" Perhaps an analogy will clarify the point. Let us suppose that a sect should arise promulgating the view that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was actually an inspired prophecy forecasting political events that must occur before the year 2000. The members of the sect would then busy themselves in attempting to work out the symbolic correlations between the story’s characters and the dramatis personae of the world’s political stage in the 1990s. Some of the proposals might be enormously detailed and ingenious, but surely we would have to say to such interpreters, “No, you’ve got it all wrong; The Lord of the Rings is not that sort of text at all.” Something similar must be said to those who read Revelation as predictive in this way. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics