I would encourage you to put the observations about Creation, the Flood, and the Exodus to the test. Look up the texts I have listed along the way. Then read the books of Genesis and Exodus carefully for yourself. Compare the stories of God’s three mighty acts. Can you see how the language is taken up from one story to the next? So what can we learn from this series of patterns? What does this study have to do with prophecy? What does it have to do with the book of Revelation? I believe that five major insights about God have emerged from our brief study of the Creation, the Flood and the Exodus. These insights provide a major key to open the prophecies of Revelation.

1) God is consistent. His past actions set the pattern for His later actions. What He did at the Creation sets the pattern for what He did at the Red Sea. The two events are very different and yet the same God is at work in both instances. What He does now reminds us of what He did then. What He is doing now sets the pattern for what He will do later on. He is faithful to His promises. You can count on God. He is consistent. But this insight needs to be qualified by a second one.

2) God is not predictable. While God is consistent He is not predictable. You have to let God be God. He is consistent in the way He approaches people, events, and circumstances but His later activities do not carry out every detail of the pattern. God’s consistency is not a mindless, point-by-point consistency. Sometimes people assume that every detail of God’s past must be carried out in exactly the same way in the future. So they assume that in unfulfilled prophecies God will do in minute detail exactly what He has said. But we must be careful not to put God in a box. We must let God be God. According to the Bible, God’s later activity carries out much of the pattern but not all the pattern.

3) God is creative. God’s later actions develop His earlier ones and often enhance them. God’s revelation of Himself grows and develops as His people become able to grasp it. The antitype doesn’t just carry out the type as a point by point correspondence. God can transcend what He has done before and He is not limited to the details of His previous patterns.
When you compare prophecy and fulfillment in the Bible, therefore, you discover a creative God who operates freely within the limits of His overall consistency. He is not bound to carry out every detail, neither is He hindered from introducing something new. Sometimes a prophecy that could have been fulfilled in one way at one point in time is fulfilled in a different way at a different time. Circumstances alter cases. As time moves on, we find God operating in creative ways to fulfill His word.

4) God meets people where they are. Whenever God reveals Himself, He does so within the time, place and circumstances of the one who receives the revelation. When God speaks to a prophet, he speaks in the language of the prophet, language the prophet has learned naturally from his own past. And, frankly, could a prophet understand a message from God if it were given in a language he could not understand? Of course not.
You see, language is based on the sum total of our past experience. The only language we know is what we learn from babyhood on up. A two-year old toddles around and hears somebody say “appreciate.” The child files that sound away for a couple of weeks and then hears someone say it again. By the third or fourth time, the toddler begins to have a sense of what that word means, what it means in context, how that word is generally expressed. So the language that we all speak is the language of our own personal past. That is why God spoke to the writers of the Bible in the language of their past. God’s revelations always come within the time, place and circumstances in which the recipients lived.
The point I am getting at is that language is more than just Spanish, French, English and Swahili. Even among those who speak English there are vast differences in the way things are defined and the way culture expresses itself. The English of the “Baby Boomer” is quite different from the English of the “Post-Modern” young person. So even though the same language is being spoken, each person’s unique experience affects what they understand and how they understand. The soundest way to apply unfulfilled prophecy, then, is to understand its meaning in terms of the language of the times in which it was originally written. If you want to understand Revelation, therefore, the soundest way to approach the book is in the language of John’s past, language as he would have grasped it around 95 A.D.
I once had an ongoing discussion with a friend who also studied Revelation. It seemed that we disagreed on every text. If I said anything about a text, he said something different. And no amount of evidence seemed to change anything. Finally, it dawned on me what was happening. I said, “You know, I’m studying the book of Revelation as if it was written in 95 A.D., you’re studying the book as if it were written in 1995.” I expected that my “brilliant” insight would settle the matter in my favor. But he had a surprise up his sleeve.
He acknowledged first that what I said was true. It was the first time we had agreed on anything! He agreed that he was applying to Revelation the language and concepts of his day. He was reading the book as an Adventist of the 90s. And further, he argued, that was exactly what he thought God would want him to do! For him, the book of Revelation would only make sense if he read it in the context of everything an Adventist knows and believes.
The biblical evidence, however, tells us that “reading Revelation like an Adventist” is not appropriate for the study of an ancient book in which God meets writers where they are. We should not read Revelation as if John was familiar with Ellen White. We should not read Revelation as if John were familiar with the SDA Bible Commentary. The message God has placed for us in the book of Revelation will be found in the language and perspective of the original situation in which God met John.

5) There is a spiritualization of the type. Beginning with the exodus event, we see a spiritualization of some of the types. In other words, the language of God’s successive actions moves from literal to spiritual (from Flood to slavery, for example). It also moves from global to more localized (from worldwide Flood to Red Sea). God can use the language of the past in literal terms at times (as in the Flood story’s reminiscences of Creation), but He can also use the same language to describe something more spiritual and more local (as in the account of the Exodus). The basic scenario and language is repeated, but He uses that language in a figurative, spiritualized form, moving from Adam to Israel or from Eden to Palestine. The same language is used but the meanings of the words are now expanded in a spiritual way.
These patterns in God’s activity are vital for our study of the book of Revelation. As we see how God fulfilled the promises and prophecies of the past, we gain a clearer picture of His workings in our present and future. As we move toward the book of Revelation, we will next examine the Old Testament prophets, whose writings span from Isaiah to Malachi in the Bible. The five principles we have developed are further confirmed by this next stage of God’s dealings with His people Israel.