"Now I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war." Rev 19:11

Heaven opened up a stunning and vivid panorama of humanity's future one day to a lonely Jewish exile by the name of John. The aging church father had been sent by the authorities to languish, alone and isolated, on a little-known island called "Patmos". The ruling authorities feared his message of faith in a crucified Messiah named Jesus, who, though publicly executed by the Romans, had apparently been restored again to the realm of the living and breathing. They refer to it as His "resurrection", and many remember Jesus referring to Himself as "the Resurrection, and the Life"when He actively taught in the crowded streets of Jerusalem. Few who heard Him say those words, however, realized He would come to embody them! And yet, their risen Master had been seen by a sizable number of reliable witnesses in the weeks following His death and burial. At times, He came to His flock in varied forms, appearing unrecognizable to some of those who had walked closely with Him. It seems that Jesus, in overcoming the powers of death and the grave, acquired a new kind of physical body. He had to prove Himself still human in order to quiet their fears that they were now in the presence of some kind of ghost or phantasm, and so He ate fish with them and allowed Himself to be touched by the most doubtful among their number. He explained that He was not ghost, but a glorified man who was equally deity, a God-man. At this, they worshiped Him. He continued with these for some time, dispersing an array of signs, wonders, and healing all who came to Him with the need. His teachings continued to alter their lives, so that they gained an identity that was akin to His. These same became children of God. And then, satisfied that His own grasped the victorious reality of His resurrection from the dead, and how it changed everything, He "ascended back to the Father" in full view of a crowd of hundreds. Just before disappearing from their view, He left them with the command to spread the good news about His achieving salvation for any who would believe upon His name. This came to be called Christ's "Great Commission", and His followers have been busily accomplishing it since the day their Lord departed. Their reasons are simple. Christ told them, and it was verified by the angels who attended Him, that He would return in much the same way they'd seen Him depart. Christ's second return would be different in purpose, however, than the purpose of His first. The next time, He would come to topple every known human government, in order to establish His own global kingdom, one over which His glorified church, alongside of Him, would also rule. It seems that Christ lived with the futures of others ever in mind. Still, every recorded moment of this amazing man's life seemed pregnant with purpose. He was on a mission, and set His face like flint toward the accomplishment of that mission, no matter what it cost Him, and it cost Him everything.

The supernatural anomalies which followed the Lord's bloody crucifixion were manifold. Earthquakes shook the globe. The sun retracted from its predictable course and hid from public view behind an impenetrable darkness. The hearts of man and beast alike melted in trepidation, for it seemed to them that the whole creation had cowed over, crestfallen. And yet, curiously, even as death howled its bleak shibboleth, the sweet aria of life chimed its hopeful descant. Holy men who had died rose up from their sepulchers, a fresh message put in their mouths for the grief and terror-stricken. They strode confidently back to the families and homes they'd left behind in death, fervently announcing that Jesus Christ had set them free from the gates of Sheol, was both Lord and Christ, that Death and Hades were now subjugate to Him. In the following days and weeks came still more supernatural occurrences– voices from heaven, angelic visitations, flames of fire which settled down upon the foreheads of men; all these signs among many others confirmed Jesus' claims of His deity, and made Jerusalem the place to be if one aspired to experience the presence of the preternatural. Certainly this was "holy ground", and the followers of Jesus boldly declared the message, that through belief in Jesus Christ, and the sufficiency of His sacrifice, all men could be restored in relationship with God. Formerly, God had not been accessible to them by any other means than a perfect adherence to the Jewish Law, a perfect morality. This was impossible to achieve, and everyone knew it, but Christ had done it for them, willingly choosing to be executed for man's crimes– in man's place. Now, faith in Him alone is what saves the soul. God no longer views those who have believed upon His Son Jesus as lawbreakers. Rather, He sees them as wholly perfect, without flaw. The cross was the cosmic platform for an amazing trade-off. It is the reason we currently measure time in terms of A.D. and B.C., because after the cross, everything changed. It was the ultimate shift in paradigm.

