Revelation 22:20. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
The book we usually call the Revelation has its title in the first two verses: “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him to show unto His servants things which must shortly come to pass. And He sent and signified it by His angel unto His servant John, who bare record of the Word of God and of the testimony of Jesus Christ and of all things that he saw.” The Revelation was given by God. And there are three witnesses to that revelation mentioned. There is Jesus Christ, there is His angel, and there is His servant John. These three witnesses appear throughout the book, and they appear in the chapter which we have read.
Whether the speaker is Jesus Christ Himself or His angel or His servant John makes no difference to the authority of what is said, because in each case it is the Word of God that is spoken. In this chapter we have words similar to our text in verse 7, “Behold, I come quickly”, and again in verse 12, “Behold, I come quickly”. And these words seem to be quoted by the angel or else spoken by the Lord while the angel is speaking. But there is no doubt at all that it is Himself who speaks directly in the verse before us here, “He which testifieth these things”. This is the true and faithful witness, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is truth itself, and He says, “Surely I come quickly”. On behalf of the Church, John responds to the Lord Jesus by saying, “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” We have here what we might describe as the last words spoken by Christ to His Church.
We might try to think a little of: (1.) The Lord’s assurance to His people, “Surely I come quickly”. (2.) Their response to that assurance, “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” (3.) The reason for that response. We believe we find that reason in the view they have of Christ: He is their Lord Jesus. Perhaps this would be blessed to help us answer the inquiry as to whether or not we can join with John in this response to the intimation that Christ is coming.
1. The Lord’s assurance to His people. He says, “Surely I come quickly”. He desires His people to be in no doubt about the matter. He is making it as certain as possible. Indeed, we have no stronger guarantee of anything than the Word of the Lord. If the Lord has said something, it will come to pass. Nothing can hinder Him accomplishing what He has promised. Nothing can slow down the accomplishment of His purposes. Nothing outside of Himself can interfere with His purposes. Everything is embraced within His purposes. And when He says, “Surely”, then it certainly will come to pass, – no matter how people may put it out of their minds, no matter how it may seem to be contradicted by the things that happen. The Lord desires us to have this firm ground under our feet to be able to stand on – that He has said it. He who testifies these things, the faithful and true witness, says, “Surely I come quickly”.
Now what does He mean when He says, “I come”? We have to notice that the Lord is speaking in the present. He is not saying, I will come. He says, I am coming. There is no doubt this will be ultimately fulfilled in His coming again at the end of human history. This is perhaps much more prominent in the Bible than in our own thinking. It is found in the Old Testament, but there the first and second comings of Christ often seem to be telescoped together – the people were looking forward to the coming Saviour. In these prophecies, you have some aspects which belong to His first appearing; others belong to His second appearing. That becomes clear in the light of the New Testament, where the Lord Himself and His apostles make very clear that He shall come again in like manner as He ascended into heaven. He came in a state of humiliation, and He will come in a state of glory.
When we think about the second coming of Christ, to summon us to resurrection, judgement and our eternal state, we find the Bible describes this as a single event at the end of time, and that it is going to be a personal return on the part of the Lord Jesus Christ. This same Jesus who died on the cross of Calvary, who rose from the dead, who ascended up on high, shall come again. It will be a visible appearing. Every eye shall see Him – not only His friends, but also His foes; not only those that were looking for Him, but those who never heard of Him. No one needs to say Christ has come.
You get all sorts of sects and cults, with all their notions about the second coming of Christ. The Lord Jesus knew what was to happen and He said, You do not need to listen to people who say that He has come, that He is in the wilderness or in the mountains. When He comes, no one will be in any doubt about the matter. Every eye shall see Him, those also which pierced Him, and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him, because the second, personal, physical, visible coming of Christ will be the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
He will appear in the glory of His Father and of His holy angels, accompanied by His saints. His appearing will make it apparent to all that He is the great God, the King of kings and Lord of lords. And that coming of Christ will bring time to a conclusion, bring this world to its end, and bring us all before the judgement seat. Then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory, and before Him will be gathered all nations, and He will separate between the sheep and the goats, He will separate between His people and those who were strangers to Him. He will say to the one: “Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you”. And He will say to the other: “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and His angels”. Yes, there is a day when the Lord Jesus will come, in His glory, as the exalted Redeemer, as the Judge of all. That is what He is saying, I come. His coming is certain. We do not know when, but we know that, at the time appointed by the Father, the Lord Jesus shall come again.
