two concerns are then taken up in greater detail in chapters 12–14 and 15–22, respectively. But before any of that, John is given the interpretation of the two sets of seven, the seven stars and the seven golden lampstands, since these items will figure significantly, as the first matters, in what follows (chs. 2–3).
Couched in the language of Jewish apocalyptic, what is being interpreted is the mystery of the seven stars . . . and of the seven golden lampstands. The seven stars, John is told, are the angels [angeloi] of the seven churches, while the seven lampstands are the seven churches. The word angeloi is one of the more difficult to put into English in much of this book, since its basic meaning is simply “messenger”; but in the Greek Old Testament it was used especially to refer to the heavenly messengers who have been regularly referred to as “angels” in English. Thus the NIV translators have tried to cut through the difficulty by putting “angels” in the text, with a footnote that offers the alternative, “messengers.” None of this is problematic for this introductory passage; but when John is told at the beginning of 2:1 to “write to the angelos of the church in Ephesus,” then the mental pictures that are conjured up by such a word do become a bit more problematic. Whether John intended a heavenly messenger or not is moot, as is his language that suggests that each church has its own angelos. What John seems most likely to have intended is not that each church had its own angel, as it were, but in keeping with the apocalyptic genre, that a different (perhaps angelic) messenger was appointed to deliver Christ’s message to each of the churches, while at the same time each church becomes privy to the others’ mail!
Thus John is herewith commissioned to write . . . what you have seen, and to deliver the individual messages of chapters 2 and 3 to each of the seven churches, while he is delivering the whole to each of them as well. And all of this is quite intentional on John’s part; each of the churches is to take heed to what Christ has to say to them individually, but they are also to learn from what he says to each of the others. It is the apocalyptic genre that allows such things to happen, without the option of any of his readers either to mourn or gloat vis-à-vis the others. They are all in this both individually and together; and they must all pay careful attention to what Christ says to the others, even as they are to pay special attention to their own letter.
1. The Greek word itself, of course, has made its way into English as “apocalypse,” which by definition for most people means “any widespread destruction or disaster” (the fifth entry in the Random House American College Dictionary).
2. This phrase recurs in 1:9, and is repeated in reverse order in 20:4.
3. That is, the sevenfold Spirit.
4. Daniel 7:13.
5. Zechariah 12:10.
6. From the Random House American College Dictionary.
7. Greek λύσαντι, which is read by all the early and most important witnesses, as well as by half of the later majority; perhaps as a mistake of hearing, the other half of the later witnesses have λούσαντι (“washed”), which had the misfortune of being present in the manuscript that stood behind the KJV.
8. The word is further used to describe the fate of the woman Jezebel in 2:22.
9. See at the end of this verse, plus 12:17; 14:12; 17:6; 19:10 (2x); 20:4; and 21:16.
10. In the apocryphal Gospel of Peter 35 and 50, although it might appear earlier in Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians, in a reference that is in considerable dispute.
11. See Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians.
12. See Daniel 7:13
13. Although the number of lampstands is Johannine, the description of them as “golden” reflects both Israel’s original lampstands in Exod 25:31–40 and that appearing in Zechariah’s vision in 4:2.
14. Greek ὅμοιον. This is the first of 21 occurrences of this word in the Revelation—47 percent of the total in the NT. But since 14 of the others occur in Matthew and Luke, all in parables and three of which they have in common (in the so-called Q source), John in reality has over 50 percent of its NT uses (understandably so, given the parabolic nature of this text).
15. Or messengers
16. “And Can It Be?” (1738).
17. The NIV seems to have understood John’s intent correctly here, whose text in the Greek reads (literally): “what you have seen and what is and what is about to happen after these things.” The reason for adopting the NIV’s rendering is a recognition that the three verbs “saw, are, will be” are not in fact coordinate—and almost certainly were not intended to be. That is, the first verb (in the past tense) has to do with John and what he has “seen” in the pictures that follow, while the second and third verbs have to do with the present situation of the churches and what lies ahead for them.
Revelation 2–3
The Letters to the Seven Churches
With the seven letters that make up chapters 2 and 3 of the Revelation, one turns from the glories of the introductory materials—the salutation, doxology, opening vision of Christ, and commission of John—to the actual situation of the churches themselves. How much grander it would have been for John to have gone immediately from 1:20 to 4:1! But that would be to miss too much in terms of the point of the book, which was, after all, written to these seven specific churches. In the opening vision Christ appears as standing among them, and John’s commission to write to them was intended in part to do with “what is now” (1:19). In fact what is said here (chs. 2–3) helps to make sense both of the book as a whole and of the preceding commission to John in 1:19 in particular. Whatever else may be true of these individual letters, as a group they let his first readers in on one dimension of “what is”; namely the condition of the church(es), which fills John with concern.
Before one considers each church individually, however, it is important to note that all the believers who are to receive this document end up reading every one else’s mail, as it were—a sure indication that the individual Christian communities still did not think of themselves in isolated terms, but as all belonging to the same larger reality. This is obviously purposeful on John’s part, since these churches are related geographically and each needs to know how the Lord feels about the others. Thus, the living Christ—the One who walks in the midst of the lampstands—addresses each of the churches individually, but he also expects each to take heed to what he says to the others by way of the encouragements and warnings that follow. After all, each letter concludes with the words, “what the Spirit says to the churches.” This reality
