Sunday School Notes: Revelation 1:1

¹ A revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave to him to show to his servants what things must happen soon. And He showed [them] through His angel He sent to His servant John, ² who bore witness to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ–as much as he saw. ³ Blessed is the one reading, and those both hearing the words of prophecy, and keeping the things written in it, for the time is near.

Even though we only covered verse 1 in detail, we started with an overview of the first three verses, which is why I have provided a translation of all three above. These opening verses seem to me to serve as a kind of preface to the work. It’s a common practice in our day for works of non-fiction to begin with a preface, often written by someone other than the author, describing not only what the book’s about, but how he or she was personally affected by the book. Revelation 1:1-3 sounds just like this sort of opening. We could debate whether John wrote it, but there isn’t a lot of hard evidence one way or the other. Our earliest manuscripts of Revelation all contain these verses at the beginning, so we have no reason to doubt they have always been a part of the book. For want of a compelling reason to believe otherwise, I’m willing to accept that John wrote this. Perhaps he intended it to serve as a brief “cover letter” to the book, a bit like Romans 16 might have been for Paul’s letter to the Romans?

I mentioned last week the fact that Revelation contains the most allusions to the Old Testament of any of the New Testament books. We see a couple of those already in these opening verses. Daniel 2:28-29 uses the verb apokaluptô, which is the verb form of the noun apokalupsis, the opening word of Revelation. When Nebuchadnezzar asks Daniel to interpret his dream about the statue, Daniel replies that dream interpretation is not within the skill set of any man–but it is well within God’s ability. God alone is the one who “reveals mysteries.” Just as the king’s dream was a truth hidden behind a symbol, so Revelation consists of truths presented to John hidden behind symbols. God is the one who reveals these truths, and it’s to Him we should look to understand them, by means of His word. Another phrase Daniel uses is “which things must happen,” which you probably noticed in our translation of verse 1 above. John and Daniel even use the exact same three Greek words (ha dei genesthai). An interesting variation, however, is the fact that Daniel says these things are to happen “in the latter days,” whereas John says they will happen “soon.” We don’t want to get too hung up on time-frames, but if John has his eye on Daniel, it’s possible he’s saying that what to Daniel was in the distant future, to John and his audience, these things are happening soon–perhaps have even started to happen.

We should bear in mind that while Daniel was written in Hebrew and Aramaic (from 2:4 through chapter 7, Daniel is in Aramaic), and John was probably aware of this, the linguistic similarities we note–with Daniel, or any other Old Testament book–are between the Greek of Revelation and the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This translation, known to us as the Septuagint (abbreviated “LXX”), was the common Bible translation of the first century, especially in predominantly Greek-speaking areas. It was the version Paul used (for the most part) in his letters, and more than likely the translation in use among the churches in Asia.

After this brief overview, we dug into the text. Last week we noted that the book is actually “a revelation of Jesus Christ”–it’s not about John; John’s just the messenger. This is a revelation concerning the things that God is going to do through Christ, so we can certainly take “of Jesus Christ” in the sense that it’s about Jesus. But there seems to be a strong sense of a “chain of command” in this verse: God gives the revelation to Jesus, Jesus gives it to John, John delivers it to the churches. This follows a pattern we see in John’s Gospel:

• John 1:18: Jesus is the one who makes God the Father known.
• John 5:19: The Son does what He sees the Father doing.
• John 6:38: Jesus came to do the will of the Father.
• John 7:16: Jesus says that his teaching is of the One who sent him.
• John 12:44: Whoever believes in Jesus believes in the One who sent him.
• John 14:9: Whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to see the same kind of “chain” at work in the delivery of this important message to the churches.

Again, I don’t want to get hung up on time-frames, largely because I want us to let the text tell us what we need to know, and, as much as we can, avoid bringing our own presuppositions to the text. However, we do need to pay attention to the fact that John says these things must happen “soon” (Greek: en tachei). Is this “soon” according to John’s point-of-view, or God’s? If John’s, then we would expect many of these visions to depict things that either have taken place, or will take place within John’s lifetime, or at least the lifetime of his audience. If God’s, then they could be thousands of years away from John’s writing–perhaps in our close future. I don’t think we can answer this solely from Revelation 1:1. Hopefully, as we start unpacking the visions, and looking at the Old Testament imagery behind them, we’ll get a better sense of how we should understand “soon.” I personally think it’s both-and: there are aspects that happened within John’s lifetime, and there are things yet to happen. But I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise by the text.

One final note we made on verse one had to do with the verb “showed.” The King James translates this as “signified,” based on the fact that the Greek verb, sêmainô, has a noun form, sêmeion, which means “a sign.” It’s true that words often change their meanings over time, and often end up with meanings that bear little resemblance to their roots. The word “crucial” has its origin in the Latin crux, meaning “cross,” but I doubt many people think of the cross when they use the word. So it’s very possible that the verb sêmainô was more commonly used to simply mean “show.” However, in the Gospel, John uses this verb a couple of times in ways that are unmistakably tied to it’s original meaning:

• John 12:37: Jesus speaks of how he must be “lifted up” from the earth. John comments that Jesus said this to signify the kind of death he was about to suffer.
• John 18:32: The Jewish leaders deliberate before Pilate how they are to deal with Jesus since, according to Jewish law, they couldn’t kill him. Again, John sees this as signifying the kind of death Jesus was about to suffer (i.e., at the hands of the State–crucifixion).
• John 21:19: Jesus tells Peter that a time is coming when Peter will stretch out his hands and he will be taken where he doesn’t want to go. John comments that Jesus said this to signify by what kind of death Peter would glorify God.

In these examples, we see the use of indirect language to point to truths. The visions and imagery in Revelation serve the same purpose: to show us truths by means of indirect language. These are things revealed to us in terms that must be discerned, just as Jesus noted that his parables were for “those who have ears to hear” (a phrase that occurs a few times in Revelation). Why didn’t God speak plainly to us in this book? Perhaps for the same reason Jesus didn’t speak plainly about his death and resurrection until the end: people will miss the point. One time Jesus did speak plainly about his impending execution serves, perhaps, to illustrate this point. At Caesarea Phillipi, Jesus asked his disciples who people say he is. After hearing their answers, he asked who they think he is. Peter boldly proclaimed that Jesus is the Christ. Jesus went on to warn them in very plain terms that when they went to Jerusalem, he was going to be rejected by the religious leaders, killed, then in three days rise from the dead. Peter was so shocked by the idea that Jesus was going to be rejected and killed, he completely missed the last part–that Jesus would rise from the dead. He was so caught up with the suffering and death, he lost sight of the final victory. And isn’t that what tends to happen with us? People get so caught up with checking Revelation against The New York Times to see if it’s coming true, and they miss the whole point. Revelation is about the victory of Christ over sin, death, and the forces of evil. It’s a picture of the hope we have in Christ, that no matter how bad things get, we know that our redeemer lives, and through him, we have victory. Maybe the symbols are there to make us stop and think, to study God’s word carefully, and hopefully prevent us from missing the big picture?

Lord willing, we’ll pick up with verse 2 next week.