The tribulation itself will find all this enormously intensified. It will _begin_ with some astonishing act of blasphemy in the temple in Jerusalem, run its terrible course, and close with a series of judgment-events, earthquake, heavens shaken, and great distress, ending in the visible appearance of the Lord Jesus Himself, out of heaven on the clouds. And this will be a signal for great penitential mourning among the people on the earth.
This, then, is the simple, broad outline with which the thoughtful reader of God's Word would naturally be familiar as he turns to this prophetic book at the end to get our Lord's last message to His followers.
As we turn now again to the book of Revelation it will help us to remember the general plan followed in its writing. It is like a series of dissolving views of the same scene, each of which lets us see the same thing from a different point of view.
This is a simple teaching rule for getting a clear grasp of what is being taught. We are familiar with it in the Bible. The story of creation is told in the first chapter of Genesis, and then told again in the second chapter with details not given in the first, the two together presenting the complete story. The historical books of Chronicles present one view of the kingdom of Israel, the official. The books of the Kings give another look at the same period; and the prophetic books a wholly different view as seen by these rarely spiritually minded men of God. Daniel is shown four visions of future events, all covering the same general stretch of events, but with a fuller description, here of one part and there of another. The four Gospels are a familiar illustration of the same principle in teaching and story-telling. This is the plan followed here.
I was impressed anew with the practical value of this method one day in St. Petersburg. We had gone to look at the panorama of the siege of Sebastopol, then on exhibition in a huge, round building. It will be remembered that the British and French allied themselves with Turkey and Sardinia in an attempt to restrain the encroachments of Russia on Turkish territory. The famous charge of Balaklava, immortalized by Tennyson, is remembered as the most stirring event of that war. Its chief event was the siege of Sebastopol on the Crimea peninsula, in the Black Sea.