Rev.1:9 I, John, your brother
and fellow partaker in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance which are
in Jesus was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the
testimony of Jesus.
Rev.1:10 I was in the Spirit
on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like the sound of a
trumpet,
Rev.1:11 saying, “Write in a
book what you see, and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus and to Smyrna
and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to
Laodicea.”
Rev.1:12 Then I turned to see
the voice that was speaking with me. And having turned I saw seven golden
lampstands;
Rev.1:13 and in the middle of
the lampstands I saw one like a son of man, clothed in a robe reaching to the
feet, and girded across His chest with a golden sash.
Rev.1:14 His head and His
hair were white like white wool, like snow, and His eyes were like a flame of
fire.
Rev.1:15 His feet were like
burnished bronze, when it has been made to glow in a furnace, and His voice was
like the sound of many waters.
Rev.1:16 In His right hand He
held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His
face was like the sun shining in its strength”.
John says, “I, your brother, your fellow partaker” Obviously, if
any other John had been writing this letter, they would have said something to
specify who they were. But because it is John the apostle, he just says he’s
John. But even more convincing is what he says about his circumstances. He says
he's imprisoned on a Mediterranean island called Patmos, which is actually
closer to Turkey than it is to Greece. And the fact that he's on this island
agrees with the early church fathers who report that John was exiled here by
the Romans at one point in the first century because of his work in the church
ministering. The city from which he ministered though is Ephesus. So they moved
him from Ephesus to Patmos presumably in the hope that it would quiet him down.
And John says that he was on this island, which raises this
question - how did John get what he received from Christ anywhere later? Well,
the church fathers give us a little history on this. By church fathers,
we are referring to some of the very earliest leaders in the church post
Apostle, which would be second century, and the man who wrote in that day tell
us that John wrote this letter very late in the first century, probably in the
mid-nineties ,90-95 AD, which would also tell you that it's the last work of
the Bible chronologically. It's not just the last one in your Bible physically,
it's literally the last thing that was written, the last prophetic work that
God created for our purposes.
And John would have had to be in his eighties by then. That's
assuming he was in his late teens when he was with Jesus. That fits, because in
the Gospels it's evident that John is the youngest. There is one moment that
tells us that. At the last supper, which was a passover meal, John was leaning
against Jesus and in the way they would recline around the table, they always
positioned the youngest next to the most honored. And so that means John was
the youngest. Also, John couldn't have been very old because he's still alive
at this late stage of the first century. And the early church fathers also tell
us that he was put on Patmos by Domitian, the emperor Domitian. And when
Domitian died, John was allowed to leave the island and go back to Ephesus. And
when he did, he would have carried this letter, we think, with him, and it
would have been distributed as it was supposed to be. And then, obviously we've
retained copies of it since then.
Anyway, John says on that day, he was in the Spirit on the “Lord's
Day”. Now in Greek, the phrase reads a little differently. The word “Lord”,
that's actually an adverb. It would be more like a “Lordy day”. So perhaps what
he's really saying is he was experiencing an especially Spirit filled time.
Maybe he was in prayer, maybe he was just really alive in the Spirit that day
which all makes sense because that's the moment in which Jesus appears. It
starts with a voice by Him, he says, a voice sounding like a trumpet.
Now imagine you're seated somewhere having a moment of meditation,
and prayer and quiet and you're feeling centered in the Lord, and then someone
takes a brass horn from behind you and blows it at you. That's what he said
happened. Imagine the startle of that, which is exactly how he began this
experience.
And the difference here among many, is that the trumpet actually
conveys speech. It's not just a noise, it's actually a communication method,
because he says, this voice that sounds like a trumpet speaks to him, and it
says he is to write. John hears, he has to write a book of what he sees and
send it to the seven churches. Notice again, he is to record what he sees, not
what he hears, and to send it to the seven churches. Not just to some churches.
To seven churches. Again, that's a reference to the 100% of churches and
those churches there named here again. We'll get back to that when we get to
Chapters 2 and 3.
