“Soon”: Perception, Perspective and Process
OK. So let’s get right to the most troublesome issue of Revelation for modern readers. The issue of “soon” in the Lord’s promise of return.
In the previous section we commented on how many times the promise of the soon-ness and nearness of the Lord’s coming is given in Revelation. Let’s enumerate all these promises here:
1:1 The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His bond-servants, the things which must soon take place…3 Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near.
3:11 'I am coming quickly; hold fast what you have, so that no one will take your crown.
22:6 And he said to me, "These words are faithful and true"; and the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent His angel to show to His bond-servants the things which must soon take place. 7 "And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is he who heeds the words of the prophecy of this book."….10 And he said to me, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near…12 "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done. …20 He who testifies to these things says, "Yes, I am coming quickly." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
Usually, when the Lord wants to make a point, He says it at least two or three times. But here, throughout the entire Revelation, we are told eight times of the quickness, nearness and soon-ness of the Lord’s coming. Four of those times the Lord directly says, “I am coming quickly.”
Clearly the Lord wants to impress this truth on us. He means what He says. And He expects us to believe it to be true, regardless of what it may seem like for any other reason.
The purpose of this discussion today then is to defend what the Lord said, and deal with whatever in our perception would cause us to believe otherwise.
In the previous section, we saw how our sense of the speed of an event is slowed in our minds if the event occurs under pressure. “Minutes seem like an eternity” under stressful conditions, no matter how objectively “short” the period of time might otherwise be deemed. We also saw how the Lord acknowledged that perception of slowness, exhorting believers to persevere in the face of feeling delay under the pressure of their tribulations. Let’s enumerate these acknowledgements as well:
2:2 'I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil men, … 3 and you have perseverance and have endured for My name's sake, and have not grown weary….10 'Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold…you will be tested, and you will have tribulation for ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.
3:10 'Because you have kept the word of My perseverance, I also will keep you from the hour of testing, that hour which is about to come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.
6:10 and [the souls of those that had been slain] cried out with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" 11 And ….they were told that they should rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren who were to be killed even as they had been, would be completed also.
10:5 Then the angel whom I saw…6 …swore by Him who lives forever and ever…that there will be delay no longer…..
13:10 If anyone is destined for captivity, to captivity he goes; if anyone kills with the sword, with the sword he must be killed. Here is the perseverance and the faith of the saints.
14:12 Here is the perseverance of the saints who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.
See the enormity of the tension between the promise and the perception! And see that the perception of delay is not only held by those on earth, but by those in heaven!
So here we have over half a dozen acknowledgements and continued exhortations to perseverance under an experience that runs counter to the promise of soon-ness, nearness, and quickness of the Lord’s coming. In fact, the Lord has as much equally “promised” that there will be an intervening time (“hour”) of testing in the course of the otherwise quickness of His coming. So we know that “soon” in the Lord’s mind was at least “an hour” away, and not a “few minutes.”
Perspective
Perception under pressure is not the only issue that affects our sense of delay or slowness in the rapidity of the Lord’s return. There is also perspective and process. Let’s talk about perspective for a moment.
When the Lord says He is coming “quickly,” He is talking about speed of motion. The Greek word “tachu” is the word translated “quickly” and it means just that—speedily. It’s related to the word “tachos” (speed), from where we get the word tachometer, which measures the speed of the rotations within an engine.
Speed of motion however is a matter of perspective affected by the size and distance of objects in motion. The larger and more distant the objects, the slower they seem to move. Conversely, the smaller and closer the objects, the faster they seem to move.
The average speed of a jetliner is 400 to 600 miles an hour (or 700 to 1000 km/h). When you first take off or when you land, even before you get to those cruising speeds, as you look out the window at the ground and buildings along the runway, your perspective is one of incredible speed as the plane passes them by. And if the plane were to actually fly at its cruising speed no more than 50 or 100 feet off the ground, the perspective of speed out the window would be blurring and dizzying. You couldn’t stand to look at it too long.
