Jesus commissions John
John's Vision of Jesus (Part 2)
And when I saw him, I fell to his feet as dead, and he placed his right hand on me saying: Do not fear! I am the first and the last, and the living one, and I became dead and look! I am living for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of Hades. Therefore write what you saw and what is and what is about to occur after these things. Revelation 1:17-19.
Have you ever been truly afraid?
So afraid you feared you would die?
I can only think of one time where I was close to that level of fear.
When I worked in Yellowstone National Park back in 1986, I joined a group of fellow employees on a one night backpacking trip to summit one of the iconic mountains in Yellowstone called “Electric Peak,” so named because lightning bolts from summer thunderstorms regularly struck the highly conductive rhyolite of the jagged peak.
It behooved all who attempted the trek to get an early start before afternoon thunderstorms arose, so we hiked to the base of the mountain the evening before and arose early for a noon arrival at the top.
Besides some blisters from deteriorating boots I had had for years, the hike up from our camping spot proceeded smoothly until we could see the peak only a hundred or so yards away.
We were almost there.
But to make it there we still had to traverse a narrow ledge of fragile shale-like rhyolite with a thousand foot drop below us as we finger-gripped with only enough strength to stay stable, but not enough to cause the rock to crumble (I shiver as I write this!).
I shimmied the twenty or so feet intact, but when I got to a “level” spot, I was frozen with fear.
My legs felt like jello.
My thigh muscles were shaking uncontrollably.
I could not move.
Within sight of the top and despite my deep desire to get there, I couldn’t go on, even with the embarrassment of backing out.
I was scared to death.
While the others climbed the last steps to the summit (over another precipitous ridge that fell off on both sides), a friend agreed to go back with me, but not back across the ledge—we found another way down. That was an adventure too, but not for the telling now.
That frozen by fear state is the closest I can imagine that John must have felt when he saw the man in the middle of the menorahs. The sights and sounds entering his senses were too awesome, too overwhelming, too terrifying to continue looking.
Even in his visionary state, John was literally scared to death.
He became frozen—catatonic. He could not move, his legs buckled under him. He fell down as dead.
John experienced the terror of seeing God face to face. (continued)
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Do not fear!
But at that moment a hand touched him.
The man placed his right hand on John and said “Fear not.”
These were the same words God spoke to Abraham and to Moses and to Joshua and to the prophets—and that Jesus spoke to the disciples when he stilled the storm.
They were the words of a divine appearance—what Bible types call a theophany.
Was John not to be afraid?
Of course he was.
But the hand of Jesus was there to comfort him and to pull him from terror—fear of death—to reverential knowledge—the fear of the Lord.
The Gospel in Review
The man immediately followed up with the reason:
“I am the first and the last, and the living one, and I was dead, and look! I am alive forever and ever.”
In a word, Jesus spoke to John.
But there is so much more to unpack in these words.
“I am the first and the last” is virtually the same as “I am the Alpha and the Omega” in Revelation 1:8 and are the words that Yahweh used in Isaiah (“I am the first and I am the last” Isaiah 44:6, 48:12). Jesus will refer to himself at the end of Revelation as “the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13).
Theophany, indeed.
But John also echoed the “I am” phrases in the Gospel of John (e.g., “I am the light of the world,” “I am the good Shepherd”), as well as other phrases such as “In the beginning was the Word,” or “Before Abraham was, I am.”
Jesus followed up this “I am” statement in Revelation 1:17 with an explanation:
“And the living one, and I was dead, and behold I am alive forever and ever.”
In these phrases, Jesus included his preexistence, his incarnation (specifically his passion and death) and his resurrection/exaltation.
Let’s think about what Jesus said here in comparison to the Gospels.
In the Gospels, Jesus predicted his passion, death, and resurrection (based on what the Scriptures said about the Messiah) as events to come.
But here in Revelation 1:18, Jesus recounted what had already happened.
Before and after.
The Gospel of John described the Incarnation of Jesus and its events in narrative form to the cross and Resurrection.
Here in Revelation, Jesus now spoke of his entire Incarnation as a past event.
He is now the Risen and Exalted One.
The Keys of Death and Hades
But he also told John the consequences of having gone through death and now raised and exalted:
As a result of the cross, death and resurrection, Jesus holds the keys to Death and to Hades.
This is another of those images that is chocked full of symbolism.
Besides the symbols themselves, the question I have is, why does Jesus have those keys?
Where did he get them?
What I have to say is somewhat speculative, that is, what I am saying is not stated this way directly in the Bible, but I think implied.
I am simply following the logic inherent in image of the keys alongside the reality of the cross, the death, and the resurrection that Jesus has just recounted (and thus my logic is fully open to criticism and comments about what I am about to say!).
The symbolism itself is basic: Jesus died (“Death”) and was in Hades—the place of the dead and the same as Sheol in the Old Testament—along with all others who were there. The gates of Hades were locked with no way out.
But when there, Jesus obtained the keys to unlock the prison doors, so to speak.
No one had ever obtained those keys until Jesus.
Who held the keys? We might say Death itself, or we might say Satan as the power behind the world system of sin that always leads to death.
The keys were acquired at the fall of Adam and Eve, and every human who sinned was destined to go and remain in Hades/Sheol. Death and Sin reigned “because all sinned,” as Paul wrote in Romans 5.
No one could leave that prison—until Jesus arrived.
But when God raised Jesus from the dead, Death or Satan was forced to give Jesus the keys.
Why?
Because Jesus was the innocent, complete, and perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world, vindicated by God as such in the Resurrection.