As we suggested already, He is not saying, I will come, but, “I am coming”; in other words, I am on the way. That is the message of Revelation: what we see in the unfolding of the purposes of God in the Church and in the world is the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is approaching in every event. He is coming to His people. Every event is bringing His arrival nearer. Many things will take place before this event. The Lord Jesus comes to the individual believer in His providence and in the effectual call of His grace. That, of course, is what brings a sinner to the Saviour – when the Lord Jesus comes in the power of His Spirit and regenerates the soul, puts the cords of His grace and love around that soul and draws it effectually to Himself. For most of human history, the Lord comes to take the souls of His people to glory. These are all steps towards this final coming. When He comes to call the soul effectually, when He comes to visit the soul from time to time, when He comes to bring the soul to glory, these are all steps towards the ultimate coming for the child of God.
And the same is true in the grander scale of the Church and the world. Many things are taking place and we tend to think of them as moving towards the end; whereas when we see it from the Lord’s side of things, what we see is Himself coming towards us. These events are His “steps of majesty”. He comes, “leaping upon the mountain, skipping upon the hills”. That was one way that Samuel Rutherford used to think of the coming of Christ. These seventeenth-century men thought a lot about Christ’s second coming. They were very much taken up with the affairs of the Church in this world, looking forward to the overthrow of Antichrist, to the ingathering of the Gentiles, to a great work of grace among the Jews and to times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, as we look forward ourselves. But they never lost sight of the fact that all these things were steps towards the coming of Christ at last. And their desire was for His coming. Samuel Rutherford used to say, “O that the Lord would be sweeping up all the ages and centuries before Him and coming in His mighty power”.
In the Old Testament, of course, they were looking for His coming, and they must have thought He was long in coming. Yet, as we see in the Song of Solomon, He was coming, “leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills”. The Lord was progressing towards His first coming. They were looking for Him, looking for redemption, waiting for Him. And now it is His second coming that is in the future. And everything that takes place is a step towards this final appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He says, “Surely I come”. I am coming. I am on the way. And the child of God on the personal level can take all the experiences through which he or she passes as intimations that He is coming, that He is on the way for them. And so can the Church at large: “I come”.
He says, “I come quickly”. It is almost 2000 years since these words were uttered. People seem to think that this book was probably written about 100 AD, a long time ago. Yet the Lord Jesus said to John: “I come quickly”. He is hurrying. He is not delaying. Of course, there are those who say, as Peter records, “Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation”. But His caution was, “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish” – the longsuffering of God.
But the Lord Jesus is coming quickly when you think of it in relation to eternity. The whole of human history is just a flash, in comparison to eternity. We talk about eternity, but who can grasp the concept? It brings that home to us when we think of the whole history of this world. Supposing it has existed as long as some of these people are saying, millions and billions of years – and we do not believe it for one moment – what is that compared to eternity? Eternity cannot be measured. Christ is coming, and every step of His way is taken precisely at the moment ordained by Him from all eternity. That is what He means, we believe, when He says, “I come quickly”. There is no hesitation, no delay. Nothing happens a moment behind the appointed time. The assurance that the Lord Jesus Christ is giving to His Church on earth is: He is coming; He is on the way. All the events that take place are the steps of majesty of our God and our mighty King.
2. The response of the Church to the assurance. It is: “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Certainly that word, Amen, can either be the conclusion of what the Lord said or the beginning of what John said on behalf of the Church. It is a word of affirmation or one expressing our concurrence and desire. We take it along with what follows: Amen – so let it be – “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”. The words surely and even so are the same word. The Church is echoing what the Lord had said. I noticed a very good comment by Matthew Henry: “What comes to us from heaven in a promise should be sent by us to heaven in a prayer”. He says that is what is happening here. The Lord said, “Surely I come quickly”. And the Church is saying, “Surely”, or, “Even so”, “come, Lord Jesus.”
This is the kind of prayer that can look for an answer, one that turns back a promise to the God who has given it. That was David’s way of praying. “O Lord”, he said, “do as Thou hast said.” And that is the desire in the heart of the child of God: that He would do what He has said. We dare not ask for something that He has not said, but when we have His promise, we can go to the throne of grace, to the very court of heaven, with that promise. We can be sure that, if it is His promise, He will be faithful to it. And we can say to Him with reverence, and yet with confidence, “Do as Thou hast said”. The Lord says, “Surely I come quickly”. And the Church says, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus” – the desire in the heart for what the Lord has promised.
