December 22-26
[M] Job 28-30; Revelation 18
[T] Job 31-33; Psalm 102; Revelation 19
[W] Job 34-36; Revelation 20
[T] Job 37-39; Psalm 103; Revelation 21
[F] Job 40-42; Psalm 150; Revelation 22
Dwell Plan Day 256-260 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Job 28:23–28 | Job reminds us that true wisdom is not something we discover by effort or ingenuity, but something that belongs to God alone. While humanity can mine the depths of the earth and uncover hidden treasures, wisdom remains beyond our reach unless God reveals it. He alone sees the whole of creation, orders it with understanding, and defines what wisdom truly is. And what He gives us is strikingly simple: the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and turning away from evil is understanding. In other words, wisdom is not primarily about information, but about relationship and reverence. It begins not with mastering life, but with trusting the God who already knows its end from its beginning.
Revelation 18 | The fall of Babylon is one of the great narrative turning points of Scripture, a moment the Bible has been moving toward from the very beginning. Babylon is not just a city, but a symbol that stretches across redemptive history—human civilization organized in defiance of God, marked by pride, violence, exploitation, and idolatry. From the tower in Genesis, to the empire that exiled Israel, to the prophetic warnings of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Babylon represents the world’s attempt to secure life, glory, and security apart from the Lord. Revelation 18 shows that this story finally reaches its end. What looked powerful, permanent, and invincible collapses in a moment under the judgment of God.
This chapter reveals that history is not an endless cycle of rising and falling empires, but a directed story with a moral conclusion. Babylon’s fall is mourned by kings, merchants, and sailors—not because it was good, but because they benefited from the empire. Scripture exposes the cost of its success and the hollowness of its promises. In contrast to Babylon’s sudden ruin stands the coming city of God, marked not by exploitation but by righteousness and peace. Revelation 18 declares that God will not allow human rebellion to have the final word. The systems that oppose Him will fall, and all of Scripture’s longings—for justice, for renewal, for God’s reign to be unchallenged—converge here. Babylon falls so that God’s kingdom can be seen for what it truly is: the only lasting home for the world.
Tuesday
Job 32:6 | Elihu being young, and waiting to speak because of his youth, is a beautiful example of age appropriate respect. It’s a Godly cultural norm, and young folks should follow Elihu’s example. It’s meant to reveal the nature of Elihu’s real wisdom. But beyond the beauty of tongue control and respect for your elders, this is also a persistent theme in God’s kingdom. He uses young people. That doesn’t sound too amazing or earth shattering to us because we live in a culture that worships youth. The ancients didn’t do that. Young people were just speculation back in the days when life expectancy didn’t go much past 40. Lots of kids didn’t make it before vaccines and antibiotics. So youth was not valued. So much so that Jesus had to correct His own disciples not to dismiss children out of hand! Young people lack wisdom, experience, and hard won expertise. But, in God’s kingdom, He uses young people in amazing ways. Joshua is one of them, Timothy another. David’s heroism began when he was just a kid, and we see Jesus being amazing at only 13. All of those instances reveal how it’s got to be God’s power, not these young people. Don’t let folks look down on you because you’re young—God loves to use the things that others think are useless to build the kingdom where His Son gets all the glory. That’s an encouragement to all of us. Praise Him!
Job 32–37 | Elihu enters the story as a surprising and unsettling voice. Younger than the others, he has waited respectfully, but now he speaks with urgency and anger. He is frustrated with Job for justifying himself rather than God, and with the friends for condemning Job without answering him. From an evangelical perspective, Elihu is not simply another failed counselor. He rightly insists that God is just and that Job’s suffering cannot mean God has acted wrongly. He also rejects the friends’ shallow assumption that suffering must always be punishment for specific sin. Elihu is trying to clear space for a bigger view of God, one that refuses to put the Lord on trial and instead calls for humility before Him.
What Elihu contributes most clearly is a different way of thinking about suffering. He argues that God may use pain not to condemn, but to warn, correct, or rescue His people—to turn them from pride and keep them from destruction. This is an important step in the right direction and fits well with the broader wisdom of Scripture. Yet Elihu still goes too far. He assumes that suffering must always have a discernible purpose that can be explained if we think carefully enough. In that sense, Elihu improves on the friends’ theology but keeps the same impulse: to make suffering manageable through explanation rather than received through trust.