The human authorities (represented by the Jews and Romans) believed they were ridding themselves of a rebellious religious and political pretender. To them, Jesus was undermining their religious and political power.
Satan the father of lies was egging them on.
In reality, with his truthful words and on the cross, Jesus exposed both humans in their evil ways and Satan as the instigator of chaos and violence that stirred up human conflict and evil.
Jesus, innocent of all, went to the cross as a volunteer. Out of love for God’s human creation (and all of creation), Jesus (“God in Christ”) bore the full brunt of human evil against himself, absorbing it all in order to render evil, death, and Satan powerless. Paul says as much in Galatians 1:4 and Colossians 2:14–15.
And if powerless, then no longer able to keep the keys.
In the Resurrection, Jesus, who redeemed the keys by his death, took them and opened the prison doors for any who would come out, and by so doing redeemed all those who put their trust in him.
Praise the Lord that Jesus holds the keys.
(cont.)
Therefore write
Therefore write what you saw and what is and what is about to occur after these things.
Then for a second time, Jesus told John, “Write.” This vision and all the subsequent ones were not to remain in John’s memory, but to be recorded (“if it isn’t written down it doesn’t exist” a Tom Clancy character once said).
By repetition of this command in the vision, Jesus reinforced its importance.
There is one other word though: “Therefore (Greek oun) write.” Translations render oun with “therefore” “so” or “now” in fairly equal proportions or simple ignore it as the KJV, NKJV, CEV, and NLT do.
“Therefore” is the only reasonable English equivalent and absolutely merits inclusion in any translation: oun indicates that what follows must take into account what came before. When Jesus told John to “therefore write,” John was to take into account what he just saw and heard, and that is exactly what Jesus tells him to do.
What you saw …
In the next words Jesus gave the scope of what John was to write: “What you saw, what is, and what is about to occur after these things.”
We—all who would seek to understand this book—must be vigilant and mindful to discern what Jesus was saying and not saying to John in this sentence.
Our ability to faithfully interpret the whole of Revelation as given hinges on the results.
First, John was to write what he saw.
What he saw encompassed both his earthly witness to Jesus’s incarnation, death, and resurrection and the exalted Jesus he has just witnessed in his vision.
I would even suggest that the entire Gospel of John was written as a response to this command, thus the Gospel of John is part one of John’s account of Jesus and Revelation is part two.
What is …
Second, “what is” is John’s current encounter with Jesus from Revelation 1:9 to the end of the oracles to the seven churches in Revelation 2–3.
There is no break in Jesus’s words to John between 1:20 and 2:1. Jesus’s vision of himself and his words to John run continuously from Revelation 1:10 all the way to 3:22.
What is about to occur …
Third, and most importantly, “what is about to occur after these things” refers to the visions in Revelation 4–22.
The important words are “after these things (Greek: meta tauta).
These words do not refer to a succession of historical events beginning then and ending now or whenever (as the end-times pundits stir up their listeners to believe), but to the visions themselves. “What is about to occur after these things” refers to content of Revelation 4–22.
The indicator of this scope is the opening of Revelation 4: “After these things (meta tauta), I saw …” John plainly follows Jesus’s directive in writing down what was about to occur after these things” in his visions.
To go beyond the visions, to turn the visions themselves and their progression (one vision after another) into some sort of prophetic historical sequence that leads inevitably to our current time and circumstances as “the last days” is simply not warranted by these words!
Christian history is littered with the failed attempts to do so, including many today (who instead of admitting their mistakes, double down at the next disaster or invasion as the “fulfillment of prophecy”).
The visions are visions, not actual events—the visions do contain deep symbolism that interprets historical reality, but they do not map one to one with any particular historical event past present or future, save for the return of Jesus—and even that event is reported by utilizing symbolic language.
We must first attempt to interpret what John and his readers understood the visions with their symbols to mean for their current circumstances. Only then can we seek to correlate their understanding with a concurrent understanding of our circumstances and the prophetic message of hope that Revelation has for us in these parallel times.
To summarize the words of Revelation 1:19:
“What you saw”—Revelation 1:2 and the entire Gospel of John (John’s witness to the life of Jesus from Incarnation to Resurrection)
“What is”—Revelation 1:9–3:22
“What is about to come after these things”—The visions of Revelation 4–22.
This post is long enough.
I’ll finish Jesus’s words to John in part 3, where we discover an interpretive secret for discerning the symbolic language in the remainder of Revelation.
Thanks for reading.
Observations on the Greek Text of Revelation
and Audio Version
Rev 1:17 Καὶ ὅτε εἶδον αὐτόν, ἔπεσα πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ ὡς νεκρός, καὶ ἔθηκεν τὴν δεξιὰν αὐτοῦ ἐπ’ ἐμὲ λέγων· μὴ φοβοῦ· ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ πρῶτος καὶ ὁ ἔσχατος 18 καὶ ὁ ζῶν, καὶ ἐγενόμην νεκρὸς καὶ ἰδοὺ ζῶν εἰμι εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων καὶ ἔχω τὰς κλεῖς τοῦ θανάτου καὶ τοῦ ᾅδου. 19 γράψον οὖν ἃ εἶδες καὶ ἃ εἰσὶν καὶ ἃ μέλλει ⸁γενέσθαι μετὰ ταῦτα.
1. ἔθηκεν in v. 17 is a “kappa” aorist and so looks similar to a perfect tense which would be τέθηκεν. Many -μι verbs take a κ rather than a σ for the aorist infix as is the case here for τίθημι.
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