You are hurting, being persecuted by a group of people that really don’t care that you’re trying to obey God and that you’re trying to live your life the best way possible. These persecutors have no mercy on you at all. While you’re trying to avoid being killed, you receive a letter. It’s a letter of hope, a letter designed to bring you comfort…or so you thought. You open it up, and you find out that it is a letter that really has nothing to do with anything you’re going through. This letter instead contains predictions of governmental, political, and religious situations in the 41st century. How much comfort will you get from that letter?
You may think the above paragraph far-fetched, but that is exactly what the futurist interpreters of Revelation want you to think God was giving to His people in the 1st century. God’s people, the Christians, are going through horrible persecutions at the hands of uncaring, vicious men when the book of Revelation was written. The book of Revelation was to give comfort to the Christians undergoing persecution. Yet, according to the futurist interpretation, the book deals with things that wouldn’t happen for twenty centuries (at the very least) in the future. Such a book would have no meaning for the people who John wrote it to. Would God write a book, address it to specific people, and then make the contents of that book meaningless to them?
Another thing to consider when examining the futurist interpretation is that God promises a blessing on those who keep [obey] the things written in the book (Revelation 1:3). If it is composed of things—none of which have yet happened—that means it was impossible for anyone, for the last 2,000 years, to be blessed by this book.
Taking this view also makes God a god of confusion. With every generation, the futurists must re-interpret Revelation to fit the current world events. Some futurists have seen Germany and Adolph Hitler in Revelation. When that didn’t work out, it was Russia. Then Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Then Barack Obama. And in another ten years, they will point to someone else.
Taking this view also ignores that John wrote down the Revelation for seven actual churches in the first century (Revelation 1:4). As you read chapters 2 and 3, you will see that Jesus addressed actual problems that actual congregations were actually going through in the first century.
Hopefully it has been made clear that the futurist position (that all—or even most—of the events in Revelation are still in the future) is in opposition to clear statements from God’s word, from the book of Revelation itself, and—as such—the futurist position must be labeled as “false doctrine.”
-Bradley S. Cobb