Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

22:5
5 As St. John told us in 21:22-25, within the walls of
the Holy City there shall no longer be any Night; and
they shall not have need of the light of a lamp nor the
light of the sun, because the Lord God shall illumine
them. In our study of “the new heaven and earth” in
Chapter 21, we took note of how St. Peter urged the
churches to holy living in light of the approaching age
of righteousness, which was to be ushered in at the fall
of the Old Covenant with the destruction of the
Temple (2 Pet. 3:1-14). Similarly, St. Paul exhorted the
Christians of Rome to godly living in view of the
imminent dawning of the Day:
And this do, knowing the time, that it is already the hour
for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us
than when we first believed. The Night is almost gone, and
the Day is at hand. Let us therefore lay aside the deeds of
darkness and put on the armor of light. (Rom. 13:11-12)
In much the same way he wrote to the Thessalonians,
arguing that their lives must be characterized by the
approaching Dawn rather than by the fading Night:
For you yourselves know full well that the Day of the
Lord will come just like a thief in the night. While they are
saying, “Peace and safety!” then destruction will come upon
them suddenly like birth pangs upon a woman with child; and
they shall not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness,
that the Day should overtake you like a thief; for you are all
sons of Light and sons of Day. We are not of Night nor of
Darkness; so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be
alert and sober. For those who sleep do their sleeping at night,
and those who get drunk get drunk at night. But since we are
of Day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith
and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God has
not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through
our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thess. 5:2-9)
The era of the Old Covenant was the time of the
world’s dark Night; with the Advent of Jesus Christ has
come the age of Light, the great Day of the Lord,
established at His Ascension and His full inauguration
of the New Covenant:
Arise, shine; for your Light has come,
And the Glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For behold, Darkness will cover the earth,
And deep Darkness the peoples;
But the LORD will rise upon you,
And His Glory will appear upon you.
And nations will come to your Light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising. (Isa. 60:1-3)
For behold, the Day is coming, burning like a furnace;
and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff, and the
Day that is coming will set them ablaze, says the LORD of
hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But
for you who fear My name the Sun of righteousness will rise
with healing in His wings; and you will go forth and skip
about like calves from the stall. (Mal. 4:1-2)
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
For He has visited us and accomplished redemption
for His people . . . .
Because of the tender mercy of our God,
With which the Sunrise from on high shall visit us,
To shine upon those who sit in Darkness
and the shadow of Death,
To guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:68, 78-79)
In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men. And
the Light shines in the darkness, and the Darkness did not
overpower it. (John 1:4-5)
Again therefore Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the
Light of the world; he who follows Me shall not walk in the
Darkness, but shall have the Light of Life.” (John 8:12)
The god of this age has blinded the minds of the
unbelieving, that they might not see the Light of the Gospel
of the glory of Christ, who is the Image of God . . . . For God,
who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who
has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of
the glory of God in the face of Christ. (2 Cor. 4:4, 6)
Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share
in the inheritance of the saints in Light. For He delivered us
from the domain of Darkness, and transferred us to the
Kingdom of His beloved Son. (Col. 1:12-13)
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without
wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider
how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not
forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of
some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you
see the Day drawing near. (Heb. 10:23-25)
And so we have the prophetic word made more sure, to
which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a
dark place, until the Day dawns and the Morning Star arises
in your hearts. (2 Pet. 1:19)
Again we must remember that the New Covenant age
is regarded in Scripture as definitively and progressively
an era of Light, in contrast to the relative Darkness of
pre-Messianic times. In the absolute and ultimate
sense, the Light will come only at the end of the world,
at the Second Coming of Christ. But, as the apostles
contemplated the end of the Old Covenant era, during
which the nations were enslaved to demons, they spoke
of the imminent Dawn as the age of righteousness,
when the power of the Gospel would sweep across the
earth, smashing idolatry and flooding the nations with
the Light of God’s grace. Relatively speaking, the
whole history of the world from Adam’s Fall to Christ’s
Ascension was Night; relatively speaking, the whole
future of the world is bright Day. This follows the
pattern laid down at the creation, in which the heavens
and earth move eschatologically from evening to
morning, the lesser light being succeeded by the greater
light, going from glory to Glory (Gen. 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23,
31): Now, St. John tells us, Jesus Christ has appeared,
and is “coming quickly,” as the bright Morning Star (v.
16).
In his concluding comment on the restoration of
Paradise, St. John tells us that the royal priesthood
shall reign, not just for a “millennium,” but forever and
ever: “The reign of the thousand years (20:4-6) is but
the beginning of a regal life and felicity which are to
continue through all aeons to come. And so the kingdom
of the saints of the Most High will be most truly,
as Daniel wrote, ‘an everlasting kingdom’ (Dan. 7:27).
This is the ‘eternal life’ of Matthew 25:46, just as the
second death, the lake of fire, is the ‘eternal punishment’
into which the ‘cursed’ go away.’”
7. Milton Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics: A Study of the Most Notable Revelations of God and of Christ in the Canonical Scriptures (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1898), p.
471.
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