Christ Revealed As Judge

Another way in which the destruction of Jerusalem served to reveal Christ was in His role as Judge upon the fleshly nation, Israel. John 5:22, 23: “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: (23) That all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He that honoureth not the Son, honoureth not the Father which hath sent Him.” ( See also John 12:31, 32.)

The fiery judgment upon Jerusalem, the War and subsequent dispersion of the remaining people terminated forever the age of the fleshly identity of the nation. Ladd speaks of John the Baptist’s witness that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire: “The fiery judgment would suggest an event terminating this age and initiating the Age to Come.”*

The Surviving Jews Rejected the Book Of Revelation

Even when Christ’s prophesies came to pass, many of the surviving Jews continued to put their trust in their fleshly genealogies or in the outward forms of Judaism. For them, Christ’s prophecies were a threat of extinction and so was intolerable. With all the ferocity of those fighting for their very lives, they resisted His teachings. The fact that the Book of Revelation showed this event as a glorious triumph of the saints and as the source of rejoicing in heaven maddened those who saw their legitimacy eliminated and caused fierce opposition against the Book in its early period of existence. Many early manuscripts of the Book , probably those written in the original Hebrew, were all burned in this early period, only the Greek translations survived as far as we now know. This ferocious opposition to the Book accounts for the fact that it was written in the apocalyptic genre using a kind of code fully understood only by those immersed in Christian doctrine.

Christian Faith Vindicated

For the Christian Jews, – and the great majority of Christians at that time were genetically Jews, – the Book was an account of the vindication of their faith in Christ, showing His triumph over all other claimants to the inheritance rights, destroying their grounds for persecution of the saints, completing the fulfillment of every prophecy, every promise, every hope of Light and Life. To them the Book of Revelation was worth every effort to preserve it. The Book itself became one of the focal points of division between the two rival religions, Judaism and Christianity.

Christianity claimed to be, in Christ, the only surviving remnant of the old nation of Israel, partly because of the account of the destruction of the fallen nation in this Book. The canonization of the Book by the Christian community represented the official declaration of their claim to be the surviving Chosen People. Canonization means that the Church accepted it as the Word of God, Holy Scripture.

*Ladd, George. A Theology of the New Testament. William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1974.