To listen to the full unabridged episode: Revelation 7 - Sweet as Honey, Bitter in the Stomach
One of the most important habits we can develop when reading Revelation is remembering what kind of text we’re reading. It’s easy to open a Bible and forget that the various books represent different genres — you wouldn’t read the Psalms the same way you’d read 1 Kings, and you wouldn’t read 1 Kings the same way you’d read Philippians. Revelation is its own thing entirely.
This is a text of apocalypse — a revealing, a peeling back of spiritual realities. It’s written primarily in metaphor and symbol, giving us word pictures of things that are real but not literal. Not history. Not a timeline. A vision.
Revelation 10: Eating the Scroll
Chapter 10 opens with a striking figure: a strong angel descending from heaven, dressed in a cloud, rainbow over his head, face like the sun, feet like fiery pillars. He holds a small open scroll and cries out with a voice like a lion’s roar. Seven thunders respond — and then John is told not to write down what they said.
Even in this text full of revelation, some things are held back. Whatever the seven thunders communicated, it wasn’t yet time for those words to go out. There are things we simply cannot comprehend, and God, in his wisdom, withholds them.
Then John is told to take the scroll and eat it. The angel warns him: “It will be bitter in your stomach, sweet as honey in your mouth."
And that’s exactly what happens.
The sweetness is God’s word itself — his plan is wonderful and beautiful. The bitterness is what that word contains: hard warnings, difficult prophecies, the reality that following Jesus in a broken world is not easy. The prophet’s task is to speak what is true and what is coming, and much of what is coming is painful.
This is consistent with other prophetic calls throughout Scripture — Ezekiel, Daniel, and others received similar commissioning. The word is sweet. But once it becomes part of you, once it shapes your calling, it’s going to be hard.
N.T. Wright makes an important observation here: prophecy is a creative act. When a prophet speaks something into the world, something happens. This is a theme that runs through all of Scripture, back to Genesis 1 — God spoke, and things came to be. John eating the scroll is him taking God’s words into himself, making them his own, so that they can go out from him with creative force.
Revelation 11: The Temple, the Witnesses, and the Seventh Trumpet
Chapter 11 opens with John being handed a measuring rod and told to measure the temple — but not the outer court. This parallels the sealing of God’s people earlier in Revelation: the measuring represents protection from ultimate harm. And yet, the outer court is left vulnerable. The people of God will experience suffering and hardship. That’s part of the deal.
Notice the numbers: three and a half years, 1,260 days, 42 months. These all say the same thing. And what is double three and a half? Seven — the number of completion. The suffering of God’s people is incomplete. It is half a measure. It is not the final word.
This is not a timeline to map onto history. It’s the message: you will suffer, but you will not be destroyed.
The Two Witnesses
Then we meet two prophetic figures — and here is where the imaginative speculation usually kicks in. Moses? Elijah? Elisha? People have proposed all kinds of answers.
But there’s a clue in the text itself. Verse 4 calls them the two olive trees and the two lamp stands. Earlier in Revelation, what did the lamp stands represent? The seven churches. The church.
Wright’s summary is apt: the two witnesses appear to be a symbol for the whole church in its prophetic witness, its faithful death, and its vindication by God.
The church, bearing witness in the world, will face opposition. The “monster from the abyss” — which later chapters reveal to be the power of pagan empire, embodied by Rome — will make war on it. The witnesses are killed. Their bodies lie in the street of the city “spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified” — that is, Rome itself, or the whole public order of empire.
And then they are resurrected. A voice from heaven says: “Come up here." And they ascend.
This is the message to a persecuted church: yes, the world will hate you. Yes, following Jesus will cost you. Some of you will actually die for your faith. But resurrection is real. The hope of resurrection is what enables us to press on.
History bears this out in a striking way. In the early centuries of the church, one of the primary drivers of growth was the martyrdom of Christians. They were known in their communities for caring for the poor, for living with integrity, for embodying the way of Jesus. And when they were executed, they didn’t recant. They stood firm. People saw this and were undone by it — and came to faith. The church has always grown through persecution. It still does. The places where the church is struggling today are often the places where it has become too comfortable, too entangled with cultural and political power.
Suffering, it turns out, produces the kinds of things that ease never can.
The Seventh Trumpet: The Kingdom Has Come
The cycle closes in verses 15–19 with the seventh trumpet. The voices in heaven cry out:
“Now the kingdom of the world has passed to our Lord and his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever."
The 24 elders worship. And notice something subtle but significant in verse 17: God is described as “who is and who was” — not “who is to come.” Because he has come. The one who was expected has arrived. The wait is over.
The raging nations are judged. The destroyers are destroyed. The servants — prophets, holy ones, small and great, all who fear God’s name — are rewarded. Remember the martyrs in earlier chapters crying out, “How long, O Lord?" Here is the answer. Here is the justice they were promised.
This is not a military conquest. There is no great Christian army sweeping through the earth. It is simply this: Christ has returned, and therefore his kingdom has come. Righteousness and justice prevail — not because we won, but because he did.
A Note on “New Heaven, New Earth”
One question that came up in our conversation: if Revelation speaks of a new heaven and new earth, does that mean the old creation gets burned up and replaced?
Wright pushes back on this reading — and I think rightly so. The popular notion that “everything’s going to get burned up anyway, so what does it matter?” is a relatively recent invention, largely pieced together in the mid-1800s from fragments of Scripture taken out of context.
What Scripture actually describes is renewal, not destruction. God declared his creation good in Genesis 1, and he is not abandoning it. The resurrection of Jesus — still recognizably Jesus, but glorified — is the template. Creation doesn’t get replaced; it gets redeemed. Sin and death are removed. Everything is made whole.
As one person in our group put it beautifully: nothing that what God created will be wasted.
Looking Ahead
Next session we move into Revelation 12 — and things get considerably stranger. Women, dragons, cosmic war. We’re going further up and further into the spiritual realm.
If you want to join us in person, we gather on Tuesday afternoons at Peace Presbyterian Church in Flint. We’d love to have you.