When Every Generation Thinks It's the Last: Reading Revelation as Living Metaphor

A church member once handed me to copy of a DVD that proved that Obama was the Antichrist and insisted I watch it. I (not so) politely refused. "If I watched every video or read every article that someone sent me about the end times, I wouldn't have time to do my real job."

If you've been in the Christian sphere at all, you'll know that Obama was the Antichrist. Then Trump. The covid vaccine was clearly the mark of the beast. Every earthquake, every blood moon, every political upheaval gets filtered through the apocalyptic anxiety machine that American Christianity has become.

Some segment of every generation for the past 2,000 years has thought they were living in the last days. Every single one.

And maybe—just maybe—they were all right?

There are (very basically) two ways to read Revelation: Futurist and Preterist.

I inherited a view of Revelation that turns John the Revelator into some kind of first-century Nostradamus, receiving visions of nuclear weapons and computer chips and whatever other modern technology we're convinced matches his strange symbols. This futurist approach treats the book like a detailed prophetic timeline, complete with charts and diagrams showing exactly when the rapture will happen and who the Antichrist will be.

But this means John wrote an entire book that would be completely meaningless to its original audience. Picture getting a letter from a friend that consists entirely of detailed descriptions of events that won't happen for another 2,000 years, involving technologies and nations that don't exist yet. You'd probably think your friend had lost their mind.

The early Christians were being fed to lions, crucified upside down, and burned as human torches to light Nero's garden parties. They needed hope for their situation, not a cryptic roadmap for some distant future they'd never see.

This is where preterist interpretation comes in—the view that Revelation was primarily about events in John's own time. In this reading, the beast with the number 666 represents Nero Caesar (whose name adds up to 666 in Hebrew numerology), Babylon is Rome, and the destruction described in the book refers to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

This does make more sense historically. John is writing to persecuted churches, using coded language that would slip past Roman censors while offering his audience real comfort about their immediate circumstances. The book becomes a powerful act of resistance literature, saying "Rome looks invincible, but God's justice will prevail."

But if we stop there—if Revelation is only about the past—we're left with a beautiful historical artifact that has nothing to say to us today. And that doesn't match how the book has continued to speak to believers across centuries of different circumstances.

What if both approaches are missing something crucial? What if John wasn't trying to write either a literal prediction of the distant future or just a coded message about his own time, but something far more sophisticated—a typological framework that would remain relevant across generations?

This is the approach that makes the most sense to me, and I'm not alone in this. Typological interpretation recognizes that biblical authors often wrote about patterns that repeat throughout history. John uses the specific circumstances of Roman oppression to illuminate universal truths about empire, violence, and resistance that transcend any single historical moment.

Think about it this way: dystopian literature works similarly. When Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower, she wasn't predicting exactly what would happen in 2025. But damn if her vision of climate chaos, corporate feudalism, and religious authoritarianism doesn't feel prophetic. When Margaret Atwood created Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, she wasn't forecasting a specific future but revealing patterns of patriarchal control that exist in every era.

Revelation functions like the Bible's great dystopian novel. John uses vivid, archetypal imagery—the beast, the whore of Babylon, the new Jerusalem—to create a framework for understanding the cosmic struggle between empire and kingdom, violence and peace, oppression and liberation.

This is why every generation has seen itself in Revelation's pages. There is always a beast—some empire or system that demands ultimate allegiance and crushes those who resist. There is always a Babylon—some center of wealth and power built on the exploitation of the vulnerable. There are always martyrs crying out "how long, O Lord" for justice against violence.

The Roman Empire that John wrote about followed patterns that Stalin's Soviet Union would repeat, that corporate oligarchy repeats today, that every system of domination throughout history has repeated. The specific details change—lions in the Colosseum become gas chambers become drone strikes—but the underlying spiritual dynamics remain constant.

This isn't to say that all empires are equally evil or that we can't make moral distinctions between different political systems. It's to say that Revelation gives us a lens for recognizing and resisting the recurring patterns of dehumanization and violence that show up in every age.

What I love about a typological reading is how it centers Revelation's most radical claim: that the way to overcome empire isn't through superior violence but through what Eugene Peterson called "reverse thunder"—the power of sacrificial love.

The lamb who was slain conquers not by becoming a bigger, scarier beast but by revealing a completely different kind of power. The martyrs overcome not by taking up swords but by refusing to bow down to the lie that might makes right. The new Jerusalem descends not as a locked-down fortress but as a place of healing, where the leaves of the tree of life are "for the healing of the nations" and her gates are never shut.

This vision remains as subversive today as it was when John first wrote it. In a world still dominated by the logic of redemptive violence—where every problem is met with calls for bigger weapons, tougher penalties, stronger borders—Revelation insists that God's power works differently.

If we take Revelation seriously as ongoing metaphor, then the church is called to be that new Jerusalem here and now. We're meant to embody the alternative to empire, to be the community where swords get beaten into plowshares and the healing of the nations actually happens.

Most of the time, we fail spectacularly at this. American Christianity in particular has often functioned more like Babylon than new Jerusalem—blessing empire rather than challenging it, accumulating wealth and power rather than laying it down, building walls rather than offering healing.

But the vision persists. In every generation, there are communities that catch glimpses of what the new Jerusalem could look like. I see it in churches that open their doors to immigrants, in congregations that choose reconciliation over retaliation, in believers who refuse to let fear drive their politics.

This typological approach helps us live in what theologians call the "already and not yet"—the tension between God's kingdom breaking into our world and the full realization of that kingdom still to come.

The beast has been defeated in principle through Christ's death and resurrection, but beastly systems still rampage through our world. The new Jerusalem is already present wherever communities embody God's justice and mercy, but we still wait for the day when every tear will be wiped away.

This means we can read Revelation with both hope and urgency. Hope, because the ultimate outcome isn't in doubt—love wins, justice prevails, death itself gets thrown into the lake of fire. Urgency, because our generation faces its own beasts that demand our resistance, its own opportunities to be new Jerusalem for our neighbors.

Revelation refuses to let us sit comfortably on the sidelines of history, waiting for God to fix everything from the outside. It calls us to embody the alternative here and now, to live as people who know how the story ends but understand that how we live in the middle matters immensely.

The apocalypse isn't just coming—it's happening, generation after generation, wherever the kingdom of God breaks into the kingdoms of this world. The question isn't whether we'll recognize the signs in tomorrow's headlines, but whether we'll recognize the call to be new Jerusalem today.