"Subtitle by:" "Abraham Christen Liando" "Banished to a cave, a persecuted man has a vision." "He sees the end of time, the return of a gentle Christ turned merciless warrior." "Plague, disease, holocausts, oceans of blood, wicked beasts, and a brutal Judgment Day." "Believers go to heaven." "Unbelievers are sent to a bottomless pit of fire." "This is John's revelation, the final book of the New Testament." "And millions believe his apocalypse is near, that we are the last generation before the end." "I think we are living in the twilight of human history." "Those who have rejected God and have lived selfish lives, they're cast in the Lake of Fire." "It's gonna be horrendous." "Was John foreseeing the future of the human race?" "Plotting a revolution against an evil empire?" "Or was he a man on the edge of insanity?" "The Book of revelation has been the brutal book of the bible." "It basically scared the hell out of us." "Why does this ancient book still haunt us?" "Can we unlock the secrets of Revelation?" "(ThundercIap)" "(Radio chatter)" "CONTROL TOWER:" "Negative." "FB-1 30, code 4." "You guys have a safe night." "PILOT:" "Jesus Christ!" "What the hell is that?" "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." "It's written war and disease follow in their wake." "Soon after their appearance, the wicked will be punished with eternal damnation." "The righteous will be saved with everlasting life." "The Book of Revelation." "It is both a horror story and the promise of a paradise soon to be." "Everybody is afraid of the end of the world." "Everybody is intimidated by the end of the world." "What's gonna happen?" "Worldwide, there are two billion Christians." "Many believe the Book of Revelation is a precise blueprint for Jesus's second coming." "In the United States, 55 per cent of adults believe the Bible is the word of God, without error, to be read literally." "Most people think that the Book of revelation is a prophecy of what's going to happen in the future." "For believers, it remains an absolutely contemporary text, just as relevant as the morning newspaper." "I'm convinced that God meant us to take it literally." "If you don't take it literally, you can't understand it." "If you can't understand it, you can't be blessed by it." "The book was probably written about 60 years after Jesus's crucifixion by a man named John." "His revelation came in a series of dream-like visions." "Many of these images are, to this day, seared into the popular imagination." "John sees an angel, a messenger sent by God." "A voice speaks." ""Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this."" "John finds himself before God." "God holds a scroll fastened shut by seven seals." "The scroll contains God's secret plan for the future." "John weeps, for he cannot open the scroll." "A sacrificed lamb appears." "This is Jesus." "The lamb opens the first four seals, unleashing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." "They bring war, disease, famine, and death upon the earth." "The fifth seal raises dead martyrs." "The lamb opens the sixth seal." "The sun grows black, the moon turns to blood." "Earthquakes destroy cities." "The seventh seal brings a half-hour of silence, a pause before the wonders and horrors to come." "John sees angels carrying trumpets." "Each trumpet blast ushers in worse terrors." "Hail, fire, and blood rain upon the earth." "Forests are destroyed, the oceans become blood." "Monstrous locusts attack any human without the mark of God on his forehead." "And I heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, "Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth."" "Two hundred million warriors on horseback swarm across the globe and destroy one-third of mankind." "A beast appears." "It is all that is evil." "A woman John calls the "whore of Babylon" comes forward." "And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." "John sees Jesus vanquish the whore." "And then on the plains of Armageddon," "Jesus and the armies of Satan fight the war to end all wars." "Christ the lamb becomes Christ the warrior." "He defeats Satan and casts him into a burning lake." "Jesus rules on earth for 1,000 years, destroys Satan for all time, and then judges all who have ever lived." "Revelation ends as a new Jerusalem descends from heaven." "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying." "For nearly 2,000 years," "John's Book of Revelation has haunted mankind." "The effort to decode the symbols in the Book of revelation - ultimately, that is the quest, to find the ultimate answer to the ultimate human riddle, which is:" "How does this story end?" "Does Revelation predict the end of the human story?" "Or does the book reveal other secrets?" "A coded political manifesto, or the rantings of a mad man?" "No matter how we interpret Revelation, we cannot avoid the fact that it is part of all our lives." "It influences elections, wars, the future." "people throughout time have found in revelation what they want to find, and some people find messages of hope and some people find the most nightmarish scenarios of what lies ahead." "Perhaps the key to unlocking the secrets of the Book of Revelation is to explore who the author was - a man on the run from one of the most ruthless tyrants of all time." "Tradition holds John wrote the Book of Revelation at the end of the first century AD." "Jesus