This book is most intriguing but not easily understood: dragons, 666, scrolls, beasts, trumpets, heavenly song and earthly war. There are many opinions and interpretations about this bizarre story at the end of our Bible. Nietzche said it was “the most rabid outburst of vindictiveness in all recorded history.” George Bernard Shaw commented it was the “curious record of the visions of a drug addict.” Even Martin Luther wrote, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”

Yet, Revelation is a gift from God given to the church for us to better understand the message of the gospel, the times in which we live, and live with patient endurance until God makes all things new in Christ. 
 
The reality is that most of the Revelation is a retelling of what has already been said in Scripture. The future is a projection of the past, but only if we can see truly what has already happened. Memory matters, and so does imagination. This, we come to find out, is history told in another form. And history, in God’s hands, is the whole long story from past to present to future: this is God’s story, and God will bring it to a proper conclusion. 

“To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.” Walker Percy