Revelation 1: Jesus Vomits Swords

Listen to the podcast below (or right click this link for the mp3 file) 

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Let's start by looking at the wikipedia page. Looks like it is written by John, although it seems to be a different John from the books by that name. Also, it seems many believe it was written in 95AD, although some place it at 70AD instead. There is actually a ton of information there, but most of it seems to be about the content itself, which we will get to in the reading soon enough. Near the bottom though is a section Criticism which contains a quote from Ingersoll that Revelation is "the insanest of all books." Awesome!

Prologue (v. 1-3)

God sent an angel to John so that his followers would know what is about to take place. Blessed is anyone who reads or hears this prophecy, for the time is near.

First, I'd like to point out that it says the events which are going to be described in this book are right around the corner. It says it twice actually, in v1 it says "must soon take place" and in v3 is says "the time is near". Seems pretty clear to me that it is therefore going to be a failed prophecy. The only way out of it is to redefine what they mean by "soon". I suppose it is up to each individual person to determine whether they think it is reasonable to define soon to be "in about 2000 years.

Guzik has 2 answers for this point. The first is one that we have seen him use many times in the past, that we are not running toward a distant brink, but we are running along side it, always right near the edge. With this logic we can be on the verge of falling for thousands of years without ever falling. Honestly, I think he's pushing his "falling off a cliff" analogy pretty hard here. If that was what was meant by the book, you would think it would say something like "it could happen at any moment" or something. Would you describe his situation (running along side the edge) as "must soon take place" or "the time is near"? I think not.

His other defense here is a quote from someone named Walvoord, he says 

Shortly is the ancient Greek phrase en tachei, which means “'quickly or suddenly coming to pass,' indicating rapidity of execution after the beginning takes place. The idea is not that the event may occur soon, but that when it does, it will be sudden.”

which I decided to check out on the lexicon for this point, when it comes to verse 1, he is potentially right, the Greek is tachei which translates to speed. Perhaps his interpretation here is correct here and we are talking about speed once it starts but not speed in it getting started. But what about verse 3? Here 'near' is from the word engus which means 'near (in place or time)'. Given that the phrase is "the time is near", I don't think there is really a way around this.

Second, if God really is all powerful, why would he only send an angel to John? Why not send one to everybody?

Greeting to the Seven Churches (v. 4-8)

John greets the 7 churches in Asia. He wishes them peace from God and the 7 spirits before his throne.

Is there supposed to be one spirit for each church? I feel like I'm missing something here.

According to Guzik, this is a reference to Isaiah 11 which describes 7 aspects of the holy spirit. I don't know about that, because the text clearly says "seven spirits". I also looked at the commentary of Jamieson, Fausset & Brown for this and didn't find anything very satisfying. They talk about seven's a lot, it has a bit of a numerology feel to it. I still might just be missing something here.

Jesus freed us with his blood, he will come with the clouds and everyone will see and wail on account of him.

I'm guessing 'coming with the clouds' means he will be flying down from the sky. This makes some sense as they believed heaven was up in the clouds. Does the idea that everyone will see him indicate a flat earth? I suppose it would be argued that Jesus could fly around the earth and everyone would see him, they don't necessarily have to all see him at the same time.

Guzik says that "every eye will see" refers to the fact that when Jesus returns everyone will know about it, in contrast to his first coming which was "somewhat obscure", and "never made front-page news in Rome". I don't know about that, didn't Herod kill a bunch of children because of the birth of Jesus? Doesn't sound so obscure to me.

God is the alpha and the omega, "who is, who was, and who is to come"

This is said twice, in verse 4 and 8. I guess it is the way the bible says God is eternal.

Interesting point from Guzik here

The Greek construction of who is, who was and who is to come is intentionally awkward in the Greek. It seems that John searched for a phrase to communicate the Old Testament idea of Yahweh.

 Vision of the Son of Man (v. 9-20)

John tells us that God sent him to the island Patmos, and while he was 'in the spirit' a loud voice like a trumpet told him to write a book and send it to the 7 churches.

Apparently Patmos is a prison island. (Guzik)

I'm not really sure what it means to be 'in the spirit', was he praying?

Again from Guzik's commentary, Walvoord says he was "Carried beyond normal sense into a state where God could reveal supernaturally the contents of this book." Whatever that means.