was a living memory, and Christianity was a Jewish sect trying to survive the horrors of the Roman Empire." "For preaching about Jesus, the Romans had banished John to a small island off the coast of Turkey." "I, John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation was in the isle that is called Patmos, because I proclaimed God's word and gave testimony to Jesus." "Exiled from his fellow Christians," "John believed their only hope for survival was the return of Jesus." "The Romans must have seemed omnipotent." "The emperors then were cruel and masochistic, men of vast power and desires." "The most infamous, Nero." "He ruled an empire that stretched from Britain to Africa and included the holy city of Jerusalem." "In 64 AD, Rome burned." "Rumours spread that Nero himself started the fire." "To avoid the wrath of his people, he needed a scapegoat." "He chose an easy target - the renegade Jews known as Christians." "His wrath was brutal and bizarre." "The early Christians were being very actively persecuted by the Romans." "Life was likely to be nasty, brutish and short." "You had to keep on the run." "If they caught you, they'd banish you, they'd kill you, they'd torture you." "One form of torture.. animals were set loose to devour human victims for the amusement of Roman soldiers." "Death was considered a relatively mild punishment for somebody." "The Romans forced their subjects to worship the emperor as if he were a deity." "A sacrilege for Jews and Christians." "In 66 AD, the Jews fought back." "They gained control of the temple in Jerusalem." "It was a short-lived victory." "The Romans sacked the temple, overran the city, and evicted the Jews." "They would not return for nearly 1,900 years." "The author of Revelation may also have fled Jerusalem in the aftermath of the revolt." "Under the cover of darkness, he preached the gospel to covert gatherings of believers." "Christians of John's generation believed Jesus had promised to return quickly, in their lifetimes, to rescue them from the tyranny of Roman rule." "But Jesus had failed to appear." "Eventually, the Romans banished John." "John was an angry person, hurt, frustrated, and vengeful." "He's sleeping with a rock for his pillow on the earth and he doesn't know how long they're going to leave him there." "And he has these dreams and visions and nightmares and fantasies and hallucinations and he writes it." "The brutal images of Revelation come from a life of anguish." "Jungian psychologist Paul Watsky claims the book itself can reveal clues to John's mental state." "Are the strange images of Revelation the result of insanity?" "Anybody who's living that kind of Iife is going to be under enormous psychological stress." "We can speculate about who John was and how he was constituted psychologically." "He could have believed that what was going on in his own mind was in fact going on in the cosmos in a major way." "What I doubt very much, though, is that he was psychotic in the most severe way, for instance, schizophrenic, because in schizophrenia, people's thoughts are not that well organised." "They wouldn't produce a great work of literature, which I would consider revelation to be." "Watsky is not alone." "Many scholars believe John was not a mad man, but quite sane, a strategic revolutionary." "The book may be a coded message to the beleaguered faithful that Jesus will soon return and destroy their enemies, the Romans." "Writing against Rome at the time meant death." "So John may have disguised his message in a secret language only Christians would have understood." "The clues are littered throughout the book." "The most famous.." "the number of the beast - 666." "Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man." "Its number is 666." "John was asking the reader to solve a riddle." "Who is 666?" "For nearly 2,000 years, people have tried." "Some answers have included popes, kings, dictators, business leaders, presidents." "But all these people lived well after John's death." "Who did he mean?" "In John's time, numerology was used to encode words." "Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet was paired with a number." "666 equals the value of the letters in the name of John's nemesis..." "There is another clue that the beast of Revelation is a symbol of Rome." "John writes.." "And I saw one of the beast's heads as it were wounded to death." "And his deadly wound was healed." "An event that mirrors the legend of none other than Nero." "In 68 AD, Nero tried to commit suicide." "Too timid to do the deed, he asked his scribe to kill him." "Soon after his death, rumours began to spread." "There was a legend which said that Nero did not die, that he would come back at some point." "Just as the beast had a mortal head wound that healed," "Christians feared that Nero also survived and was in hiding, preparing for battle, soon to return with an army to slaughter them." "The beast is accompanied by a whore," "a symbol that clearly represents Rome." "John writes.. "The whore fornicates with the kings of the earth. "" "On her forehead, words.." ""Mystery, Babylon, the mother of whores and earth's abominations. "" "The whore is dressed in purple." "Purple was the royal colour of the Roman Empire." "She sits on a beast with seven heads." "The city of Rome sat on seven hills." "The whore is Rome." "John saw the emperors as sinful and