One of My Favorite Books
Last week at Adrian Warnock's UK Blog, guest blogger Glennsp had a brief post titled:Revelation the Most Unpopular Book in the NT. The opening was:

The Book of Revelation must be the least read book in the New Testament.
A lot of Christians have either never read the whole book or having read it once have decided it is too difficult and have thereafter left it well alone.

Of course it's hard to understand. We often read it the wrong way. We try to make sense of metaphors and images that are meant NOT to be taken literally. They are "secrets" for only the insiders to know in a society (Rome, originally) that was hostile to the church. Yet it is also one of my favorite books of the Bible. It is exciting. It is challenging. It is literature at its finest.

It's style is best described by what we today call "fantasy." The Epic- J.R.R. Tolkein/C.S. Lewis kind. Like all great fantasy it wraps the great story of good and evil in new images that make us sit up and pay attention. It is there to tell us in no uncertain terms that good wins. God wins. No matter how much we as humans fail, fight, and fear, the power of God is greater than the power of what is not-God.

I am a fan of epic fantasy in the first place. I am currently in book two of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. The ways humans in the story (as well as all kinds of other creatures) keep getting in the way or running away or fall to evil is nothing short of what we can see in the daily news. It may be set in a never, never land- but it is a mirror.

Hang in there, John of Revelation wants us to know. Good - God - will win. But what a ride it can be to go with him on the journey.