Sword, Power, Glory, Cloud: a close look at the 2nd Coming to the inner man

 "11 And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.

12 His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.

13 And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.

14 And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.

15 And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

16 And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King Of Kings, And Lord Of Lords.

17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God;" (Revelation 19:11-17).

Straightaway the reader should understand that the sword proceeding from Jesus' mouth which we see here in Revelation's depiction of the 2nd Coming is the exact same sword to which Simeon refers when addressing Mary and by extension everyone of us: "(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed" (Luke 2:35). We find an expanded version of this same message in Hebrews also, where we read, "For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12).

In Revelation then -- and by extension in the 2nd Coming to the Church (the collective expression) and in the 2nd Coming to the believer (the singular expression) -- we have the basic anatomy of how God visits or comes back to His people (His people of course being those who "worship Him in spirit and truth", not just those who go through particular motions of external religiosity such as God compares to one's forefathers worshipping at some particular mountain (John 4:24; John 4:21). We see God's "visiting" mentioned throughout the Word using a variety of terminology; but this specific term for God's various Comings shows up with particular visibility here: "And the people believed: and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel, and that he had looked upon their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshipped" (Exodus 4:31).

As is clear enough to anyone who has read the New Testament, this hearing that the Lord has visited is precisely a synopsis of part of Acts, as the remaining salvageable members of the Jewish Church gradually came into contact with the New Church of Christianity, the Noah's Ark or crossing the Red Sea on dry ground or new Heaven and new Earth of its time. And we even see direct notice drawn to this in various ways by the author of Acts, as for instance when certain converts who had previously only known of the baptism of John bumped into Paul. Another way in which the author of Acts draws attention to this parallel between the Jewish Church in Exodus and the Christian Church in Acts is the way that Stephen the martyr dwelt on the Exodus at considerable length prior to being stoned.

Speaking of stoning, the traditional punishment symbolic of those who tell spiritual falsehoods, here we have a fascinating parallel to Acts back in Exodus; this mention is also to make it crystal clear that these links are numerously there to be drawn, that there is a there there as we say: "25 And Pharaoh called for Moses and for Aaron, and said, Go ye, sacrifice to your God in the land. 26 And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God: lo, shall we sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us?" (Exodus 8:25-26).

When Stephen the martyr gave his extensive sermon essentially on Exodus "before their eyes" -- that is, before the members of the Jewish Church who understood the same to be heresy, being at the stage in their Church when they could no longer perceive truths other than as lies -- then they set about punishing him precisely for perceived spiritual falsehood.

The same thing happened of course with Jesus: "58 Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. 59 Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by" (John 8:58-59. He uttered a spiritual truth, they perceived this as false teaching, and they attempted to apply the penalty for perceived false teaching. This is made even explicit elsewhere, where it is not a "good deed" but "blasphemy" which motivates their attempt to stone him, in their own words (John 10:32-33).

To return to Stephen the martyr, we read of him that "he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into Heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55). The important detail to note here in the context of God's visits to us is the term "glory" in relation to "look[ing] up steadfastly into Heaven"; the reason being that this very "glory" shows up in association with "power" or "might" in multiple Biblical texts about the 2nd Coming, or about the Comings generally with which we have been variously concerned (this being all along about a template, not a single filling in the blanks of that template).

As it happens, the "right hand of God" with which Acts juxtaposes Stephen's vision of Heaven with "glory" bears particular relation to "power" or "might", the other ways by which God and His Church refer to the same thing. Let us first establish this association between "right hand of God" and "power" by noting its fuller expression and explicit mention in Luke: "Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the power of God" (Luke 22:69). One went to the extent of underlining this association quite carefully because one wants people thenceforth to be alert to any and all usages of "power and glory" in relation to the 2nd Coming (or to Comings to individuals and collectives); this being one of those aspects of the Church which is just plain fascinating and special.

Let us now look at some of these other camera angles on the 2nd Coming which make note of power and glory. Here is Mark's take: "And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory"13:26). If God had wanted, He might have added something here about the "right hand"; that He did not is because He effectively made use of a synonym for the "right hand" by directly mentioning power, in His case omnipotent.

While we are on the subject of what an author might have said, consider the way in which Stephen "looked up steadfastly into Heaven"; there is no mention of clouds, although there might have been. And we can see easily enough why no need existed for a mention of clouds in relation to "glory", because Luke provided a synonym for clouds when he mentioned "look[ing] up steadfastly into Heaven" in itself (Acts 7:55).

