Blessed Is He That Readeth Is the First Blessing in the Last Book

There is a part of the Bible he has been told to leave alone, and he has left it alone for twenty-six years.

Nobody forbade it. It was more of a general steering. That book is difficult, people go strange with it, there are men who have wrecked themselves on it, better to stay in the Gospels until you are further along.

Every one of those statements is true and every one of them was said kindly and the effect of them together was a fence.

So he has never read it. He knows two or three famous verses out of it, the way everybody does. He has an impression of it that came entirely from other people's descriptions of it, and the impression is of something dangerous and probably above him.

That book opens with a blessing on the person who reads it out loud.

The blessing, and what it is attached to

Here it is, in the King James Version:

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand. (Revelation 1:3)

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear.

Two parties. One reads and the others hear, which is a description of somebody reading out loud to a room, because that is how a letter reached a congregation.

And the blessing is attached to both.

Note carefully what it is not attached to. It is not attached to understanding it. It is not attached to interpreting it correctly, or to having a system for it, or to arriving at the right conclusions about any of it.

He that readeth. That is the whole qualification.

This is the third verse of the book. Before a single vision, before any of the difficult material, before anything that anybody has ever argued about, there is a blessing on the act of reading it.

You have a blessing attached to the reading itself and you were never required to understand it to receive that. Revelation 1:3 says blessed is he that readeth, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a system of interpretation who makes the reading of a hard book a thing that does a man good.

And again at the end

The book says it a second time, near the last page, in case anybody missed it.

Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. (Revelation 22:7)

Two blessings, one at each end, bracketing everything difficult in between.

That is a deliberate structure. Whatever is in the middle, the frame around it is a blessing on the person engaging with it, said twice, at both ends.

Which does not mean the warnings a man received were malicious. People have gone strange with this book and that is a real thing and the men who steered him were describing something they had actually seen.

But the steering produced a fence around a book that opens and closes by blessing the reader, and the fence was built out of other people's bad experiences rather than out of anything the book says about itself.

You are blessed for reading it and you were never fenced out by the book itself. Revelation 1:3 and Revelation 22:7 put a blessing at each end of everything difficult, and it is His Spirit who makes an old bracket into permission on a Tuesday night.

What is secret and what is not

There is a verse in Deuteronomy that handles the anxiety underneath all of this, and it does it in one line with a clean division.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. (Deuteronomy 29:29)

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God. There are things a man is not going to get. That is stated and it is not treated as a tragedy.

But those things which are revealed belong unto us. And that half is stated just as plainly, and the word is belong.

A revealed thing belongs to the reader. Not on loan. Not pending clearance. Revelation means unveiling and the book is named after the act.

So the question of what a man is allowed to look at is answered by whether it has been written down. If it is in the book, it is on the revealed side of that verse, and the verse says whose it is.

You have the revealed things as your own property and you were never trespassing by reading them. Deuteronomy 29:29 divides secret from revealed and assigns the revealed to us and our children, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold a hard passage without needing to solve it.

What to do with what you do not get

And the model for what happens when a man reads something and does not understand it, which is the actual fear.

And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. (Daniel 12:8-9)

I heard, but I understood not.

That is a prophet, in the middle of receiving the thing, saying plainly that he did not follow it.

And the answer he gets is not a rebuke and it is not an explanation. It is go thy way, which is a release. He is allowed to leave with the question open.

That is the model. A man reads a chapter, gets some of it, does not get the rest, and goes to work. He is not in danger and he has not failed and he does not have to resolve it before he is permitted to close the book.

And Proverbs, on the enjoyment of the whole business:

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. (Proverbs 25:2)

The honor of kings is to search out a matter. Searching is described there as honorable rather than presumptuous, and the searcher is compared to a king.

You are allowed to close it with the question open and you were never in danger for not understanding. Daniel 12:8 has a prophet say he did not understand and get told to go his way, and it is His Spirit who makes an unresolved chapter something a man can carry safely.