blasphemous." "He exacts revenge against the Romans the only way he can - in his book." "He writes that Jesus will annihilate the beast that is the emperor." "The whore that is Rome will fare no better." "The Kings shall hate the whore and shall make her desolate and naked and shall eat her flesh and burn her with fire." "I think that revelation is written for people who are experiencing injustice." "And it was very important for them to know that evil would be judged, that Rome could not continue to inflict evils and injustices on the world for ever and get away with it." "They thought Jesus was gonna topple the Roman Empire." "They literally thought it was gonna be a war." "The war, John wrote, would take place at Armageddon." "It is a real location, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds on earth." "In the Book of Revelation, John writes of the events that will happen in the days before the Battle of Armageddon." "Disease, plague, and drought will spread across the planet." "Oceans and rivers will turn to blood." "The sun will go black." "A massive earthquake will destroy cities." "And then Satan will gather the kings of the earth in preparation for battle against Jesus." "And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon." "This is Armageddon." "It is an actual place, 50 miles from Jerusalem, in the Jezreel Valley in Israel." "The name Armageddon comes from Megiddo." "In the original Hebrew, it's Har Megiddo, which means mountain of Megiddo." "And from Har Megiddo, we get Har Megiddon, and from there, Armageddon." "When John wrote Revelation, Megiddo was occupied by his mortal enemy, the Romans." "We've got one of the largest Roman legions in all of the holy Land parked and ready for battle." "It made perfect sense for John to locate this battle between good and evil at Megiddo." "34 times armies have waged war in Megiddo." "In Revelation, the corpses of Satan's army will bloody these fields again." "So here we're at the site of Megiddo, the biblical Armageddon, the battle between good and evil." "We are told that the kings of the armies of the world are gonna come in from all directions, Iike so." "Jesus is gonna come down on a white horse from the heavens along with the forces of good." "They are gonna meet in the JezreeI valley." "The JezreeI valley is shaped like a triangle on its side, with its tip over here at the Mediterranean and its base by the River Jordan." "Megiddo is here." "That's Armageddon." "As we're told in the Book of revelation, the forces of good, led by Jesus, are going to vanquish the forces of evil." "Armageddon is going to, of course, be the culmination of all of the wrath of man and the wrath of Satan against God." "According to the Book of Revelation, the kings of the world - led by Satan - swarm across Armageddon." "Jesus descends from heaven." "He obliterates Satan's army." "Satan is imprisoned in a lake of fire." "Jesus banishes all evil from the earth for 1,000 years." "John died around the beginning of the second century, leaving behind a mystery." "The ultimate question is what did John mean in writing the Book of revelation?" "Is it meant to be taken literally?" "Is it just symbolic?" "In the late second century, a prophet named Montanus believed the Battle of Armageddon was all too real and was soon to happen." "He was among the first to preach that Revelation was a blueprint for the future." "(Thunder rumbles)" "He attracted many followers." "They cut themselves off from society and awaited the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven." "Jesus never did return in Montanus's lifetime." "But the belief that Revelation predicts the future did not die out with Montanus." "It has spread through nearly 2,000 years of Christendom." "The early Catholic Church tried to reign in interpretations of Revelation." "The church forbade attempts by those outside the priestly hierarchy to interpret the Bible." "Located a few blocks from the Vatican is the Valdese Church." "Eight centuries ago, this Christian sect was bold enough to interpret the New Testament for themselves, directly challenging the authority of the church." "They wandered from town to town preaching messages not sanctioned by the Vatican." "For the Catholic Church, the Waldensians represented a threat." "The book of the apocalypse is a passionate announcement for the believers" "to resist and to conduct with firmness their testimony without giving in, without being intimidated." "It was a dangerous time to defy the church." "The Vatican declared the Waldensians heretics." "They were viciously persecuted." "Many died for their beliefs." "Against all odds, the Waldensians have endured to this day, and the Bible is no longer the dominion ofjust the Catholic priesthood." "Today, there are as many as 3,000 Christian denominations, each with its own interpretation of Revelation." "The fevered imaginations of passionate religious believers set loose on this text can produce a Iot of chaos." "Late in the 20th century, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo became obsessed by the Book of Revelation." "They thought they could hasten the Apocalypse through murder." "A poison gas attack in a Tokyo subway killed a dozen people and injured thousands." "An apocalyptic cult called the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland believed a three-month-old boy was the