erchomai

This is one of the most common verbs in the New Testament, the ordinary word for a person or thing moving from here to there. Its one fixed idea is movement that reaches a destination. What changes is the direction, and the direction is set by where the speaker or the story is standing: the same word means "come" when the movement is toward that point and "go" when it is away from it. Greek lets one verb cover both, so the translator reads the scene to decide which English word fits.

Most of its hundreds of uses are exactly this plain: people travel, arrive, approach, draw near, and set out. Jesus comes to a town, a crowd comes to him, the disciples go ahead by boat. Because the word is so common and so neutral, the weight of a verse sits in who is moving and where, not in the verb itself.

One strand stands apart enough to break out on its own: the phrase "the Coming One," used as a near title for the promised deliverer and then for Jesus, together with Jesus' own statements that he has come into the world for a purpose. The verb there is still the plain one, but it is doing freighted work.

Greek uses the same verb of movement for moments and events that arrive. A time does not walk, but it can be spoken of as coming: an hour comes, the day comes, the kingdom comes, judgment comes. The picture is the same arrival, now applied to something that happens rather than someone who travels.

This is the natural home of the New Testament's language about what is still ahead. The prayer your kingdom come asks for a future reality to arrive. Promises and warnings repeatedly say that an hour or a day is coming. Revelation makes the verb almost a refrain for the return of Christ, ending the book with the cry Come, Lord Jesus.

Keeping this apart from plain travel matters because the same form can mean either. When the subject is a person on a road, it is ordinary movement; when the subject is a time, an event, or the kingdom, the word means that thing arrives or takes place.