When he turned to see the voice, he saw 7 golden lampstands. In the middle was Jesus in a long robe with a golden sash around his chest. His hair was white like wool or snow. His eyes were like fire, his feet were bronze, his voice was like the roar of many waters. He held 7 stars in his right hand, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like staring into the sun.

Uhh...so he's insane right? Or stoned out of his mind, or something. Seriously, how are we supposed to make sense out of this?

Looking at Guzik once again, the lamp stands are not lamps, they are a vessel to put a lamp where you display light, but they don't produce light themselves. This is an analogy for the church, which is more of a platform for Jesus. He also says that the garments are meant to show that Jesus is of high status. Long robes are worn by people who don't have to work much, and the sash is gold and therefore very valuable. The hair is about old age and wisdom. Eyes are about judgement. The feet are also about judgement, as well as stability and permanence. His voice is powerful. The sword is power and it is coming out of his mouth because it is supposed to be his words. His face is shining because of his glory.

Jesus says he is the first and last, and then says he has the keys of death.

A third time he is saying he is eternal, and that with Jesus you can't die.

Jesus explains that the 7 stars in his hand are the angels of the seven churches, and the 7 lamp stands are the churches themselves.

Okay, so does every church have a corresponding angel then, or are these 7 churches special? Why do the stars and lamp stands go together? What about all of the other crazy images here?


What we learned today:

--Apocalypse--

Revelation 1:1,3 The end is near

"must soon take place", "the time is near"

--Properties of God--

Revelation 1:4,8,17 God is eternal

"who is and who was and who is to come" (twice)

"I am the first and the last"

---

Check out today's comic

Introducing Hausdorff Bible Comics

For the last couple of months, I've been posting comics of some of the things that come up in the bible reading. I had a lot of fun with it, and decided I would like to do them more often. I would ideally like to draw one for every bible chapter (although realistically I am going to shoot for at least one a week), so in the interest of not cluttering up the blog with a bunch of extra posts, I've decided to put them on their own site: Hausdorff Bible Comics. Notice there is also a new RSS feed in the sidebar.

I'm back home, so tomorrow the blog will be back to normal. We are on Revelation, the last book in the bible. I've heard plenty about this book but never read it myself, I'm excited, I hope you guys are too.

Infinities are counter intuitive, an example involving the digits of pi

Apologetics will sometimes use infinities in their arguments, and as far as I have ever seen it is always done poorly. Explaining exactly why is difficult because infinities are very counter intuitive and often the argument I'm trying to refute is poorly stated. With this in mind, I have been keeping my eyes open for infinities being improperly used in other situations with the intention to simply highlight how confusing these things can be. A few nights ago I was watching Person of Interest and this exact thing happened. Finch was talking about the digits of pi and he said something that caught my attention, in my opinion, the 'mistake' he made basically boils down to a misunderstanding of infinities.

As far as I can tell, the logic goes something like this:

• pi is an irrational number
• since it is irrational, it's decimal expansion never repeats
• since it never repeats and it goes on forever, every possible sequence must eventually come up somewhere.

That third step might sound reasonable, but it is wrong. Let me illustrate with a quick example, I will provide an irrational number in which every sequence does not come up:

.10110111011110111110...

If we continue this in the obvious way, we get an irrational number in which many sequences of numbers never show up, 00 is an example. So what do we have here? It is a sequence that never repeats, that goes off to infinity, and yet many finite sequences never show up inside. This may seem counter intuitive, but the example is before you.

Let's return to the statement made in Person of Interest. The statement remains that every number shows up within the digits of pi. I have provided an example of an irrational number that does not have this property, which I would argue at least puts a bit of doubt on this statement, but it doesn't prove it wrong. It demonstrates that the above logic is faulty, it can't be true simply because pi is irrational, but perhaps there is something else about pi that makes this true. I couldn't think of a way to prove this either true or false, time to consult the internet! It turns out that this is actually an unsolved problem. Nobody knows whether or not what Finch said is true or not (which I why I put mistake in quotation marks in the first paragraph). That is how hard these problems are to solve.

One last thought here, if the decimal expansion to pi has every possible finite sequence contained within it, that means that somewhere we will find a billion zeroes in a row. Put in those terms, this seems obviously false...and yet, it could be true. No one knows. Infinities are weird!

Edit


I was thinking of another angle to the billion zeroes thing this morning. It will take me a couple of steps to get there.