Antichrist." "They murdered him by driving a stake through his heart." "With investigators on their trail, 53 believers died." "Some committed suicide, others were murdered." "In Waco, Texas, the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh, believed the Apocalypse was near." "David Koresh convinced the Branch Davidians that he was, in fact, a figure foretold in scripture and that the final apocalypse was at hand and they were the small group of redeemed souls who were under attack by the forces of Satan." "After a 5 1-day government siege," "Koresh and 73 church members died in fire and flame." "Christian institutions over the years have always been made exceedingly nervous by the Book of revelation because it very quickly slips out of control." "And it's not just extremists who believe Revelation is a description of how the world will end." "Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician, physicist, and biblical scholar." "He believed the symbolic language of the Book of Revelation could be decoded with the same accuracy as any of the laws of nature." "Newton spent 55 years trying to figure out the date of Jesus's return." "Was Newton a kook, a fanatic?" "He was actually a man of his time." "Until the 1 9th century, the ultimate scientific quest was to understand God's plan for the universe." "Newton would have seen no difference in his study of biblical prophecy and his experiments in physics." "They both revealed God's secrets." "Science and prayer were two paths to the same destination, that is an appreciation of the mind of God and God's will for the physical universe." "Near the end of his life, Newton scribbled a date on a scrap of paper- a prediction for the Apocalypse." "2060 AD." "We'll have to wait and see if he was correct." "The most famous explorer in history wasn't so patient." "He tried to trigger the Apocalypse in his own lifetime." "1 492." "Christopher Columbus sought trade routes to Asia." "He also had a secret mission - to usher in the last days of the Book of Revelation." "Columbus wrote, "God made me the messenger of the new heaven and new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St John. "" "He hoped to discover a westward route to the Middle East so Christian armies could capture Jerusalem." "Once in control, they would convert the Jews to Christianity." "Only then, Columbus believed, would Jesus return." "Columbus never made it to Jerusalem." "Instead, he landed in the Americas and the Apocalypse did not take place." "Columbus's plans for the Holy Land live on into the 21 st century." "You can make a very strong case historically that the origins of Israel are deeply connected with evangelical Christian prophetic belief." "Early Jewish settlers were supported by American and British Christians who believed Jesus would only return after Jews possessed all of the biblical Holy Land." "Decades later, with Christians looking on in anticipation, Israeli soldiers captured Jerusalem in 1 967." "For the first time in 1,900 years," "Jews controlled the Western Wall, the last remnant of the temple." "That was, in our minds, the fulfilment of prophecy that was given 2,500 years ago." "We sobbed and wept and rejoiced." "We knew Jesus was coming back in our lifetime." "Evangelical Christians around the world waited." "And, again, the end did not come." "So some believers re-interpreted the prophecy." "They proposed that the Antichrist must desecrate the temple in Jerusalem before Jesus would return." "But there is a problem." "There is no temple to desecrate." "The Romans sacked it in 70 AD." "So, in order for Jesus to return, the temple must be rebuilt." "In the way is the Dome of the Rock, the third most holy mosque for Muslims." "But razing it would risk holy war." "Jesus has to come back." "And we want him to come back soon." "And he can't come back until the temple's rebuilt." "So get the heck out of the way and let us rebuild the temple." "That's the mentality." "But it's powerful, it's prolific." "It's our religion, it's our culture." "And it's sacred to us." "Christian groups donate millions of dollars a year to Israel." "And nowhere is that support stronger than in the United States, where evangelical beliefs continue to gain in popularity." "(wild cheering)" "Millions of young Americans today believe they are living in the last days, the second coming is near." "I will seek your kingdom... ln mega-churches, like Guts Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the message of Revelation is being preached in all new ways." "And I will trust in you, Lord" "And I will now sing my hope" "That you would be glorified" "When we started the church, we just thought about taking our approach to younger people and to people that weren't attracted to church." "You've got to make it enticing, make it attractive to them." "And I worship you with all I am" "blessed be your name" "Churches like this one preach that the Book of Revelation is perfectly clear" "God will condemn non-believers to eternal hell and bless believers with everlasting life." "Like, I don't have a shred of doubt right now that we're in the end times." "Things change so rapidly, and things are becoming so intense, and things are so passionate today that something has to happen." "I Iook at the Book of revelation as a wonderful outline or a map of the future." "Many believe the Apocalypse is imminent." "I