JESUS SAID BEHOLD I COME QUICKLY: HOW LONG IS QUICK?

  

HOW LONG IS “QUICK?”

By Ada Brownell

I didn’t greet becoming a senior citizen with enthusiasm.

“How did we get old so quickly?” I asked my siblings. “It seems like just yesterday I was a teenager.”

Since I’m the youngest, I was interested in their response. As I expected, they feel the same. The years passed so swiftly we barely noticed entering the fourth quarter of our lives, and the clock ticking the years away.

After considering how quickly I aged, I thought of Jesus saying, “Behold I come quickly” (Revelation 22:7, 12KJV).  I’ve wondered about that phrase. He’s been gone 2,000 years.

Now that I’ve experienced the swift passage of time, I see from the time Jesus made the promise, generations came and disappeared so speedily it hasn’t been that long.

One Sunday school teacher took a bottle of hairspray and pushed the button in the classroom. The mist hovered in the air; then disappeared. “That’s how our lives are,” she explained. Then she read James 4:14: For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. David wrote, “Man is like a breath; his days like a fleeting shadow.”

I am the point I even see our grandchildren lives going before us in a flash. Seems like a few days ago they were preschoolers. Now one’s a mother, another is a surgical nurse, others are in college and high schools, and the youngest, which seem like they were babes only yesterday, are in elementary school.

More than 2,000 years have passed since Jesus told John in the vision,

“Behold I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates of the city” (Revelation 22:12-14).

Yet, generations pass so quickly—like a mist that quickly disappears from our sight—2,000 years are not long at all, but time enough for the gospel to be preached and souls to be plucked from the pit of sin before Jesus comes like a thief in the night to meet the church in the air—unexpected by too many (Matthew 24, 25, and 1 Thessalonians 4).

No one knowS the day or the hour when He will appear to catch away the church coming in clouds as His disciples saw him go (Acts 1). When He comes back with His saints at His Second Coming, Jesus’ feet will touch the Mount of Olives. The Great White Throne Judgment will occur and the dead will be judged and anyone whose name is not written in the Book of Life will be cast into hell (Revelation 20:11-15).

But if we know Jesus, our future is secure. We will already have been raptured when He comes in the clouds. That's when two will be together, one who is ready will be taken, and the other left (Matthew 24 and 25).  “The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus shall we always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).

Our short time on earth is only the beginning. Jesus said, “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25).

©Ada Brownell March 2015

-- Ada Brownell is author of Swallowed by LIFE: Mysteries of Death, Resurrection and the Eternal. Available Here