Good quote from Greg Boyd:
“…interpreting Revelation’s symbols as referring primarily to future historical events produces a multitude of contradictions and absurdities. To offer one trivial but clear example, when I first read Revelation as a seventeen-year-old recent convert in a fundamentalist church, I was troubled by John’s statement that all the stars fell from the sky ‘to the earth, like figs’ (Rev 6:13). Since I was taught that this work provides a literal depiction of future events, the cosmological absurdity of this passage bothered me. But this was nothing compared to the disquietude I experienced when I discovered that the stars were back up in the sky two chapters later (8:12) only to have a third of them swept away once again four chapters after this (12:4). Revelation is filled with word-pictures such as this that are absurd if interpreted literally but that are altogether unproblematic when the symbolic nature and rhetorical purpose of this work are acknowledged.” (Gregory Boyd, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, 1:599-600)