SYMBOLISM -- TOO CRYPTIC TO UNDERSTAND? NOPE.

There are several interesting things we note as we explore through the Bible. First is the use of symbolism. When reading the Bible, the method that makes the most sense (and is confirmable by checking against history) is where we read a passage literally. If that doesn't make sense, then we ask ourselves does it make sense as symbolism.

In conjunction with symbolism we encounter duplicate passages used throughout the Bible. Revelation, which is said to be the most cryptic book in the Bible, actually has one out of every three verses appearing almost word for word in some other place in the Bible. So Revelation may talk about waters being divided in a context where water doesn't seem appropiate, and we do a quick scan of the verses around it looking for duplicate matches elsewhere, only to discover something like 'people of the earth, who are like the waters...' The symbolism stays consistant and we can find a match to unravel the mystery of the current passage.

Unfortunately, you'll find there are those who either take everything literally or everything symbolically. You will even have those who will reapply symbolism to symbolism... (e.g. if a day is as a year, then that is itself 360 days, which is 360 years, which is.....) It doesn't work that way. When we decode a symbolism, two things have to apply:

One other thing that seems to hold true is that text of the Old Testament appears to be a literally written, local event or circumstance which parallels a symbolically written, global event or circumstance in the New Testament. For instance, the Old Testament talks about Babylon, a place which was destroyed; if the New Testament talks about a Babylon, then it is a larger global scale example which is symbolically represented as Babylon (and we would expect the same fate to befall it).

However, we will examine these particular aspects of the reading in greater detail at a later time.


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