Revelation 22:12

Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to render to each man according as his work is.

Behold, I come quickly For discussion of this, see under Revelation 22:7.

And my reward is with me, to render to each man ... The coming of Christ in the New Testament is invariably associated with the final judgment of the good and bad alike, the good to receive eternal life, and the wicked to receive the second death.

In this verse, "The words take the first person and become the very words of Christ."[60] Although Roberts understood the "coming" here to be not the Second Coming, but his coming in the great ordeal the church was confronting, such views do not take into account the rewards and punishments clearly associated with it in the text. These indicate the Second Coming of Christ in glory to judge the living and the dead. Limiting this to the period of the persecutions coming upon the church when John wrote comes from the acceptance of a narrow preterist system of interpreting this prophecy. The people who passed through that persecution did not receive their rewards then; at least Paul didn't (2 Timothy 2:4).

The usual knee-jerk response to a verse such as this may be illustrated by, "John had no expectation that this age of human history would last even a generation, to say nothing of centuries."[61] Such a dictum flows out of a comprehensive misunderstanding of this whole prophecy, to say nothing of the entire New Testament. See the "Speedy Return of Christ," in my Commentary on 1Thessalonians, pp. 18-20.

According as his work is ... That the final judgment will be related to the deeds of men is so clear and so often repeated in the New Testament that the interpretative denials of it are continuously refuted and checkmated.

[60] J. W. Roberts, op. cit., p. 196.

[61] Martin Rist, op. cit., p. 546.