First, think of the 10 available digits, we would probably expect that each one would show up at some point. No single digit seems to have a greater chance to show up than any other. There's no reason to think that a 5 has a better chance of turning up than a 7 right?

Now, the digits that we have are somewhat arbitrary, we have 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 because we count in base 10, and there's nothing really special about 10 except that is the number of fingers that we have. So what if we counted in a different base? We would need a bunch of new symbols, but fundamentally nothing would really change. What if we instead counted in base 100? Every 2 digits of our normal decimal expansion of pi would be a single digit in the other base. I don't want to come up with 90 new symbols, but I could write the decimal expansion of pi in base 100 like this:

(03).(14)(15)(92)(65)(35)...

In base 100 this is 6 digits. Given this view of the decimal expansion, I see no reason to think (00) would have any less chance to come up as any other number. By thinking in base 100=10^2, I can argue that there is no particular reason to think 2 zeroes won't show up at some point.

Now, if I want to think about getting a 1,000,000,000 zeroes instead of 2, why can't I use the same idea and write the digits of pi in base 10^(1,000,000,000)? I would argue that there is no reason to think the zero of this base has any less chance of showing up compared to any other number in that base.

I want to stress that this is absolutely not an argument that we will definitely get a billion zeroes somewhere. It's more an argument that it is much less impossible sounding than it might initially seem. A little change of perspective can really screw with your intuition.

More "Free" Books

If you have amazon prime like I do, you get 1 free book a month, and when I am low on material (or time) I share the good stuff I come across.

The last book I read was World's Collider: A Shared World Anthology. It was a horror book, and it felt a little bit like Lovecraft. Basically, there was an accident at the large hadron collider which caused all kinds of scary things to erupt into our world. It's basically a book of short stories written by a bunch of different authors in the same universe, with a few recurring characters and an overall arc that came together in the end. I found it quite enjoyable, although since I read before I go to sleep it gave me some crazy dreams this past month.

I just started reading Post Human. Futuristic, humans have augmentations, nanomachines in our body making us better and such. I've only just started it, but it made a really good first impression.

Mech Suits are right around the corner

Given that I don't have time to do a proper post today, I figured I would share a freaking awesome story I saw on 60 minutes a few nights ago. They took this quadriplegic woman and hooked a robotic arm up to her brain and she was able to control it directly. I would say the obvious next step is to put her in a mech suit...so freaking cool.

There was also a guy whose arm was amputated who had a robotic arm attached and he was able to control it directly. It actually made me wonder about phantom limb pain. We know that it is possible to use mirror tricks to deal with phantom limb pain, I wonder if you had a robotic arm if it would do the same thing.

Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50137987n

The Purpose of Hell

A few weeks ago, tragedy struck the nation when a shooter went into an elementary school and gunned down a bunch of young children and their brave teachers who were trying to protect them. He killed a bunch of innocent people and then turned the gun on himself, so the end result for him and his victims is exactly the same. This reality feels really shitty. I want that mother fucker punished! For the first time in a long time, I can really understand the appeal of the concept of hell. It would be somewhat...satisfying...to know that someone who has caused so much pain is getting what is coming to him.

Of course, this only works if you don't think about it too much. Hell is not merely punishment, it is torture forever. Is justice really being done if this guy is still burning in a lake of fire a billion years from now? As much as there is a part of me that wants this guy to be punished, torturing him doesn't make things right, and the idea of him going through that makes me sick, even though he has done something unimaginably bad.

And then there is the mental health angle. Whether it was nature or nurture, this guy was clearly not right in the head. I think it is safe to say he either got a bad set of genes or he was severely damaged by a terrible upbringing (maybe both). In any case, had he survived I'm sure he would have to be removed from society in either a prison or a mental institution. But would it really be right for us to torture him? Even though there might be a part of us that wants to beat this mother fucker to a bloody pulp, I think we can recognize that we would be monsters if we actually went through with this action.

What happens when you slice a Menger Sponge diagonally?

I decided to post something fun for the new year. A Menger sponge is a fractal which is similar to a Sierpinski triangle, except you start with a cube instead of a triangle. In both fractals, you cut out the middle of the shape in such a way that you leave a number of parts that are a smaller version of the shape you started with, and repeat to infinity.

So I stumbled across a video where cross sections of the Menger sponge are taken. The results are neat and surprising. Check it out :)

https://simonsfoundation.org/multimedia/mathematical-impressions-the-surprising-menger-sponge-slice/