by James Thomas

Created on: October 07, 2009   Last Updated: October 10, 2009

The Book of Revelation has always been a difficult subject to discuss for the simple reason of the figurative language used in the book. The Bible itself is full of figurative language and Revelation is no different. So in reading the book of Revelation, I must refer to my main rule of hermeneutics: Literal interpretation but figurative when obvious. In order to understand the book of Revelation, you must learn how to read it correctly first.

I am a recovering premillennialist. Once I bought into the entire Hal Lindsey scenario of the end times prophesies and read many of his books and watched most of the movies. After the drama subsided I found a more rational approach to these scriptures. Now I consider myself an amillennialist. The first part of this article will be a brief overview as to the reasons why I switched sides.

Many readers of Revelation understand that the book contains much poetic and figurative language. Amillennialism's approach to the figurative language displayed a more logical progression of the book. This method of interpretation is called progressive parallelism and it allows the reader to see that the reading of Revelation is not in a chronological order but is written in sections that run parallel to each other through history. This is not unlike the order of the chapters in the book of Jeremiah.

Jack Cottrell, in his book The Faith Once For All, pointed out 6 of these sections but I believe that there are a total of seven distinct sections in Revelation. Chapters 1-3, 4-7, 8-11, 12-14, 15-16, 17-19, and 20-22 of which most are not written in a chronological order[1]. Examine for instance chapters 12-14 and 15- 16. The former clearly describes the birth of Christ which is an event that has already occurred in history at the time the book of Revelation was written. Also understand that 12:9 is the defeat of Satan in this same section but a new beast comes in 13:11 and the section ends with 14:19-20 with the reaping of the earth. In the latter section, chapters 15-16, we see more information given about the new beast (16:13) from the former section (progressive) and that all this occurs before the reaping of the earth because chapter 16 clearly shows people still living on the earth (parallel).

Once a reader understands this concept of progressive parallelism, the book of Revelation becomes much clearer in understanding. I do not suggest that now everything will make perfect sense but instead a historical flow can be followed by the reader.

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