After These Things

REVELATION Number 63

Revelation 4:1
“After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.’” (NASB 2020)

This vision, like the one John recounted in chapter one, shows us things that are to take place. In Revelation 1:19, you may recall, we found, “Therefore write the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which will take place after these things.” (NASB 2020)

The Greek for “after these things” is the same here in our text as in 1:19. This construct (meta tauta) is taken by many to indicate a chronology of events. However, in Mark 1:14–15 we learn that “after John was taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (NASB 2020) Similarly in 1 Corinthians 10:11 we find, “Now these things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” (NASB 2020)

We today exist in the last days, the ends of the ages. The time is fulfilled. John says that “after these things [he] looked and behold.” After his first vision recounted in Revelation chapter one, and after receiving (and probably recording) the letters to the churches, he has another vision.

Much like the first, this vision will show him “what must take place after these things.” We are once again about to gain a view into things that must take place in the interim between the coming of Jesus in the flesh and His coming again on the clouds. To quote Jim Fowler *, “There is nothing in these words that would indicate a chronological gap that jumps thousands of years to the time of the so-called ‘Tribulation Period.’"

Similarly, G. K. Beale * writes, “the concluding phrase of 4:1 affirms only that the subsequent visions of the book are further visions concerned with an explanation of the “latter days,” which are both “realized” and “unrealized,” set in motion but not consummated (as chapter 1 affirms), including the eschatological past and present as well as the future.” He goes on to write, “suffering Christians can take heart that God not only has all knowledge of historical affairs but has decreed them and guides them.”

* Fowler, Jim - Jesus: Victor over Religion-A Commentary on the Revelation of John, C.I.Y. Publishing, 2013

* G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary, (Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle, Cumbria: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 1999), 318.