am of the firm opinion that we are living in the Iast days." "For the believer, the signs of the end are everywhere." "Jesus said there'II be an increase of wars and rumours of war." "There'II be earthquakes and the sea and the waves roaring." "There would be an increase of wickedness in the Iast days because love grows cold." "And while it is true that no man knows the day or the hour," "Jesus said, "When you see these signs begin to happen, then lift up your head for your redemption draws near."" "people feel powerless and they want to know what the future holds." "Prophecy." "Prophecy is there to save us." "More than half of all Americans, according to a nationwide poll, believe the prophecies of the Book of Revelation will come true." "One of the most influential apocalyptic prophecies is called the Rapture." "The Rapture has been popularised by the Left Behind series of books and other apocalyptic Christian media." "In the Rapture, Jesus comes to rescue believers from the horrors of life in the end times." "They rise in the air, like helium balloons, to meet their saviour who takes them back to heaven." "We meet our loved ones in the clouds and we meet the Lord in the stratosphere, because he has come from heaven to take us to the Father's house." "What a great getting-up morning that's going to be." "I can't wait to meet my mum and dad and many other friends." "We're gonna get out of here before all hell breaks loose or before it freezes over." "We're out of here, praise God." "glory to Jesus, Iet's be prepared so we can get out of here before all this hell takes place." "With the faithful safely in heaven, the end, as described in Revelation, now comes to pass." "There's going to be a colossal, evil rule on the earth." "There's gonna be genocide, it's gonna be horrendous." "What happens to the unbeliever is probably the most difficult thing for us to cope with." "I see no hope for the unsaved after this life." "Doug Batchelor was one of the unsaved - a petty thief, a drop-out, a runaway." "As a teenager, he left civilisation and headed into the wilderness." "This personal journey would eventually become a desire to bring a prophetic reading of the Book of Revelation to the entire world." "The last thing I was interested in really was Christianity." "So I went through a litany, a kaleidoscope of different religions, a Iot of Eastern religions, tried to mix them all up and tried to find out what the purpose of Iife is." "By chance, someone led me up here and I fell in love with the place, and moved into the cave." "Batchelor lived in a self-imposed exile for over a year." "Alone, in the cave, he discovered a discarded Bible." "Reading the bible, as much as I didn't want to believe it, because I thought it was just full of fables and allegories, something about it told me that this really is true." "And I can't put my finger on the day when it happened, but somewhere along the way I found as I was reading it, I was believing it." "I Iike to think I'm not gullible," "I'm very cynical, growing up in New York City, kind of cynical about con artists, and what is real," "but I began to try what I found in it." "And the principles that Jesus teaches were so revolutionary and unique that it just got a hold of my heart and mind and that's been 30 years ago." "Every sinner is punished according to what they've done..." "Batchelor now takes his end-time message to the world." "He is one of many preachers who use television and the Internet to export the American interpretation of Revelation across the globe." "For God, the punishment of the wicked is a painful act, but it's something that His justice demands." "It is a strict reading of Revelation." "Only Born Agains go to heaven." "The rest of mankind goes to hell." "And it is no longer confined to Sunday morning church services." "A Iot of decisions in our government are made either directly or indirectly related to the religious evangelical consciousness:" "In God we trust." "One nation under God." "Many Americans take that to mean:" "In Christ we trust." "One nation under Christ." "If we're representative of 40 per cent of the population, then 40 per cent of the Congress and 40 per cent of the Senate," "40 per cent of the Supreme Court should be Christian." "For believers who understand the bible to be God's inspired word the bible trumps everything else, including the United States Constitution." "Of all the apocalyptic prophecies, the Rapture stands out for evangelicals." "But there's a catch." "John never wrote a word about the Rapture." "The author of the Book of Revelation believed Christ's return was imminent." "The God of the spirits and the prophets has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place:" ""See, I am coming soon."" "Nearly 2,000 years later, believers still await the arrival of Jesus." "The bible talks about the coming of Christ being immediate and we have to be ready for it at any moment." "Many believe Jesus will reappear in the Rapture." "For many theologians and scholars, however, the Rapture is questionable theology." "We as scholars think there's a range of possible interpretations of which a number are legitimate, but the Rapture idea would be outside of that range." "That's not in the Book of revelation and that's not in the Christian tradition as it's been understood for the Iast 2,000 years." "I think many believers think