At the cross, believers exchange their life, for His life. He died for their sinful life, took their rightful punishment, and they are given His perfect record, and thus, inherit His glory. Forever, the believer is one who has always been holy and blameless in the eyes of God. Is it little wonder that the word "gospel" means "good news"?

These were days when the heavens and the powers behind the heavens interfaced openly with the world of secular men. As a result, the reigning power structures felt threatened and unsure of their hold on the community. People thought this carpenter's son turned preacher, whom they had documented proof of executing, was going to return at any moment to launch an attack upon the Roman Empire. The crowds were emboldened by this message, whether any among them professed authentic faith in Christ or not. There were riots, and a rise in the Anti-Roman discourse was heard in the streets, among those who despised the Roman occupation of the Holy Land. New messiahs began popping up all over the place. It was all growing out of hand, and so began the persecution of the Christian church.

The authorities, consisting of the Romans, who simply wanted to bring order back to the streets, and a faction of the Jewish Priesthood, who opposed the message of Jesus as Messiah, were intent on its muzzling. To the Jewish priests, Christianity was a contemptible perversion of the revered Mosaic Law, which had always had a purely Jewish application. They each hoped that John and these new ideas would die with him on Patmos. More importantly, they hoped that the whole bloody mess would never achieve any significant reference in the record of history. They happened to be fighting with God, however, and Christianity proved to be insuppressible.

Despite extensive persecution of the sect called "Christianity", the Christ follower's numbers exploded. It seemed no amount of torture, no tried or true method of intimidation, could successfully stamp them out corporately, or squelch their all-inclusive message. Prior to his exile, the apostle John had been tortured by being boiled in a vat of oil. Still, the aged church father held to his testimony that this "Jesus" remained permanently and potently alive.

Their Master had promised everyone who believed upon His name, that their reunited relationship with God came with certain benefits, one of the most extraordinary being what He called "eternal life". His parting instructions, that His followers continue His ministry, the "Great Commission", was the very thing that caused most of them their profound legal trouble. However, Jesus also seemed to empower them for carrying out His instructions in some new mysterious way. He changed them on the inside, so that they could carry out the task of spreading the "gospel of the Kingdom". They no longer feared death, or found the Roman legions as intimidating as they had before. Rather, they prayed for those that abused them, and shared with those who spitefully used them. It was remembered that this was the way their Master acted when He walked among them on the dusty streets of Jerusalem. He told them to take this new way of living unto all the world, beyond Jerusalem, to the outer regions, the likes of Judea and Samaria. And His flock obeyed Him as do sheep a shepherd. It was apparent even to their enemies that nothing of this hard-nosed world had produced this peculiar people, but some power the world had never seen.

As one of those most affected by this unique brand of Christ-empowered ardor was John. John had actually known Jesus from the beginning, when He was just beginning His ministry. John was one of those who boldly claimed his Master's return was an imminent and approaching reality. He encouraged his converts to do the same. Many of them died and were executed had for doing so. Like John, they also refused under torture to deny their allegiance to their returning God-man, Jesus.

Many of whom John had persuaded to believe upon the Name, were killed right in front of him. Some were ripped apart by lions. Others had been bound to stakes and set ablaze like torches. He'd watched some of his choice church leaders be stripped, placed into hollowed-out logs, and sawed in two. Yet, despite witnessing all these gruesome deaths, and his own death sentence looming (it is difficult to survive being forcibly submerged in a vat of scalding oil), the flint-faced old man, who referred to himself in his writings as "the apostle whom Jesus loved", refused to recant his beliefs. He'd only have had to pledge his allegiance to the Roman Emperor, to escape all the suffering.

But no, John refused. This was an outrageous faith! The Romans knew not what to make of it. Rumors of secret Christian rituals added fuel to the fire, bringing down the cruel wrath of the Roman Emperors. It was thought that the Christians maintained the practice of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their own dead Messiah. It was learned later that this was a practice He'd commanded them to do until the day He returned for them.