The reason one underlines this equivalence of "clouds" with "looking into Heaven" of course is to make quite clear that God effectively visited Stephen in his very own individual version of the 2nd Coming of Jesus in the clouds with great power and glory. We will get to the significance of this "glory" in due time, but for now it does to note anew the 3rd chapter of Ephesians in which Paul explains how you interpret prophecy, being especially the bits about power and glory and temple dimensions. Paul says, "That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man;"; by which he very deliberately calls our attention to the way in which the 2nd Coming occurs by explicitly tying it to the "inner man" (Ephesians 3:16).

Does Jesus do this also, explicitly tying in the 2nd Coming to the "inner man"? He does: "20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: 21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20-21). Note the way that the "kingdom of God" very much came to Stephen in his inner man: for the members of the Jewish Church who were about to stone him did not see some literal appearance of Jesus in the sky. So, now that the Coming of God "within you" or to the "inner man" has been amply documented, it does as promised earlier to return to and explain the "glory" side of the "power and glory" marriage. One refers to the pair as a marriage, of course, because all of the pairs of images in the Bible are either marriages (if positive in context) or adulteries (if negative in context).

The "glory" side of the "power and glory" marriage, then, means "the inward sense, thus the more internal levels of the Word" (AC9429). If Jesus comes to you in the clouds of Heaven -- the literal text of the Word -- with great power and glory, then this has everything to do with the believer and reader of the Word being personally confirmed in the faith and instructed by God -- on an ongoing basis from that point shall we say, not as some one-off -- about the internal meaning of the Bible. We speak in common parlance of 'putting a face to the name', and in a sense that is what the 2nd Coming in its individual form does (or begins to do) for the reader of the Word. People cease to see just a wall of bewildering text and get some kind of handle on what it all means in relation to graspable love and spiritual life.

We can see this shift from the Word as enigmatic text to the Word as something really grasped explicitly laid out in 2 Peter, where we read, "We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts" (1:19). And of course the reader may also refer to Paul's comments in the same third chapter of his letter to the Ephesians -- already mentioned above in relation to Christ coming with "might" and "riches of His glory" to the "inner man" -- about how this Coming changes them. What does this change involve? It involves being "rooted and grounded in love" so that they "may be able to comprehend with all saints which is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height" (Ephesians 3:17-18); or in other words, when prophecy talks about things like the architectural dimensions of temples the 'calibrated believer', as it were, has a firmer leg to stand on so to grasp what the prophet is going on about.

Now, one would certainly emphasise that there is more than greater textual comprehension involved in this change. One may love figurative language and so forth, but even so it does to emphasise that the star of this show is still love; and the Day Star's rising in your heart is apt to demonstrate love for you in its most nurturing sense, so that you can understand that this amazing love exists and use this experience as a touchstone for practicing and sharing it. That said, the increase in textual comprehension is still important, so let us return to 2 Peter so we can see his reference to "glory" and "clouds"; and by the way, it isn't an accident that this reference occurs just prior to the verse about the Day-Star rising and thence giving the believer a handle on what prophecy means:

"16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

17 For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

18 And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount" (2 peter 1:16-18).

This passage is a direct relation of Peter's experience during the famous Transfiguration on the Mount. One would emphasise here something that Peter does not explicitly mention, how the voice which the three disciples heard came out of a cloud; so we are dealing with the same Coming with great power and glory in the clouds (of the Word) with which we have all along been closely concerned. During that transfiguration on the mount we see in addition to disciples Peter, James, and John -- the truths of faith, the practice of charity, and the good deeds which result from the marriage of these -- the figures also of Elijah and Moses, by which the prophetical and historical Word receive like personification.

We have been dealing with a variety of images starting from the sword and then going deeply into the incidences of power and glory in relation to clouds and Comings, so it does perhaps to reassure the reader -- amid so much diversity of imagery -- that we have all along been dealing with the Coming of the Word with a sharp sword proceeding from His mouth.

When the sharp sword of the Word enters into the soul of someone who feeds numerous cruel, proud, contemptuous, bitter, pornographic, resentful, vengeful, greedy, 'unpersoning', envious, ungrateful, or selfish thoughts, it exposes these to the more or less willing scrutiny of the reader. The more sincerely the reader of the Word takes these exposures of the shackles chaining them to various Hells -- each with its allures and delights -- the more that sword sorts them out; but the more insincerely the reader of the Word receives these exposures of their character consequent to comparison of it and divine order, the more likely they are to end up among the uncircumcised, pierced, slain by the sword, that is in Hell.

