book of revelation

In a discussion about the Rapture, a friend of mine argued that the book of Revelation is a book of prophecy concerning the events that lead up to the Second Coming. This is an interpretation I'm familiar with; it essentially holds that the letters to the seven churches each refer to a different period in the church age, Laodicea being the church of the Last Days. After that letter, there is no more mention of the church, just one judgment or act of God after another. So clearly, the church is Raptured or removed from the world, and everyone else is left to face the wrath of God.

The problem is that this assumes that many of the events in Revelation are not already fulfilled, as at least one school of thought claims. (Mr. 666 would be Nero Caesar, using a form of letters-for-numbers familiar to Jews of the day; Babylon was a codeword for Rome, as supported textually in one of Peter's epistles, and so on.) In this reading, it was a book written primarily to Christians experiencing persecution in the first century.

Another view is that Revelation is a recap of God's actions throughout biblical history when his people were persecuted, hence the parallels with writings by other prophets, major and minor, and various other O.T. Scriptures.

In either case, the verses of Revelation stand to support a belief in the supremacy of Christ and the triumph of his kingdom over adversity and affliction, no matter the source. So as I think we're all agreeing, the actual foretelling significance of the book is less important to our daily living than its revelation of Christ through apocalyptic imagery.

(It's rather ironic, isn't it, that "apokalypsis" means "unveiling," but many Christians view the book's meaning as veiled?)

I think the "apocalypse" of the book's title is the unveiling of our hope in Christ, within that book; i.e., the book's main themes are quite plain and evident.

Nearly everyone concedes that some of the events described in the book of Revelation have not yet been fulfilled, although I'm aware of one school of thought -- which I do not subscribe to, incidentally -- that holds that Revelation 19 refers to the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of Rome, with chapters 20-22 being the only unfulfilled prophecy. And those, of course, are waiting for the church to accomplish its purpose.