people are a new kingdom, replacing the former Davidic kingdom. Redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on their/our behalf, people like the recipients of this Revelation—and us—have been freed not from Egypt but from the power of sin itself, reconstituted to be God’s own newly formed people. At the same time they/we are to serve as his “priests” on behalf of others, especially those who continue to be slaves to sin and thus to the power of Satan.
This reminder sets John off in praise and acclamation, but he does so in a way that could seem quite ambiguous to the later reader since in English it is not at all clear as to whom the “to him” refers in the concluding acclamation, to him be glory and power for ever and ever! In order to remove the ambiguity the NIV has (rightly) put a dash before the “to him,” while the NJB reads “to him, then,” making sure the reader recognizes that the pronoun “him” here refers to Christ, not to God the Father. That this is John’s own intent is made certain by his use of the personal pronoun (“to him”) rather than the relative pronoun (“to whom”), which could only refer to the Father. The significance of this for the later reader is the especially high Christology that is assumed in this doxology, which is directed from beginning to end to Christ himself, the one “who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood.”
Furthermore, the praise that is due him (Christ) is that regularly offered to God the Father: “glory and power.” “Glory” is one of those biblical words that is so common that many, if not most, readers simply go on to what comes next. But if “glory” is sometimes an elusive word, difficult to pin down with precision, it is the word used in the Old Testament primarily to offer praise to the eternal God. At the very outset of the Apocalypse, John sets it out as the primary word of doxology now afforded to Christ. And such “glory” attributed to God is frequently accompanied by recognition and acclamation of his “power”; thus David sings of Yahweh, “Yours, LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor” (1 Chr 29:11). For John the acclamation of such “glory and power” is now directed toward the Son, “the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” What else, then, could John do but conclude with a resounding Amen!, which means something like “so it is and shall forever be.”
What happens next is even more surprising. One might well assume the “amen” at the end of verse 6 is to mark the end of the salutation as such, which in a sense it was undoubtedly intended to do. But before John moves on to identify himself and his readers, he bursts into acclamation. First (v. 7), John celebrates the coming of Christ, with special emphasis directed toward those who do not know him; and second (v. 8), he sets all of this out by way of divine affirmation. In so doing, he in the first instance echoes several moments from the Old Testament Prophets; then, second, he pronounces God the Father’s own stamp of approval on what John is about to record for the sake of his reader and hearers.
Thus John turns from doxology (vv. 5–6) to acclamation. Citing first a well-known passage from Daniel 7:13 and then reworking a passage from Zechariah (12:10) that had come to be understood as messianic, John acclaims Christ’s second coming up front in his Apocalypse. But his immediate interest is not on the salvation-of-God’s-people aspect of that coming, but on its affect on those who do not know him. Thus in the language of Daniel he first announces Christ’s coming: Look, he is coming with the clouds, language that suggests both his coming from the heavenly realm and doing so with great power. Then picking up from Zechariah, John adds, and every eye will see him. His reason for citing the Zechariah passage is found in the next line, having to do with the believers’ enemies, especially the Romans who were ultimately responsible for the crucifixion itself. That is, even though Jesus had been betrayed by his own people, he had in fact been turned over to the Romans for crucifixion, as one more messianic pretender. Thus John goes on with the Zechariah passage: among those who will see him are even those who pierced him, an indirect allusion to Rome’s implication in the crucifixion that could scarcely have been missed by John’s original readers.
John then concludes the citation from Zechariah by adding his own, much broader, application to the prophetic text. What in Zechariah was a prophetic word about the mourning in Jerusalem over the one who had been slain is made universal in John: all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.” It is not altogether clear what was intended by this extension of Zechariah’s prophecy, but most likely it is in anticipation of what it will be like for the Romans, who were responsible for the crucifixion, as well as for all others, when Christ appears again at what the later church has come to call his “second coming.” Thus this citation stands in direct contrast to the doxology in verses 5b–6. The coming of the one whose death “freed us from our sins” will at the same time bring great mourning to those responsible for it—a reality that is so certain, and thus anticipated, that John bursts out with the double acclamation, “Yes! Amen!,” which the NIV rendered, So shall it be! Amen!
The final word, however, is not John’s, but God’s. Thus this remarkable introduction to the letters and visions that follow is punctuated by a divine word from the Lord God. First, God announces himself as the One who embraces all that language could possibly express, the Alpha and Omega (in English, “the A to Z”), and thus everything in between. Whatever human language could possibly express regarding God and all reality, the God who is speaking to John and thus standing behind this Apocalypse is the eternal, all-embracing God, who stands at the beginning of all things and is continuously there, and thus at the end—and this only from our limited point of view, since God is eternal and therefore timeless. Thus God is also the One who is, and who was, and who is to come, a choice of word order that is hardly accidental on John’s part. Whatever else is true about God, he is the Eternal One, always the “I am”; so John begins with the present tense, and then points backward and forward to stress God’s eternal nature.
The final word then punctuates what has preceded by stressing that God is the Almighty, language that recurs throughout the Old Testament, and which occurs twice (vv. 4–5) in the oracle from Zechariah 12 that immediately precedes the one John has just echoed. This designation, which occurs elsewhere in the New Testament outside the Revelation only in 2 Corinthians 6:18, will occur some eight more times in this book. Thus John concludes with a word that stresses the absolute, unparalleled power of the one and only God; he alone is “the Almighty.” It is not difficult to see in this emphasis a Christian response to the Empire, whose emperors and armies had caused her to regard herself in terms of invincibility.
One should note also, finally, that the description of the divine speaker as “the Lord God” and “the Almighty” is language once again derived directly from the prophetic tradition. In this case John is reflecting Amos 4:13 (in the LXX), where the oracle concludes, “the Lord God Almighty is his name.” In the present instance, and almost certainly for effect, John divides up this divine name by inserting the phrase “the One who is, and who was, and who is to come” between “the Lord God” and “the Almighty.” Thus the concluding self-identification puts most of the emphasis on God’s being the Eternal One, but whose identity here concludes with God’s being the All-Powerful One.
At the conclusion, one might ask further, why all of this as a way of introducing John’s Apocalypse? That is, how does it function so as to introduce the reader/hearers to what they are about to encounter? The answer to this seems to be twofold: first, it theologically grounds what they are about to see in God the Trinity; second, at the same time, it focuses especially on Christ and his work, which John does both by description (v. 5a) and by doxology (vv. 5b–6). Thus the way is paved for the introduction to the first vision in verses 12–20. But before that, in a piece of extraordinarily straightforward historical narrative, the readers are given the circumstances of the author and the cause of his writing.
The Dramatis Personae: John Introduces Himself and His Recipients (1:9–11)
9I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. 10On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit,