That tension is exactly why Elihu matters in the flow of the book. His speeches prepare us for what comes next, because God does not step in to affirm Elihu’s explanation. Instead, the Lord answers Job by revealing His greatness, wisdom, and freedom. Elihu moves the conversation away from blame and toward humility, but even he cannot deliver the final word. Job does not ultimately need a better theory of suffering; he needs to encounter God himself. Elihu points in the right direction, but the book of Job teaches us that hope is not found in understanding why we suffer, but in trusting the God who reigns even when explanations fall silent.
Revelation 19:1-8 |Take a step back when you’re reading here (and elsewhere) when the book suddenly, without any real warning, just begins to describe praise. It syncopates the book and the narrative visions. Praise in heaven is weaving in and out of the conflicts and judgments that are spilling out over the earth. Take a pause in these chapters and sing a song yourself. Stop and open your music app and listen to a whole worship song before you keep reading. The power of praise is transformative, but it’s also illuminating. Praise regularly opens up exegetical insight. The Bible is teaching us information, but it’s also showing us how to process this information in real time. You can’t do the work of interpretation without the work of praise, or it’s just an intellectual exercise at best. Knowing without praising just leads to conceit and pride. Let worship guide your exegesis as you read Revelation, so you can actually experience it like John did. You can see he got confused in this very chapter—that should be a good encouragement to you if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed and unable to comprehend! So was John!
Revelation 19:6-10 | For people in the ancient world, a banquet was not ordinary—it was extraordinary. Daily life was repetitive and often marked by scarcity. Most people ate the same simple food, did the same work, and lived within tight limits day in and day out. A feast broke that rhythm. It was abundance instead of lack, joy instead of routine, celebration instead of survival. When Scripture describes the future of God’s people as the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, it is drawing on the most joyful image the ancient imagination could hold. God does not describe the end as an escape or an abstract spiritual state, but as a long-awaited celebration, the kind of day people marked on calendars and talked about for years.
That image tells us something essential about the heart of God and the shape of our hope. The culmination of history is not merely judgment, but joy; not merely victory, but communion. Christ does not simply defeat his enemies—He gathers His people to a table. The Marriage Supper is the public celebration of a relationship already secured by grace, where the bride finally shares uninterrupted joy with her bridegroom. Revelation invites us to imagine the best day we have ever known and then to realize that God promises something far greater. History is moving toward a feast, and the call of the gospel now is to live as people who already know an invitation has been issued.
Revelation 19:13 | The detail that the robe is already dipped in blood before the battle begins is intentional and theologically loaded. Jesus does not win by first shedding the blood of His enemies, but by having already shed His own. His victory flows out of His self-giving sacrifice, not brute force. The cross stands behind every scene of judgment and triumph in Revelation, reminding us that Christ’s authority to rule and judge comes from His obedience unto death. This is how Jesus conquers: by giving up His life, by bearing judgment Himself, and by overcoming evil through sacrificial love. Before the final victory is displayed publicly, it has already been secured privately at Calvary by the Word of God who was willing to bleed.
Wednesday
Revelation 20:1–6 | The Millennium | (This is a long one, sorry about that folks, hopefully it'll be helpful.)
This passage describes a vision in which Satan is bound for a thousand years, preventing him from deceiving the nations, while those who belong to Christ reign with Him. John speaks of a “first resurrection,” of martyrs coming to life, and of a reign that precedes a final judgment and the ultimate defeat of evil. The imagery is symbolic and tightly connected to what comes before and after this text in Revelation, raising the central interpretive question: is this thousand-year reign a future earthly kingdom, or a symbolic description of Christ’s present reign and the church’s vindication?
Christians have historically answered that question in four main ways. Dispensational premillennialism teaches that Christ will return before a literal thousand-year reign on earth, distinct from the church age and closely tied to ethnic Israel. Historic premillennialism also expects Christ to return before the millennium, but without the sharp Israel–church distinction and with more symbolic elements. Postmillennialism sees the millennium as a future golden age brought about through the spread of the gospel, after which Christ returns. Amillennialism understands the millennium symbolically as the present reign of Christ, begun at His resurrection, during which Satan is bound in a real but limited sense until the final return of Christ.
I (Jon) grew up in a dispensational church, where the millennium was always framed as a future timeline to decode. Later, I became persuaded by historic premillennialism, which felt more grounded in the broader storyline of Scripture. A few years ago, though, reading Sam Storms’ book Kingdom Come forced me to slow down and ask harder questions about how Revelation works as apocalyptic literature and how Revelation 20 fits within the whole Bible rather than standing alone as a roadmap of the future.
