What Must Soon Take Place

This time through Revelation, it struck me that for all its difficulties, the book is bracketed with very simple declarations that the prophecy pertains to things on the near horizon:

Rev. 1:1 The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John,

Rev. 22:6 And he said to me, "These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place."

So if there is a way to understand this book as applying to the reorganization of the world that happened when Jesus came and judged Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and ended the 1000-year temple age (930 BC - 70 AD), well, that seems to me to be the way we ought to read it.

I still feel like I need plenty of guidance. Nobody reads Revelation without following *some* interpreter or other.

But f'rinstance: The Euphrates. I have heard dispensationalists soberly predict that an army of 200,000,000 Chinese will converge on the middle east, miraculously aided on their march by the stopping of the waters of the Euphrates. (Rev. 16:12)

1. It doesn't make military sense. A modern army of 200 million would not find the Euphrates river much of an obstacle.
2. It flies directly in the face of the book's claim that these things "must soon take place."
3. It ignores the Euphrates as part of the Bible's vocabulary of Symbol: a) the Euphrates is one of the four rivers that flows out of Eden, b) Israel's kingdom is to be bounded by the Euphrates, and d) Israel's exile is marked by a captivity beyond the Euphrates.

Especially in a book like Revelation, those kinds of connections have to figure in to your calculations.

I have great affection and respect for many who follow a futurist approach to Revelation. I used to be in that number. But I just couldn't keep it up.