Alan F. Johnson

Revelation’s sixth vision—The Vision of the Great Whore (Rev. 17–20)—mentions a thousand-year reign of Christ (Rev. 20:2–7). Commentators call this period “the millennium.” This word comes from the Latin words mille, “thousand,” and annum, “year.” The traditional prophetic frameworks derive their names from this period. Postmillennialism believes the Lord will…

We now come face-to-face with an evil triad. The Seven Mystic Figures vision has already revealed the Dragon (Rev. 12:3–17) and the Sea Beast (Rev. 13:1–10). Now John introduces us to the Land Beast (Rev. 13:11–18). “This second beast completes the triumvirate of evil—the dragon, the sea beast, and the…

We need to chat about prophetic beasts. Our interpretation of Revelation using the inmillennial model requires it. They will play a major role in the rest of Revelation’s drama. In an earlier post, we saw how the Seven Mystic Figures vision describes the generation between Jesus’s birth and the destruction of the…

The Seven Mystic Figures vision makes a slight change to the timeframe of the first two judgment visions. They concentrated on the “great tribulation” Jesus predicted in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24:1–3, 21, 34; Rev. 7:14). This vision focuses on the entire generation of Jesus’s life on earth. It begins with…

One proof of a good theory is its ability to suggest answers to difficult problems. We have seen how our prophetic model—inmillennialism—does this in Hebrews. We are now applying this framework to John’s visions in Revelation. The complications increase here due to the many prophetic images in this book, but,…

In this post, we continue applying our prophetic model—inmillennialism—to John’s third vision in which he hears seven trumpets. The sixth trumpet and the following interlude pose several difficulties. Speaking of Revelation 11, which describes this part of the vision, Alan F. Johnson says: Some have considered this chapter one of…

In our last post, we began showing how Inmillennialism can account for the signs in Revelation’s third vision (i.e., of the seven trumpets). Some of them have kernels of physical reality inside John’s figurative language. Others continue long-standing prophetic traditions where the figures portray God’s judgments against Israel. Let’s resume…