Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Revelation 22:19 vs. Eternal Security

  

And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life, and from the holy city, which are written in this book. (Rev 22:19 NASB)

 

Rev 22:19 is a common "proof-text" used against Latter-day Saints and in favour of Sola Scriptura and/or the doctrine that public revelation ceased with the inscripturation of the final book of the New Testament. On this, see the discussion in Not By Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura.

 

Notwithstanding, this text is actually problematic for many flavours of Protestantism as it teaches that one can lose their salvation: note how God will “take away” their promised inheritance—it is something they had but forfeited.

 

Disciples of Jesus need to guard the words of the prophecy in order to retain their place in the city and their access to the tree of life (22:19). If they take away the words of the book, God will strip them of their citizenship rights. They will end up like Dan, excluded from the register of tribes; their names will be erased from the book of life. The warning against tampering with the words of the prophecy is in part a warning about the importance of preserving the actual book of Revelation intact. John claims to be recording words of God. Those who alter the book have not simply edited the words of John but the words of God. Jesus discloses himself in the words that John writes. John’s book is the means by which Jesus is unveiled to the church, disclosed in the consummation of his love for his bride. To take away the words of the book is to take away that disclosure. It is to disfigure the unveiled Christ, to deprive the church of the full glory of her Lord. (Peter J. Leithart, Revelation, 2 vols. [The International Theological Commentary on the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments; London: Bloomsbury, 2018], 2:428)

 

Reformed Protestant G. K. Beale, himself an advocate of the “Perseverance of the Saints,” noted that

 

the warnings in 22:18–19 are directed not primarily to those outside the church but to all in the church community, as the warnings of Deuteronomy were addressed to all Israelites. Those who do not heed the warnings profess to be Christian, but their allegiance to other gods betrays their confession. As a result, the inheritance they lay claim to by their apparent testimony will be withheld because they deny by their actions the faith they profess. Not only will they not receive their purported inheritance at the end of the age, but they will also suffer “the plagues that are written in this book” (v 19). These “plagues” include not merely the suffering of the last judgment in the “lake of fire,” as v 19 implies, but penal inflictions incurred by the ungodly throughout the time prior to that judgment. In line with this are uses of the πληγή (“plague”) word-group elsewhere in the book, which are applied to the era preceding Christ’s last coming (e.g., 8:12; 9:18, 20; 11:6; 13:3, 12, 14ff.; cf. also 16:21).

 

Therefore, the whole range of plagues recorded in the book will come on the apostate, in agreement with the allusion to Deut. 29:20: “every curse that is written in this book will rest on him” (likewise Deut. 29:21; 28:58–61; Jer. 25:13). One Armenian version makes the all-encompassing reference in Rev. 22:18 explicit with “all the plagues that have been written in this book” (likewise JB: “every plague mentioned in the book”). The possible allusion to Deut. 28:58–61 also suggests an all-encompassing reference to the plagues in Revelation (G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text [New International Greek Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999], 1152-53)

 

This is another example of a commonly used proof-text used against Latter-day Saints that, when exegeted properly, refutes the false theology of many of our Protestant critics.

 

On the book/tree of life textual variant, see:

 

Kevin L. Barney, A Book or a Tree? A Textual Variant in Revelation 22: 19