“When John echoed the Old Testament prophecies of the doom of Babylon and the doom of Tyre, using them to compose his own prophecy of the fall of Babylon, he was not ignorant of their original reference to the great pagan powers contemporary with the prophets who pronounced their oracles. But he saw Rome as the successor to Tyre in its economic empire and the successor to Babylon in its political oppression. Since the evil of these cities was echoed and surpassed by Rome, how much more must God’s judgment on them also fall on Rome.”
Biblical prophets did two things: (1) they addressed their contemporaries about their own present and the immediate future; (2) they “raised hopes” so as “to continue to direct later readers to God’s purpose for the future.” “Biblical prophecy was only preserved in the canon of Scripture because its relevance was not exhausted by its reference to its original context.”
Richard Bauckham, who I’m quoting throughout this post (Theology of the Book of Revelation) notes that grasping this approach helps readers avoid two extremes. The first is the historian’s extreme, supposing that Revelation was only concerned with the immediate events of its audience–the historian’s extreme. The second is the fundamentalist’s extreme, which so concentrates on what Revelation has to say about some future events at the end of time that it neglects “to ask what it meant to its first hearers”.
A bit of experience reading the Bible shows us that “prophetic promise frequently exceeded fulfillment.” So in the OT, we find glorious promises of restoration that by anyone’s view must go beyond what actually happened when, say, Israel returned from Exile. The prophets really were vindicated, “but in another sense they continued to inspire hopes for a much greater salvation event in which God would be vindicated universally as the God both of his people and of the nations of the world.”
Even though the premier issue at hand in Revelation is the church versus the world in the middle era of the Roman Empire, the Apocalypse “depicts the impending conflict between the church and the beast in terms which are eschatologically universal rather than historically realistic. It superimposes the vision of the coming of God’s universal kingdom on the immediate future which John and his readers confront.”
And it still works the same way for readers today, who can look back on the judgment on the beast that was Rome’s Empire, or the protection granted the woman in the wilderness in the midst of her conflict (depicted by William Blake above) and believe in God’s promise to gain the victory and rescue his people in the future . . . no matter how dark the 21st century becomes for them.
Go At A Walking Pace 
I just started reading Bauckham’s little balck book….