Studied obscurity

There are familiar, tenacious, long-standing schools of prophetic interpretation: amil, premil, postmil, preterist, futurist, historicist, classical dispensationalist, progressive dispensationalist, prewrath, &c. 

I think some of these are just plain wrong, or wrong to some degree. However, I think one reason we have competing interpretations of Bible prophecy is because, to some extent, Bible prophecy is intentionally ambiguous. Even when God discloses the future, he both reveals and conceals the future.

Predicting the future is a tricky business. What makes it tricky is not that the future is uncertain or unknowable, but that the very act of predicting the future can affect the outcome. The way people react to the prediction can throw it off. 

I don't think Bible prophecy was ever meant to be a bus schedule. Rather, I think it has two objectives:

i) To prepare the faithful for the future. Give them some advance notice of what to expect in terms of adversity and deliverance.

ii) After the fact, to enable them to see how this was, indeed, predicted. That shows them that they are in safe hands. 

It's like a subway map. There are so many potential routes and destinations. So many transfer stations. You can't tell where it will end from where it begins. 

Once, however, a passenger has arrived, you can retrace the route from the endpoint to the starting-point. Once we see how it all comes together, we can take the destination as our reference point, and isolate the thread. 

To some extent, I think Bible prophecy reflects a strategy of studied obscurity. God reveals just enough, but not too much.