It's only at this point that John turns around to see where this
voice is coming from. Now imagine, again, what this would have felt like if you're
on an island by yourself, in some jail cell. What would you turn around
expecting to see?
John says when he turns around, he notices seven lampstands.
Now, here's that number seven again, and you would ask yourself at this point,
what does the lampstand mean in this context? Why are they there? What are they
trying to tell us? If you remember our first rule about interpreting
symbols - where do we go now to look for the answer?
Yes, go backward, and backward in the sense of chapters, backward
in the sense of books, not backward in the sense of in the immediate context,
because it's not unusual for someone to say there was a lampstand and then the
next verse says, “and the lampstand is….” That’s not violating the backwards
rule, which has to do more with the idea that you go completely out of the
context. If you have to go out of the context, you go backward.
But in this particular case, the context is really all of Chapter
1, the scene of Chapter 1, and somewhere in that scene, the answer is actually
given, and so we don't have to go very far to find it. Let's wait till we get
there though because it comes in a few more verses.
Back to the main point, you have standing in the middle of those
lampstands, Jesus, a figure, and He’s clearly the focus. It starts with His
description, one like a Son of Man. Now that's a phrase that clearly points us
back to Jesus because that's a statement we hear used for Him at other times.
But when you hear someone who is something like a Son of Man, you might ask,
why not just say I saw a man?
Because He's not exactly a man, which is the whole point. He's
like a man, but not exactly like a man. He looks human to an extent - He has a
robe, He has feet, He has a waist, He has a sash girding His Waist and those
are all details of human beings, certainly. What do they mean?
Well, people of authority wear robes and sashes around them -
priests, kings and the like. To have this human-like representation is a part
of how John is allowed to have some comfort in the moment. And yet at the same
time we realize that as we get deeper into the description, not exactly, is
more the point.
Because His hair is white as wool, like snow, and this isn't just
somebody having gray hair, this is something very different than that. And His
eyes are like a flame of fire. This is not stuff you usually see.
Moving on, the description says that the feet are like bronze and
a furnace, that means glowing hot, glowing red; voices like a torrent of water
rushing through a canyon. Imagine a flood or a downpour, like water rushing
over a waterfall. That's the sound of His voice. And His face shines as
bright as the sun. Now, imagine looking directly into the sun. That's what it
was like trying to look at Jesus’ face.
So, how do I interpret all those rules or those descriptions?
Well, first glance down the chapter, look at Verse 20 – we’ll just jump there
for a second so that you get the point:
Rev.1:20 As for the mystery
of the seven stars, which you saw in my right hand and the seven golden
lampstands: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches and the seven
lampstands are the seven churches.
And there you go. No guessing required. Now, as you read that
though, it doesn't really help because now you're wondering, why does He have
seven lampstands representing seven churches? Why does He have to hold stars to
represent angels? In other words, you still want to know where is that going?
Where you find your answers is by going back in Scripture and
finding places where these same ideas are represented, where they are explained
more deeply. That is, “Why are lampstands pictures of the church? Why are stars
pictures of angels?” or “What does it mean that He has seven angels for the
churches? Does that mean we each have a little angel on our shoulder? What does
this mean?” Well, Hebrews tell us this in 1:14:
Heb.1:14 “Angels are
ministering Spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will
inherit salvation”.
Did you know that? That the angelic realm exists in large part to
render service to the believer, obviously in a supernatural way, in a spiritual
way, ways that we don't necessarily detect? And if you've heard people say an
angel was riding with them that day before their car went over the edge and
they’d almost died and some of that's just a euphemism, but we don't know that
it's not always true.
But whatever God is using His messengers for, they render service
for the sake of those who will inherit salvation. It's one of the roles of
angels. So when John says He has seven stars representing the angels that serve
the church - seven meaning 100% - all the angels are in His hand serving the
church.
And what does it suggest to you that they are in His hand? That
they're under His authority, that He controls what they do. They obey Him. That's
what we'd expect.