that the idea of the Rapture must have very ancient origins, that it must be part of Christian belief from the very beginning, and, actually, that's not the case." "In 1 830, in northern Scotland, 1 5-year-old Margaret MacDonald had a vision of Jesus returning to earth not once, but twice more." "She saw Jesus taking true believers to heaven and then returning again for the Last Judgment." "A British preacher named John Darby incorporated Margaret's vision into a precise end-time plot based on passages found throughout the Bible." "The centrepiece of his prophetic system.." "Jesus would rescue believers before the horrors of the Book of Revelation." "Margaret's vision of Jesus's return was spread by Darby throughout Great Britain and America as the Rapture." "In the early 20th century, Darby's ideas were taken up by one Cl Scofield, embezzler, reputed adulterer, and biblical scholar." "Scofield annotated a Bible based on Darby's end time prophecies." "It was a stroke of genius to put his notes on the same page as the biblical text because readers often couldn't remember whether they had read something in the book of the bible itself or whether they had read it at the bottom of the page." "It has sold over 1 1 million copies worldwide, and is still in print in seven languages." "Father, we give you praise for your special name." "Like countless ministers across America," "Bishop Carlton Pearson preached Scofield's interpretation of Revelation." "Everybody say hallelujah." "With thousands of followers, he believed that the Book of Revelation was God's blueprint for the future." "But as his influence grew, his convictions began to crumble." "The way we were raised," "God is intolerant, distant, cold, harsh, bitter, and he's sitting there waiting and looking for some sin to judge." "And then after execution, he tortures you for ever." "That's not only absurd and profane, it's vulgar." "So I'm now coming to my own conclusions and that's upsetting the cart." "Now here's what I'm trying to get us to:" "I'm trying to get you to still feel God, but not fear Him." "I want you to be able to approach the Book of revelation without panicking." "Panic, the word Panic comes from the Greek mythological God of fear." "Pearson now preaches the hell of the Book of Revelation does not exist." "The revelation is the revelation of Jesus Christ." "Those of you who want to do this end-of-the-worId freak stuff, go ahead." "Continue scaring everybody and scaring yourself and being miserable doing that." "If that sounds like a denunciation, it's really an observation and hopefully a correction, because it really brings destructive responses and habits on the planet, and we can make it better." "This radical idea has cost Pearson dearly." "Most of his congregation abandoned him after leading Pentecostal bishops declared him a heretic." "HaIIeIujah." "But Pearson might find an ally in the most surprising of places - the Vatican." "The international theological Commission, which is the chief advisory body to the Vatican on doctrinal questions, is today working on a document." "It will for the first time in official form say this, that Christians can hope that hell will be empty." "The belief is that even the worst sinners may be redeemed and sent to heaven." "This revolutionary idea cuts against the beliefs of most Christians who think the Book of Revelation is all too clear about the existence of hell." "The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." "Those who have rejected God, they're cast in the Lake of Fire." "hell is a life without God for ever." "It's torment." "It's weeping and gnashing of teeth." "It's no hope." "Who is damned?" "Who will be saved?" "These questions have haunted mankind since before John's Revelation." "John came face-to-face with the final terror.." "his own death, the deaths of those he loves." "A cosmic drama of good and evil played in his mind's eye." "If you look at the human side, the realistic human side of John's plight, you really care about the man." "He was in hell." "John asks the questions many ask.." ""ls there justice?" "Will evil be punished?" "is there life beyond the here and now?"" "He goes on a journey through darkness and misery in a search for the meaning of life." "In the end, God promises him that the blessed will win." "The last sentence is: "May the grace of God be with all of His people for ever."" "So it starts with a revelation of Jesus Christ, and it ends in grace." "Not hell, not brimstone, not lakes of fire." "It ends on this soaring note of an era of peace, an era of happiness and justice, no more deaths, no more tears." "That may be why the Book of Revelation has endured for so long." "It is the ultimate story of good triumphing over evil." "But John took to his grave the answer to the question that has been haunting humanity for two millennia." "How did he intend Revelation to be read?" "Many scholars agree that the book is a symbolic manifesto against the horrors of the Roman Empire." "But millions of people believe Revelation is God's plan for the future and that we are the last generation before the Apocalypse." "For believers eagerly awaiting the end, wars, natural disasters, pollution are all part of the script of Revelation." "To date, apocalyptic prophets have always been wrong." "But if you are predicting the end of the world, you only have to be right once."