Canter Bridge

The Book of Revelation is apocalyptic literature.

This scholarly term places the ‘Vision of John the Seer’ alongside other early Jewish literature that majors on the revelation of events and sequences that would otherwise be inaccessible to human minds. The Greek verb ἀποκαλύπτω means to reveal and lends its meaning and its name to this body of revelatory work.

Yet John’s ‘revelation’ also conceals.

Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He had a little scroll open in his hand. And he set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land,and called out with a loud voice, like a lion roaring. When he called out, the seven thunders sounded. And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down.’ (Revelation 10:1–4 ESV)

The disclosing Lord of the biblical witness is like this. He reveals, but does not do so exhaustively. He gives himself away in word-shaped relationship, yet makes no promises to surrender all his secrets.

Apocalyptic literature, whether biblical or running in parallel streams alongside canonical books like the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel and the New Testament’s Revelation, simply raises this divine way with his world to a more articulate level. Under the stress, conflict, and suffering that serve as context for such works, the manner and intensity of divine revelation alter appreciably. Every word counts, every number too.

The whole shape of things becomes less public than prophets and apostles would have it. Heavenly secrets are told, passed on to a suffering and needy remnant, treasured among the members of a bereft clan rather than shouted from the rooftops, caressed and inspected for hidden and deeper meanings, stored here among the elect.

And, sometimes, they are withheld altogether.

With pen in hand, this Johannine recorder of the cosmos’ secrets is told in these verses to cease and desist for the moment, to withhold some of what he has seen and heard. Some things are too wonderful—in the old sense of that term—for human eyes, human hearts, human minds. For now.

The Seven Thunders must be allowed to rumble inarticulately, for this is not the time for words.

This will seem a stress-induced insanity to the skeptic, to the scoffer a culpable retreat from public discourse.

Yet to a suffering band, aware that only heaven can save them from the wolves at the door, these things are not nonsense. If some aspects of the Sovereign’s plans must remain unspoken for now—concealed amid the powers, seals, trumpets, and thunders of heaven—it is only because the Trusted One has still greater marvels in store than our familiar syllables can speak.

We can wait, if wait we must.