Restoration

Desmond Ford's commentary was first written in summer 1979. It is a detailed and comprehensive study using much of the available scholarship at that time. This scholarship has been grafted into Ford's very profound textual knowledge. He has grasped the past ways this book has been understood and plumbed the pitfalls into which many have fallen trying to make sense of it. Ford attempts to resolve these problems.

Ford's work is in two parts. The first part, a hermeneutic of the book, covers the way Revelation has been understood and interpreted in the past and how those interpretations have changed, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. It shows how the more simplistic Historicist interpretations, based on contemporary political events and headlines imposed upon the text, have failed to come to terms with what this book was about and the Christ at its centre.

The second part, the commentary, covers in detail the text of Revelation, expounding on the central themes that are relevant to the entire present age between the death and resurrection of Jesus and His return to raise the dead. This includes Christ's destroying death along with the satanic deceiver who brought its curse upon the human-race. Thus he brings to a close the final resolution of this Present Age with the creation of a New Earth in which there is no death nor sorrow and where God finally reigns supreme.

John Rosier