Jesus Christ instructs the apostle John to write what he will see: the past, the present, and the future.
This has contributed to the challenge of reading Revelation. John's prophetic material does
not indicate what events are of the past.
As the apostle records his observations, some things recognizable to him and others never seen before, he
records his observations sequentially as he is led to see them.
John's figure of speech, describing things he does not easily recognize, further complicates
the reading of Revelation. And what the apostle attempts to describe may be very foreign to a reader two
thousand years later.