This Sunday, we conclude our Forgotten Books of the Bible series with a book that may not exactly be forgotten—but is certainly one of the Bible’s most misunderstood: Revelation. With its dragons and beasts, mysterious numbers, cosmic battles, and strange visions, Revelation has sometimes been treated as a secret code predicting how and when the world will end. But for its first readers—Christians living under the shadow of the Roman Empire—Revelation offered something much more important: hope, courage, and the assurance that the powers of fear, violence, and oppression will not have the final word.
Rather than inviting us to escape this world, Revelation ends with God coming to dwell among us and declaring, “See, I am making all things new.” As we finish our summer series, we’ll explore Revelation as a book of faithful imagination: an invitation to resist the forces that diminish life, to trust that God is still at work even when the world seems chaotic, and to live right now as citizens of the new creation God has promised. In the end, Revelation is less about predicting when the world will end and more about helping us decide how we will live while we wait for God to make all things new.