How, in His apparent absence, might this be carried out? To where might these practices, if not squelched, lead? And who could give up their lives for such faith? Who could believe it? These were the kinds of questions that plagued and perplexed the Romans. What they couldn't begin to fathom was why Christianity was spreading through the populace like wildfire? It had become uncontrollable, and unstoppable. Once John had been captured and duly sentenced, these questions were put to him. John's answer always seemed to come in the form of a sermon.

"And Christ became a human being and lived here on earth among us and was full of loving forgiveness and truth. And some of us have seen His glory; the glory of the only Son of the heavenly Father! Eternal life is in Him, and this life gives light to all mankind. His life is the light that shines through the darkness; and the darkness can never extinguish it."

John 1:4,5,14 NIV†

That didn't stop them from trying to put out that light, however. The persecutions succeeded only in fanning the flames of the spreading church, until Christianity seemed to take over the whole world.


Despite all the fantastic images that the apostle John recorded for future generations to theologically dissect and interpret, it is not the visual spectacle of "The Revelation" that I find so compelling about this sixty-sixth and last book of the Bible.

I am not as "easy believer", I assure you. I have a skeptic's heart. However, despite it's fantastical quality, and all of the scintillating imagery, the Revelation account has the "ring of truth" resonating behind it. There is something about this book that haunts the soul long after reading it. It is understandable to me that so many develop an obsession with prophecy once having studied it at any length. The nature of this "testimony of Jesus" impacts it's readers in such a way, so that they are forced to consider the very real possibility that a resurrected and glorified Jesus Christ is, in fact, planning a return, and that it could very well be at any moment. For me, it is our Savior's absolute confidence in His own preeminence that qualifies John's record of his experience on Patmos; pure historical fact.

Jesus never asks us to allow His reign or rule, He never defends His right to do so. He never argues with those who would criticize the legitimacy of His resurrection, He only chides their unbelief. As with every promise God makes, there is absolutely no hesitation or a moment's consideration given as to whether He can back up every word of His testimony. He boldly assures us, his church around the world, that He will– without fail, return, and we had better be prepared for it when it happens.

Christ's second coming will be entirely different in both scope and nature than His first. This time, He will be coming to set the record straight in front of the whole world concerning His deity, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt His absolute power to rule as God on the earth. What other character in history ever made these kinds of claims with any similar confidence? Only Jesus. He claimed to be the Conquerer of Death, the Resurrection and the Life.

And I believe he must be. He is all that He claimed to be before His crucifixion, after His resurrection, and beyond His ascension. There is no story like His story. By comparison, all the others who claimed any advanced knowledge of the Eternal God stand in His shadow. His is the much greater reality. Life, what we are living, and all history, is truly all about Jesus, from beginning to end, alpha to omega.

What about you? Who is Jesus Christ to you? If we read the scriptures and believe them, His is a government that will have to be established by violence and bloodshed, not by peace. The Bible says there will be a large number of objectors to His reign. He will takeover as the world's monarch, and rule with an iron scepter from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Those who resist His rule will attempt to fight against Him when he first appears there, astride a white horse, to set up His royal throne. They will be men of high rank, eminent leaders from a variety of nations. They will come against him with all their weapons and respective armies, and will actually be deceived enough to believe they can win a war against God incarnate.

Similarly, an angel called Lucifer thought to wage a winnable war against the Almighty, and he subsequently lost his place in heaven. He and his band of rebellious mutineers engaged the loyal angelic host of heaven in a brazen coop attempt. His ambitions were none other than to replace God and be worshiped as God. Satan and his legions failed miserably; they lost everything.

How could any sane person believe they could take on their own Creator, and actually win? And yet, many of the human persuasion will think and do just that on the Day of the Lord. They will, like their predecessor Lucifer, fail most miserably. They will die by Christ's "sword"–His voice, or, "the word of His mouth". One of the qualifications of being God is that when You speak, reality obeys. He is the Supreme Commander of reality, and in Him we live, and move, and have our very being. That's why when He said "Let there be light", there could not help but "be light".

