Day 190 – May 7, 2024: Revelation 7-12

There is always that fine line between telling the future and telling the present in ways that make it impossible to understand in the future. That is the line that Revelation dances upon. There are areas of this prophecy that we have to say that God is telling us that Jesus is coming back in the future, but until he comes there will be great tribulation. There are some who have spent a lot of time (I would probably say wasted a lot of time), in putting together a theory on the coming of Christ and what the times are going to look like. They are called dispensationalists who have come up with theories of millenialism, postmillenialism, and amillenialism that has nothing to do with what generation you were born. But the bottom line is that Jesus is coming back like a thief in the night and we cannot predict when that will be, nor should we attempt to correlate modern events with those described in Revelation.

Let me give you one example of what John wrote in Revelation that some try to match up with today but was probably an event that took place in the 1st century. Look at 8:8-9 where we see a flaming mountain thrown into the sea. My take is that this is the description of Vesuvius erupting which took place in 79 AD. It is thought that John was still alive then and that Revelation was written soon after that and so he described this horrific event as something that today some would say is a prediction, when in fact John incorporates it as a description of current events. We have to be really, really careful in trying to read Scripture and attributing it to future events in ways that we try to predict. Careful as in we should not do it at all.