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The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

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    XI. John’s Contribution the Climax of Prophecy

    It is believed that John’s Gospel, his Epistles, and the Apocalypse, were all written in the last decade of the first century. It is to be noted that John, in his Epistles, is the first and only Bible writer to use the specific term “antichrist,” for the coming apostasy. But he does so with the significant words, “Ye have heard that antichrist shall come.” 1 John 2:18. This was common knowledge in the church, not only heard from Jewish literature, but through the teachings of Jesus and Paul. Paul, many years before, had likewise reminded the Thessalonians, “Ye know” all about the coming “mystery of iniquity.” As students of the prophecy of Daniel, they could see the essential equivalence of Paul’s malign “man of sin,” “who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God,” with Daniel’s Little Horn on the fourth or Roman Beast, that had the “eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things”—uttering “great words against the most High.” Such was the concurrence of apostolic teaching with that of the Old Testament Scriptures.PFF1 155.1

    John’s Apocalypse forms the crowning spire of the majestic temple of Scripture. It is appropriately a glorious prophecy of the future course and triumph of the Christian church, as well as a retrospect of her conflicts through the centuries; it constitutes God’s final entreaty and admonition to man, with a thread of deeply spiritual teaching running through all its mystic symbolism. Let us now analyze the contents of the book of Revelation. After the introductory letters to the seven churches (chapters 1-3) the Revelation continues with a description of the heavenly throne (chapters 4, 5), and then come the opening of the seven seals (chapters 6-8), the seven trumpets and their warfare culminating in Christ’s possession of the kingdom (chapters 8, 9, 11:14-19), the mighty angel and the bitter-sweet book (chapter 10), and the two persecuted witnesses (chapter 11:1-13). Next are portrayed the dragon and the woman in the wilderness (chapter 12), the ten-horned leopard beast from the sea and the two-horned beast from the earth (chapter 13), the climax of heaven’s threefold reformation message to the world, which creates a remnant keeping “the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus,” and the last crisis of conflict ending with the harvest of the earth (chapter 14). Then follow “the seven last plagues,” at the end of which “the cities of the nations fell,” “and every island fled away.” (Chapters 15, 16.) Next is pictured the judgment of the apostate woman, the beast-riding Babylon (chapters 17, 18), and the culminating second advent of the King of kings (chapter 19). Then comes the millennium—introduced by the resurrection of the righteous and closing with the judgment scene and the destruction of the wicked (chapter 20); and finally the New Jerusalem and the new earth forever (chapters 21, 22). What a mighty panorama! Only God could devise it! Only inspiration could depict it!PFF1 155.2

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