Christ as its source? The reason for going the latter route is to be found in the clause that follows. The significance of this small point lies with the rest of the book, since from here on Christ is the one who now gives the revelation that John here says God gave him [Christ] to show his servants. The term “servants” in this case is to be understood as a general, but especially meaningful, term for all believers; they are those who serve both God and others.
The content of what “God gave him to show his servants has to do with what must soon take place, a clause that anticipates the content of the rest of the book. Unfortunately, this brief clause has also served as the source of an considerable number of speculations about the end-times. But as the narrative that will soon unfold makes relatively clear, this phrase has less to do with the End as such, and mostly to do with the somber events awaiting the churches of John’s day. Himself an exile on Patmos, what John had come to see clearly as awaiting a new generation of believer’s was the church’s coming collision with the Empire over who should rightly be proclaimed as “Lord and Savior”—the Roman emperors or the humble Galilean whom they had crucified, but who their followers asserted had been raised from the dead.
But the question of whose servants these are, God’s or Christ’s, is not immediately clear in the Greek text, although the rest of the sentence seems to make it decisive that the “his” in every case has God as its antecedent. The NIV translators have tried to clarify the issue by making a new sentence out of John’s second clause. Thus, he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, where the initial “he” can refer only to God. At the outset, therefore, one learns that God “made” this revelation “known” to John by way of one of “his angels,” one of the heavenly beings who throughout the book “shows” John these things, while John in turn testifies (= bears witness) to all that he has been shown, which John at this point puts in the active: to everything he saw.
The surprising moment comes at the end of this opening sentence, where the reader is told that what John “saw” was the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, a phrase that is as ambiguous in Greek as it is in English.2 On the basis of its further occurrences in the book, the first phrase almost certainly means “the word from God” (= the word God spoke), which in this case, and in most instances throughout, primarily comes to John visually. But the second phrase is especially uncertain, since in what follows it can refer to either the testimony that Jesus himself had borne through his life, death, and resurrection or to the testimony that John had borne about Jesus that had brought about John’s exile on Patmos. While either of these is a possible meaning in terms of the narrative that follows, both the abbreviated version that occurs in 6:9 (“the word of God and the testimony they had borne”) and the present emphasis—which is not on the “life of Christ” per se but on John’s witness to that life through this book—suggest that the intent here has to do with John’s own witness that came to him from Christ himself by way of his angel.
In the final sentence John further describes this word/testimony as the words of this prophecy, language which, because of its primary meaning in English as “the foretelling or prediction of what is to come,” can be misleading when used in the New Testament. To be sure, there is a future aspect to this “prophecy,” but it is primarily a word spoken into the present situation of the seven churches; and its primary urgency is not about the final future event (recorded in chs. 20–22), but the near future for John and his readers. What makes John a truly Christian prophet is that from his position at the end of the first Christian century he clearly recognizes that the church and state are on a deadly collision course, wherein the church will suffer in the near future, but will know Christ’s triumph at the end (the “real” future). Thus at the outset John uses apocalyptic language that is intended to merge what is seen with what is spoken. That is, for him this was a “seen” word; but to communicate it to the church it had to become a written word, “the testimony” that Jesus Christ gave by way of one vision following another.
The concluding benediction is on both the one who reads aloud [in a culture where only about 15 percent of the people could read or write] the words of this prophecy and on those who hear and keep what is written in it—John’s version of being both “hearers and doers of the Word.” This reading/hearing phenomenon is made urgent by the final clause, because the time is near, which has created a different kind of urgency for later readers. But what John almost certainly intended is that the pending difficulties that the recipients of this Revelation were about to experience already stood at the door for them—as the unfolding of subsequent second- and third-century history actually bore out.
The Johannine Prescript (1:4–8)
4John,
To the seven churches in the province of Asia:
Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits3 before his throne, 5and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, 6and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.
7“Look, he is coming with the clouds,”4
and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”5
So shall it be! Amen.
8“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”
John follows his first introduction, which informed his readers that what follows is an apocalypsis from Jesus Christ, with a second, formal introduction that has all the earmarks of a first-century letter (vv, 4–5a). However, this is then joined by several features that mark off this Apocalypse as something unique in the history of literature: first (vv. 5b–6), a benediction with an appropriate “amen” at the end; second (v. 7), an invitation to the reader to be looking for Christ’s coming, using well-known language from Daniel, Zechariah, and Genesis, which also concludes with an “amen”; and finally (v. 8), an announcement from “the Lord God,” who is identified twice with language that emphasizes God’s being the eternal God, thus the only God there is.
To get there John begins with the standard greeting of a first-century Greco-Roman letter: author, to the recipient, greetings. Since he has already identified himself (in v. 1), he now begins with the simple identifier John. The addressees are also put simply: to the seven churches in the province of Asia, who will be identified as to the specifics in verse 11. The salutation itself is very Pauline, and probably reflects his influence on the church at this early period. John has also kept the Pauline word order, “grace to you and peace,” which, as elsewhere in the New Testament, is changed in translation to a more normal English order, grace and peace to you. “Grace” in this context refers to all the benefits that come from God to his people, while “peace” reflects the standard Jewish greeting, shalom. Thus the one benefit (“grace”) comes from God, his goodness bestowed on his people; the other (“peace”) is the resulting benefit that God’s people experience in their relationships with one another—and thus is not here a reference to the internal peace of a “well-arranged heart.”
At this point the salutation takes on a decidedly Trinitarian character, which is unique to this document in the New Testament, both in appearance as such (especially in their order of appearance) and the fact that only Christ is specifically named. Two matters
