Apocalyptic? #12: Coming with the Clouds (Rev. 1:5b-8)

 

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, ⁶ and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.

⁷ “Look, he is coming with the clouds,”
    and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
    and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen.

⁸ “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

 

 

(Revelation 1:4-8 NIV)

                                                                                                                                              

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, ⁶ and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.  In this popular benediction/doxology, quoted in the church down through the ages, John praises Jesus for so loving us that he paid for our sins by his death (John 3:16), and making us into a Kingdom of priests.  Martin Luther saw in this verse a very important doctrine: “The priesthood of all believers.”  We do not need to have priests (beyond our great high priest, Jesus) to approach God for us.  WE are ALL priests!  The clergy-laity distinction is unnecessary, if not completely wrong!  We will serve Jesus’ God and Father.   Notice that God is not only Jesus’ Father; John calls him Jesus’ God, as well.  The benediction/doxology ends with words familiar to all who pray the Lord’s Prayer: “To Him be glory and power for ever and ever!  Amen.”  The Lord’s Prayer ends: “For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever!  Amen.”  Who is the “Him” who has glory and power forever?  The antecedent of the pronoun “him” could be either Jesus (To him who loves us) or his God and Father (which is the closer antecedent).

⁷ “Look, he is coming with the clouds,”
    and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
    and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen.

 

The Clouds of Heaven

Daniel 7:13 states: “I saw One like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence.”  In Matthew 24:30, Jesus identifies himself as the Son of Man from Daniel and states: “At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.”  Mark 13:26 and Luke 21:27 agree, but shorten the prophecy to the words, “At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.”  Since Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 all pertain to Jesus’ mini-apocalypse and connect his “coming” with his prophecy of the Fall of Jerusalem, John is here effectively informing us that he is connecting the prophecies of Revelation to that same time frame, i.e., around 70 A.D.  Writing a year before the Fall of Jerusalem in 70, John is informing the churches in Asia Minor, which probably contained many who had fled Jerusalem and Judea because of Jesus’ prophecy and their perception of a gathering storm around Jerusalem, that he is writing concerning the apocalyptic events surrounding the Judean-Roman War that had begun a year earlier.  This further corroborates the dating of 69 A.D. that I presented in my earlier post (Apocalyptic? #10) that other scholars are unsuccessfully digging for historical referents in 96 A.D., I repeat the Indiana Jones line: “They are digging in the wrong place.”  They need to be digging in the historical events around 69 A.D. 

Every Eye Will See Him, Even Those Who Pierced Him

Having said that, I am immediately confronted with the question of what will be the visible nature of Jesus’ “coming.”  What does he mean that EVERY EYE will see him?  The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association suggests a possibility:  

First, He will come for believers, both living and dead, in the “rapture” (read 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17). In this view, the rapture—which is the transformation and catching up of all Christians, dead or alive, to meet Christ in the air—will be secret, for it will be unknown to the world of unbelievers at the time of its happening.

The I Thessalonians passage (4:17) refers to the meeting “in the clouds,” but the BillyGraham.com quotation says that that that meeting might “be secret.”  Are the believers (both living and dead) the only ones who are indicated when John says that “every eye” will see him?  The Christians, you will note, are not the ones “who pierced him.”  Daniel only claimed that HE (in a vision) “saw One like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.”  Zechariah 12:10 states that God “will pour out on the house of David and on the residents of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and prayer, and THEY will look on . . . the One they have pierced. They will mourn for Him.” 

και

So, was John saying that Jesus’ coming would be a visible event, clearly seen by everyone alive on Earth at the time and by everyone who has died in the history of mankind?  Or, was he saying, as BillyGraham.com suggests that the event will be secret?  A lot hinges on one little Greek word—KAI—that is normally translated “and,” but is translated “even” in the translation we have used: “EVEN those who pierced him.”  What would it mean, if it were translated “and”?  Wouldn’t it be redundant to say that “every eye” AND the eyes of those who pierced him would see him?  That’s probably why our translator chose another alternative: “even.”  Nevertheless, “even” is only one of several alternative translations of the word KAI.  Another major alternative translation is “namely” or “that is.”  If the “every eye” that will see him means “namely” those who pierced him, we do not have a universally visible event.  We have something closer to the suggestion of BillyGraham.com:  that it will “be secret.”  Matthew 26:64 has Jesus telling, specifically, the Sanhedrin that tried him: “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”  The vast majority of those who pierced him in 30 or 33 A.D. (being of adult age in that year) would now likely be dead (in 69 A.D.), so God may be saying that they (from their residence in Hades) will see the “Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven . . . approach[ing] the Ancient of Days and [being] led into His presence.”  This would fit clearly with Zechariah 12:10, that God “will pour out on the house of David and on the residents of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and prayer, and THEY will look on . . . the One they have pierced. They will mourn for Him.”  John confirms: “all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.” Keep in mind:  the word “earth” means “land (of Israel).”  Matthew 24:30 confirms: “At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.”  The “tribes” are the twelve tribes; the “earth” is the “land” of Israel.  The Christians would NEVER “mourn” when they see Jesus being led into God’s presence.  In terms of mourning, Luke 23:28 reports Jesus’ words: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.”

