When Evangelicals Switched The Blood, It Changed Everything

The final piece in a series on reading Revelation the way its first hearers did. All other articles can be found on FBF main page

My wife and I were new parents in the 1990s when we walked into a theological dilemma. We had taken our young daughter to the TBN headquarters in Orange County, California. They had a screening room for films, so we went in.

What played on that screen was the full imagery of a violent returning Jesus, come to crush his enemies, exactly as the evangelical church had taught us. It was so violent we left quickly.

But our daughter had already gotten the message.

Our daughter looked up at us and said, “Jesus is mean.”

We tried to correct her.

Here is the problem. She was not wrong about what she saw.

A three year old walked into that room, watched what the church put on the screen, and understood it perfectly. It took me nearly thirty years to admit she had read it right.

It is the same message millions of us absorbed about Jesus in Revelation. So I am here, once again, in my best fatherly tone, to tell you what we saw is not the whole truth.

Let me explain.

Picture the sky ripping open in Revelation 19. A rider on a white horse charges onto the scene for the ultimate showdown.

His robe is absolutely drenched in blood.

If we grew up in certain church circles, this is the moment we were warned about. Jesus is finally back. The gloves are off. He is out for revenge.

It is the Armageddon action movie where the Prince of Peace suddenly turns into a holy version of Conan the Barbarian. It is the movie my daughter watched in that screening room.

But there is a massive plot hole in that story. We can see it right there in Revelation 19:13. Look at the rider again. The battle has not even started yet. He has not struck a single blow.

So whose blood is he covered in?

It is his own.

John shows us something here that is easy to miss if we have already been told what Jesus is supposed to look like. The rider arrives at the battle already covered in blood.

And John is the perfect person to show us this.

He stood in the garden of Gethsemane and watched Jesus refuse to fight back when the soldiers came for him, even telling Peter to put away his literal sword. He stood at the foot of the cross and watched his friend bleed out.

How does a man who witnessed that nonviolent love firsthand suddenly picture Jesus as a warrior king who brings violent destruction?

He doesn’t.

John isn’t changing Jesus. He reveals what victory actually looks like. Look at the weapons.

If John wanted to describe a traditional warrior, he would have put a sword in his hand. Instead, the sword comes out of his mouth. His weapon is his word. He does not defeat his enemies by spilling their blood. He defeated the ultimate enemy by shedding his own.

This is not a one-verse trick. John builds the entire book on this reversal.

• He hears about a fierce Lion and turns to see a slaughtered Lamb.

• He sees a victorious army, but they are washed in the blood of their leader, not their enemies.

• He sees a massive dragon defeated not by superior firepower, but by sacrifice and truth telling.

We covered this ground before in this series.

The beast had a name and a street address, and the first readers ran the math on it in a heartbeat. Nero was the 666 number used to believers as a code. The book was a letter to hunted people, written to make them brave. Every image in it points the same direction. A scientist and inventor named Heron who used machines to make the Roman gods look like they were doing the miracles in the Book of Revelation.

But the real message we were meant to read is:

The empire wins by killing.

The Lamb wins by dying.

Those are the only two kingdoms in the book, and every reader has to pick one.

John shows us the same Jesus, over and over.

So how did the Jesus who absorbs violence become the poster child for apocalyptic revenge?

We already met the man who drew that map. John Nelson Darby built his system in a Dublin sickbed. It needed a terrifying ending, and it found one by reading the rider’s robe backward.

Evangelicalism took John’s profound vision of a completely different kind of kingdom and turned it into a theological haunted house. They built an entire industry on scaring people.

They built the screening room my daughter walked out of.

Think about what this teaching actually does.

If we grew up under it, we know exactly what it feels like. We know the pure panic of being told Jesus will come back and only take the righteous rule-followers. We know the sleepless nights staring at the ceiling, terrified we were not faithful enough to make the cut.

They weaponized the idea of a brutal tribulation and a vengeful return to keep us completely in line. They handed us a bait and switch.

They told us God loves us unconditionally, then they taught us he secretly bides his time until he can finally unleash hell on earth and slaughter his enemies.

It is not just bad theology. It is spiritual abuse.

It messes with the mind. It teaches us that at the end of the day, violence is how God actually solves problems. That creates a profound religious trauma. It leaves us walking on eggshells around a terrifying God who waits to snap.

My daughter needed one viewing to arrive at the conclusion the whole system points to.

Jesus is mean.

Millions of us sat through a thousand viewings, in sermons and films and prophecy conferences, and the conclusion sank in so deep we stopped noticing we believed it. She said it out loud. We just lived it.

When I wrote Rescuing Jesus From Evangelicalism, this is the exact impulse I was taking on. Because the crushing irony is that Evangelicalism has recreated the very violent religion that killed Jesus in the first place.

The religious establishment in the first century desperately wanted a glorious warrior king to slaughter their oppressors. They wanted blood. And when Jesus refused to be that kind of violent messiah, they had him executed.

Evangelicalism demands that exact same violent Messiah today. It asks us to believe that Jesus will come back to do the very thing he refused to do the first time.

And this is where the theology stops being an argument and starts filling graves. We do not have to speculate about what happens when people read the rider’s robe as permission. History already ran the experiment.

July 15, 1099. The Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem and slaughtered the city. Men, women, children.

The killing ran so deep that Raymond of Aguilers, a chaplain who marched with them and wrote it down proudly, described men riding in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.

He was not reaching for a random image. He was quoting Revelation.

The winepress of God’s wrath, where the blood flows as high as the horses’ bridles. He looked at a massacre his own army committed and saw prophecy fulfilled. He read the bloody robe as a promise, so he wore one himself and called it worship.

That is the pattern, and it has never stopped.

When we believe in a God who cannot wait to violently destroy his enemies, it becomes terrifyingly easy to violently destroy ours.

We see it in the legacy of slavery, defended from pulpits by men holding this same book. We see it whenever Christians turn their political opponents into people God wants destroyed. We see it in the drumbeats for the next war, blessed in advance as part of the plan.

A violent God justifies human violence. Every time.

We want God to finally make the world pay. We want a powerful God who will use overwhelming force against the people we believe deserve it. And if that is the God we want, it becomes very easy to turn Jesus into him.

But John interrupts that story to save us from it.

Look again. The Lion is a Lamb. The weapon is the word. The conqueror is covered in his own blood before the battle even begins.

The Jesus who comes back is not a different Jesus from the one who left.

The greatest indication of what the second coming of Jesus will look like is that it will look exactly like the first.

Anything else is just an Armageddon mythos we created to justify our own desire for revenge.

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So how do we keep from falling for the bait and switch? Let’s dive into this now.