After looking at the undeniable reality of the Second Coming, let’s consider the unbroken promise: the fulfillment of Christ’s return in Revelation 1:7–8:
“BEHOLD, HE IS COMING WITH THE CLOUDS, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him; and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over Him. So it is to be. Amen. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’”
The Second Coming was promised, even in the Old Testament. In fact, at the very beginning of Old Testament history, it was promised by Job. Job lived during the time of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac) and in Job 19:25, he states, “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth.” At the end of the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi writes about the same promise of the Second Coming (Mal. 4:1–3). In Revelation 1:7, John alludes to two more Old Testament passages that prove the Second Coming was something that God had promised to His people.
The first part of Revelation 1:7 says, “He is coming with the clouds.” This is a clear allusion to Daniel 7:13–14 where Daniel has a vision of successive human world empires that are brought to an end by an eternal divine kingdom. Daniel writes:
I kept looking in the night visions,
And behold, with the clouds of heaven
One like a Son of Man was coming,
And in this case He came up to the Ancient of Days
And was presented before Him.
And to Him was given dominion,
Glory and a kingdom,
That all peoples, nations and men of every language
Might serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
Which will not pass away;
And His kingdom is one
Which will not be destroyed.
This passage is the culmination of Daniel’s vision in which he saw the future coming of the Son of Man who, our Lord Jesus Christ, would be given rule and dominion over a worldwide eternal kingdom.
In the second half of Revelation 1:7, John alludes to the book of Zechariah. Zechariah is really the Old Testament equivalent to the book of Revelation; it has much to say about what will happen in the end times. Because of this, the apostle John refers to Zechariah 12:10–11a, 14: “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn. In that day, there will be great mourning in Jerusalem…all the families that remain, every family by itself and their wives by themselves.”
These two Old Testament references—Daniel 7 and Zechariah 12—promise that the Messiah will return just as it is described in the book of Revelation—it’s a promise that God will not break.