“John is taken, as it were, out of this world in order to see it differently… John (and thereby his readers with him) is taken up into heaven in order to see the world from the heavenly perspective. He is given a glimpse behind the scenes of history so that he can see what is really going on in the events of his time and place. He is also transported in vision into the final future of the world, so that he can see the present from the perspective of what its final outcome must be, in God’s ultimate purpose for human history.”
–Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7.
