John’s Apocalypse: A Study in Dream Interpretation

By T. Craig Isaacs

Two things confound and confuse most of us: our dreams and the book of Revelation. However, people remain fascinated with both. This study tackles both subjects. The book of Revelation is a vision, a dream, yet it is most often interpreted as if it were a piece of consciously created literature. One should never attempt to decipher a dream or vision by purely rational methods; rather, the dream needs to be approached as poem, art, and mythic story. In this book you will learn a means of understanding your dreams and then apply this to approaching a renewed view of the book of Revelation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498282604

T. Craig Isaacs

T. Craig Isaacs is a clinical psychologist practicing psychotherapy and spiritual formation in Marin County, CA. He is also a priest of the Anglican Church North America. He is author of the book Revelations and Possession: Distinguishing Spiritual from Psychological Experiences (2009), as well as two books on preventing violence in churches: Wolves Among the Sheep (2011), and The Wolves Among the Sheep Workbook (2013).

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John’s Apocalypse

a study in dream interpretation

T. Craig Isaacs

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JOHN’S APOCALYPSE

A Study in Dream Interpretation

Copyright © 2016 T. Craig Isaacs. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8259-8

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8261-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8260-4

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Isaacs, T. Craig

Title: John’s apocalypse : a study in dream interpretation / T. Craig Isaacs.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references

Identifiers: isbn 9781498282598 (paperback) | isbn 9781498282611 (hardcover) | isbn 9781498282604 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Revelation—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Dream Interpretation. | Dreams—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: BS2825.3 I7 2016 (print) | BS2825.3 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Consummation and the Beginning

Chapter 2: The Letters to the Seven Churches

Chapter 3: The Seven Seals

Chapter 4: The Seven Trumpets

Chapter 5: The Unholy Trinity

Chapter 6: The Function of Wrath

Chapter 7: The Final Unnumbered Visions

Chapter 8: Last Judgment and Consummation

Chapter 9: Final Thoughts

Bibliography

1

The Consummation and the Beginning

Whenever I approach an interpretation of the Book of Revelation, I think I understand a bit more what Job might have felt. Immersed in a field of seemingly incomprehensible terror and horror, I attempt to find some meaning in it, only to be surrounded by advisors in commentaries who tell me this thing and that, few of whom seem to agree, fewer still making any reasonable sense. Job, knowing this same confusion, disregarded these speculative theologians and turned to God for the answer. Like Job, if we are to make any sense of this book, we must return to the source, to the vision or dream itself which we call the Apocalypse.

To use the term dream here is not unreasonable. In the Old Testament there is no clear distinction between a dream and a vision such as there is in our thinking. To us, visions are often taken as more real than dreams merely because visions—by our definition—arise during waking consciousness. Since, in recent times, we have degraded the unconscious, the contents of the unconscious are likewise degraded; therefore, dreams are often dismissed and disregarded. How often have we said to ourselves and others, "it was merely a dream." In the Old Testament, this distinction is missing. So it is that we can read in the Book of Job about pondering the visions of the night: the dream.¹

There are certain dreams and visions that we do take more concretely than others. There is a sense, an experience, of the visionary/dreamer that is distinguishable, allowing us to know when to interpret an experience in a fairly concrete, literal manner, in distinction to a symbolic interpretation. I discuss this distinction in detail in the work Revelations and Possession,² and will not take time here to pursue that line of thinking. If we did take the time to review that discussion we would find that we would be correct in approaching the Book of Revelation in a more symbolic manner rather than attempting to take all that is in it literally. We would do well to approach it as it is—as a dream. In this manner, we may be able to come to some clearer understanding of what John experienced. Like Job, we need to bypass the convoluted explanations arising from preconceived opinions and theologies, and return to John’s experience, just as Job returned to God’s experience. It is in this way that we will investigate the Book of Revelation.

If you will, imagine the Apostle John walking into a psychotherapy consulting room, sitting down, and relating a troubling dream he recently experienced. How would we then deal with him? Most likely, seeing the potency of the dream, we would begin a dream analysis.

Typically, to understand a dream we must see that it is not some confusion of images, but that it is most often coherently organized as a story. To view it as a story is convenient. Likewise, the dream is to be seen as a poem—a message spoken in a manner foreign to our linear, logical way of understanding. Most laypersons have a difficult time with poetry. We enjoy poems that seem easy to comprehend, but so many are just the opposite. Most poets compose their works using images and phrasing that leaves us initially scratching our heads in bewilderment. However, the poet has composed a work that has a meaning; one that can be seen as we flow through the poem from beginning to middle to end. Likewise, the dream is to be seen as such a poem; just such a story told in a manner foreign to our linear, logical way of speaking.