What ultimately persuaded me toward the amillennial position is how well it accounts for the New Testament’s repeated emphasis that Christ is reigning now and that the decisive victory over Satan has already begun through the cross and resurrection. The binding of Satan makes sense in light of the gospel going out to the nations, and the reign of the saints coheres with the consistent biblical theme that believers are already seated with Christ. More than that, amillennialism offers deep hope—not by promising a temporary golden age, but by anchoring our confidence in what Christ has already accomplished and in the certainty of His final return to make all things new.
At the same time, Revelation 20 reminds us how careful and gracious we must be with one another. Faithful, Bible-loving Christians have landed in different places on this passage for centuries. These are difficult texts, filled with symbolism, and humility is required. Our unity is not grounded in getting the millennium exactly right, but in the shared confession that Jesus reigns, evil will not win, and history is moving toward the day when Christ returns in glory.
All that to say, I think I'm pretty grounded in the amillennial position—but to my dispensational friends—I guess I'm also willing to change my mind mid-air.
Revelation 20:7–15 | This passage confronts us with the biblical reality of hell in a way that our culture consistently resists. There is a strong temptation today (even within the church) to soften, explain away, or quietly remove hell from the story of Scripture. Yet Revelation presents final judgment as real, personal, and unavoidable. As Tim Keller often argued, if you remove hell, you do not end up with a kinder Christianity; you end up with a smaller one. You diminish the seriousness of sin, the reality of justice, and ultimately the meaning of the cross itself. If there is no real judgment to be rescued from, then the love displayed at Calvary is reduced to sentiment rather than sacrifice. Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book Confronting Christianity, presses this same point: the biblical story insists that evil matters, victims matter, and God’s justice is not a myth. Hell is not an embarrassment in Scripture; it is part of the moral gravity that makes the gospel good news.
Revelation 20 also corrects many of the popular images of hell that shape our imaginations far more than the Bible does. Much of what people picture comes not from Scripture but from Dante’s Inferno or pop culture—the ideas of Satan ruling hell, demons gleefully torturing souls, and hell functioning as his evil kingdom. But this passage tells a very different story. Satan is not in charge; he is judged. Hell is not his domain; it is his doom. It was prepared for him and for all who joined his rebellion, not designed as a playground for evil. What we see here is not Satan pouring out wrath, but God doing so. Final judgment belongs to the Lord alone, underscoring that evil is not eternal or rivalrous—it is defeated and condemned.
Finally, the imagery itself matters. Revelation describes books, fire, a lake, and judgment scenes that are unmistakably apocalyptic. These images are likely symbolic, but that does not make them less real, only less literal. Apocalyptic imagery always points to realities greater than the picture itself. Fire and destruction are not meant to trivialize hell, but to communicate its seriousness and finality. Hell represents complete separation from the life, goodness, and presence of God.
Revelation 20 is not meant to satisfy our curiosity, but to sober our hearts. It reminds us that God’s justice is real, His victory is final, and the grace offered now in Christ is unimaginably precious precisely because judgment is not pretend.
Thursday
Job 38–41 | God’s response to Job does not begin with an explanation of suffering, but with a series of questions that reframe the entire conversation. Speaking from the whirlwind, the Lord draws Job’s attention to creation, the natural order, and the governance of the world—realities far beyond human control or comprehension. The questions are not meant to humiliate Job, but to expose the limits of his perspective. God shows that Job’s suffering cannot be understood in isolation from the vast, complex, and wisely ordered world God sustains. By highlighting Job’s inability to create, govern, or even fully understand the natural world, God reveals the flaw in Job’s demand for a moral accounting: Job lacks the vantage point necessary to judge God’s rule.
In the later chapters, God turns from the created order to the untamable forces within it, particularly the figures of Behemoth and Leviathan. These creatures represent powers that no human can master, yet they exist fully under God’s sovereignty. God’s point is not simply that He is stronger than humanity, but that He governs a world that includes danger, chaos, and forces beyond human control without losing authority or wisdom. Rather than explaining why Job suffered, God demonstrates that He is capable of ruling a world far more complex than Job imagines. The divine speeches do not resolve the problem of suffering through logic; they resolve it by reestablishing trust in the wisdom, freedom, and majesty of the Creator.
Psalm 103:6–14 | This psalm invites us to slow down and simply look at the heart of God. He is a God who works righteousness and justice, yet whose defining posture toward His people is mercy. He does not deal with us according to our sins or repay us according to our iniquities. Instead, He reveals Himself as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The psalmist wants us to just sit right here with this idea; to let the weight of who God is press into our souls, not as an abstract doctrine, but as a lived reality.
