Let us examine what is the nature and character of the Book of the Revelation. It is a book of judgments, but it is specially John who brings forward this point of view, while speaking of the truths connected with our salvation, especially the presence of the Holy Spirit and, in the epistle, of propitiation. In his Gospel it is the Son who is come as life, the life being the light of men. In the epistle this is taken as the groundwork, and the life communicated to us, and its existence tested by its true character to guard us against deceivers. It is remarkable that, except in a few passages coming in to complete the truth here and there (and they are very few and short), John never sees this life carried up to its ultimate result in the purpose of God, but manifested in this world, whether in Christ Himself or in us. The fact that we shall go up on high to the Father’s house is blessedly stated in the beginning of John 14 and desired in the end of chapter 17, but it is nowhere the general subject.
John presents the divine person of the Son in life (and that in grace in flesh, divine love showing itself and the Father), in His blessed superiority to evil, and hence the exceeding sweetness of the writings he has given to us by the Holy Spirit — and as divine love does, adapting itself to the want and sorrow around it, to everything the human heart could need, yet light all through. We do not get man taken up to heaven, so to speak, in John, but we get God Himself in grace, the Son revealing the Father down on the earth. The Gospel and epistle, as we have seen, reveal this life in itself or in us, but the Gospel (for the epistle gives us the life between the departure and return of the Lord) gives us at the end a hint of the Apostle holding a testimony to the coming of Christ. He did not say he should not die, but if He would that he tarried till He came. Paul might build the church, lay its foundation as a wise master-builder; Peter might teach a pilgrim how to follow Him that was risen and had begotten him again to a lively hope by it — how to follow his Master through the wilderness, in which, after all, God still governed. These, and others, warn too of coming evils. But he who was so personally near to Christ — such a one (the disciple whom Jesus loved) could watch, with the power of divine love, over the departing glories of the church on earth in the energy of a life which could not fail in it. And he could pass on with prophetic vision to establish the rights of the same person (out of and on the part of heaven, yet still) on earth — rights, whose establishment should bring peace on the earth and set aside the evil and make these rights good, where the prophet had seen them despised, in One he so loved, as manifested on earth, and connect the excellence of the glorified Sufferer with the blessing of a rescued world, which grace could bless through Him, though it had once rejected Him. The way of bringing about this, with the failing church’s previous history, is what is given to us in the Apocalypse, with the prophetically known person and glory of Christ connecting itself, first with the responsible assembly on earth, though then judicially, and then with the earth.
J. N. Darby