To understand a dream, we look at it as we would any other story, a story which has a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion. The beginning often sets the stage, giving us the context and the setting, as well as introducing the primary characters. Then the story unfolds and we observe the process of moving toward a climax and a conclusion. The climax and conclusion often then reveal to us both the meaning of the story—the point we are to gather from it—as well as the method of moving toward realizing that meaning.

As much as seeing it in the form of a story or a poem, we can further understand the dream as a classical drama. For those familiar with dramatic structure, it initially presents the setting and protagonists, followed by the development of the plot, leading to the culmination or climax, and finally the resolution. Similarly, we can observe in a dream drama such a statement of setting and protagonists, development of the story, and the third climatic stage which culminates in a resolution.

For example, we can look at Shakespeare’s King Lear. Here we have a story which begins with a king who, wishing to test his daughters’ love and loyalty, divides his kingdom amongst them. The story then develops with treachery and suffering, and climaxes with the deep suffering of Lear’s one faithful daughter, who is true of heart but is unrecognized by her father because his desire for power has blinded him. The character of the fool within the play is the purveyor of wisdom as he concludes the story with the assertion: It is sad when one grows old before one grows wise.

We see the context of the story as a family in which power and greed are the guiding principles. The main characters are the father and his daughters. The outcome is suffering and disaster, where true love and loyalty are unrecognized. In the progression of the story, we see love manipulated in the service of greed and power. Knowing the end, we can understand the beginning and the middle. The end tells us that we are in need of wisdom, because the unwise path leads to despair, destruction, and loss of love and trust. What is that unwise path? To test another’s love; to place power and acquisition of things over love and trust of the beloved. The playgoer may walk away from King Lear with the message: trust those you love and trust their love, do not test it, and value love above all things.

King Lear, written and performed in beautiful, yet archaic language, is still more comprehensible than the average dream. Even so, the process of interpretation is much the same.

Here we have the Apostle John sitting before us in our consultation room waiting for us to help him with this disturbing dream. The first thing that we would do is ask him to tell us the whole dream, as best he could remember.

John begins, telling us that on a certain Sunday, while he was living the life of an exile on the island of Patmos, not far off the coast from his adopted home town of Ephesus in Turkey, he fell into a trance and had a dream. He heard a voice telling him to write down what he was about to experience and send it to seven churches. He then tells of how he saw a heavenly scene with Christ, clothed with the attributes of deity, standing in the midst of seven lampstands and holding seven stars.

With this we are immediately given our initial context. We have the setting and the principle characters. The setting is heavenly, so we already know that this is a transcendent message—it is not just about mundane, everyday life. Many of our dreams relate to questions or concerns that relate to living our daily lives well. This one relates to the deeper inner life, the life of the spirit, the transcendent life.

The principle characters are John himself, the resurrected and glorified Jesus, and seven churches. There is also an angel who, as an intermediary, transmits the message from Jesus to John. As is the way with angels, he then takes a backseat to the message to be delivered and we hear little of him again. When the dreamer is represented in a dream, this image most often relates to the conscious identity or ego. We will speak more about this identity, or ego, at another opportunity.

John goes on to relate the story of how he received specific insights for each of these churches. After this, he realized that it was as if he had previously been in an anteroom of the third heaven, for now he sees a door above him and he is called up into a higher, or deeper, aspect of heaven. There he witnesses the heavenly liturgy before the magnificent throne of God. He tells of watching living creatures and angels as they call forth and produce terrifying events on the earth. This relating of horror upon horror continues building to a crescendo with a scene of final judgment and the end of the world as he knows it. Then, as we are almost out of breath from this climax, we sigh with awe and relief as we encounter the resolution as the new heaven and new earth—and a beautiful heavenly city—are presented and all ends well.

We now need to make sense of all this material. The first step in any dream interpretation is to set aside preconceptions. To interpret a dream one must commence with the realization, I have no idea what any of this means. If we are at all honest with ourselves, this should be an easy task with the Book of Revelation. However, in other situations we often proceed as if we know what is going on; this is a disastrous mistake.

