I used to skip Revelation.
Not officially. I never announced it from a pulpit. But if I’m honest, I treated it like the weird uncle at Thanksgiving — acknowledge him, don’t make eye contact, move on quickly. Too strange. Too contested. Too easy to get wrong in front of people who were counting on me to get it right.
Then God sat me down.
Literally. A neck injury last year forced me to slow down in a season where I had been moving too fast for too long. And in the stillness — in the thing I had been dreading — I picked up Revelation. Not to preach it. Not to produce anything. Just to read it. Slowly. Like a man with nowhere else to be.
And it wrecked me. In the best possible way.
Because here’s what I had always assumed: Revelation is a book about the future. A timeline. A sequence of events that haven’t happened yet. A map for the end of the world that you pull out when things get bad enough.
But the more I sat with it the more I realized — that’s not how John wrote it. And it’s not how the first people who received it read it.
Those people weren’t reading prophecy about events 2,000 years in their future. They were receiving a letter in the middle of real persecution from a real empire that was demanding they worship a real emperor or face real consequences. Revelation wasn’t abstract theology for them. It was survival literature. A pastor named John — exiled on an island — pulling back the curtain on what was actually happening behind the visible world so his people could keep going.
What if Revelation isn’t primarily about what’s coming — but about how to see what’s already happening?
That question changed everything for me.
Over the next several weeks I want to take you through what I’ve been finding in this book — not as a scholar and not as a prophet, but as a pastor sitting with a text that keeps meeting me exactly where I am. We’re going to look at the woman and the dragon. The lampstand and the olive tree. The witnesses standing in the gap. The cosmic war behind the visible one. And what it means that we are not waiting for this story to start.
We are already inside it.
There are four main ways scholars have read Revelation throughout church history. Some say it was fulfilled in the past — primarily in 70 AD when Rome destroyed Jerusalem. Some say it’s still entirely future. Some trace its fulfillment through the sweep of church history. And some read it as a timeless picture of what God’s people always experience in every age.
I’m not going to pick one and defend it against the others. I’m going to use all four like lenses — because the richest reading of Revelation holds them together rather than forcing you to choose.
But here’s my honest confession going in: the lens that has done the most work in me lately is the last one. Because it’s the only one that makes this book immediately and continuously relevant to a pastor in Concord, North Carolina in 2026.
This isn’t a book about later. It’s a book about now.
And I think if you’ll read it with me — slowly, honestly, without the pressure of having to figure out the timeline — it’s going to meet you exactly where you are too.
Let’s start at the beginning. Or rather — let’s start before the beginning.
