Mostly, however, the author of Revelation devotes himself to an account of the disturbing sights that he has seen during a vision that came to him on the island of Patmos off the west coast of Asia. The author has achieved a trancelike state of mystical ecstasy in which he sees, among a great many other and even odder things, a scroll on which is written God’s secret plan for the end of the world. The scroll has been closed with seven seals, presumably of wax or clay, and all seven seals must be broken before the scroll can be opened and read.
Here begins the single most insistent motif of Revelation—the author’s almost obsessive use of the number seven. He sees not only seven seals but also seven angels, seven bowls, seven candlesticks, seven churches, seven crowns, seven eyes, seven heads, seven horns, seven kings, seven lamps, seven mountains, seven plagues, seven spirits, seven stars, seven thunders, and seven trumpets. The story of Revelation, such as it is, focuses on what will happen in heaven and on earth when, after the ever-mounting terror of the last days finally reaches a climax, the seventh trumpet is sounded, the seventh bowl of God’s wrath is poured out, and the Lamb of God breaks the seventh seal.
The celestial figure who reveals the divine plan for the end of the world is variously called “one like unto the Son of Man,” “the Son of God,” “the Spirit,” and “the Lamb”—all of which are terms borrowed from Jewish messianic tradition. The author also coins an elegant and enduring phrase that appears nowhere else in Christian scripture: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.”22 Only rarely does he invoke the unambiguous name and title of “Jesus Christ,” and he prefers to conceal the identity of his celestial source in puzzles and riddles: “I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore,” says the nameless visitor by way of self- introduction, “and I have the keys of Hades and of Death.”23
Then, too, the deity who stalks the pages of Revelation is a shape-shifter. At the outset, he is a celestial king dressed in a golden robe, with hair “as white as snow,” eyes “like a flame of fire,” holding seven stars in his right hand, “and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword.”24 Later, the author beholds the odd and eerie figure of a lamb, looking “as though it had been slain,” and yet standing upright, with “seven horns and seven eyes.”25 At the climax of Revelation, the author sees a divine warrior mounted on a white horse, crowned with “many diadems” and wearing a bloodstained robe. Here, too, the author engages in conjuration of the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t variety: “He has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself,” the author writes—and then, a moment later, he reveals: “On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords.”26
The most memorable characters in the cast of Revelation, however, are the bad guys. The arch-villain is “a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads,” who is later revealed to be “that ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.”27 The earthly agents of the Devil are two “beasts,” one with seven heads and ten horns who emerges from the sea, and the other with two horns and a voice “like a dragon,” who emerges from the land.28 And there are cameo appearances by false prophets and prophetesses, corrupt and decadent kings in great profusion, and various other malefactors, both human and demonic.
The single most provocative character in Revelation, for example, is the Great Whore of Babylon. She is depicted as a sexual monster with whom “the kings of the earth have committed fornication,” and her lovers are so numerous and far-flung that “the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.” The woman is drunk, too, but her intoxicant is “the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” She is “arrayed in purple and scarlet” and “bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls,” and she carries a golden cup in her hand as she rides on the back of the scarlet-colored beast with seven heads and ten horns. And, in a startlingly explicit image, the author points out that the cup itself is “full of abominations and impurities of her fornication.”29
Just as the Lamb is the counterpart of the Dragon, the counterpart of the Great Whore is the celestial figure of “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” At the very moment when the woman goes into labor, the red dragon sets upon her, waiting to devour her newborn baby. When she gives birth to “a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron,” the newborn is snatched up to God’s heavenly throne, and the woman is given “the two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness,” where she will be nourished and sheltered from the predatory dragon. Meanwhile, a battle is fought in heaven between Satan and the archangel Michael, each one at the head of an army of angels. Satan is defeated and cast out of heaven, but he descends safely to earth and sets out to establish a kingdom over humankind.30
Indeed, the only way for God to defeat the Devil and his servitors, according to the author, is to destroy the world and start all over again with “a new heaven and a new earth.” But the end-times are wired to a slow-burning fuse. First, the Christian true believers must endure a period of oppression and persecution—the so-called Tribulation—at the hands of Satan’s deputies, including the “beast” who is nowadays better known as the Antichrist, although the latter term itself does not appear in the text of Revelation. The beginning of the end will be signaled by signs and wonders: earthquakes and floods, comets and eclipses, famine and plague and pestilence, and a series of mighty battles in heaven and on earth.
The afflictions of the end-times are described in some of the most memorable passages in the Bible. For example, the famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, each rider mounted on a horse of a different color, “kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth.” What we might understand as natural disasters are described in fanciful language: “The sun became black as sackcloth, and the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to earth.” And the author conjures up monsters like nothing in nature. When he describes a flight of locusts, for example, they are insects with the face of a man, the long hair of a woman, the body of a warhorse, the teeth of a lion, and the stinging tail of a scorpion.31
“And in those days men will seek death and will not find it,” writes the author of Revelation in one almost poignant passage. “They will long to die, and death will fly from them.”32
After seven years of suffering under the Beast, Jesus Christ will descend to earth as a mounted warrior-king at the head of an army of angels and resurrected saints and martyrs, and a decisive battle will be fought at a place called Armageddon. The author of Revelation delights in describing the revenge that the Lamb of God will take on those who once tormented his faithful worshippers. “Come, gather for the great supper of God,” an angel will cry to the birds of prey, “to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.”33
Satan will be bound in chains and confined in a bottomless pit, and the survivors of the Tribulation will live in an earthly kingdom under the authority of King Jesus and his resurrected saints and martyrs for exactly one thousand years. But the end-times are not quite over yet. Satan will break his fetters, and Jesus Christ will be forced to go to war yet again against his archenemy and the far-flung nations that are the Devil’s human allies, now called “Gog and Magog.” Only then will Satan and his minions be cast once and for all into “the lake of fire and brimstone,” where they will be “tormented day and night for ever and ever.”34
Now, at last, our benighted world—“the first earth”—will be brought to an end. Everyone who has ever lived will be resurrected, and living and dead alike will be judged and rewarded or punished as God sees fit. And the litmus test for salvation is true belief: “Those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” will be permitted to spend eternity in perfect bliss in the new heaven. Everyone else—men, women, and children—will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, “which is the second death,” along with the Devil and “the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars.”35
Revelation, quite in contrast to the Gospels, is notoriously lacking in loving-kindness. Rather, it is a punishing text, full of rage and resentment, almost toxic in its longing for bloody revenge against one’s enemies. Only rarely does the author allow his readers to glimpse a kinder and gentler realm, and when he does, he explains that it will arrive only after the earth as we know it, strewn with corpses and flooded “as high as a horse’s bridle” with blood, is finally destroyed. And only “the ones who come out of the great tribulation,” the ones who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” will be granted admission to a celestial paradise.36
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more,” writes the author in a rare and almost grudging moment of tenderness and compassion. “[N]either shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”37
For all of its Sturm und Drang, then, the book of Revelation offers a happy ending, at least for “them which are saved.”38 Everyone on earth in the end-times is destined to suffer horribly at the hands of the Antichrist—and most of them will die just as horribly—but a select few will be resurrected, judged, and granted
