There are moments when I find myself thinking about Revelation.
Not because I claim to understand it. Not because I believe I have been given some special insight into what the words mean. And certainly not because I want to tell anyone how they should live.
For the most part, I watch.
I tell no one to follow me. I tell no one what to believe. I tell no one to listen to me. I leave people to their own devices, because life has taught me that every person eventually has to confront the consequences of the choices they make.
But as I watch the world around me, I find myself returning to the words of an ancient book.
And sometimes, the parallels are unsettling.
There are children bearing children. There are wars being fought in cities whose names many of us have forgotten, yet those names remain written in the pages of Scripture. There are nations rising against nations, people speaking of power, control and dominion, while ordinary human beings continue trying to make sense of the world they have inherited.
It is surreal to watch something written thousands of years ago and then look around at the present day.
And so I wonder.
Are we the generation of vipers?
Or are we simply another generation looking backward at the generations that came before us and asking the same questions they once asked?
Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable possibility.
Every generation seems to believe it is living at the center of history. Every generation looks at the corruption, violence, greed and confusion of its own time and wonders whether something unprecedented is unfolding.
Yet perhaps humanity has always been this way.
Perhaps the difference is that today we see everything.
A war breaks out thousands of miles away, and within minutes we can watch it on a phone. A child is born somewhere we have never heard of, and within hours their story can become known around the world. The suffering, the arguments, the celebrations and the ambitions of billions of people arrive simultaneously through a screen.
The ancient world could not see itself this way.
We can.
And that makes the words feel closer.
There are passages that speak of serpents, of kingdoms, of the north, of judgment and of things that must ultimately fall. I sometimes find myself wondering about those words too.
When Scripture speaks of the serpent falling in the north, what exactly is the serpent?
Is it a person? If it is, then is a good man portrait as something evil or a Vile Creature that wears the smile of a man.
A kingdom?
An institution?
An idea?
Something righteous being misunderstood?
Or something genuinely vile hiding behind a respectable face?
I don’t pretend to know.
Those are questions I ask myself, not conclusions I carry around as answers.
Because there is another passage that keeps returning to my mind: the idea that man was given dominion over the earth and over the things within it.
But nowhere in that idea do I see a command that one man must establish dominion over another man.
That distinction matters.
To care for creation is one thing.
To control another human being is something else entirely.
And perhaps that is where some of our confusion begins.
We have become fascinated with power. Who possesses it. Who controls it. Who deserves it. Who should surrender it. Who should rule and who should obey.
Yet the older I become, the more I wonder whether dominion was ever supposed to mean domination.
Maybe stewardship was the greater responsibility.
Maybe power was always supposed to come with restraint.
Maybe freedom was always supposed to come with responsibility.
And maybe the greatest danger is not that we have forgotten the words of the old book, but that we have become so certain of our interpretation of those words that we no longer question ourselves.
So I watch.
I wonder.
I listen.
I see generations growing up in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. I see older generations looking at the young and asking what has happened to them. I see the young looking back and asking what was done to the world before they inherited it.
And somewhere between those two generations sits the uncomfortable truth:
Neither generation is entirely innocent.
Perhaps we are not the generation of vipers.
Perhaps they were not either.
Perhaps we are simply human beings repeating an ancient struggle between power and responsibility, knowledge and wisdom, freedom and control.
The Book of Revelation has been interpreted in countless ways throughout history. People have seen their own wars, their own rulers and their own crises reflected within its pages.
I don’t claim to know whether our time is different.
I don’t claim to know whether the serpent has already appeared, whether it is still coming, or whether the serpent was ever meant to be understood as a particular person at all.
I only know that the questions remain.
And so I go about my day.
I watch the world.
I watch the generations.
I watch people searching for someone to follow and others searching for someone to blame.
But I do not ask them to follow me.
I leave them to their devices.
Because perhaps that is another lesson hidden in all of this: eventually, every generation has to decide what it will do with the freedom it has been given.
And perhaps God does have a face.
Not necessarily the face we imagine.
Not necessarily the face of the powerful, the famous, the righteous-looking or the loudest among us.
Perhaps we encounter that face in the moments when we are forced to look honestly at ourselves.
That is where my thoughts leave me.
Not with an answer.
With a question.
And sometimes, I think the question is exactly where it is supposed to be.
