There are several presuppositions that I will be carrying with me into this study. While there appears to be some semblance of a timeline presented in the book of Revelation, it is my understanding that God is not bound by time and space as we humans are, so it will be helpful to try to imagine viewing the historical and future events described as if they all appear on one huge simultaneous canvas rather than attempting to organize them into a linear timeline.
All literature, including the Bible, was written with a cultural and historical context which must be given consideration when seeking to understand the author’s intent. This becomes a little more complex when dealing with scripture texts because one must consider both the intent of the human author as well as the intent of the Holy Spirit who was also present and to some extent involved in the process when the text was written.
The book of Revelation is essentially the Apostle John’s description of a serious of visions and/or dreams that occurred while he was living in exile on the island of Patmos.
“This is a revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants the events that must soon take place. He sent an angel to present this revelation to his servant John, 2 who faithfully reported everything he saw. This is his report of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. “ (Revelation 1:1)
We must keep in mind while John was seeing visions of events far in the future, his description is limited to the range of his own experience in the historical context of the time in which he lived. In other words, one might try to image how a person living in the first century might try to describe seeing an aircraft or ballistic missile. John’s descriptors are limited to the vocabulary and visual experiences of a person living in the first century. In that context a vision of a helicopter might be described as a huge roaring locust breathing fire from its tail…or…it might actually have been a huge fire breathing locust that he saw. These are the kinds of questions that the text raises for which I’m not certain answer with any kind of certainty, nor do I believe that we need to in order to understand what God seeks to reveal us through the text.