Now the desire is for the coming of the Lord. That desire is implicit in all that Christians desire. But it should also be explicit; it should be quite clear. The Lord’s people are desiring perfect holiness in soul and body. They desire to have unbroken fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ, to be able to give themselves soul and body in the service and worship of God. They desire the conversion of all those whom God has given to Christ in the everlasting covenant, and the perfection of the Church and the glory of Christ to be manifested. These are desires in the heart of the child of God, even of the unassured child of God, who questions if he is a child of God at all. Because the Spirit of God is in that person, he or she desires holiness, Christ, the service and worship of God.
All these desires will be met most fully when the Lord Jesus comes. In the day of resurrection, He will gather all His people home to glory. That is when soul and body will be made perfect in holiness, when communion with Christ will never be broken again, when every single member of Christ’s body will be found together before the throne of God and of the Lamb, when the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ will be manifested in a way beyond anything that was ever known in this world. Then every single living soul will breathe out this desire, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”.
Not only will the desire say so, but the life also. This is something the Bible emphasises in its references to the coming of Christ. It connects this with the effect it has on the life in making the person desire to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus: “Ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come”. And: “The grace of God which bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ”. The longing for the coming of Christ manifests itself in the desire and endeavour after new obedience, the desire to be prepared for that place into which nothing shall enter that defiles.
Yet the Lord’s people have it as a conscious desire. They should not be able to rest until they can express their own confidence that they desire not only those things which will be accomplished when He comes, but that they desire His coming. They are looking for and hastening unto the coming of the day of the Lord. John says emphatically, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”. He desires the accomplishment of all that has been promised in the Bible. That will be close to the heart of God’s people when they look around at the world, the Church and themselves. They will desire to see evidences of the coming of the Lord in the accomplishment of what He has promised. That is why they pray for the overthrow of the Antichrist and of the False Prophet, for a great revival of true religion that would gather many in from the Gentile world, for the ingathering of the Jewish people to the Church of Christ – because they believe these things are promised as steps towards the ultimate accomplishment of God’s purpose for the Church in this world. That is why they desire their own growth in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. They look for the coming of the Lord at last.
How can one look for something which they believe will take place once they have died? We tend to think that Christ’s coming is, in temporal terms, perhaps hundreds or thousands of years away. One of the nineteenth-century ministers in Edinburgh, in trying to understand this, pointed out that faith does not take account of temporal distance. We do not have to project our mind over 2000 years, to come to Christ in the exercise of faith. Nobody who has been taught by the Spirit of God ever does so. If you read a book about the Middle Ages, you have to try to project yourself into that time in order to understand it, but nobody has ever felt like that about the revelation of Christ in the Bible. We do not have to project ourselves over 2000 years to come to Christ by faith. The truth about Christ and His coming is set before us in the pages of the Bible, and the sinner is enabled by the grace of God to embrace Christ and the truth about Him as a present reality, as something of present influence in one’s life.
This minister said it is the same with the second coming of Christ. John lived 2000 years ago but he did not have to project His mind through thousands of years so that he could look for Christ’s coming. No, just as faith laid hold of Christ in His first coming, so hope lays hold of Christ in His coming at last and makes it a present reality. The person does not say, It will not happen for thousands of years and therefore I can put it out of my mind. No, it is the next great event in human history which will involve every one of us; we will all be involved in Christ’s second coming, whether we are dead or alive, whether we are Christians or Christless. Believing the fact brings all the implications of that fact into our present experience and makes us live in the light of that certain reality. “Surely I come quickly.”
That is why someone on earth today can say with John: “Even so, come”. The coming of Christ is an object of desire to the Lord’s people. The more they are occupied with it, the more they think about it, the more it becomes part of their whole frame of mind, the more desirable it will become. The Lord says, “Surely I come quickly”; the Church says, “Amen. Even so, come” – saying it in its desires, in its way of living, and consciously.
