Some modern people come to Revelation with the recipe, “interpret everything literally if possible.†That recipe mistakes what kind of book Revelation is. Of course, John literally saw what he says he saw. But what he saw was a vision. It was filled with symbols, like the Beast of 13:1-8 and the seven blazing lamps in 4:5. It never intended to be a direct, nonsymbolical report of the future. People living in John’s own time understood this matter instinctively, because they recognized that John was writing in a “apocalyptic†manner, a manner already as familiar to them as a political cartoon is today.