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Along with an inability to distinguish which words should be taken literally, and which words symbolically, another obstacle presents itself before us. Even in the case where the words might have a purely literal meaning and therefore could be understood correctly (if there were some way for us to know that the meaning was purely literal, which there is not), practically all details are absent in the picture given by prophecy. The prophecy uses but a few words, to express what are sometimes great, even magnificent themes or events. This leads to a rather natural, but possibly fatal consequence: we ourselves fill in the details of the picture. We read the words, we make sense out of them, and by this we form a picture of what they mean. This picture, then, becomes our "vision" of what will happen
(7:2)
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