To give the short answer to the question of: Is the Book of Revelation a Roadmap to the Future?, I would have to say NO. There are future elements to the book but not everything in it is about the future and I am not sure we can say that it is a roadmap because that would assume the order to the book means something like we would perceive a timeline from a western point of view. I think not and in large part it is because there are indeed certain rules when interpreting the Bible and we violate many of these when coming to this book.
The great challenge I had in observing this book was setting aside everything I had been taught and just letting the book speak for itself. The first rule that I see violated is the idea that we have in interpretation that we should never read into the scripture but draw our meaning out of it. Most interpreters of the Book of Revelation violate this rule on a regular basis. I think to assume modern technology, a timeline or even giving symbols in the book modern understandings is to read into the book. One of the classic ways this is done by some is to assume the book describes a period of time known as the Great Tribulation, but the book itself does not say this.
The other failure is to respect throughout the book the author of the book’s purpose and what the original recipients of the book would have understood about the book. This is quite evident when people hit verse one of chapter four and basically ignore what the seven churches would have thought about the visions of Revelation. It is written in symbols they would have understood and would have guided their future action.
For that matter, one of the big assumptions is about the nature of prophetic literature and in particular apocalyptic literature. Prophecy in the Bible does not spend the vast majority of its time predicting the future. Rather, it spends most of its time trying to bring the people it is addressed to a certain action to either change or fulfill the future spoken of in the prophecy. This also leads to another assumption about prophecy that must go when looking at Revelation – that once God prophesies something it is set in stone, but any look at Old Testament prophecy will show that some prophecies are not fulfilled and often the reason is the conditions change from the time the prophecy is made. Revelation may have the same time locked conditionality so now that 1900 years have passed some of the prophecies made in it are now null and void. We also have to concede that some of them may have been fulfilled and some of the revelations in the book may have not been about the future at all but showing the present spiritual state of things from God’s perspective.
The real challenge for me is how to proceed in interpreting the book but I think I must go back to the beginning and look at it again with the idea that each vision is something either past. present or future or a combination of all three in that the thing revealed has always been. Each vision stands on its own and as part of a whole. The overarching purpose also remains that each vision is Jesus revealing something of himself to the seven churches.
Next: Vision by Vision and Vision’s within Visions