Dreams and visions come to us to shake up and to enlarge our present conscious positions. To impose the present conscious position on the dream is to negate its very purpose. John did not have this vision because he already knew what was to happen but rather because he did not know. Too often the Book of Revelation is taken as a document where John is seeming to put into code language a conscious communication of the problems to come, as if hiding it from the uninitiated. However, this calls his description as a vision a lie. In that case it is not a vision but merely a coded language of a consciously produced story. Or we take the Book of Revelation and read it in the more Freudian manner, where dreams are seen as attempting to hide from the ego their very meaning. In a caricature of that approach, every long object would then be seen as a phallic symbol representing a repressed sexuality. Yet, why would we approach a dream, especially John’s dream, in such a manner? Would we really assume that Jesus is coming to deliver a message to John, only then to hide that very meaning from him in the most obscure manner? To think in such a way appears rather convoluted and unnecessary. Instead, the dream is attempting to get a message across to the dreamer in as accurate a manner as possible.

I often think of dreams as a game of charades. The dream presents images and events in the manner of saying it is as if and then it delivers the message. Because of this it is important for us to not assume that each image and event has a predetermined meaning that we know. It is for this reason that dream dictionaries are, if not useless, at least of minimal use. What we need to understand is what each image and event means to John. Even when the image or event has a seemingly general and/or common mythological theme, John’s understanding and associations with these very images and events is of primary importance. It is John’s dream, not mine, and it is with John that the game of charades is being played.

Next, we want to understand where this dream is pointing. When we looked at King Lear, it was observed that when we finally understood the end we could incorporate the action into a meaningful whole. It will be the same in interpreting the Book of Revelation. When we comprehend the meaning toward which it points, we will be better able to gain a coherent understanding of the process represented in the symbols and images of the Seals, the Trumpets, the Bowls of Wrath, and so forth.

Understanding the end in order to grasp the process is of utmost importance in our interpretation. This is similar to reading the last chapter of a murder mystery and discovering the murderer prior to reading the rest of the book. Or it is like being told that the protagonist in the film The Sixth Sense was a ghost prior to watching the film. Some may call this unfair, reading or knowing the end prior to experiencing the beginning. It does remove the excitement of our story. However, we are not approaching the Book of Revelation as an exciting mystery; we want to know what it means. To know the who in the who-done-it, or the fact that the character in The Sixth Sense was a ghost allows us to understand the events in the preceding portions of the story in a more coherent, even if less exciting, manner.

Understanding the interpretation of the meaning in this book is complicated by the fact that many of us live in a confused state because we do not live by a coherent philosophy of life. We declare that we are headed for heaven—or are at least hopeful that is the direction we are going—and that this is what guides our way in life. However, we otherwise act as if we are determined by our past. Our confusion arises because these two philosophies dominate our lives, yet they contradict each other. The Christian view has always been defined by the prospective, teleological, or finality view of life. In that case, life is determined by the future destiny of the individual. We see this in as simple (yet complex) an example as the acorn. The acorn is only an acorn because within it is the potential reality of an oak tree which will one day become manifest. The acorn is not defined or guided by some push from behind, but by a destiny it is to fulfill in the future.

Our intellectual infatuation with classical Darwinian thinking has us believing that everything is determined by past events. In which case we are determined by past fate rather than destiny. We must make a choice which philosophy best fits reality if we are to move out of the confusion in which we live. The Christian message is one that holds forth the image of God as a shepherd. To the agrarian society this image is clear. The shepherd walks before the flock and the sheep follow behind. The pillar of fire and cloud experienced on the Hebrew exodus went before them, it did not drive them from behind. These images, and more, have defined the Judeo-Christian understanding, and have been rife throughout most of the world’s mythologies. They inform us of the most reasonable (if not presently liked) understanding of the motive force of life. Life is defined by destiny.

The destiny that is portrayed in John’s dream is one of union, consummation, and wholeness. It is of entry into a life beyond division, where earth and heaven are not divided, where human beings and God are no longer separate but are so close that it would take the very sword of the Spirit to divide between them as between bone and marrow. Now let us take a deeper look at just what this destiny entails.

The Consummation

The resolution of John’s vision begins: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more."³ This is what is recorded in the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation. Immediately we are led to understand that the consummation of the vision reveals that the present life is not to be reconstructed, nor is it some form of reordering of present attitudes. John presents a complete transformation, a totally new form of life and existence. It is to be understood that the old will be completely removed in favor of a transformed life. It will be a life that no longer experiences separation from God, or separation of any form. Since separation is the origin of pain and sorrow, these, too, will have no place in the transformed life. John observed this as he saw the holy city, [the] new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’⁴ This transformation would mean union with God, a thing the great saints and mystics have always held as the culmination of life, the destiny of the soul.

At