One's favourite passage concerning this matter is perhaps that of Paul in Romans: "7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.

8 But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead" (Romans 7:7-8).

What might this situation look like in practice? For we want to situate these matters in demonstrable practice, not merely add to your collection of claims about which you suspend judgment. This passage from Romans should be verifiable in spiritual practice. Perhaps one of the most obvious processes whereby this occurs may be seen in the common practice of cursing constantly. If someone who engages in this habit of constant cursing -- as I did myself -- earnestly commits themselves to reading the Word and taking its prescriptions and proscriptions seriously, then they cannot but notice the incidence of this constant cursing in themselves. At that point, they either willingly regulate it so as to diminish it or they don't. You can see a sort of microcosm of all the above when someone addicted to cursing as another person might be to chain-smoking enters this room and continually has their messages very obviously deleted by the bot, which our guests program themselves.

So we notice this conflict between the text of the Word -- which shines as a luminous example of magnanimous behaviour, ideation, and motivation -- and the grody actuality of our deeds, thoughts, and goals. Some people enjoy hating other people so much that they scarcely recognise how hateful they are all the time: the music of hate is just so pumping that hating people is the life of the party, what we would call the life of their love. But if the person who has this sort of interior chain-smoking habit of hating others still has a conscience and some remaining capacities of that kind, then it may be that God can still get through to them; this at an optimum time. And if He gets through to them such that they actually bother to read His textbook, then it may be that they can be motivated without coercion to take it deadly serious and as marching orders, to each as they can receive it.

Now, we began this close examination of Jesus Coming with great power and glory in the clouds in relation to the sword of the Word in the inner man with the passage in Revelation where a sharp sword issues from His mouth. This sharp sword -- which is the truth militant of the divine Word -- proceeds to fill the field with the bodies of the slain, with God furnishing something called the "Supper of the Great God" to the birds. This supper -- so ostensibly violent, is really about "conjunction with the Lord", the conjunction of righteousness and understanding in the inner man and practice of the believer (Apocalypse Revealed 831).

It does to reiterate in passing that the wars of the Word are spiritual wars; that is to say, they are wars of truth against ignorance and of love against hate; wars of Heavenly liberation from the bondage of false and Hellish delights. The holy war of Christianity fights against hate, lust, envy, pride, greed, deceit, predation, and sundry, each of these with an attendant cloud of falsehoods and lusts locking it into place in people's lives; and from which they cannot extricate themselves without the Saviour; the same Saviour from whose mouth issues the truth militant of His Word: "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free", God says, and this is no poetic turn of phrase but very nuts and bolts.

If, then, the subject of the battlefield strewn with the bird-feeding dead comprises the marriage of righteousness and understanding in proper conjunction with each other and the Lord, what are all the bodies about? The dead bodies of those slain by the sharp sword of the Word consist of people who cast themselves into Hell in their preference for and practice of its various hatreds and deviations from divine order. These people have chosen not bread and wine for their portion and their eternal neighbourhood but rather bread of wickedness or bread of mourning and wine of violence or wine of the wrath.

One would like to draw attention to the strengthening aspect of eating the bread and drinking the wine with a brief look at Elijah's long, solitary journey into the wilderness:

"5 And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.

6 And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again.

7 And the angel of the Lord came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.

8 And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God" (1 Kings 19:5-8).

One emphasises this strengthening aspect in relation to bread and wine so as to give extra context to what one said earlier about Paul in Ephesians chapter 3, when he speaks of Jesus "strengthening the inner man" with "the riches of His glory. And one would relate this experience further to another way of saying as much in Revelation: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Revelation 3:20). The 2nd Coming may be likened to eating bread and drinking wine with Jesus in the clouds of the Word's literal meaning with the glory of its inner meaning and the strengthening of compassion especially practiced; such that the unlocking by love of light occurs.

How else does the Word refer to the Supper of the Great God? It refers to it often and on various levels. But one of the most common equivalents that one encounters would be the voice of the bride and the bridegroom sounding joyously, which conjunction of compassion with enlightenment is a temple of the living God. And naturally the people who are slain by the sword of casting themselves into Hell to be flesh and blood in that supper are effectively those in whose hearts and behaviours are the disjunction and adultery of sin and spiritual darkness.

