of Christians. John was sentenced to a four-year banishment to Patmos, an island in the Aegean Sea. It was in a cave in the Patmos prison that John is said to have written the book of Revelation.
So there was John, locked away in what was undoubtedly a torturous dungeon. He was in the later years of his life. His brother James and his friend Peter, both fellow disciples of Christ, had been martyred. His existence must have been bleak, cruel, and desolate from one day to the next. Assuming
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