On five occasions (1:3; 22:7, 10, 18, 19), Revelation explicitly calls itself a work of prophecy, and it also characterizes the activity of John as prophecy (10:11; 19:10; 22:6, 9). Many people assume that Revelation is a prophetic book in the sense of predicting, in rather explicit detail, “the way the world will end.” The most popular approach to Revelation, dispensationalism, both creates and reinforces this assumption. A
