Revelation 1:1 and the Scroll with Seven Seals
N.B. With events in the world seemingly increasing in chaos, Revelation has come to the forefront in the news. I will address this intersection of Revelation and the news “very soon.” In the meantime here is my next regularly scheduled post.
The Revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave to him to show his slaves what must happen soon. Revelation 1:1
And I saw at the right hand of the One sitting on the throne a book written on the inside and outside sealed with seven seals. Revelation 5:5
And I saw in the middle of the throne … a lamb standing as slain…. And he came and received [the book] from the One sitting on the throne. Revelation 5:6–7.
One of the difficulties with interpreting Revelation is that this book is so rich, so dense, so full of meaning that it is hard to even get past the first verse.
The threads that tie Revelation together are almost infinitely small and interwoven to be almost imperceptible in themselves.
And the theology of Revelation is so connected to the rest of the Bible as to be impossible to ever fully fathom.
Such is the dilemma facing anyone who would wade into Revelation and soon find themselves drowning from the vast amount of information and images (and why it took two and a half years for me to work through Revelation with the church small group I am a part of—and we all felt we should start over again).
Only in reading and pondering this apocalypse over and over, forwards and backwards, inside and out, outside and in, is it possible to start mining the depths of its riches.
My task here is to mine that information about “The Revelation of Jesus Christ.”
So here goes (and for the next several posts).
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The Revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave to him
Revelation 1:1-2 is not even a proper sentence—it is a title with additional information densely packed to prepare the reader for what is ahead.
And if you glanced through several commentaries to find information on the phrase “which God gave to him,” you may or may not see it mentioned at all. At most you may see a connection made to the Gospel of John which refers to the Father giving all things to the Son or similar.
What you will not find is any connection between this phrase and the rest of Revelation (at least that I have seen).
But John tells us that God GAVE the revelation to Jesus.
Is that a general statement or does it relate to something in the book itself?
Well come to find out, with careful reading, we can discern the when and the what of the revelation that God gave to Jesus. “When” is not time-bound, but refers to when in the book of Revelation that God gave it.
That when is Revelation chapter five.
Up until that point, the book of Revelation is in some respects a long introduction—about Jesus crucified and exalted and returning, about John seeing visions on Patmos and then recording prophetic speeches from Jesus to the seven churches, and finally to the introduction of the apocalypse proper in chapters four and five, which form a seamless unit.
When John is taken up into heaven in 4:1 the apocalypse as a genre begins—like so many other Jewish works.
But this real life John records his visions not as an ancient character (see What is Revelation, Part 1), but as himself seeing this vision on Patmos.
People could ask John about it.
And now John puts those visions on paper (rather papyrus or maybe leather) in an organized way that will sound familiar to Jews of the time even though they sound so strange to us.
The first scene of the apocalypse (Rev 4-5) occurs in heaven. Heaven is a typical location for an apocalypse—one writer years ago entitled his book on apocalypses “The Open Heaven” and so it is here.
God is on his throne with rainbow and crystal sea and thunder and lightning, and all the heavenly host—angels, living creatures, twenty-four elders—worship Him: “Worthy are you, the Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power, because you created all things and through your will they were also created.”
And I saw … a book
It is at that moment that John saw in his visionary journey a book at the right hand of the one sitting on the throne: a book written on the inside and sealed on the outside with seven seals.
You may be wondering why I translate it as “book.” More properly it was a scroll. The Greek term biblion can refer to a sheet of papyrus for writing, or a book like we know of, or a scroll. At that time in history, a transition was taking place from scrolls to books. All of our Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament are in book form (properly called a codex). But Jews continue even to today to record the Hebrew Bible in a long scrolls, usually of leather, or portions in shorter scrolls for use in the synagogues.
The seven seals would indicate a scroll most likely. It was common to seal a scroll to guard its contents until the person it was meant for opened it.
And that is the case here.
No one was worthy in all of creation to receive and open the scroll except for one: the Lion of Judah and root of David, the Lamb standing as slain, whose it is evident is Jesus, the exalted Son of Man from Revelation chapter 1.
And he came and received
In Revelation 5:7, John records: And he came and received (the scroll) from the right hand of the One sitting on the throne.
This is the point in time (Revelation time) that God gave the revelation to Jesus, referred to as a “Lamb standing as slain.” Jesus came and took scroll to the awe and praise and delight of the heavenly host and all creation (5:11).
Whatever happens after this point in Revelation comes from this scroll. God handed the scroll to Jesus and Jesus is the one who opens the scroll to reveal its content.
Revelation and the Gospel of John
The commentaries that mention the Gospel of John for “God gave” in 1:1 are perceptive—there are many parallels between Revelation and the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John.
The most obvious for this post comes at the end of the Prologue of John (1:1-18), John writes this: “No one has ever seen God, the only-begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father has revealed him.”
John does not use the verb apocalyptō there but the synonym exēgeomai—both can be rendered “reveal.”
The intent is the same.
Jesus is the Word of God, both as Incarnate Son and as Exalted Son, who speaks and displays God, his ways, and his purposes to the world. In the Gospel of John this is through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection; in Revelation it is through Jesus’s opening of the scroll to show “what must happen soon.”
I’ll talk about that last phrase in the next post.
An Invitation: Beginning on November 5, 2023 and going through December, I will be teaching a course for Right on Mission entitled, “Interpreting Scripture 1.” Here is the description:
The task of interpreting Scripture is foundational to doing responsible Christian theology. Biblical interpretation, often referred to as "biblical hermeneutics," is intellectual work that calls for honesty, not prejudice, from the interpreter. It also calls for knowledge of language, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and more. It takes longer than eight weeks to learn hermeneutics. What this course does is introduce students to the discipline of reading the Old and New Testament with respect to genre, dialogue, and authorial intent.
I would love to have anyone of you who desires to know more about studying the Bible.
Notes on the Greek Text of Revelation
ἣν ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ ὁ θεὸς Revelation 1:1b
From a grammatical and syntactical point of view this short phrase has all sorts of interesting tidbits to comment on.
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