The Book of Revelation is the revealing of Christ to us. The revealing of Christ is not about timings of events, but about Who He Is and His Ways, out of Whose revealing the events of history are stirred. Those events of time are like the ripples on a pond penetrated by a stone. The ripples are not the stone, but bear witness to the action of the stone upon the waters of humanity.
The revealing of the Eternal Christ has a pebble-sized beginning in history through the spoken word of prophecy, and a mountain-sized consummation in His actualized appearing. Between the spoken Word and the manifest appearing is a harvest-like process—as the imperceptible unveiling of a plant from hidden seed to ripened fruit ready to be plucked.
Even so Christ’s coming was conceived already with the original release of the Word of John’s Revelation, and has been unfolding ever since on the lake of human events, whose ripples bear witness to the actions of His progressive coming.
So far, we have appreciated the unfolding nature of the Lord’s return just from the perspective of harvest. Today, we look at how that unfolding was prophetically built into the very structure of the Revelation itself.
Unrolling of the Scroll
The way Revelation was factually written and read as a scroll, and the scroll-based platform of the central prophecy contained within Revelation bears further unmistakable witness to the developmental nature of the Lord’s coming across history.
The centerpiece of the Revelation drama is the unrolling of a scroll by the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.
5:6 And I saw between the throne …and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth. 7 And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne. 8 When He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, … 9 And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals; for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.
Observe closely what we are seeing here. We are seeing a “book within a book.” The book of Revelation as we hold it in our hands is the “jacket” to what is really another inner book opened by the Lamb of God. See further that this inner book contains all the subsequent prophecies of the many “ripples” of human and angelic events that are to appear in association with Christ’s unveiling and return.
But what we want to see above all is this: The book opened by the Lamb is not a book in the way we think of a book. It is not a collection of pages held together at the spine. It is a scroll that is unrolled, one turn at a time across history.
This unrolling of the scroll is key to understanding the developmental unfolding / outworking nature of all that is prophesied within Revelation. It witnesses in parallel to what we have already said about the harvest nature of divine process.
As the Lamb unrolls each turn of the scroll, the prophecy within the scroll is being both uttered (shown) to John, and in that showing is being released into its own actualized unrolling in time. The Lamb’s unrolling to each next seal reveals something new to be fulfilled. Yet in His very act of the unrolling, the fulfilment has begun to be set in motion through the “unrolling” of creatorial events.
Answering then to the process of harvest, the scroll is a gradualized unfolding of purpose and destiny that has a beginning, passes through a process of unrolling, and has a completed finalized unveiling.
The “book” of Revelation itself, when first written, was in the form of a scroll. At that time in history, virtually all books were scrolls, with the exception of wax tablets for some kinds of writing. Books using pages bound to a spine as we know them today did not exist until generations after John wrote
This is important. The Book itself was originally a scroll. The central drama within the book is also a scroll. But that is not all. Reference is made to various other “books” inside the Book of Revelation. There is the book of the angel of Revelation 10. There is the book of Life, and there are also all the “books of deeds” of the individual lives of all people (Rev. 20:12).
What were/are all these “books”? They were/are all scrolls to be and to have been unrolled. And in that unrolling is the enacting of unfolding process from beginning unto end, from opening unto dénouement, from seedtime unto harvest, from alpha to omega, from first to last—all encompassed within Him.
Thus it is that whenever we give ourselves to considering the meaning of soon in the promise of the Lord’s coming, we must understand that the entire prophetic promise of His revealing is released into its fulfilling according to developmental unrolling, or as we would say, a “roll out.” The roll out is not the same as what we call “the turning of a new page.” Not at all.
And so we must stop looking for the soon return of Christ in the way one expects to simply turn a new page or to flip on a light switch. No. Christ’s return is a development, and it has been rolling out for a very long time the way a scroll is unrolled. It is in the immediacy of that unrolling that He has been fulfilling His promise of soon active coming (“I am coming quickly”) that was set in motion from the first moment John watched the Lamb step up to the Throne to take the scroll from the hand of the Father.
(To be continued…..)
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org4/16
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Page updated January 24, 2018
