MJF APOLOGETICS

The Book of Revelation Made Easy by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., Th.D

Available at American Vision – starting price $10

This book is exactly what it claims to be: making the book of Revelation easy. That doesn’t mean it answers all of your questions. In fact, it might raise for your more questions than it answers. This may especially be the case if you’ve never encountered a preterist perspective on the book of Revelation. In fact, most Christians have never encountered preterism and this includes many in the reformed world.

This book is not necessarily intended to be your first stop as a defense for preterism. Instead, it is intended to explain the preterist perspective for Revelation and provides you with the proper tools to exegete the sections that aren’t dealt with in the book. What you’ll get is an exegetical basis for viewing the book of Revelation within a first century fulfillment by examining the passages which explicitly state that the prophecy really is coming soon (for John’s audience). You’ll see how a preterist interprets some of the judgment texts and how they show their fulfillment in the events leading up to the destruction of the temple. This is probably where most readers will find the greatest difficulty because the events seem too unbelievable and worldwide to have been fulfilled in a localized event in Jerusalem. But for me, this was the most convincing part because even Josephus (a Jewish contemporary historian) uses similar language that John uses to describe the events.

If I had to say anything negative about the book, it would be the treatment of the millennium. The book was already very short and I think Gentry could have devoted just a few more pages to make the case stronger. But that’s the problem with creating short books like this on such a deep topic. How could you possibly explain Revelation in 100, 200, or 2,000 pages? There would never be enough pages to explain all that you want to explain. There are almost always new questions that arise with every explanation. But at least with Revelation 20, I think a verse by verse analysis would have been helpful, even if it was condensed into 20-30 pages.

If you are coming to this having never read a work from a preterist, don’t expect to be fully convinced. But you will certainly have a more clear idea on how a preterist might interpret Revelation. If you want a compelling treatment of preterism as a whole that deals with the full range of Scripture, I couldn’t recommend more “Last Days Madness” by Gary DeMar. That book made me a preterist nearly overnight.