The Book of Revelation takes its name in English from its title in Greek, apokalypsis. In its verb form the word means "to reveal." The book intends "to reveal" God's plan for human history. Perhaps even more important, it intends "to reveal" how hu mans are to live their lives in the present once they understand God's intent for the future.

God intends a future where ultimately a new heaven and a new earth will offer salvation to those who testify to the lordship of Jesus Christ as God's Messiah. This Jesus was executed by Rome because he made his entire life a testimony to that lordship.

The writer of Revelation, the Apostle John, recognizes that those who proclaim a testimony similar to Jesus' will meet a fate like his. John himself has been exiled to the island of Patmos. This points to a paradox: How can God be in charge of history when God's people suffer persecution for making that very claim?

The Book of Revelation intends to reveal the answer. John begins by introducing metaphors, such as a dragon in Chapter 12. The dragon is the representation of satanic power that infests the hearts of humans and the governments they wield. The moniker Beast from the Sea applies to the Roman Empire. In order to reach Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), where John and the seven churches to whom he wrote were based, Rome had to cross the Aegean Sea.

The third enemy, the Beast from the Land, also called the false prophet, was John's way of representing the bestial puppet governments in Asia Minor that cooperated with Rome's military, political, and economic agenda.

RECENT scholarship has concluded that there was no systematic persecution of Christians when John of Patmos wrote, most likely sometime near the end of the first century, during the reign of the emperor Domitian (81-96). The Romans, generally tolerant of indigenous religions, allowed locals to worship their own gods and goddesses as long as they also paid proper allegiance to the deities of Rome and the divine nature of Rome's emperor. They generally operated by what one today might call a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. During Domitian's reign, imperial forces did not go looking for persons who would not show proper veneration of Roman divinity, but if someone brought such lack of fidelity to their attention, the Asia Minor authorities, on Rome's behalf, were bound to act.

Christians intolerantly held to the view that there was only one God. When a Christian was so charged, he was brought before government leaders and punished. Sentence could range from loss of social standing, reputation, or property -- even to loss of life.

John did not want his followers to wait for such a charge to be brought against them. He demanded that Christ-believers tell on themselves by publicly witnessing to their exclusive belief in the Lordship of God and God's Christ.

Christ-believers who followed John's counsel suffered. To stake its own claim to lordship, the empire executed many of these believers the way it had once executed their Christ (see Rev 20:4). And so they cried out, "Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" (Rev 6:10).

ESCHEWING vengeance, God brought justice. The violence connected with the seven seals, trumpets, and bowls occurred as a direct result of the movement of justice into a defiantly unjust world. Christ-followers were not raptured out of the devastation; they were caught up within it (Rev 7:13-14). Shockingly, they were neither asked nor expected to fight back. At least not violently so.

Christ-believers would conquer imperial oppression "by the word of their witness" (Rev 12:10). Long before Mahatma Gandhi in India or Martin Luther King Jr. in the American South, John of Patmos asked his people to engage in a testimony that was tantamount to active, aggressive, nonviolent resistance. Their witness to the world would transform the world.

For modern readers, the Book of Revelation remains a call to nonviolent arms against any and every human person or people who would position themselves as lord over the destinies of others. In our own troubled times, when so many people seek spiritual direction and guidance, those who turn to the Book of Revelation should not expect to find a blueprint for constructing a spiritual escape hatch to heaven. John's focus is not on running away from the world but on changing the world by standing up to humankind's most draconian impulses and tendencies and witnessing against them.

Revelation is about resistance.
Brian K. Blount, author of Can I Get A Witness? Reading Revelation Through African-American Culture, will be installed as president of Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education today at 4 p.m. He may be contacted at bblount@union-psce.edu.