Verse 21: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. They all to whom John addressed this benediction were standing on the threshold of all that had been envisioned and disclosed to John. They were the same events described in the words of Jesus (Matthew 24:21), “ such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” - -and in a pathos which even the reader of his words can feel, the Seer of Patmos invoked the grace of Christ to be with them all. And to this benediction of grace, he added Amen. Thus ends the greatest pageantry ever envisioned for disclosure to mortal man. Nineteen full centuries have faded into the pale nations of the past since John’ s Amen, and there has been nothing in all history to replace the events of that generation to which this apocalypse belonged. The effort to stage the re-enactment of these scenes of Revelation is scripturally unexegetical and historically anachronistic. The continuous-historical theory is biblically non-scientific, not in the occult meaning of the word, but in the sense of its inconsistent exegetics. The future theory is non-historical because its whole thesis consists in anachronisms, the taking of events out of the period to which they belong and assigning them to the wrong periods of time, or errors in the order of time. As an end of the world theory this continuous-history view is non-philosophical in its millennial phases in that it presents a pessimistic concept requiring the same conditions of tribulation which surrounded the church in the Roman empire to be re-enacted, bringing back into existence the empires of heathenism necessary to fulfill the symbolic delineations of the apocalypse; and a further than that millennial contention that the gospel of the Great Commission is not competent for the conversion of the world and, therefore, this dispensation in a failure to accomplish the purpose of redemption must culminate in another earthly age called the millennium. And the future history theory is non-scriptural in its disharmony with the purposes and plan of redemption revealed throughout the New Testament. Withal, the future theory is little short of the nonsensical in the assertions necessary to bring it down through the dark ages, and is comparable to the efforts of the Roman Catholics to establish the calendar of popes from the apostle Peter to the present pope Paul; and of the Baptists to maintain their claim of an unbroken chain of church succession from John the Baptist. But from one generation to another the links fall out of both these Catholic and Protestant unhistorical chains; and the continuous-history theory of Revelation has never had a chain. When the book of Revelation is placed where it belongs in the canon of all the other apostolic epistles, in proper chronology before the Destruction of Jerusalem; and as being an apocalyptic vision of the struggle and triumph of the Church with the existing power of Judaism and heathenism, its contents fall into complete harmony and all the parts fit--and when things fit it is a sort of prima facie evidence that they are in the right place. In conclusion, the book of Revelation unrolls in a series of images the sublime panorama of the victory of the church over the great powers of Judaism and Romanism and Heathenism set to the theme of the promise and providence of God in the protection of his Cause and his Church, summed up in the initial divine assurance, I come quickly, and in the concluding human prayer of response, even so, come, Lord Jesus. It is between this beginning and ending that the visional message of the angels was communicated--the epistles to the seven churches signalling the approach of tribulation; the apocalypses of the conquering Christ and of the victorious church; and the vision of the glorious New Jerusalem--all of which were interspersed with lyric anthems and choral doxologies, which all together impart to the Patmos apocalypse its unique position as the apex of all revelation, and sufficient in itself to vindicate the claim of divine inspiration for all the Scriptures. Finally, notwithstanding its apocalyptic character in reference to its historical period, and all of the obscurities which have given rise to the legion of speculations, it answers an important practical purpose--by implanting and increasing unwavering faith in the integrity of the Word of God; by engendering hope in the unfailing promises of God; by inducing patience in extreme suffering and sorrow; and by infixing implicit trust in him who is able to save to the uttermost all who believe in him, and come to him, and obey him. THE END