The penultimate discussion of the End

So tonight we got through a big chunk of the book of Revelation. I have been covering the End Times for 3 months in my Young Adults class and we are almost done. We started with a time line (actually multiple time lines) showing how various parts of the entire Bible need to be understood for any study on the End Times including the major books like Daniel and also all manner of other passages from Genesis to Exodus. Someday I might post the file with some notes explaining it. It is huge, printed on tabloid paper so it takes a bit of explaining.

Anyways, we then went in depth into Daniel and Matthew 24, which are very important to understanding Revelation since much of the imagery and how it is used in Daniel is used in Revelation and the events in Matthew 24 lead right up to the end.

We have gone chapter by chapter through Revelation looking at what it actually says instead of taking a time line and forcing the passages to fit our assumptions. To be honest I changed some of my views a little about the exact order and layout of everything going on.

Well, today we covered what I’m hoping will be the next to the last class on the book. I feel like I’ve been doing more teaching that discussing these past few months. It really isn’t what I started out planning. I ask questions but apparently the ideas are just beyond their grasp before I explain them so I get very little discussion until after my teaching and then it ends up being more my answering questions. I’m looking forward to moving on to something that will generate more discussion with my group offering their own ideas rather than accepting everything I say. I teach enough, I’m ready to push them past my teaching and into interacting with the subjects.

Hopefully next time we go over the subject some of them will be more willing to debate. Of course it isn’t likely to happen next week, but then we get to move on.