God’s witnesses have more power than their enemies appreciate, and more even than they themselves often appreciate. The gospel is preached or an individual Christian witnesses and the message is treated with contempt. The world cannot bear to have its conscience troubled. God’s witness has penetrated into the sanctuary of sin.
Unless the interpreter releases himself from the constraints of a literal view of this passage, he will lose the great lesson for the church. To some, this amounts to playing games with Scripture. How can anything other than a literal interpretation be right? But those who interpret symbolically may have equal respect for Scripture and concern to do it justice. To give a figurative meaning does not mean that all prophecy is reduced to vagaries. It does not mean that we no longer believe in a literal return of the Lord Jesus Christ to this world or a literal resurrection. It means that where this book describes patterns of events which occur repeatedly throughout the gospel age, it often represents them as a single event expressed in terms of an Old Testament type. This is how types work: a single event is intended by God as a universal truth that applies to many corresponding situations in the future. Though the Israelites only went out from Egypt once, though they only crossed the Red Sea, passed through the wilderness, crossed the Jordan and entered Canaan, defeating the seven nations of the Canaanites once, yet these things were a pattern of every believer’s experience. We go out of the world, we die to the old life, travel through the wilderness of this world, enter the kingdom of Christ and progressively defeat our spiritual enemies in the process of sanctification. These things which are repeated in the life of every believer were set forth once by God in the physical realm as a pattern for all times. In exactly the same way the visions which John sees teach truths that apply till the end of the world.