Are we in the tribulation

[Grace]

I normally don't comment in threads about Revelation or "end times". What I believe has a sever tendency to piss off modern Christians. I've seen preachers get red in the face and ball their fists up like they were about to try and whoop me for it. So I don't generally enter the discussions even in the real world. Life is too short to spend it arguing with folks over inconsequential things, so I try not to.

Therefore, I'll say a few things only once, and try to be done with it.

First, you are right about the nature of time - it's not at all like we experience it, sequentially. That's just the only way we can experience time in a mortal body.

But the subject of Revelations is even deeper and more convoluted than that. It's my understanding that Revelations is actually in seven sections, and all of those sections overlap one another, like pancakes stacked in a pile. Each one describes the same events, but from a different perspective (or from a different "level", going with the pancake analogy here) than the others. It was written that way as an "apocalypse", a "hidden work", to make it harder to tease out the actual threads. In a way, it's encrypted.

To further complicate it, Revelations was written in symbols and symbolic "code", to hide it's revelations from prying eyes who, in the first century AD, were not privy to the Christian teachings of those days. A "New Jerusalem" may not be, and is probably not, and actual physical cubic city larger than the earth flying out of the sky like a comet to obliterate what is now, physically. A "temple" may not be, and probably is not, a large cubic building on the top of Mount Moriah. The "Great Whore of Babylon" may not be, and probably is not, an actual sex worker in the Iraqi desert wastes where a great city once stood. That sort of thing.

These milennialist perspectives that try to sort out a timeline from Revelations, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel primarily, are all modern inventions. They are no older than the first half of the nineteenth century. Schofield tried to flesh them out with his Bible annotations... but what does it say at the end of revelations about that sort of activity? Tim LaHaye has certainly gone a long way in popularizing Schofield's heresy.

I believe that all of the events of revelations were fulfilled nearly 2000 years ago, and were not written for our eyes or understanding. Rather, it was written for Christians in the first century, when they actually DID go through some severe persecutions and tribulations. "This generation shall not pass..."

I believe Jesus when he said the Kingdom is spiritual, not "of this world". if that is the case, if he was not lying, then of what possible use would an Earthy Millennial reign be to him? It would be an abdication of his throne in the spiritual Kingdom.

I believe that Kingdom was instituted 2000 years ago with the words "It is finished".

I won't go any further in what I believe. I figure I've already said enough to get modern Christians to throwing rocks at me.

The description of Revelation as you described, sections told from 7 perspectives, is what I posted... It's taught this way by Dr. Baucham, and I posted free access to his sermon section on Revelation.. I believe it's 10 or more sermons in total, but I've never counted. 

I just wanted you to know that.