Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

1:7-8
Mark 14:62; Acts 2:19). This is the Glory-Cloud, God’s
heavenly chariot by which He makes His glorious
presence known. 20 The Cloud is a revelation of His
Throne, as He comes to protect His people and destroy
the wicked. One of the most striking descriptions of
God’s “coming in the clouds” is in Nahum’s prophecy
against Nineveh (Nah. 1:2-8):
The LORD is a jealous and avenging God;
The LORD takes vengeance and is filled with wrath.
The LORD takes vengeance on His foes
And maintains His wrath against His enemies.
The LORD is slow to anger and great in power;
He will not leave the guilty unpunished.
His way is in the whirlwind and the storm,
And clouds are the dust of His feet.
He rebukes the sea and dries it up;
He makes all the rivers run dry.
Bashan and Carmel wither
And the blossoms of Lebanon fade.
The mountains quake before Him
And the hills melt away.
The earth trembles at His presence,
The world and all who live in it.
Who can withstand His indignation?
Who can endure His fierce anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire;
The rocks are shattered before Him.
The LORD is good,
A refuge in times of trouble.
He cares for those who trust in Him,
But with an overwhelming flood
He will make an end of Nineveh;
He will pursue His foes into darkness.
His coming in the clouds thus brings judgment and
deliverance in history; there is no reason, in either the
overall Biblical usage of this term or its immediate
context here, to suppose that the literal end of the
physical world is meant (although the sense can
certainly be applied to the Last Day as well). St. John is
speaking of the fact, stressed throughout the “last days”
period by the apostles, that a crisis was quickly
approaching: As He had promised, Christ would come
against the present generation “in the clouds,” in
wrathful judgment against apostate Israel (Matt. 23-
25). And every eye will see Him, even those who
pierced Him (the Gentiles, John 19:34, 37): The
crucifiers would see Him coming in judgment – that is,
they would experience and understand that His Coming
would mean wrath on the Land (cf. the use of the word
see in Mark 1:44; Luke 17:22; John 3:36; Rom. 15:21).
The Lord had used the same terminology of His
Coming against Jerusalem at the end of that generation
(Matt. 24:30), and He even warned the high priest:
“You shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand
of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt.
26:64). In other words, the apostates of that evil
generation would understand the meaning of Christ’s
Ascension, the definitive Coming of the Son of Man,
the Second Adam (Dan. 7:13). In the destruction of
their city, their civilization, their Temple, their entire
world-order, they would understand that Christ had
ascended to His Throne as Lord of heaven and earth.
They would see that the Son of Man had come to the
Father.
Jesus had said also that “all the tribes of the Land will
mourn” on the day of His Coming (Matt. 24:30), that
“weeping shall be there and the gnashing of teeth”
(Matt. 24:51). St. John repeats this as part of the theme
of his prophecy: all the tribes of the Land [the Jews]
will mourn over Him. Both Jesus and St. John thus
reinterpreted this expression, borrowed from Zechariah
12:10-14, where it occurs in an original context of
Israel’s mourning in repentance. But Israel had gone
beyond the point of no return; their mourning would
not be that of repentance, but sheer agony and terror.
Yet this does not negate the promises in Zechariah.
Indeed, through Christ’s judgment on Israel, by means
of her excommunication, the world will be saved; and,
through the salvation of the world, Israel herself will
turn again to the Lord and be saved (Rom. 11:11-12,
15, 23-24). Because Christ comes in the clouds, in
history, judging men and nations, the earth is
redeemed. He comes not simply for judgment, but for
judgment unto salvation. “When Your judgments come
upon the earth, the people of the world learn
righteousness” (Isa. 26:9). From the beginning, the
ultimate purpose of the coming of Christ has been
redemptive: “For God did not send His Son into the
world to condemn the world, but to save the world
through Him” (John 3:17). Christ “comes in the
Clouds” in historical judgments so that the world may
know the Lord God as the eternal and unchangeable
Source and Goal of all history (Rom. 11:36), the Alpha
and the Omega, the A and Z (cf. Isa. 44:6), who is and
who was and who is to come, the eternal Origin and
Consummation of all things. Almighty is the usual
translation of the Greek word Pantokrator, which
means the One who has all power and rules over everything,
the New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament
expression Lord of Hosts, the “Captain of the Armies”
(meaning the armies of Israel, or the star/angel armies
of heaven, or the armies of the heathen nations, whom
God used to pour out His wrath on His disobedient
people). Christ was about to demonstrate to Israel and
to the world that He had ascended to the Throne as
Supreme Ruler.
Jesus Christ, Transcendent and Immanent (1:9-16)
9 I, John, your brother and companion in the Tribulation
and Kingdom and perseverance which are in Christ Jesus,
was on the island of Patmos because of the Word of God
and the Testimony of Jesus.
10 I came to be in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard
behind me a loud Voice like a trumpet,
11 saying: Write in a book what you see and send it to the
seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum,
Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.
12 And I turned to see the Voice that was speaking to me.
And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands;
13 and in the middle of the seven lampstands one like a Son
of Man, clothed in a robe reaching to His feet and with a
golden sash around His chest.
20. See Chilton, Paradise Restored, pp. 57ff., 97ff.; cf. Kline, Images of the Spirit.
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