Revelation 1:1-3

The Practical Apocalypse of Jesus Christ

A sermon by Pastor Joe Haynes

Preached on December 31, 2017 at Beacon Church

The Revelation is written so that Christians won't be afraid. What is it that people fear? The collapse of Apple’s stock value?  Re-election of the President or Prime Minister? What about disease? Death? Climate change? Nuclear war? The Apocalypse? It's fair to say that what we fear most largely depends on what we believe. The Revelation is not written, however, to everybody. It is written for a particular audience: those who serve God (v1a). It is written to encourage and equip God's people to overcome their fear of the future (v1a), by dramatically strengthening their confidence in Jesus Christ. So the hero of the book of Revelation is Jesus Himself. And it is written in such a way that if you begin to understand its message, and if you are a servant of God, a believer in Jesus yourself, when you hear about the stock market collapsing, you will say, "I'm not afraid. My treasure is in Heaven with Christ." (1 Pe 1:3-5) When you are troubled about the next election, you will say, "I'm not afraid. King Jesus is on the throne." (Heb 10:12-13) When the doctor breaks the news that it's cancer, you will say, "I'm not afraid. My life is hidden with Christ in God." (Col 3:3) When death takes someone you love, you will say, "I'm not afraid. God will bring with Christ those who have fallen asleep." (1 Thess 4:14) When you hear alarming news about Earth's climate, you will say, "I'm not afraid. Even the wind and the sea obey Jesus." (Mar 4:41) When you hear a rogue nation threatening nuclear war, you will say, "I'm not afraid. No power on Earth can separate me from the love of Christ." (Rom 8:38-39) And when you hear that the Apocalypse is coming, you will say, "Even so, come Lord Jesus." (Rev 22:20)

Can we trust this book?  

“The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place,” (Rev. 1:1 ESV). It is the personal testimony of Jesus. That’s what those first 5 words mean. It’s his book. Jesus Christ: Jesus is the name the angel told Joseph to give him when he was born, because it means “Yahweh Saves”, and “he [did] save his people from our sins” (Mt 1:21). The implications and weight of prophecy behind even the name of Jesus are incredibly significant for every person who lives and breathes on this Earth. Your sins are why you will face the wrath of Almighty God when you die. Jesus saved His people from their sins. So the question is, have you asked him to accept you as one of His people? Christ is the title given to Jesus by the prophets who foretold His first coming to save His people and be their King forever (c.f. “messiah the prince” in Daniel 9:25; “messiah” or “anointed” in Psalm 2).

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?  2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,  3 "Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us."  4 He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.  5 Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying,  6 "As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill."  7 I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, "You are my Son; today I have begotten you.  8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.  9 You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."  10 Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.  11 Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.  12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.  (Ps. 2:1-12 ESV)

Is this Jesus Christ worthy of your trust?

So this is His message, and in it He reveals everything God has given to Him to be revealed. [read v1a] The word "revelation" is the Greek word, "apocalypse". Some people might be surprised to learn that the word "apocalypse" does not mean the "end of the world" or "collapse of civilization" or anything like that. The word simply means "something that is revealed".[i] So what is revealed in this book? Well first, the future things that were going to happen soon. But obviously also (if you've ever read this book) the things that were going to happen at the end of the world as we know it. The main thing revealed in this book, however, is not merely an event, but a person: Jesus is revealed in this book as the sovereign Son of God, and as the King of Kings, the one who has all authority in Heaven and on Earth, and who will rule all of Creation forever (c.f. Rev 10:7).

Can you imagine a father on Christmas morning saying to his 16 year old son, "I have  one more gift for you, but it's out in the driveway." And as he goes outside, the son sees the shape of a car covered by a large sheet. And his father pulls back the cover to reveal what is underneath… That is like what God gives His Son, Jesus Christ here in verse 1. An uncovering. He pulls the sheet off to reveal a much greater gift He has in store for Christ--an everlasting Kingdom and glory. So when John says that "God gave… him" this revelation, it is as if God said to Jesus, "Here are my plans to glorify you and establish your Kingdom, my Son, over all of Creation. Now go and show this to your servants." In fact, then, the Revelation God gave Jesus, is the forecast of events up until all of God's plans for Jesus are finished. Like the prophecy Daniel was given in 7:14 about what God would give to the Son of Man, to Jesus: "And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed."

So can we trust this book? It is a gift from God to Jesus. Can God be trusted? It's also a message from Jesus to "his servants", written down by John. Verse 1b tells us how: “He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John,  2 who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw,” (Rev. 1:1-2 ESV). Jesus sent an angel to John, and that angel "made [the revelation] known" to John. I'll come back to that next week. But notice that John wrote down everything the angel showed him, as a witness testifying to everything he saw, and that we are not expected to just take John's word for it: he says that this is God's Word and Jesus' testimony that he is merely recording and passing along to Jesus' servants. At the end of the book, Jesus Himself again confirms that He sent His angel to give this message to John for the sake of the churches, and that this message is the personal testimony of Jesus: “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify to you about these things for the churches,” (Rev. 22:16 ESV). “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20 ESV). Therefore, unless you believe Jesus is a liar, you must trust this book.

Just in case you're wondering if the message of the Revelation has maybe been altered over time since it was written, the whole book of Revelation is preserved in the oldest complete Greek copy of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus, written in about the middle of the 300's.[ii] In all that time, with all the copies made since, there are no discrepancies between that and what we read today big enough to make any real difference to the meaning of the book.[iii] (e.g., instead of “servants” v1 says “saints”)

Is this book relevant today?

