7.4. Understanding Symbols and Figures

This description of the glorified Lord (Rev. Rev. 1:16+), . . . may suggest a few reflections on the apocalyptic, and generally the Hebrew symbolism, and on the very significant relations of difference and opposition in which it stands to the Greek. Religion and Art for the Greek ran into one another with no very signal preponderance of the claims of the former over the latter. Even in his religious symbolism the sense of beauty, of form, of proportion, overrules every other, and must at all costs find its satisfaction; so that the first necessity of the symbol is that it shall not affront, that it shall satisfy rather, the aesthetic sense. . . . But with the Hebrew symbolism it is altogether different. The first necessity there is that the symbol should set forth truly and fully the religious idea of which it is intended to be the vehicle. How it would appear when it clothed itself in an outward form and shape, whether it would find favour. . . as satisfying the conditions of beauty, this was quite a secondary consideration; may be confidently affirmed not to have been a consideration at all; . . . but rather that it should remain ever and only a purely mental conception, the unembodied sign of an idea;—I may observe, by the way, that no skill of delineation can make the Cherubim themselves other than unsightly objects to the eye.¹⁵

Notes

¹ Gregory K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 51.

² Ibid., 48.

³ “Revelation is a symbolic book, but that does not mean the symbols do not depict literal events.”—Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 16.

⁴ Robert L. Thomas, Revelation 1-7 (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1992), 35.

⁵ “It must be noted, however, that not every object seen in a vision is symbolic. Neither is it true that because some objects in a vision are symbolic, everything else in that vision must be symbolic.”—Mal Couch, Classical Evangelical Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications), 71.

⁶ Ibid., 73-74.

⁷ “In which one thing explicitly (by using like or as) resembles another.”—Roy B. Zuck, Basic Bible Interpretation (Colorado Springs, CO: Cook Communications, 1991), 148.

⁸ Couch, Classical Evangelical Hermeneutics, 258-259.

⁹ Ibid., 73-74.

¹⁰ Paul Lee Tan, The Interpretation of Prophecy (Dallas, TX: Bible Communications, Inc., 1993), 137-138.

¹¹ Matthew Waymeyer, Revelation 20 and the Millennial Debate (The Woodlands, TX: Kress Christian Publications, 2001, 2004), 99-100.

¹² Merrill C. Tenney, Interpreting Revelation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1957), 142-143.

¹³ Osborne, Revelation, 16.

¹⁴ “The interpretation of such figures is not left up to the reader’s imagination or ingenuity. They must be defined and explained, unambiguously, either in the immediate context or in the broader context of the historical and prophetic Scriptures which John could assume his readers should already have mastered.”—Henry Morris, The Revelation Record (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1983), 24.

¹⁵ Richard Chenevix Trench, Commentary on the Epistles to the Seven Churches in Asia (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1861), 42-43.