This is what is so satisfactory about Barnett: the current times were thoroughly explored, but the final statement is that the kingdom of God lasts a long time and is harassed to the last day, when the NHNE quickly takes its place (no 7 years of drawn out judgements as usually known).
Barnett, BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE NT: “Patmos”
IVP, 1990s
Using coded language John writes of the menace of Rome to Christians. Rome is portrayed as the instrument of “a great red dragon…” (ch 12).
This dragon gave authority to two beasts, a sea beast and an earth beast, to “make war on the saints…” (ch 13). The sea beast (from his location) is John’s code for the Roman emperor (who had just required all people to refer to him as “Lord and God”), while the earth beast represents the high priest of Asia, who officiates at the major cultic activities within in the province… The earth beast engages in magical arts to hoodwink the populace into worshipping the image of the “sea beast” (ch 13).
Although the dragon appears to be rampant on earth he is in fact, bound, limited, circumscribed through the period between Christ’s resurrection and his return—symbolically a thousand years (ch 20). Those who have lost their lives for Jesus’ sake, …reign with him throughout the millenium, sharing his victory over the dragon.
John’s book, therefore, was written above all to strengthen and encourage Christians facing harassment and persecution from Roman officials in the city s of the Province of Asia. John was deeply conscious of the political events in the wider world. He made many references, in particular, to the critical events of the sixties, but in tantalizing and elusive ways.
The massing of the dreaded Parthian cavalry near the Euphrates in AD 62 and the barely averted conflict with Rome’s eastern legions appears to be in mind on a number occasions (chs 6, 9). John develops horrific images of fiendish galloping cavalry based, apparently, on his knowledge of the Parthians and Euphrates region.
The great fire which devasted the world capital in AD 64 seems to have supplied John with imagery for the coming judgment of the “harlot city.” Despite her gaudy opulence and immorality and her immense wealth and power (inspired by memories of Claudius wife, the notorious Messalina?), God will bring upon her overwhelming destruction in a single day. (ch 18)
Once again John has apparently taken an event in recent history and converted it into powerfully vivid apocalyptic language.
Nero’s bloody onslaught on Christians which followed and was a direct result of the fire of Rome also provided much of John’s descriptive language. He wrote about the woman, the harlot Rome in ch 17 and 13.
The writer’s enigmatic description of the two witnesses/two prophets who were killed and who bodies lay in the streets of the great city (ch 11) is probably but not certainly) a reference to the martyr-deaths of the apostles Peter and Paul which occurred in Rome during Nero’s persecutions. (ch 11).
Nero’s own career ended in disaster. He was condemned by the Senate…and took his own life. There were widespread beliefs in Nero redivivus that may lay behind Johns’ description of one of the heads of the sea beast which revived. (ch 13)
Nero dominated the sixties. To that point in history he had been the greatest enemy of the Christians, satanic in his dimension of evil…
The eighth king is, in all probability, Domitian. …John was using the events of the recent past to depict the future…
In contrast to Domitian’s requirement to worship him, the true Lord of Lords and King of Kings declares a gospel from heaven in which we are to worship God. It is only in this century that scholars have begun to have an appreciation of John’s profound awareness of and audacious attack upon the theological pretentiousness of Roman civilization.
It is, in my opinion, of great significance that John used the dramatic historical events within his book. In earlier decades, Christians had expected Jesus to return at any moment (2 Th 2, 3). If one had experienced the firey destruction of the ‘eternal city’ in AD 64 and the bloodbath that followed, removing as it did the great apostles Peter and Paul, or the sacking of Mount Zion and desecration of the Holy Place in AD 70, it would easily have seemed that the end would come at any moment.
But…in fact John saw the return of Jesus as not occurring for some considerable time.
--pages 237—241.
