You can never really understand the Book of Revelation until you understand that it was not written to people who live in modern Western cultures. It’s a letter written to folks who lived a long time ago in a culture and time that was very different from our own.

Below, I’m borrowing a passage from my book, Your Life And What Comes After, to make that point.

“Adriana, a football fan, wrote a letter to her friend who also really liked following and watching football games. In the letter, Adriana described a high school football game she went to recently like this:

‘It was raining cats and dogs as if the sky had sprung a leak, but the game marched on as if the gridiron were Noah’s front yard. The quarterback was trying to thread the needle through a secondary playing tighter than a drum. Some of the fans were hollering that the offense needed to stop shooting themselves in the foot with their false starts and do a better job of establishing the run.

By the second half, the field had turned into a mud pit worthy of a hog-calling contest, and the players were slipping and sliding like greased lightning. The defense was bringing down the house with all-out blitzes on three straight downs.

Finally, midway through the fourth quarter, our junior kicker split the uprights. The score held, and that missed point-after attempt in the first quarter didn’t come back to haunt our squad.‘

If you aren’t familiar with American football, then Adriana’s report on the game would be kind of confusing to you.

Now just try to imagine how strange and confusing that letter would sound to a young girl in a little fishing village in a faraway country who knew nothing about America, football, or the figures of speech in the English language, like ‘shooting themselves in the foot.’ That young girl would have to see everything through the eyes of the friend Adriana wrote the letter to in order to understand its meaning.”

That doesn’t mean that we can’t learn and apply lessons from Revelation in our own lives. We certainly can. But first we have to understand what John’s vision from God meant to the churches in Asia Minor in the first century. How would they have understood the seemingly strange language, symbols, figures of speech, and images when the letter was read to them?