The book of Revelation is chock-full of strange beasts and events, but to my mind one of the strangest of the latter is a simple action of John. In Revelation 22:8-9 he bows down in an attempt to worship an angel only to be chastised for such an inappropriate response. And this is the second time John had tried to do the same thing!! I think that even I would have learned my lesson the first time around. So how can we explain this apparent spiritual blindness on the part of the Apostle? I was not at all surprised to find that a number of commentators on Revelation completely skirted over this odd behavior on the part of John as if it didn't pose any sort of problem at all. But there were some who were bold enough to tackle the issue, although few of them agreed with one another in their explanations.
Tasker mildly labels this renewed attempt of John as “curious.” His only explanation is as follows: “It is likely that among the recipients of Revelation there were some who were tempted to this kind of worship. John may wish to make it clear that he sees its attractiveness but it is forbidden. So he repeats the prohibition.” But such a rather forced explanation would in fact be admitting that in 22:8-9, John was totally fabricating the repetition of his action in 19:10 in order to stress a point for his readers.
Phillips takes John's missteps more seriously with the words: “What a patent denial John's act really was of the entire message of the Word of God and especially of the message of its closing book.” But he attributes it to a natural human tendency we all possess – “We would count John's act incredible, did we not carry around in our own hearts the seeds of every imaginable form of disobedience and a whole pantheon of secret idols.”
Beale draws the same spiritual lesson from this event as did Tasker by saying, “Since this is the second time that John repeats the sin of substituting a false object of worship for the true, v 10 underscores the subtle problem for even faithful Christians. Perhaps we should not criticize John too much for this, since when a messenger of God powerfully preaches the word of Christ, 'we are prone to give him reverence beyond his due' [quoting from Hailey].” But despite this statement, Beale offers an entirely different explanation for John's repeated behavior, namely, “John may have mistaken the angel for the divine, heavenly Christ of 1:13ff and 10:1ff., who does deserve worship.”
And then Ford takes a different approach to the problem: “Many argue that it [Rev. 19:9b-20] is a doublet of 22:6,8-9.” And to demonstrate that point she reviews the following similarities:
Both passages teach the truth of “These words of God.”
In both, John falls down to worship the angel messenger.
In both, the angel refuses to be worshiped.
He declares that he is like John in being a servant of God.
He also states that God is the only One who deserves worship.
Both passages follow beatitudes.
Thus, her explanation, as for most any doublet in the Bible, lies in the presence of multiple authors for the book who narrated the same event using slightly different language. So the conclusion is that only one such faux pas by John actually took place.
Although I certainly not subscribe to Ford's postulate of multiple authorship for this book, I think she is on the right track in stating that John only bowed down to an angel once, not twice. And Jacques Ellul appears to agree although he offers two different explanations for John's action. First, he says that it is due to John being “seized by the immensity of the vision, by the majesty of that which approaches.” And then he states, “Far from being a clumsy doublet, we have, on the contrary, a rigorous indication that it is the same vision, but which, being complex is repeated.”
Thus, it represents the clearest example of what William Hendricksen and others call “Progressive Parallelism”or “Progressive Recapitulation.” According to this very compelling view of the book of Revelation, it presents its visions not according to a chronological order, but as seven different tellings and re-tellings of the same time frame: from Christ's first coming to the Second Coming. But instead of each one of the seven recounting the exact same time frame, each succeeding section advances the action somewhat. We might diagram the results as something like the following in which the horizontal axis represents chronological time:
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You can see that the time frame does move forward as the book progresses, but at the same time there is a tremendous amount of parallel overlap between one section and the next in which the same time frame is covered using quite different imagery in each. Viewing the book in this manner has the great advantage of explaining the many seeming repetitions of what are actually re-tellings of the exact same events:
Gathering together of enemies for the great battle: 16:12-16; 19:19; 20:8
Babylon falls: 14:8; 16:19; chs. 17-18
Satan is cast down and his influence curbed: 11:2-6; 12:9; 20:2-3
Satan rises from the pit: 11:7; 20:7
People suffer torment but do not repent: 9:20-21; 16:9-11
One-third of the stars are swept from heaven: 8:12; 12:4
If you do not realize that this is the way the book is organized, you end up with a strictly chronological reading of Revelation in which all of the events above, and more, take place multiple times. I should add that it also yields a scenario in which there are seven final judgments and as many as three different periods of divine rule on earth. To attempt to treat all these as subsequent events to one another results in an extremely complex future scenario, unlike the much more simple understandings of amillennialists and historical premillennialists. That is why the spread of dispensational premillennialism was immensely aided by a series of large prophecy charts which were produced and posted around churches so that the layman could visually comprehend at least a fraction of what their teachers and preachers were talking about when this theology began to take root in the late 1800's in America.
In conclusion, the view that I hold (at least at present) is that John only bowed down to the angel once, not twice. And the duplicate telling was certainly not the product of multiple authorship of Revelation but was a purposeful product of, and a clue to, the way the book is organized.
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