ESV Study Bible sneak peek

The great folks at Crossway have been providing some sneak peeks at the upcoming ESV Study Bible. This week they made available for download the Introduction to Revelation.

Download it here.

I've had a chance to read it and look it over. It's excellent! Hopefully this will prove a corrective to some of the far-out treatments of Revelation in some previous study Bibles and popular Christian literature. Not that it takes sides, but it does a terrific job of placing John's Apocalypse within it's historical and literary context. It fairly and cogently explains the four main schools of thought on how to interpret Revelation, and the three main millenial views. The diagrams are clever and helpful. As I said, the editors don't take sides and make it clear that all of these views are well-represented among orthodox, Bible-believing Christians. But seeing the diagrams of the more complicated interpretations (see page 7) may give food for thought.

BTW if anyone from Crossway is reading this...there's an error on page 4. "They" should be struck from line 4 so it reads: "can help in understanding the way in which the symbols were understandable to John's contemporaries".