What does the future hold?

Some people turn to Revelation for a picture of what the future will look like.
I have to confess, I'm not one of them.

If Revelation were about the future directly, we would've covered it in the Prophetic Literature week - it gets a category all of its own titled 'Apocalyptic'.
In the reading notes we handed out at the start of this 8 week readathon, it was suggested you read the book like a magazine in a waiting room - look at some nice bits, skim past the blah.

For me, this meant reading it all, but paying particular attention to the first few chapters (1-5) and the last one (21), and here's why:

The early chapters explain why John is writing it - a vision from the God, chinese whispers-style, passed from God to Christ to an angel to John to us the church. So to expect it to be literally true is a bit pie-in-the-sky in my book, and it's important to remember this first paragraph, regardless of what you think of the truth in Revelation.
Once you get into the letters to the seven churches, you're looking at a section with great similarities to some of Paul's letters like Ephesians & Philippians, or perhaps 2 & 3 John which we looked at on Sunday gone - offering a mixture of encouragement and challenge.

Chapter 21 is just cool - I like to imagine the scale of the New Jerusalem, and Rob Wallace has done something about this in church recently - basically it's the size of northern Europe! Not to mention very bling.

So take what you will from Revelation. Mind you, if you get all wacko-Christian on us, I might just slap you with a fish. And that's not an allegory for anything nice.