heir deliverance; and then the great
Kingdom following.

The outstanding features spoken of by our Lord Jesus in His Olivet talk
agree with this, but go much more into detail, especially about the
tribulation. The tribulation will be _preceded_ by wars, rumors of wars,
famines, earthquakes, and persecution. There will be many false
religious teachers, many Christians untrue to their faith, and a great
increase of wickedness. This is a sort of foreshadowing.

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.

Getting a Broad, Clear Outlook.

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