The Soon Return

Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.  -- Revelation 22:7 (KJV)

In the King James Version of the Bible, six times in the Book of Revelation, Jesus repeats these words:  I come quickly.  John is writing about those things that “must soon take place”.  Because of this, it is rather natural to take a futurist view of Revelation and conclude that it is about things that will happen at the “end of time”.  Whatever a person’s interpretation, we can surely agree that a repeated phrase such as “I come quickly” is important to understanding the message of Revelation. 

I prefer to bypass the eschatological fortifications erected around Revelation and look at this as an epistle written by the Apostle John to the churches of Asia Minor.  How would those early Christians have understood this letter with all of its expansive and graphic symbolism? 

For one thing, they might have understood this repeated promise of the Lord to come to them as not necessarily a full-fledged invasion.  I believe that Jesus will return to earth in the final destruction of the dichotomy between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world.  I don’t know when or how that happens and, as has become clear over the last thirty or forty years (if there were doubts before), neither does anyone else.

The churches to which John addressed his letter did not need an end-of-the-world answer.  They needed help dealing with a loss of faith, persecution, cultic leaders, hopelessness and confusion.  It sounds a lot like what I need.  The answer they received enabled them to stand and form the foundation of the Church as it has grown and developed through the ages.  For them, He came quickly.  So, too, for us, the Lord is coming to set things right.  Not in some far distance future, but today.  Jesus will show up when He is most needed and put our lives and our situations back on course. 

When I was a small child, we built a large hay barn.  We dug the trench for the footing by hand.  I say “we”, though I was not old enough to run a pick or spade.  Instead I was given a little coal shovel and tasked with keeping the footing clear of all the clay and rocks that got knocked back into it.  The barn’s still standing.  If it ever falls over, it won’t be because the foundation gave out.  One difficulty that we encountered is that we could only work on the trenching between the morning and evening milking.  It seemed to me that it went on for weeks, but it was probably done over the course of three or four days.  We had lines stretched and stakes driven to keep the foundation straight and square.  But, we could not keep the dairy cows completely away from the site, especially at night.  A couple of times all the squaring and checking had to be redone because some cow had stumbled over it. 

We run into trouble and into dead ends.  We get loaded down with mistakes and failures and regrets.  As Kipling notes so cleverly in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, we are surrounded by those who promise the wonders of social progress, yet the consequences of those ideas and advanced programs are like dumb, stumbling beasts that know not what lines they are tearing down. 

In building the barn, one morning, we had all the footing dug, the forms set and perfected, and we spent all day pouring concrete into those forms.  When it cured and the forms were removed, it was the end of the potential damage a cow might do.  The barn rose from that solid, square, level base, a solid, square construction. 

The Lord has a plan and is moving it toward completion.  There are times when things are a little more vulnerable, a little less impervious to the awkward, unthinking actions of the brutes and the ignorant.  We may suffer in those trying times – these trying times.  But the Lord has His square and His level out, and He is on His way to put it all back in order.  And the Church will rise.