The work of David Chilton on the book of Revelation is indispensable. It is also obsolete.
David Chilton’s groundbreaking Revelation commentary, The Days of Vengeance, is a book I came across by accident in the late 1980s. Having already rejected dispensationalism for the historicist position in Albert Barnes’ notes, Chilton’s engagement with the whole Bible in the work of interpretation was a revelation of what should have been obvious to all.
About fifteen years later, when the book was out of print and only available in an error-laden OCR PDF, I copied and corrected the text and retypeset the volume as an A4 document so that I could share it. Somebody commented that it was a fascinating work and that the Revelation could not be understood without it. But to me, from an intuitive standpoint, something still did not seem right. Why would God give us such an important prophecy if, without access to the Old Testament but also without reference to the works of Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, it remained impenetrable?
In 2007, I listened to Ken Gentry’s lectures on Revelation. His position is virtually identical to that of Chilton, but it was handy to have an accessible summary of the preterist position in audio form. In Australia, this interpretation was still virtually unheard of. (While there has been much progress, we have a long way to go in this regard.)
Immediately after that, I came across James B. Jordan’s lectures. From memory it was because he was cited in Chilton’s work. Jordan’s series (described by Jordan himself as “interminable”) is a recording of adult Sunday school classes, and aptly clocks up 144 hours. It took me a year to listen to them, and some of the lectures I had to listen to more than once because I wanted to get a solid grip on the details. But from the very beginning, I realised that I was wrestling with a very different beast than that presented by Chilton and Gentry. While the overall framework was the same, since all agreed upon the date and purpose of the prophecy, Jordan’s interpretation of the “guts” of the book were incomparable. Finally, somebody had truly “cracked the code.”
For Chilton and Gentry, while the Old Testament provided the covenantal background as the reason for the judgment, Josephus’ Jewish War was the interpretive key for all of the strange details. In contrast, Jordan relied entirely upon the Bible. The reason he could speak for 144 hours (and thankfully, he speaks slowly) is that he used Revelation as a window upon the entire Bible. Every allusion in the prophecy is a “hyperlink” to previous texts, so Jordan takes the listener back to the source materials and explains them in order that we too might “get the jokes.”
The main difference is that Chilton’s interpretation views most of the prophecy as a symbolic description of the Jewish War. Ken Gentry and Douglas Wilson follow this line of thinking. Jordan, instead, sees the battle as a description of the spiritual warfare between the “firstfruits” church from the time of the ascension of Christ (when He opened the New Covenant “scroll”) to the destruction of Jerusalem (when Old Covenant “scroll” was rolled up). This accords with the equipping of the saints and the warnings against the claimed authority and the heresies of the Judaizers throughout the epistles. It shows us the true battle—not the battle against flesh and blood—as it played out, and from heaven’s point of view. The Jewish War does not come into the picture until the judgment of the harlot at the climax of the prophecy. What occurred “on the ground” is incidental in comparison to its covenantal significance, and this is why the details must be interpreted in the light of the rest of the Bible.
The outcome is that Jordan’s strategy makes a lot more sense of the book. Preterists condemn the practice of dispensationalists who have a long and embarrassing history of forcing the prophecies of the Bible to fit whatever is currently in the news headlines. But the position of Chilton, Gentry, and Wilson, merely forces the text to fit the ancient news headlines. A prime example is the identification of the hailstones in Revelation 16:21 with the great stones catapulted into and over the walls of Jerusalem. After all, these stones were white in colour, and they most certainly fell from the sky.
But Jordan’s practice is to look into the Old Testament for the meaning of the symbol, and here we find that the book is far more subtle—and biting—than we could have imagined. He transports us back to Joshua 10, and the battle against Adonizedek, king of Jerusalem. While his godly predecessor, Melchizedek, had blessed Abraham despite the fact that the entire territory had been promised to Abraham’s offspring, Adonizedek was resisting the claim by the nation when it came due. God not only hit the pause button on the sun, and sent a great panic upon His enemies, but also sent great hailstones upon the fleeing armies.
So, what is the purpose of the allusion? The Herodian dynasty was in opposition to the newly-minted Melchizedekian priesthood of Christ, a priesthood comprised of both Jews and Gentiles. Like Adonizedek, the Herods were opposing the claim of the spiritual territory which they inhabited, and they would be destroyed by Yeshua just as Adonizedek was destroyed by Joshua. Jordan also links the hail with the “fall” crystal sea, an aspect of the spiritual realm of the Old Covenant that would soon be replaced by the crystal city—“nature” would be reformed as “culture” in the heavenly Jerusalem. For more discussion on the architectural and liturgical significance of the plagues in Revelation, see Zion as an Ascension.
Does this mean that the Roman catapults are entirely out of the picture? Not necessarily, although it is most certainly secondary as far as the author’s intent goes. The “islands” and “mountains” refer to the “high places” of the Jewish “Land” and the Gentile “Sea,” and these have no referents in Josephus, so why should the hailstones? It should also be noted that since the stones were naturally white it made them easy to spot and avoid as they caught the sunlight, so the Romans began painting them a dull black. This suggests an even more complex symbolic allusion—the white and black stones that related to the blessings and curses of the covenant.1 But if we regard Josephus as the key, we miss what the prophecy is actually communicating to us as the culmination of all Scripture.
Another example is the “locust” warriors who had “hair as women” (Revelation 9:8). These are thought to be the zealot factions who tormented and plagued the city during the siege by the Romans. But those in the city are not the concern of Jesus. The book is about the witness and suffering of the saints. Jordan rightly links the long hair with the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6, a symbolic reference that describes those Jews who assumed that they were doing the work of God and took “holy” vows to destroy the saints (such as those in Acts 23:12). It is their crimes that are the main point of the prophecy, not the judgment. And that is where Jordan passes with flying colours while Chilton et al, though serving up a brilliant foundation, are now obsolete. Their strategy misses the actual point of the prophecy, identifying the careful, detailed symbols and sequences WITH THE WRONG BATTLE.
So, get a copy of Ken Gentry’s indispensable Before Jerusalem Fell, and David Chilton’s groundbreaking The Days of Vengeance, but also grab Jordan’s Revelation lectures (I liked these so much that I was able to design a cover for them!), his summary, The Vindication of Jesus Christ, his commentary on the book of Daniel, The Handwriting on the Wall, which provides some important background to the New Testament and Revelation, and Peter Leithart’s recent extensive (but expensive) two-volume commentary. Leithart has also recently produced an extremely helpful “walk through” series of videos that explain the main symbols and themes of the prophecy.
If you are game, you can also grab my structural analysis of the prophecy that is based on Jordan’s approach, Moses and the Revelation, and also The End of Israel: Jesus, Paul & AD70 which expands upon Jordan’s premise that Judaism no longer exists as far as God is concerned. I am currently working on a Bible study book that follows the same strategy, Teach Through Revelation in Seven Steps, which uses the pattern below as its starting point in its explanation of the prophecy as a primarily spiritual, rather than territorial, conquest.
