Secrets revealed

John's Vision of Jesus (Part 3)

The secret of the seven stars which you saw at my right hand and the seven gold lampstands: the seven angels are the angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the churches. Revelation 1:20

Vision of the Seven Candlesticks. Miniature from the book “The Apocalypse of Three Senses.” Moscow Old Believer Printing House 1909, from an ancient written manuscript of the first half of the 17th century. Notice John dictating below what he sees in his vision above.

Secrets are everywhere. 

I have secrets, you have secrets. 

We keep secrets for a variety of reasons, I think most often to cover embarrassment or shame or potential consequences for our actions. 

And when a secret is discovered by another, that secret may be used as leverage for an advantage, aka blackmail. 

Sometimes groups create secrets (or cover up secrets) to be known only to the members in order to create and maintain loyalty and coherence and boundaries for the group. 

The secrets not only keep others out, but have built in penalties for those who might expose the secrets—gangs, clubs, secret societies, rogue law-enforcement officers or elected government groups, and even boards of directors or churches or groups within.

These secrets are often, maybe always, destructive.

If they are not destructive on the outside, secrets may “eat a person alive.”

Of course, since we as humans do not understand the depths of biology or the physical world or our brain or our emotions or our impulses to violence and war rather than peace, there remain secrets of our existence that only God knows. 

And that is probably a good thing since we like to screw everything up.

What happens when secrets get exposed, though? 

One phrase that often gets used is “the truth came out.” And generally that’s a good thing, though often painful.

Jesus said it this way: everything hidden will be shouted from the rooftops.

(continued)

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Revelation as an exposure of secrets

The Greek word apocalypsis means “an uncovering” or “an exposure.” Our translation of the term as “revelation” somewhat gets at that, but more to the point, Revelation is an unveiling of secrets. 

What those secrets are comes out in the prophetic oracles (chapters 2–3) and in the visions (chapters 4–22). In the oracles to the seven churches, Jesus exposes the good and the bad about each church. In the visions, Jesus exposes the truth about God as sovereign over all creation and the truth about evil and its coming end.

A Secret to the secrets?

But to many, maybe even most in our day, Revelation itself is full of secrets.

It seems only those with the “secret decoder ring” have access to the mysteries of Revelation.

That decoder ring gets passed around and used to present Revelation as a document whose secrets have been hidden for two thousand years only to be decoded now in “the last days.”

Of course, I am being very tongue-in-cheek about the “secret decoder ring.”

The book of Revelation was never meant to be obscure—from the time it was written until now. 

Perspicuity

The Reformers had a principle they relied on called the “perspicuity of scripture.” 

Perspicuous means clear, lucid, understandable.

The Bible in whole and in part is understandable to those who faithfully take the effort to understand it, including Revelation.

And taking the time to understand how the Bible was written, including Revelation, helps us to comprehend that clarity.

Further, the Bible as a whole and in its individual books is fully clear only in the light of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah—including Revelation.

The Need for Symbols

Yet because the Bible goes beyond the physical, the social, and the political to the realities of the spiritual world, plain descriptive language of things we perceive with our physical senses cannot convey those spiritual realities apart from symbolism.

Spiritual realities compel language to be employed symbolically. 

Thus the Bible often uses plain language as symbolic of spiritual realities. 

The Old and New Testaments saw events of the past as evocative of future realities—the past events became symbols pointing to future events or persons, who “fulfill” the symbol.

This phenomenon is referred to as “typology.” A modern equivalent is “history always repeats itself” or more negatively, “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

The prophets saw the entire story of Israel in Egypt and the wilderness as pointing toward the Israel of their day hundreds of years later, and they used poetic language to talk about God and his plans.

The prophets own visions for their day pointed forward to the coming of the Messiah and the new heavens and new earth.

Jesus often used simile and metaphor and parables to explain the Kingdom of God.

And Jesus saw the entire Old Testament as pointing to himself as the Messiah who would be put to death and raised the third day.

Paul took the Old Testament the same way as pointing to Jesus.

Symbolism in Revelation

Revelation may take symbolism to the next level, but the symbols are still meant to be “perspicuous.” 