Furthermore, vast numbers of the residents of Jerusalem in 69 A.D. (especially, those old enough to have taken part in or to have accepted the “piercing” of Jesus) were savagely slain in the siege of Jerusalem.  Some of the younger residents were kept alive to provide sport for the wild beasts in the Roman amphitheaters, but the older residents were killed.  In fact, this event (the coming in the clouds) may not have been witnessed by ANYONE ALIVE—except for the Christians who were being raptured (in the Parousia).  The visible nature of Jesus’ “coming” is described elsewhere in the New Testament as happening “in the twinkling of an eye” (I Corinthians 15:52) and as happening as rapidly “as the lightning flashes from the east, and is seen even to the west” (Matthew 24:27).  While “every eye” might “see” the lightning flash, the significance of what had happened would have occurred in such rapid-fire sequence that, effectively, it would have been “secret.”  Matthew 24:41 describes the event narratively: “Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”  Luke 17:35 reports the same phenomenon.  Not only does that sound like a rapid-fire event, but also it would seem to place the general time frame of the Parousia as occurring at a time when “women [would] be grinding at the mill.”  For those who contend that the Parousia has not yet come, modern technology seems to have ended the period when women grinded at the mill.

How could the Parousia have happened “in secret” in the years from 70 to 73 A.D.?  How could no one have known about this event?  So many Jews (including Jewish Christians?) were either slain or escaped into hiding at that time that no one would know if they had been raptured, killed, or just gone into hiding.  I cited Church historian S. G. F. Brandon in the previous post: “[F]ar more amazing is the fact that . . . Christian Literature contains no record of the fate of its Mother Church in this calamity.”  What happened to them? 

When did Jesus say that the Parousia would occur?  Matthew 16:28 says: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”  Mark 9:1 and Luke 9:27 repeat Jesus’ prophecy.  Put otherwise, a generation for the Jews is 40 years (based on the generation of wondering in the wilderness after the Exodus).  Jesus is cited in Matthew 24:32: “Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.”  Mark 13:30 and Luke 21:32 repeat Jesus’ prophecy.  And, now, in 69 A.D., Revelation 1:1 (NIV) indicates that John is showing God’s “servants what must SOON take place.”  John is to be listened to by his audience, according to Revelation 1:3 (NIV): “because the time is NEAR.”  John predicts that the "time" is "near" also in Revelation 22:10, that Jesus is "coming soon" (Revelation 3:11, 22:20), that the dragon’s "time is short" (Revelation 12:12), and that these things “must soon take place" (Revelation 22:6).

Compare John’s discussion of “soon” with Daniel’s discussion of Nebuchadnezzar’s apocalyptic dream in Daniel 2:28: “There is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. He has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what will necessarily happen in the last days . . . As Your Majesty was lying there, your mind turned to things to come, and the revealer of mysteries showed you what is going to happen. As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me,” The Hebrew word for “reveals, revealer, and revealed” may be translated with forms of the term “apocalypse” in the Greek, which I think John does in Revelation 1:1.  Daniel then proceeds to predict the coming of four great empires,beginning with Nebuchadnezzar’s own Babylonian empire, and proceeding through the Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires, concluding with a messianic prophecy of one whose kingdom will never be destroyed (understand:  Jesus).  John borrows Daniel’s language of “show[ing] King Nebuchadnezzar what will necessarily happen in the last days” and changes the wording from showing “King Nebuchadnezzar” to showing “His servants what will necessarily happen SOON.”  John substitutes the word “soon” where Daniel had written “the last days.”  John has, therefore, stated that the prophecy of Daniel concerning the “kingdom will never be destroyed” is about to be fulfilled.  Soon!  Not in some far-off “last days.” 

⁸ “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

We have already discussed “Alpha and Omega” in previous posts (Apocalyptic?:  #1 and #2).  We have already discussed “who is, and who was, and who is to come” in a previous post (Apocalyptic?:  #11).  We will reserve discussing the term “Almighty” until a later post.  More “digging in the right place” coming soon.