But the average jetliner also is cruising at around 6 miles (or 10km) above the ground. At that distance from the ground, the passage of the “tiny” farms and towns and highways below appears quite slow! And the same is true in reverse looking at a jet liner high up in the sky from the ground. That little “speck in the sky” does not appear to be moving all that quickly.
The perspective of slowness of motion is magnified when we begin to talk about space craft and heavenly bodies like the moon and the planets and stars. These objects travel faster than we can possibly imagine, in the tens and hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. But they are so large and their distances from us so great, that they seem to move very slowly, if at all!
If I told you I could fly at 66,000 miles an hour, would you be impressed with my speed? After all, at that rate I could circle the globe almost three times in one hour! “Yes. That is pretty fast,” you would say.
Yet 66,000 miles an hour is the same speed that the earth circles the sun, an orbit that takes a whole year! Now how fast does that speed seem?
The sun is so large (though it appears so small in the sky) and it is so far away at 93 million miles, that 66,000 miles an hour now seems very slow. In fact, there is no way to even objectively feel or see that the earth is moving around the sun at all. We are just told by those who measure the skies that this is so! From this perspective, the only thing we know is that it takes a year to complete one orbit. And a year is a comparatively long time to an hour by most anyone’s standard of perception.
If we can see this to be true in the natural, we should not have trouble making the application to the spiritual. Just like our travel around the sun, the Lord is coming to us from dimensions of size and distance totally unknown to us by experience. Because of this, our perspective on the motion of events bringing us to actually experience His arrival seems interminably slow. It seems like nothing is really happening toward His coming (“History is going nowhere”). But in reality, heaven is on a collision course with earth history at a rate that is breathtakingly impossible for us to imagine.
So if we agree that 66,000 miles an hour is faster than we could ever hope to move on our own, yet we know that we are moving at that speed right now without the slightest perception that we are, then we should be able to believe the Lord who, in coming to us from reaches of totally unknown distance and dimension, is indeed coming quickly—even if it seems imperceptible to us in taking now more than 2000 times around the sun over the lifespans of numerous generations for Him to actually arrive! The speed of the Lord’s return has nothing to do with the measure of a human lifespan.
So again, it is all in the perspective. And this tells us much about the true essence of overcoming. It is about overcoming limited perspective.
Process
When the Lord says He is coming “quickly,” that is a dimension of motion across distance. But when it says He is coming “soon,” that is a dimension of motion across time—i.e., sequence. In the same way that perspective of size and distance affects our perception of speed over distance (which indirectly affects our perception of time), the process of sequential events directly affects our perception of time.
Events of magnitude don’t just happen in a split second of time. They have a sequential beginning, a development, and an end or “terminus” across time. This is called process. All events are processal. They are progressive. And the greater the magnitude of the event, the greater its progressive nature.
This is especially true about the Lord and His coming, which is the greatest event of magnitude to ever confront human history. And so it is, that our greatest error in perception of the Lord’s soon-ness of coming is actually in plain sight before us in Revelation.
How so?
The Lord repeatedly makes two significant statements. First He says, “I am the beginning and the end.” Let’s look at this:
1:8 "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."…21:6 Then He said to me, "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. …22:13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
What is the Lord trying to drum into us? He is telling us that in His Being, He is Process. As the “word” of God, He is not just a “period.” He is as a “sentence” embracing a beginning and an end. And as is His Being, so is His Coming. That is to say, His coming has a beginning and an end. His coming is processal. So His coming is evidenced and experienced over time.
This is our first basic problem in perceiving the Lord’s coming. We view His coming merely as a “period,” a “punctuation mark,” an “exclamation mark” (!) indicating a sudden singular moment of “arrival.” We only see it as “the end.”
But this is our error. The coming of the Lord is not just a sudden singular punctuation mark piercing the veil of time. It is not just the end. It is not just the arrival.
