How to Read Revelation & Avoid the Mark of the Beast - Paul Lamicela - Ep. 211 

While this isn't a good format for fully working through the many (good!) interpretive questions about Revelation, here are just a few responses to comments posted:

One of the best explanations of Revelation I’ve ever heard.

Amen! Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Very powerful truth that we need to hear in our day!

Thank you, Anabaptist Perspectives, for posting this material. It was refreshing to hear Paul's patient explanation of how to read Revelation. Aside from the graffiti in Smyrna, I think my favorite takeaway was the mark in the foreheads of the faithful in 14:1 that is in contrast to the mark of the beast. I am all in favour of rehabilitating the Revelation. By God's grace, I may preach through it someday which would force me to dig in much deeper. Blessings!

The perspective of the Book of Revelation as presented in this episode is most helpful. The Book of Revelation is just repeating the message of the rest of the New Testament in a different way, the way of apocalyptic literature, similar to apocalyptic literature of the Old Testament. Instead of being a strange book out of sync with the rest of the Scriptures, the Book of Revelation repeats the basic message of Scripture in an alternate form. God is quite creative in His efforts to woo us into cooperating with His cosmic plan which will eventually triumph - and we get a chance to participate in it!

Paul and Reagan: this is just superb! Paul knows his stuff, and how to understand Revelation--much needed in churches, instead of theories from ambitious dreamers (dispensationalism). I hope Paul will take this kind of teaching to more of us Anabaptists.

This is brilliant, thank you. Can we please get this man teaching through Revelation online, please. I'm in a dispensational church because there is nowhere else to go where I live. It would be really good to have Anabaptist teaching on Revelation for those of us who live in countries without an Anabaptist witness.

This video was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversational approach to the book of Revelation.

What a fantastic episode this was, thank you so much for sharing it! I’m now really exited to read Revelation with hopefully a new set of glasses. May the Lords peace and blessings be with you!

Thank you so much for this helpful perspective! Though I was raised with the amillenial view, I've never heard Revelation explained in quite this way.

This is so eye opening... thank you!!

This was very good! Thank you for sharing and God bless!

Praise God! Really well explained!

Great teaching. Thanks for this!

Thanks for this edifying presentation. Especially clarifying for me is the thought that Revelation simply teaches what the NT teaches! I would welcome your views on the place of Israel. I have yet to hear an explanation from both camps that I am comfortable with. Thanks!

Fantastic discussion. End time prophecies that came true in modern times, is one of the phenomenons that pushed me from a secular/atheist background, into faith. Anabaptism is the type of Christianity that seems most authentic to me.

A very enlightening perspective. As humans we tend to see things from a natural, physical, tangible, earthly perspective. We can hardly imagine anything spiritual if we are carnal. The more we see spiritually, the more we can understand the mysteries of the kingdom of God. And those mysteries are far greater than any earthly kingdom. Thank you for sharing.

I have now read through Revelation, and although I see that in many ways the prophecies can be, and most likely are cyclical and has a spiritual meaning, I still understand the text to explain what will happen in the end times. For example, I can see and do agree that the mark of the beast is a mark based on who/what you trust in during your life, but I also see that in the end, the last mark of the beast is the real deal in a more literal sense. Almost like that which is cyclical is very real and at the same time a foreshadow of the last that is to come. It’s all so interesting and I would love to listen to a study from Paul on this book.

We don't have to start out with some modern reinterpretation of what apocalyptic literature is. Nor do we have to draw on extrabiblical sources like the Sybilline Chronicles. We can look at the book of Daniel and how it parallels Revelation, and connect things in the two books. And we can look at how parts of Daniel were fulfilled in the past and expect that the prophecies that haven't been fulfilled yet will occur in the same way. An idealist living in Daniel's time would look at his prophecies that have already been fulfilled in our time - such as the kingdoms of Daniel 2 - and say, well, to make this relevant, we have to believe this is just about evil kingdoms at all times! But it wasn't. It had specific things that were fulfilled. Alexander the Great was an actual man who fulfilled the "goat with the prominent horn" of Daniel 8, and his kingdom split into literally four kingdoms as the vision showed. And Antiochus Epiphanes was a literal man who fulfilled the other horn in vs 9. Idealists would have looked at all that and said, "Jesus, the church, evil forces of all times, whatever". But it's not. It had specific fulfillments.

Genre in reading the scripture? New concept? Any scriptural proof for this?