Revelation 1

      The Introduction

      The opening chapter of John’s Revelation does what a good introduction to any book is expected to do: lay out the major players and the plot, while giving a few hints as to what will unfold along the way. John’s introduction, which includes all of chapter 1, does exactly that, although at this point the plot is more difficult to discern than are the players. At the same time this opening chapter introduces some of the “apocalyptic furniture” that will become an essential part of the story. This is especially true of the “son of man” (v. 13)—imagery taken from Daniel 10—and of the churches themselves who appear as seven golden lampstands. But these are mild images in comparison with many that will follow, which are very often bizarre, as for example in 13:1, where we are introduced to the understandable image of “a beast,” including the fact that it has heads and horns; however, a beast with “seven heads” and “ten horns” we do not know, and for the most part have considerable difficulty “seeing” even with the imagination.

      What is striking about this introductory chapter, therefore, is how little one here encounters the kinds of imagery that the reader will meet later on with full force. Indeed, if one were to read only this chapter, plus the next two sections (chs. 2–3 and 4–5), one could feel quite at home, since most of its imagery falls into categories or images that are either understandable or at least manageable on the basis of one’s prior knowledge of the Old Testament. In which case the occasional apocalyptic image is not especially startling. But all of that changes at chapter 6, and will continue so through chapter 17, with a single recurrence in the great battle of 19:11–21. Otherwise, from 18:1 to the end the imagery is very much like that of the Prophets, where “real” (as distinct from “bizarre”) images become the general rule to the end of the book. All of this to say that ordinary readers, who have had no acquaintance at all with apocalyptic, should not presently sense they are stepping into a whole new world. That will come eventually, but is somewhat rare at the beginning.

      The Revelation as Apocalypse and Prophecy (1:1–3)

      1The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, 2who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. 3Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and keep what is written in it, because the time is near.

John introduces his book with the word that is responsible for its name, Apocalypsis, which in Greek means simply “revelation.”1 But in these opening sentences the reader is also faced with some of the idiosyncrasies of John’s style, which at times leaves the reader guessing as to John’s own intent. Thus he begins here with three Greek nouns, without modifiers or definite article. So did John intend “the revelation” or “a revelation”; and did he intend “revelation of Jesus Christ,” with Christ as the object of the revelation, or as the NIV has it, the revelation from Jesus Christ, with Christ as its source? The reason for going the latter route is to be found in the clause that follows. The significance of this small point lies with the rest of the book, since from here on Christ is the one who now gives the revelation that John here says God gave him [Christ] to show his servants. The term “servants” in this case is to be understood as a general, but especially meaningful, term for all believers; they are those who serve both God and others.

      The content of what “God gave him to show his servants has to do with what must soon take place, a clause that anticipates the content of the rest of the book. Unfortunately, this brief clause has also served as the source of an considerable number of speculations about the end-times. But as the narrative that will soon unfold makes relatively clear, this phrase has less to do with the End as such, and mostly to do with the somber events awaiting the churches of John’s day. Himself an exile on Patmos, what John had come to see clearly as awaiting a new generation of believer’s was the church’s coming collision with the Empire over who should rightly be proclaimed as “Lord and Savior”—the Roman emperors or the humble Galilean whom they had crucified, but who their followers asserted had been raised from the dead.

      But the question of whose servants these are, God’s or Christ’s, is not immediately clear in the Greek text, although the rest of the sentence seems to make it decisive that the “his” in every case has God as its antecedent. The NIV translators have tried to clarify the issue by making a new sentence out of John’s second clause. Thus, he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, where the initial “he” can refer only to God. At the outset, therefore, one learns that God “made” this revelation “known” to John by way of one of “his angels,” one of the heavenly beings who throughout the book “shows” John these things, while John in turn testifies (= bears witness) to all that he has been shown, which John at this point puts in the active: to everything he saw.

The surprising moment comes at the end of this opening sentence, where the reader is told that what John “saw” was the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, a phrase that is as ambiguous in Greek as it is in English.2 On the basis of its further occurrences in the book, the first phrase almost certainly means “the word from God” (= the word God spoke), which in this case, and in most instances throughout, primarily comes to John visually. But the second phrase is especially uncertain, since in what follows it can refer to either the testimony that Jesus himself had borne through his life, death, and resurrection or to the testimony that John had borne about Jesus that had brought about John’s exile on Patmos. While either of these is a possible meaning in terms of the narrative that follows, both the abbreviated version that occurs in 6:9 (“the word of God and the testimony they had borne”) and the present emphasis—which is not on the “life of Christ” per se but on John’s witness to that life through this book—suggest that the intent here has to do with John’s own witness that came to him from Christ himself by way of his angel.

      In the final sentence John further describes this word/testimony as the words of this prophecy, language which, because of its primary meaning in English as “the foretelling or prediction of what is to come,” can be misleading when used in the New Testament. To be sure, there is a future aspect to this “prophecy,” but it is primarily a word spoken into the present situation of the seven churches; and its primary urgency is not about the final future event (recorded in chs. 20–22), but the near future for John and his readers. What makes John a truly Christian prophet is that from his position at the end of the first Christian century he clearly recognizes that the church and state are on a deadly collision course, wherein the church will suffer in the near future, but will know Christ’s triumph at the end (the “real” future). Thus at the outset John uses apocalyptic language that is intended to merge what is seen with what is spoken. That is, for him this was a “seen” word; but to communicate it to the church it had to become a written word, “the testimony” that Jesus Christ gave by way of one vision following another.

      The concluding benediction is on both the one who reads aloud [in a culture where only about 15 percent of the people could read or write] the words of this prophecy and on those who hear and keep what is written in it—John’s version of being both “hearers and doers of the Word.” This reading/hearing phenomenon