I know what you are thinking. What about grace? What about the love, the mercy, of Christ? And it is true, this is an entirely different Jesus than the one we are comfortable teaching about in Sunday school class. The Christ of Revelation is a Christ that we rarely dare speak of. We are more comfortable with a Jesus who is as passive and as non-confrontational as we prefer to be. To many believers today, we reject an Almighty Christ. We like a Christ who is more of an overly permissive parent, than the Son of God, who has been commissioned by His Father to preserve all that is holy. In that day, he will be called upon by the Father to finally purge the universe of its every evil. He is the cosmic Christ!

Don't misunderstand me, Jesus is forgiving. He is love itself; but He is also the "Master Avenger", the Judge of the Living and the Dead. His zeal for His Father's holiness is something with which we may not be altogether familiar, and I am talking about those of us who have already believed upon His name. My brothers and sisters, we may not fully appreciate their shared nature.

There is an aspect of horror to this second bodily visitation by the King of Kings. He's coming back not to die for the world, but to enact bloody retribution. I think we often conclude that because God seems to restrain Himself in the cause of justice, apparently allowing bad things to happen, that He is planning on doing so for all time. That is simply not the case. "The Revelation" details for us a graphic description of a day approaching our own when there will be literal "hell-to-pay".

What convinces me of the veracity of John's account is that though the apostle is certain he saw what he saw, he is not certain of the meaning of what he saw. The account's "truthiness", cries out at us from every chapter. He is faithfully, mostly fearfully, reporting something he does not completely grasp or understand. It is clear to many Christian believers today that the world stage is being arranged right now, in such a way so that the fulfillment of John's chilling report is unavoidable. And so, we are on a collision course with Christ's second advent. Just prior to His coming, the armies of the world will surround Jerusalem, led by a figure known as the Antichrist. The true Christ returns to defend and secure the Jewish people and the land He calls "Mine" in the scriptures.

What about you? If you haven't thought about Jesus before, and whether His claims to be God are true, my friend, I urge you to think hard about it, and make a choice before it's too late. The Great Day is coming in which all decisions about His Lordship will be settled once and for all, but by then it may be too late. This is the moment, in our day and time, to make up your mind. The Bible tells us that the day will come when "Every knee will bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord".

Today we are fortunate to be living in an extended period of ordained grace. The King is giving His creation time to come to its senses, and recognize Him as the God of all creation. Even as you read these words, the King extends His nailed-scarred hands toward all humanity, to all who will humbly come to Him, turn from their sinful lifestyles, and give themselves over to Him in relationship. That's what He wants for you also. He will make anyone, no matter how base, no matter what they've done, a whole new creature. He will give them the power to overcome their past, and open up for them a brand new limitless future. God calls His children His "special treasure". It boggles my mind to think, "I am royalty in Christ!"

And who would reject such an offer? Are you so pleased with your life now, that the one He wants to give you is of no interest to you? Well, He also offers peace, salvation, and forgiveness. The slate is wiped clean. Who wouldn't want a fresh new beginning? Listen, my life was so screwed up, I practically begged Him to take me. But you don't have to beg, you just have to ask believing. He will come in.

Why not acknowledge His might now? I have. Why? It's simple. I don't want to be one of the countless rebels who are kept from experiencing the glorious plans and purposes He has prepared for those who love Him. He doesn't want to exclude anyone, but many shall choose to exclude themselves because of sheer stubborn pride. I don't know about you, I want to be "in good" with the King!

I admit, the Jesus of Revelation is not the warm and cuddly Christ we so often hear about, but He is the authentic Jesus.

Consider these words penned by an earthly king, named David. He was a man who knew who his King was, and wrote about Him often.

"Now therefore, be wise, O kings;
be instructed, you judges of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest He be angry,
And you perish in the way,
When His wrath is kindled but a little.
Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him."

From the Book of Psalms
Psalm 2: 10-12
†New King James Version