That posture is especially striking when we remember who we are. God knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. He is not surprised by our weakness or disappointed by our limitations. Like a father who shows compassion to his children, the Lord bends toward His people with tenderness. This is not a God who tolerates us at arm’s length, but one who draws near with understanding and care. The greatness of God is not diminished by this nearness; it is revealed through it.
As we wrap up our reading plan tomorrow, this psalm reminds us of why we’ve been reading in the first place. The hope is not that we would simply accumulate information in order to boost a sense of self-superiority, but that we would walk away more aware of how astonishing this God is. My hope for all of us is that this year has been marked by moments of awe—moments where the truth of who God is moved from our heads into our hearts. Scripture is meant to do more than inform us; it is meant to form us, shaping us into people who stand amazed at the mercy, patience, and love of the Lord we worship.
Friday
Job 40:3–5; 42:2–6 | When Job finally encounters the majesty of God, his questions fall silent and his posture is transformed. He does not receive an explanation for his suffering; he receives a revelation of who God is. Faced with the Lord’s greatness, Job moves from demanding answers to humble repentance, recognizing how small and limited his perspective has been. This posture is meant to be the posture of every believer. Unlike Job, we have more of the story. We know that we come to this holy God through Jesus Christ. At the cross, God’s majesty and mercy meet; His greatness is not diminished, but made accessible. Christ bears our pride, our accusations, and our need to be right, and brings us safely into the presence of the God before whom Job could only bow in silence. True faith is not found in our understanding and righteousness, but in trusting Him—and in Christ, we are invited to do so not as condemned sinners, but as forgiven children who can humble themselves without fear.
Job 41 | I (Jon) was going to write about Leviathan, but then I remembered Chris is going to end the year by preaching this passage on the 28th. So I deleted what I wrote so that you'll all have to come hear him explain it better than I could.
Revelation 22:1–5 | The closing vision of Scripture brings us back to where the story began—but transformed. The imagery is unmistakably Eden-like: a river of life, the tree of life, fruitful and healing, God dwelling with His people. Yet this is not a return to the garden so much as its fulfillment. In Eden, access to the tree of life was lost; here, it stands open and abundant. The curse that fractured the world in Genesis is explicitly named—and explicitly removed. What sin broke, God does not merely repair; He restores and completes.
At the center of this restored world is not humanity’s achievement but God’s presence. His servants see His face. His name is on their foreheads. Night is gone, not because creation has no rhythms, but because nothing remains that needs hiding or guarding against. The hope of Revelation 22 is not escape from the world, but the renewal of it under the direct, joyful reign of God. This is where history is headed: not toward loss, but toward life; not toward distance, but to communion; not toward survival, but to reigning with God forever. And knowing that end reshapes how we live now, as people already anchored in the future God has promised.
Revelation 22:18 | John is literally the last man standing. We know both from the Scripture and from outside our biblical witness, that John outlasted and outlived all of the other apostles. We don’t know the true outcome of what happened to all of them, but of those we do know, it was violent, and for the others we don’t know with certainty, every legend sends them to a martyr’s end. Jesus predicted as much for them. But not for John. John was probably the youngest of the bunch, but he certainly lived the longest. The report is that he died of old age.
But what is interesting is he is also the last writer of the New Testament. When you read this chapter, you get the sense that the author is aware that he’s writing the last book to be written. It feels like an ending to the whole Bible. It isn’t, but then it amazingly is. It certainly wasn’t written to be a sign-off of the Bible. That’s clear. It’s the ending of Revelation, and it’s consistent with how the book started, in its first paragraphs. But here’s another interesting note. Every copy of the New Testament we have, where there’s more than one book, they are always in the same order, with Revelation at the end. The order of the New Testament books is how we received it from the manuscript evidence. So that makes Revelation consistently the last book, and it’s odd that it ends with that sort of tone. Perhaps it was selected to be last for that reason. That’s what I (Chris) suspect. But I also suspect, based on John’s literary choice to “disappear” in his own gospel narrative, that John was the one who quietly collated and organized the books of the New Testament. I imagine he put his gospel and his letters last (except for Jude) as a part of that humble habit. This is merely speculation, and we can’t base any interpretation on such ramblings, but it’s the reflection not of an academic, but a pastor. And, thinking like a pastor, which is how I imagine John thought, I sense a pastoral heart organizing and arranging this material. And it works; it feels like the last chapter of the Bible. And it is—postured to show us how to wait now for Jesus. Praise Him!