Look at the book of the Revelation itself! It has a what? It has a beginning and it has an end—across 22 chapters. And in between those chapters it has what? A development. All of this is His coming. So, the very Revelation of Jesus Christ is processal—as a Book, and in Reality. His coming is progressive. It is not about a singular “punctuation in time.”
Therefore from His own self-proclaimed processal Being as the First and the Last within an expansive revelation that itself comprises a beginning and an end, the progressive nature of the Lord’s coming is staring us in the face.
The other statement about His coming that reveals its processal nature even more hidden in plain sight is the statement He has already repeated four times:
“I am coming.”
Please read this carefully. It says “I am coming.” This is an active present statement. It is a statement of present action. It means, “I am in process of coming.”
He is not saying, “I am arriving.” Arriving is only a consummating terminus. But coming is a process having a beginning, a development and an end, of which arrival is only the end.
- “Honey, I’m coming home now….”
So a simple illustration should suffice for this. Let’s say I go to work on a certain day. At the end of the day, I phone into home. I tell my wife, “I am coming home now.” Or I might say, “I am coming home soon.”
She might ask me, “Are you taking the interstate highway or are you taking the back road?” And I say, “No, I’m coming the fast way. I’m taking the interstate. I’m coming quickly.”
OK. So let’s think about this. So on a good day (when I used to work for the world), it takes me an hour to get home from the time I leave work. If there is heavy traffic, I might be “delayed” a few minutes, or maybe even a half hour. But I have still taken the fast way. I am proceeding quickly. Averaged out, I am still moving more quickly than if I take the slow way on the back road with all the stop signs and school buses.
So now. I tell my wife, “I’m coming home now.” What does she expect? Does she expect me to “arrive” right “now”? Of course not.
My wife knows that my coming home is a process with a beginning and an end, and that it takes at least “an hour” before I arrive. But she doesn’t measure my statement by my point of arrival. She measures it as a complete process involving a certain wait.
OK. So what if instead of saying “I’m coming home now,” I tell her, “I’m coming home soon”? Now what does she think?
What she thinks, and rightly so, is that I will be departing shortly to begin the drive home. She’s not thinking about my arrival. She is thinking about my departure time. She’s not thinking about the end of my travel home, but the beginning point of my travel. She knows I may have a few things to finish up at the office first before I set out.
So what should the virgins be thinking when our Lord calls up through John and says to the bride and to the churches, “Honey, I’m coming soon”? Should we be thinking about His arrival, or about His departure that initiates His trip home to us?
By contrast, who is it that, when “Daddy” calls up and says “I’m coming home soon” has no concept of “Daddy’s” process to get home, has no concept of beginning from ending, and only can conceive of things in terms of “Daddy’s” point in time arrival?? C’mon. Who is it? I just gave it to you!
It’s the kids! It’s the babies. It’s the immature ones in the family who have no concept of anything but what gratifies their immediate sense of seeing “Daddy’s” presence come through the door.
So, “wife” knows that “soon” means a process is about to begin that will take at least an hour on a fast highway. “Kids” think “soon” means an event that only has an ending and which occurs in a few minutes.
So the conversation goes like you already know, “Mom, when is Daddy coming home?”
Mom: “He is coming soon.”
Kids: “But that’s what you said 10 minutes ago.”
Mom: “Yes, I know. What I said is true. He is coming soon, and quickly.”
Kids: “But when? How come it is taking so long?”
Mom: “He still has a few things to finish up at the office, and then he is leaving soon to come home. He is taking the fast way home. But it will be at least an hour once he leaves.”
Kids: “Awwwwwww. That isn’t soon!! Daddy lied again! I want Daddy now!”
So church? When we receive the Lord’s word to John that He is coming soon, who are we? Are we the “wife”? Or are we the “kids”?
To be continued….!
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org4/16
BACK TO TOP
Webmaster littleflock@netzero.net
Page updated January 24, 2018
