Prologue
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw – that is the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it, and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near. (Rev 1:1-3)
It was 95 AD, over 60 years since Jesus had walked among His people. Jerusalem and the Temple had been destroyed, leaving the Jews defeated. Paul was dead, beheaded in Rome nearly 30 years earlier. Peter had been crucified there about the same time. Of all the disciples only John was still alive. He had written his gospel and his 3 letters sometime earlier, and had served for a time as the Bishop of the church in Ephesus, having moved there with Mary, the Lord’s mother, about the time of the Temple’s destruction in 70 AD.
It’s not that the Romans and Jews had left John alone. Tradition has it that several times they’d tried to kill him, even throwing him live into a cauldron of boiling oil, but the Lord had prevented it, fulfilling His promise of John 21:22. (Responding to Peter’s question about what would become of John, Jesus had said, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?“) Finally the Romans had exiled him to Patmos, a prison colony off the coast of modern Turkey, thinking they had heard the last of him.
But the Lord had other plans, and appeared personally to John, commanding him to write one final letter and send it to seven churches in Asia Minor. As an old man at the end of his life, John was about to undertake one of his greatest challenges. After writing the Revelation, he died of natural causes in about 100 AD.
By the way, your Preterist friends have had to give the book an early date to get around verse one because they contend that it was all fulfilled by 70 AD, but they needn’t have bothered. In the first place the later date is pretty well established, but the word translated soon or shortly actually means quickly or rapidly and describes the speed with which events will unfold once they begin, not their chronological nearness to John’s day.
Blessings,
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