end did not come when he expected. The central point in John’s message is not the timing of events, but God’s final triumph over evil. Verse 2, still part of the title, does not refer to what John did in the past, apart from this book. Presumably he was already a prophet before his exile to Patmos. But normally a title such as this would be written after the book had been completed; therefore past tenses such as “testified” and “saw” refer to the actual content of the book. The means whereby this