And then the lampstand - lampstands in Scripture are commonly used
to represent the illumination of truth reaching into the darkness. And even the
believer's own heart is described that way by Paul, that God has shown the
light of the truth into our hearts and that we would then shine it into the
world.
Jesus said, shine your light before men. It's the idea that we
represent truth in our testimony, and it acts like a light in the darkness.
So the lampstands represent churches, all of them together
represent the whole church.
What is the mission of the whole church? Based on that short
little symbolic description, what would you say it is?
Individually, that is bringing hearts to know Christ. But even if
you're not saving an individual person through your testimony, you're still
representing light to the unbeliever. Because there are two ways to be a
witness.
One way is to witness the purpose of their saving, and other
times, you're witnessing the purpose of their condemnation. You don't choose
which outcome, that's in God's hands. A witness can testify to exonerate, and a
witness can testify to prosecute and convict. And God decides how our witness
is used.
What about the other details of His appearance? For example,
Daniel 7:9 tells us this:
Dan.7:9 “I kept looking up
until thrones were set up, and the Ancient of Days took His seat and His
vesture was like white snow and the hair of His head like pure wool. His throne
was ablaze with flames, Its wheels were a burning fire”.
Later in Daniel 10:4, he says this:
Dan.10:4 “On the
twenty-fourth day of the first month, while I was by the bank of the great
river, that is, the Tigris,
Dan.10:5 I lifted my eyes and
looked, and behold, there was a certain man dressed in linen, whose waist was
girded with a belt of pure gold of Uphaz.” Sounds familiar?
Dan. 10:6 “His body also was
like beryl, his face had the appearance of lightning, his eyes were like
flaming torches, his arms and his feet like the gleam of polished bronze, and
the sound of his words like the sound of a tumult”.
Or like water rushing. So Daniel sees exactly the same thing John
sees. So what we’re seeing is that the description John gives is perfectly
consistent with the Bible's general description of what God looks like in the
form of the Son, anytime He appears in His supernatural state.
One more, and we go to Isaiah. Isaiah 11:1 says this:
Is.11:1 Then a shoot will
spring from the stem of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear
fruit.
Is.11:2 The Spirit of the
Lord will rest on Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of
counsel and strength, The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the
Lord.
Is.11:3 And He will delight
in the fear of the Lord, And He will not judge by what His eyes see, Nor make a
decision by what His ears hear;
Is.11:4 But with
righteousness He will judge the poor, And decide with fairness for the
afflicted of the earth; And He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,
And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked.
Is.11:5 Also righteousness
will be the belt about His loins, And faithfulness the belt about His
waist”.
What you're learning here is what a belt on a sash or on a robe
means. Isaiah explained it’s a picture of faithfulness or righteousness. We
didn't have to guess, it’s here.
And what does it mean that there's a sword coming out of His mouth
- the description in Revelations chapter 1? Isaiah says here that a sword
coming out of his mouth is representative of the breath of His lips slaying the
wicked.
These details in and of themselves don't necessarily become some
huge revelation to us in the moment. What is shown here is how the method of
understanding them is to go back in Scripture, find where it's been given,
understand it there and carry it forward into what we're learning now. To
reiterate - we do not guess what we think it means. There's no need to, because
it’s already there in Scripture.
So we have all these descriptions of Jesus that tell us something
about Him, and His power, His might, His purpose, His righteousness and putting
it all together. Jesus in His appearance to John then tells us He is glowing
white, purified and holy. His robe represents His priesthood, His kingship; His
sashes, His faithfulness. And His eyes of fire are piercing discernment. His
face shines like the Sun. That's the light of the truth. And His glowing bronze
feet represent judgment as He tramples out His wrath on those who are
unrighteous.
This is the Lord we serve. So we have Christ appearing to John in
a form that is consistent with what we see elsewhere. And all of that is
interesting, but probably not terribly surprising. What is striking about this
is the way John responds to this appearance.
Look at what verse 17 says, “When I saw Him, I fell at His feet
like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid,
I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I
am alive forevermore, and I had the keys of death and of Hades.””
