Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

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that must shortly take place. The Revelation,
therefore, is not concerned with either the scope of
world history or the end of the world, but with events
that were in the near future to St. John and his readers.
As we shall see throughout the commentary, the Book
of Revelation is a “covenant lawsuit,” prophesying the
outpouring of God’s wrath on Jerusalem. It is a
prophecy of the period known in Scripture as “the Last
Days,” meaning the last days of the covenantal nation
of Israel, the forty-year “generation” (Matt. 24:34)
between the Ascension of Christ (A.D. 30) and the
Fall of Jerusalem to the Romans (A.D. 70). 1 It foretells
events that St. John expected his readers to see very
soon.
This clearly militates against any “futurist” interpretation
of the book. The futurists would have it that St.
John was warning the Christians of his day mostly
about things they would never see – meaning that the
Book of Revelation has been irrelevant for 1900 years!
To claim that the book has relevance only for our
generation is egocentric; and it is contrary to the
testimony of the book itself. It must be stressed that the
Greek expression for our English word shortly plainly
means soon, and those who first read the phrase would
not have understood it to mean anything else (cf. Luke
18:8; Acts 12:7; 22:18; 25:4; Rom. 16:20; Rev. 22:6). A
futurist interpretation is refuted in the very first verse of
Revelation.
Before we go any further, we should also note that St.
John’s opening statement presupposes the Biblical
philosophy of history: God is Lord of all, He has an allembracing
plan for His creation, and He rules every
atom of reality according to His plan. After all, how
does God know the future? The Bible does not indicate
that God has some sort of crystal ball with which He
can perceive future events. Think about it. There is
really no such thing as “the future,” in the sense of
something “out there” that can be divined with the
proper equipment. To say that something is in the
future is simply to say that it does not yet exist.
How then does God know the future? The Bible gives
only one answer: God knows the future because He
planned it:
The LORD has established His throne in the heavens, and
His Kingdom rules over all. (Ps. 103:19)
Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases.
(Ps. 115:3)
And all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as
nothing, but He does according to His will in the host of
heaven and among the inhabitants of earth; and no one can
hold back His hand, or say to Him: What have You done?
(Dan. 4:35)
We have obtained an inheritance, having been
predestined according to His purpose who works all things
after the counsel of His will. (Eph. 1:11)
Thus, even though “the future” does not yet exist, it is
absolutely certain and secure, because the all-powerful
Lord of the universe has infallibly planned it. He “gives
life to the dead and calls into being that which does not
exist” (Rom. 4:17). God knows all things exhaustively
because He planned all things exhaustively.
Arthur Pink wrote: “The Lord God omnipotent
reigneth. His government is exercised over inanimate
matter, over the brute beasts, over the children of men,
over angels good and evil, and over Satan himself. No
revolving of a world, no shining of a star, no storm, no
movement of a creature, no actions of men, no errands
of angels, no deeds of the Devil – nothing in all the vast
universe can come to pass otherwise than God has eternally
purposed. Here is a foundation for faith. Here is a
resting place for the intellect. Here is an anchor for the
soul, both sure and steadfast. It is not blind fate,
unbridled evil, man or Devil, but the Lord Almighty
who is ruling the world, ruling it according to His own
good pleasure and for His own eternal glory.” 2
Now St. John says that these things regarding the
future were signified, or “sign-ified, ” to him by the
angel. The use of this word tells us that the prophecy is
not simply to be taken as “history written in advance.”
It is a book of signs, symbolic representations of the
approaching events. The symbols are not to be
understood in a literal manner. We can see this by St.
John’s use of the same term in his Gospel (12:33; 18:32;
21:19). In each case, it is used of Christ “signifying” a
future event by a more or less symbolic indication,
rather than by a prosaic, literal description.
And this is generally the form of the prophecies in the
Revelation. It is a book of symbols from beginning to
end. As G. R. Beasley-Murray well said, “The prophet
wishes to make clear that he does not provide
photographs of heaven.” 3 This does not mean the
symbols are unintelligible; the interpretation is not
what any individual chooses to make it. Nor, on the
other hand, are the symbols written in some sort of
code, so that all we need is a dictionary or grammar of
symbolism to “translate” the symbols into English. The
only way to understand St. John’s system of symbolism
is to become familiar with the Bible itself.
2-3 An important relationship is set up here. Verse 1
showed us Jesus Christ giving the Revelation to St.
John; now St. John states that he himself bore witness
to the Word of God and to the Witness of Jesus
Christ. Thus we see that Jesus is the preeminent
Witness-Bearer, testifying to His servants; and we see
also that St. John bears witness of Christ’s Witness,
testifies of Christ’s Testimony. He can do this because
he is one of Christ’s servants, and has become like his
Master. In giving testimony, St. John is conformed to
the image of Christ. These two patterns – Christ and
His servants bearing dual witness, and Christ’s servants
1. See David Chilton, Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion (Ft.
Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1985), pp. 112, 115-22. I have explained this
in much greater detail in a series of articles on the Last Days, published in
The Geneva Review, P.O. Box 131300, Tyler, TX 75713.
2. Arthur Pink, The Sovereignty of God (London: The Banner of Truth Trust,
[1928] 1968), pp. 43f.
3. G. R. Beasley-Murray, The Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., [1974] 1981), p. 51.
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