The answer to that becomes obvious when we realize this book is like a counterpart, or sequel, to the book of Daniel. First, the first verse of the Revelation repeat words from the book of Daniel to help readers and hearers connect this prophecy with that one (Dan 2:28-29, 45). Daniel explained that his prophecy was to make known "the things that must happen in the latter days" (lit. in Greek LXX) using the same words as in the Greek translation of that passage as in Rev 1:1, "things that must happen". But Daniel's prophecy was about events in the "latter days". It was many years later, after King Nebuchadnezzar had died, when even the first events in that prophecy began to happen. The last events of Daniel 2 are still future today. Second, the last words of the Revelation also echo the last words of Daniel's book. In Daniel 12:4, the angel tells him to "shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end." But John is told exactly the opposite in Revelation 22:10, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near."

At the end of the Revelation, in 22:12, Jesus promises, "Behold, I am coming soon…" So the final events prophesied in the book of Revelation surround the future second coming of Jesus. Tomorrow is the first day of 2018. If John had this vision in the year 96, it is now 1,922 years later. So is this one of those times when God's idea of "soon" and our idea of "soon" are very different? As in 2 Peter 3, for God, "a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day"? Because if the message of this book is about events that could still be another 1900 years in the future, then a) it doesn't inspire confidence in this book if none of it has happened yet, and b) it doesn't seem very useful for us today.

Unlike Daniel's words in Dan 2:28 when he said that prophecy was about things "that must take place in the latter days", in Rev 1:1, John clearly says this book is about "things that must soon take place"--he adds the word "soon" instead of "in the latter days". The implication is that the things predicted in the book of Revelation must start to happen soon. And again in verse 3, still part of his introduction, John writes, "the time is near". As I’ll show when we get to chapter 6, the first set of evens predicted in this book started happening immediately. However, Jesus still has not returned. To tell readers the time is near, and that Jesus is coming soon, does not mean everything predicted happens all at once. The people this book was originally written for, "servants of God" at the end of the first century, were not stupid, or naïve. Yes, they knew that the return of Christ is often described as coming "soon". But they also knew from Daniel's prophecies that before Christ comes, a lot of bad things were still going to happen before Jesus would return.

They had the book of Daniel. They knew they were living under the terrible fourth beast of Daniel 7; they knew a time of great trouble was coming, a “war against the saints” (Dan 7:21). Everything before that, predicted by Daniel, had come true. So they knew that the worst part, the war against the saints was still to come, when a mysterious power, the "little horn" would grow up out of the Roman Empire and bring great suffering on God's servants. For believers living at the end of the first century, when John wrote the Revelation, there was lots of reason to fear what was coming. The insane Roman Emperor, Nero, almost 30 years earlier had cruelly persecuted Christians. Vespasian waged a brutal war against the Jews, and became emperor the year after Nero died. His son Titus destroyed Jerusalem in a massive slaughter, and became the next emperor. And then Titus' brother, Domitian, became emperor and in his hatred of Jews, Christians were caught up in a persecution second only to Nero's.[iv] One of his victims was Jesus' Apostle, John, who wrote this book. The Emperor Domitian exiled him to the island of Patmos on account of preaching the Gospel.[v] The emperors of the Roman Empire, that terrible fourth beast in Daniel's prophecies, were getting worse. So the very practical question worried them: Would the "little horn" of the Roman Beast appear soon? How much would Christians suffer? When would Jesus return and bring the peace and victory He promised?

The book of Revelation was written to answer these questions. And when Christians began reading the book, and listening to it, they quickly realized there were still many things that must happen before Christ comes. As the readers in churches opened to them this book of prophecy, with its intricate prophecy of 7 seals, then 7 trumpets, then 7 bowls of wrath, all before Christ's Kingdom comes, they could clearly see that although these events were going to start happening very soon, it would take a long time for all of them to come to pass. Likely there would be many, many years to come before Jesus was to return. But now they had a long-range forecast, a roadmap to remind them Jesus is in control.

Is this book useful today?

How much use, how practically helpful this book becomes to us, depends on how we interpret it. Verse 1 says God gave this revelation "to show his servants the things that must soon take place". You could make the Revelation practically useless by ignoring that. If you were alive when John wrote this and said, "None of this will matter in my lifetime," then it wouldn’t make much difference to you. If you say, "None of this should be taken literally," then it will only be vaguely helpful at best. But the words in verse 1 require us who read and hear this to accept it as a revelation of "the things"--specific events--which "must soon take place". And God "gave" this revelation to Jesus for the express purpose of "showing [it] to his servants". Not to torment them with frightening images, or to fill them with uncertain anxiety, but to bless them.

Verse 3 gives a promise of blessing that is unique in the whole Bible. “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near,” (Rev. 1:3 ESV). This is the only book of the Bible that promises “special blessing to the reader and the hearer”.[vi] I need to point out a couple of things about this promise. First, it assumes that those who read it will read with some understanding. Because the promise is also applied to the hearers if they respond in the right way. Like when Ezra and the priests (Ezra 8:8) read the Scripture out loud to the people, where it adds, "and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading". For the hearers to respond properly means that the readers will often have to explain what they read. I don't know if you've read this book before, but not everyone is going to understand it on the first time through. And that's the second assumption about this promise: the hearers who are blessed by it, "keep what is written in it". This means we read and hear to obey. Obey the commands, heed the warnings, receive the encouragements, believe the promises, and worship the divine Author whose testimony here must be trusted. My favourite commentary adds this explanation: "This reminds us that the Revelation is not intended to satisfy curiosity about the future, but to give information for practical application to daily life."[vii]

In fact, if we belong to Jesus, what more do we need today? A blessing from God. A promise of happiness in Christ forever. And that’s just what He promises us in Rev 1:3: “…for the time is near.”