So John is flabbergasted at what he sees, but it's more than that.
He's fearful, he’s immobilized by the experience. Now, why is that surprising?
First of all, it's not uncharacteristic. If you go through the
Bible and you look at moments when men had these moments with God in some form,
for instance in Ezekiel 1: 28, Ezekiel gets a similar kind of moment:
Ezek.1:28 As the appearance
of the rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the
surrounding radiance. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of
God. And when I saw it, I fell on my face and heard a voice speaking.”
Daniel, when he sees something like this, he becomes so frightened
it says in Daniel 8:17 “I fell on my face”.
So why is it surprising in this case? Because it's John. We know
that for three years, John walked with Jesus, and euphemistically described
himself as the one Jesus loved. And yet he has now appeared, the first time in
60 years - 60 years that they have had any kind of appearance, as far as we know
- we would expect that reunion would have been joyful. Instead, John was
terrified. He fell down, and couldn’t move.
And the reason is because the time of the Gospels when Jesus
walked the earth in the form that He had was a unique period of history.
Think about it, that account from Ezekiel and from Daniel, they predate the
incarnation, and now you have Revelation which postdates incarnation, and
between them you have this moment when you could actually hug Jesus. But on
every other side of it, all we know is that God, the creator of the universe,
as He appears to His creation, is awe inspiring and fear driving in a healthy
sense of fear of the Lord.
And when we go to other books of Scripture like Ezekiel, which
talks about what the times will be like when the Kingdom begins, and even later
in this book, what you're learning is you won't be hugging Jesus.
And that’s not to disappoint you. I mean, if you can hug your God
when you see him in His glory, that’s not a very powerful God. That's not the
God you want to worship. The God that can make everything should at least
inspire a little bit of awe in you, shouldn’t He?
And it was a unique exception to that rule that God appeared in
the form of man. Paul said it this way in Philippians, that “although He existed
in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but
emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the
likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by
becoming obedient to the point of death.”
The meaning of that well known passage is that He went from what
we see described in Daniel and Ezekiel, and from what we now see in Revelation
and for a period of history, He came down as low as you can get. That is lower
than angels, to the point of being like us, but worse than that, He dies on the
cross, which the vast majority of humanity will never do.
So it's a significant distinction that He took that approach. Now
we only know that moment, that’s all we can remember. That's our history. We
only see Him from that point of view, which is why we have paintings of
blue-eyed blond hair Jesus, that looks like a movie star hanging on our wall.
And we think we can't wait to get to that guy and give Him a big
bear hug. But that’s not the way you're going to encounter Christ.
Because if you could encounter Him that way, that would be a very disappointing
way to meet the creator of the universe.
So you learn through this chapter that Jesus is to be worshipped
and known for who He is and even someone like John, who knew him so personally,
was awestruck, thrown on the ground in the presence of the living God, though
at an earlier time he responded to Him in a different way.
And what we learn about the book in general through this chapter
is that every chapter in the book of Revelation is a prophetic chapter to some
degree, even this one which looks back on a moment in history. How is it still
prophetic? Well, it is in the sense that the appearance of Jesus and the
description of His appearance here is a view of His way to be seen when we get
in His presence in the future.
It's a preview of who Jesus is in the Kingdom to come and in our
experience when we see Him. It’s showing us who we are worshipping in advance.
In fact, if you go to Revelation 19 which we will see later in this book, at
the point of Christ’s second coming in that chapter, there's a description of
what He looks like. Chapter 19 Verse 12, eyes are a flame of
fire, clothed in a robe, comes with a sharp sword in His mouth, sound familiar?
That’s exactly the same appearance He gave John. That is how your
Lord appears, not as we have known Him on earth. Now in response to the
fear, Jesus responds, “You don't need to fear me, John. Do not be afraid.” But
then He describes Himself so that John knows who he's looking at. “It's me,
John”.