One would in passing mention the contrast between honour and glory on the one hand and shame and contempt on the other as a clear illustration of the opposition between two married/conjunct or adulterous/disjunct pairs. To return to bread and wine, there is indeed a very sermon on the topic in John, where we read, "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him" and that this is "the bread that came down from Heaven" (John 6:56; John 6:58). One emphasises this last bit about bread from Heaven to underline the way the 2nd Coming unites symbolism of bread and wine with symbolism of might and glory; which patterns of symbolism once seen and grasped, especially for such as practice them, are difficult to unsee. For we do not only see in the Word or experience in the inner man the strengthening by His might and riches of His glory. We also see them in the actions carried out by this strengthening and glory as expressed in the thoughts that we feed and the deeds that we do.

We see those who do not chose to be strengthened in their inner men in the wake of Jesus' sermon on flesh and blood, which offended many people apparently: "From that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him" (John 6:66) These people turned their backs, not on some ceremony alone, but on the trials of bread and the trials of wine, the trials of fire and the trials of water which respectively purify the will and the understanding, that the conjunction of power and glory in the inner man may the more optimally occur.

We see these same people in the parable of the sower as those who at first hear the Word in gladness but then reject it when tribulation or trial arises on account of it. One would emphasise that genuinely attempting to practice the compassion and enlightenment espoused by the Word precipitates purifying turbulence consisting of the flesh warring with the spirit. The person with a habit of hate but the sincere desire in the will to fight that hate will experience the purifying of their wills, that they may do without the hate afflicting them.

So it is with all the other delightful chains which binds us to the various Hells from which the sword of the Word would fain cut us loose, if we would but choose the right and the compassionate course. But to return to the subject of people who can not handle the turbulence of bread and wine purification, see what Peter says when Jesus, in the wake of that same sermon on flesh and blood when many depart, asks whether they also will depart from Him: "To whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life" (John 6:68). Here again we have that same close association of the sharp sword issuing from His mouth with the bread and wine which we have not even close to exhaustively tracked.

This is an opportune time to return briefly to the episode when an angel feeds and waters Eljiah in the desert: "And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God" (1 Kings 19:8). We see the number forty here because this signifies a duration of temptation, which is a period of turbulent purification. We see this number forty in relation to individuals, such as here Elijah and also Moses and Jesus, in the context precisely of individual purifications.

We see the same forty or duration of temptation in the story of Noah's ark and also in the the forty years which the Israelites spent in the wilderness; which years were purifying and turbulent for the collective as the same periods of trial were for the individual in the cases of Elijah, Moses, and Jesus. One emphasises this expression of temptation or trial at individual and collective levels to relate it to the expression of the 2nd Coming at individual and collective levels. We have in the course of this text dealt primarily with the 2nd Coming at the individual level, which in addition to unlocking the light of the Word with the warmth of His love precipitates a period of purification in those who sincerely believe and practice it.

People might imagine that the sword of the Word cutting through your soul is 'tame', but be the imagery figurative that is yet not the case: "Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you" (1 Peter 4:12). The periods of trial inaugerated by the strengthening of the inner man with the riches of His glory are those meant in the account of Elijah, for these precisely prepare him for them. If someone experiences the love of Christ and the informative glory that accompanies that love, then they have had warmth and light demonstrated for their inner men. With these demonstrations, they can knowingly choose love and not hate in the garden of forking paths that purifies them so they can worthily eat the bread; and similarly can knowingly choose truth and not falsehood in its own garden of forking paths so that they can worthily drink the wine.

It's all about the conjunction of compassion and enlightenment in which is no image that causes jealousy; that the Lord may come into the temple of our souls and our hands and sup with us, strengthening us as to bread and shining on us as to wine, that we may be still more and forever further purified of fallings short in us of love and understanding. We were born to align with divine order as to fire and to water, to bread and to wine, and as to power and glory; and the sword will certainly pass through our souls. Let us then not be among those whom it slays by their choice of evil and darkness. For they who are uncircumcised or slain by the sword will eat bread of mourning and drink water of affliction, dwelling in the very absence of compassion and understanding which they have graven on their hands and foreheads. 

Let us watch over fire in ourselves, that we may be worthy to eat the bread of His indwelling behavioural improvement; and let us watch over our very thoughts with an eye to the rejection of any falsehood supportive of evil. For this is the watch and pray of which our Lord spoke; and the basis of the Lord's coming into our very lives to sup with us. May you grow then as to bread and as to wine, that the moon in your sky may shine like the sun; and that the sun in your sky may shine seven fold.