3. The reason for the response. We believe it is bound up with this view of the Lord Jesus. It is He who said, “Surely I come quickly”; it is to the Lord Jesus that the Church says, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”. It is what Christ is to His people that makes them desire Him and desire all that is involved in His coming. He is their Lord Jesus. Is there not something very precious in this description of the Saviour? He is our God. He is the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity. He is the Lord Jesus.
What we come up against continually in the Bible is the combination of the God of glory and the Saviour of sinners in the one Person. He is Lord of all and the Saviour of His people, and He is drawing His people to Himself. He has made Himself known to them as their Saviour and as their Lord. They have come to trust in Him as their Saviour and submitted to Him as their Lord. These things cannot be separated. The faith that receives Christ as Jesus, as Saviour, submits to Him as Lord and God. Where there is reliance upon Him for justification, there will also be a concern to be sanctified, to be submissive to His will, to be governed by His law and that is the effect of effectual calling; Jesus Christ becomes the Lord Jesus to us. He is all our salvation and He is our Lord and God. When Christ is that to someone, he has desires for the Saviour which culminate in this desire for His glory as it will be manifested when He appears at the end of time.
James Durham wrote a commentary on the Book of Revelation. He was a seventeenth-century man of the same calibre and character, we believe, as Rutherford. When he was dying, one of the last things he said was that he wanted a statement put at the end of his book on Revelation – this address which he made to his own soul, to the effect that the Lord Jesus had been saying, and was still saying, to him, “Come”, and that in response, he desired to say to the Lord Jesus: “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly”.
That is the secret of this desire in the soul of the Christian. However consciously or unconsciously, however confident or lacking in confidence it may be, there is this desire for Christ and for His coming which is the effect of Christ having called the soul to Himself. The Lord Jesus says, “Come”, to His people, and they cannot say anything else to Him. That is what John is doing here: “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
When we try to consider where we are in relation to this, surely there is much encouragement for the Lord’s people, in the assurance that everything that takes place in their personal lives, in the Church and in the world, is summed up in these words of Jesus, “I come quickly”. Whether Satan or the enemies of God are involved, whether it is on the personal level or on the world’s level, everything that takes place echoes the words of Jesus, “Surely I come quickly”. Everything is moving inevitably towards the conclusion He has in mind; nothing hinders His purposes; nothing keeps Him back from His people. There is much encouragement here for believers.
Perhaps there is something to give us some direction as to how we may enter more and more into the spirit of these words, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”. Some of the Lord’s people feel that this is something they cannot really say because they feel so uncertain about themselves and there are aspects of His coming which terrify them. But what creates, nourishes and strengthens this desire is for the person to be taken up with the Lord Jesus Himself. The more familiar we become with Christ, the more precious He becomes to us, and the more communication there is between us and Him, the more free we will feel our souls in giving expression to this desire, “Come”. Its absence is because there is so often a distance between us and the Saviour. Do you ever feel a distance between you and the Saviour – as if He is a stranger? “Why shouldst Thou be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night?” Do the Lord’s people not have to say sometimes, if they are honest, We are virtually strangers.
When did He last speak to us? When did we last speak to Him? When did our soul last find itself able to say, “I am my Beloved’s, and my Beloved is mine”. When that is the case, is it any wonder that we find these words sticking in our throats, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”? The more we have dealings with Him, the more we see of His preciousness, the more we trust in Him, the more we love Him, the more this will be the breathing of our hearts after Him: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
Indeed that is probably the answer to most of the problems we have in our spiritual experience and most of the problems we have in the Church, that we are not taken up with Christ enough. Yes, He is precious to us, but how precious do we feel Him to be? The more we know of Him and the more we are taken up with Him, the more ready our souls will be to say, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”.
These words surely have something to say to those who are strangers to Christ and without God and without hope. He says, “Surely I come quickly”, and sooner or later, inevitably, all of us will be caught up in the events of His coming. We must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ – whether our souls have been in eternity for generations, as far as this world is concerned, or we were still alive, whether we are Christ’s or not, whether we were looking for His coming or not – each and every one of us will be witnesses and participants in this event. The following words apply to saints and sinners: “When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power; when He shall come to be glorified in His saints, and to be admired in all them that believe . . . in that day” (2 Th 1:7-10).
Saints and sinners will be caught up in the events which will bring human history to a conclusion and surely it should be a very solemn question to us, a very solemn matter of concern: Where will we appear in that day and what will be the consequences for us of the coming of the Lord?