Notice He doesn't say “It's me, Jesus”. What does He say? “It's
me, the first and the last, the one who is dead and is now alive forever.” In
other words, Jesus doesn't describe Himself by His temporal identity. He
described Himself by His eternal characteristics. He was God before He was man,
and He remains God even after His death and resurrection, so His eternal
identity is what we celebrate, even as we thank Him for His time on earth dying
for our sins.
We are not making one more important than the other and we are not
diminishing His humanity. What we are saying is that when we think of Him and
we worship Him now, we think of Him as He is now in those eternal
characteristics. In fact, in Revelation 19, it says this, “He has a name
written on Him which no one knows, except Himself.”
So, His name is not going to be Jesus or Yeshua in the Kingdom.
That was His earthly name, for us now. But there is a name that will be His
name that we don't even know yet.
Let’s now go to the last verse that sets up the whole rest of the
book. Verse 19:
Rev.1:19 “Therefore write the
things which you have seen, and the things which are, and
the things which will take place after these things”.
John is given a task, and his task is to write this letter that we
now have, and it comes in three parts. This is the outline of the letter that
John is to write. It moves as you can see from past tense to present tense to
future tense. Write what you saw, write the things that you have seen, in
another word, past perfect, and the things which are present and the things
which will take place after these things.
That may not sound like much of an outline, but it is. Now the
first part of the outline is actually very easy to recognize in the letter.
Which part of the letter is part one in this outline? Well, at the moment Jesus
spoke these words to John, He said, “saw” - past tense. So at
the moment He's speaking, He's saying what has already happened up to this
moment. What John saw, what had happened up to the moment that
Jesus spoke that sentence, pretty much everything on the scene that we just
looked at. So the things of this chapter effectively are the things John saw.
They're the things that had happened before this moment.
All Jesus was saying is, “Make sure you tell them where you got
this from. Make sure you tell them you saw Me, tell them what
I look like. And tell them this came from Me. That is the thing you saw.”
Now, that would tell you that the things that “are” must
be everything that happens after this moment, up to some point, right? If this
is the moment in the line and sentence in which he says saw, meaning
what has already happened, then by definition, from that moment forward starts
the next section, which, from our standpoint, the way the book's been divided,
that would be chapter 2.
So from chapter 2 onward, we now reach into the times that are. But
that just gives us a bit of concern, because this all happened 2000 years ago.
So we might sit here today saying,” Okay, well, now that that must all have
been past tense for us, the things that are must now be the
things that “were”, from our point of view, right?” But that's not necessarily
true.
And in fact, in the next part of this study, we’ll see how it's
not true. But in the meantime, we'd like to get the sense of where the next
anchor is. In other words, I know that Chapter 1 is where the first part ends,
and the second part begins.
Now, I'd like to know, where does the second part end and the
third part begin? Because that will help me keep straight what I'm looking at
in the book. That is the whole idea of an outline: The things that he saw,
the things that are and the things that happened after these
things.
Now, “the things that happened after these things”, they are the
things that happened after ‘are’. “These things” refer back to ‘are’.
So you have things he ‘saw’, the things that ‘are’ and then
things will happen ‘after the things that are’. That's what he just
said to do. It's just confusing for us because we don't know what he's
referring to yet. We just know it comes in three chunks.
How would I know then when he moves from the second of those to
the third? I know the first one is Chapter 1, and I know the second one starts
in Chapter 2. How do I know where it ends? Well, again, our God is not a God of
confusion. So He must tell me somewhere in the book, right? What happens if you
go down through the pages of this book looking for that break? You’ll find it
at the very beginning of Chapter 4 Verse 1 where it starts with the words ‘After
these things.’ It really is that easy. This is actually proof to you
that the God who wrote this really wanted you to understand it.
So what that just told us is if chapter 4 and onward is part three
and there's only three parts, then we go all the way to the end of the book
with part three, that means part two is easy to find now. Because part two is
what between those two. We still have a mystery to solve here though, many
mysteries. We still want to know how these letters to the churches that existed
2000 years ago could still be relevant to us today. Why are they still the
things that ‘are’? And we’ll look at that in Revelation 2 (I).
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