Revelation, far from being a secret code, was an open unveiling of reality. 

Revelation spoke the truth about God and the truth about the world (and still does).

We simply need to follow its clear information and use our God-given eyes to understand the symbolism—a symbolism not intended to keep secrets but to reveal them.

And what is more, Revelation itself tells us that its content is mostly symbolic.

We detect this in Jesus’s “decoding” of the stars and lampstands in the final verse of chapter one—the concluding words of Jesus to John before Jesus conveys the messages to the seven churches.

(cont.)

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The Secret of the Stars and Lampstands

Here are Jesus’s words to John again:

The secret of the seven stars which you saw at my right hand and the seven gold lampstands: the seven angels are the angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the churches.

“Secret” is a translation of the Greek word mysterion, from which (fairly obviously) we get the word “mystery.” A mystery/secret is something hidden, not known, or covered up.

But Jesus uncovered the secret of the things that John saw in his vision! 

He told John the images meant something else than the image itself! 

That is the very definition of a sign or symbol—signs and symbols point to something else that the sign/symbol “symbolizes” or stands in for.

In this case the symbolism is simple: seven stars=seven angels and seven gold lampstands=seven churches. The number seven itself is symbolic of completeness or perfection and goes back to the creation story of seven days brought to completion with the Sabbath day.

There is not much more to say about these symbols except that they are signs pointing beyond themselves. 

But—and this point is crucial to keep in mind throughout Revelation—because Jesus decoded the images as symbols here, we can expect the remainder of Revelation to be full of symbolic images, which it is, and to expect that they are easily decoded too. 

John’s descriptions throughout Revelation were what he actually saw in the visions themselves, but Jesus informed John that what he saw and was to see and hear after these things usually pointed to a reality beyond the physical, or the real behind the real.

The stuff of the visions was symbolic of unseen truths about God and about the world.

The visions signified something beyond themselves.

The Lamb and the horses and the earthquakes and the monstrous creatures and the falling stars and the Beast and Babylon—all of them point to another different, more substantive, but unseen, reality.

Many or even most of the symbols have their “secrets” revealed in either Revelation itself or in the Gospels or in the Old Testament scriptures. 

We don’t have to search the newspapers today to find the meaning of the symbols—the Bible gives us the meaning already.

In the months ahead we will tackle these symbols head on.

Thanks for reading.

Observations on the Greek Text of Revelation

and Audio Version

 τὸ μυστήριον τῶν ἑπτὰ ἀστέρων οὓς εἶδες ἐπὶ τῆς δεξιᾶς μου καὶ τὰς ἑπτὰ λυχνίας τὰς χρυσᾶς· οἱ ἑπτὰ ἀστέρες ἄγγελοι τῶν ἑπτὰ ἐκκλησιῶν εἰσιν καὶ αἱ λυχνίαι αἱ ἑπτὰ ἑπτὰ ἐκκλησίαι εἰσίν.

1. τὸ μυστήριον … τὰς χρυσᾶς This first “sentence” is not a sentence. τὸ μυστήριον is the “subject” but there is no verb.

This construction is called a “nominative absolute.” A noun in the nominative stands alone with no predicate. 

It’s like saying “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America” at the State of the Union, where “may I introduce to you” is implied. Here the words “this is” are implied at the beginning, but dropped to add more emphasis to the announcement of τὸ μυστήριον.

2. Scholars often point out that John’s Greek grammar seems to be off in many places. Their term for this is “solecisms” or “grammatical errors.” 

But as many recognize, John’s grammar and syntax is strongly affected by Hebrew and Aramaic. And I would add that John may make intentional alterations to bring out certain emphases. In this verse we have τὰς ἑπτὰ λυχνίας τὰς χρυσᾶς which would ordinarily be in the genitive case like τῶν ἑπτὰ ἀστέρων, thus τῶν ἑπτὰ λυχνίων τῶν χρυσῶν. If John was thinking in Hebrew, though, the first phrase is called a construct phrase with the first noun in construct state followed by an absolute absolute state, but after the καί there is no repetition of the head term, τὸ μυστήριον, so no construct state. Instead, John uses the accusative as an “accusative of respect.”

Audio Version!

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