Fr. Stephen De Young: I’m sure we’re going to breeze right through the book of Revelation; it’s so clear and understandable, and no one will have any questions at all. As you flip through the Orthodox Study Bible, you may notice there’s more notes than text on most of the pages. [Laughter] So I have a feeling it will not move that quickly, even though the book of Revelation is actually not that long of a book, if you just go by the text. I mean, it’s certainly longer than 2 or 3 John or St. Jude’s epistle, but it’s not super long, compared to the gospels, for example.

But by way of brief, brief, brief re-introduction, remember this is going to be the account of a visionary experience that St. John has while he’s in exile on the island of Patmos, where there was a salt mine. So we’re also going to see that he was likely not the only Christian there, because there’s going to be a worship space, or at least a place where they gather for prayer, the Christians on the island. That space where he received the vision is still preserved. There’s a monastery next to it now, an Orthodox monastery on Patmos. You can go and see that place directly if you go there.

Q1: Who had exiled him?

Q2: Domitian.

Q1: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: And so… Yeah, that’s probably enough, and we’ll get some more here as we pick up. Unless there are any other comments or preliminary questions or a bad weather report that I need to know about, we’ll go ahead and pick up in the revelation of St. John, chapter one, verse one.

“The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants things which must shortly take place, and he sent and signified it by his angel to his servant, John.” The first point here is what is being revealed in this revelation. What is it a revelation of?

Q3: Jesus Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Of Christ, right. So it is Christ revealing himself. Again, this is an important reminder. He’s not revealing things that are going to happen in the distant future. He’s not revealing the end times. He’s not revealing some war in the future. It’s a revelation of Christ himself, “which God gave him to show his servants,” and what is he showing his servants in revealing himself? “Things which must shortly take place.” “Shortly” does not mean 2,000 years later. I think it would go without saying, but some of you may have heard someone talking about the book of Revelation recently, so it doesn’t go without saying, apparently.

But this is important: “Things that must shortly take place.” Minimally this means, which should also be kind of obvious, that this text that St. John is writing down— He’s recording this vision so that the written record of this vision can be sent to, as we’re going to see tonight, these seven churches, where he’s had this leadership role, which means that what’s written here is going to be relevant to those people living in the first century in those churches. There is a message here for them from Christ that’s being given by an angel or messenger to St. John to pass on to them. Nowhere are we going to see where it says, “Okay, that was the stuff for right now. The rest of this stuff, don’t worry about. A couple millennia from now, that’s when the rest of this stuff is going to happen.” We’re not going to see a gap; we’re not going to see— Everything in this book, the book of Revelation, is addressed to those people. That doesn’t mean—

And it’s addressed to them in the same sense that St. Paul’s epistles were addressed to the churches he sent them to. Now that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to us. It doesn’t mean that we’re reading it as archaeology or something like: “Oh, isn’t this an interesting historical thing.” The book of Revelation, like the rest of the Scriptures, is written for us, but it’s not written to us. Those are different things. Because this is the revelation of Christ, and Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever, Christ will also reveal himself to us through this book. But it’s not written to us as in “we’re the generation who can finally understand these things; these things are all unfolding now in a way they weren’t before.”

And this isn’t just me picking on Evangelicals; I want to be clear about that, too, when I say this, because this isn’t just contemporary Evangelicals. [Laughter] This has been all through Church history. Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century had this all worked out in terms of the geopolitics of this day, who was what. Martin Luther had this all worked out: pope was the antichrist, and he had the whole thing, and the Prussians and this and that. So this has happened over and over again. As we’re coming up on the year 1000 AD, people all over Europe sold their possessions and went on pilgrimage because they were totally sure—“Hey: thousand years, round number!” Christ was going to return. Now it’s all happening. They were wrong. So I’m not picking on the contemporary people who do this any more than I’m picking on any other generation of Christians who have done this.

As this goes on, though, I’m not only going to argue that all of those folks were wrong; I’m also going to argue that in a certain sense they were all right, because it’s not just that, yes, obviously, Christ didn’t return in the 18th century or the 16th century or the 11th century, but it’s also that the things we’re going to see in the book of Revelation—we talked last time about what “apocalyptic” is, what “revelation” is—the spiritual realities that are depicted here, that St. John sees and that he relates are spiritual realities all through history. This is the story of spiritual reality in this last age before Christ’s return, which all of us have been living in over the past 2,000 years. So all of those folks were in one sense right and in one sense wrong. Some of the crazier ones were just wrong, like Jack Van Impe saying Juan Carlos, King of Spain, was the antichrist. [Laughter] He just kind of missed that one, because Juan Carlos didn’t even do anything.

But for the most part, they’ve been— The people who thought that Napoleon was the antichrist were right in a certain sense: he was one. The people who thought that Hitler was the antichrist were right in a certain sense: he was one—not the final one, but— So the spiritual realities that they’re connecting with—they’re right in a certain sense, but wrong in sort of the finality of it. We’re going to see that sort of all the way through here. As we go through, I’m going to start with: Okay, here’s what this is talking about in the first century. We have to understand that first, and then we can move from there to how does that speak to us today; how do we relate to that today. You can’t just— We can’t just leap— And that’s true not just for Revelation; it’s true for all the Scriptures, but because people have pegged Revelation of prophecy and they have a certain understanding of prophecy, they tend to interpret it in a way that they don’t interpret anything else, in a sort of ahistorical way that they don’t interpret anything else.

So that’s verse one. [Laughter]

Verse two: “Who bore witness to the Word of God.” This is talking about St. John now. “Who bore witness to the Word of God.” “Word” there should be capitalized, by the way, because this is St. John we’re talking about. “And to the testimony of Jesus Christ, to all things that he saw.”

Now, this is all past tense. At the beginning here— People have a tendency to kind of ignore the verb tenses here and say, “Oh, well, it’s just saying in this book he’s bearing witness to the things he saw in the vision,” but that’s not actually how the verb tenses are structured here. This is actually a reference to his gospel. You won’t find a lot of people talking about that, because like we talked about last time in the introduction, people want to say it’s a different John. They don’t want to say it’s the same author as the gospel. As I argued last time and we’ll see as we go through, it’s the same person. Because we’re going to see, even as we go through, that the book of Revelation is structured the same way like his epistles were structured when we went through those fairly recently. I know it’s been a while on the gospel; it’s been five years on the gospel, but it’s the epistles we went through relatively recently.

So this is talking— This is identifying who this John is. It’s telling us that it’s St. John the Apostle, “who bore witness to the Word of God.” How does his gospel start? “In the beginning was the Word.” This is Logos: it’s the same word. And then “gave testimony of Jesus Christ, to all the things that he saw.” So that’s talking about the gospel.

Verse three: “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it, for the time is near.” Notice the two pieces. There’s “he who reads and those who hear.” We have to remember, this is part of the same act, because people weren’t literate. It wasn’t that he was going to make 100,000 copies and get on the Ephesus Times’ best-sellers list by selling tons of copies of this book because everybody was going to sit at home and read it. Most people couldn’t read, so this was going to be read publicly. This is “the one who reads and those who hear.” So someone’s going to come to their church, if they’re in one of these seven cities, with this text and read it to them. So “blessed is the one who reads; blessed are those who hear.”

But then notice part two: “And keep those things which are written in it.” This “keep” is not like remember intellectually, like “Oh yeah, I forgot that part this week.” [Laughter] This is “keep” like keeping commandments. This is the same kind of hearing-and-doing idea that we got from Christ in the gospels over and over again. St. Paul in Romans: “It’s not the hearer of the Law but the doer that’s justified.” We saw in St. James’ epistle… So this also should condition how we look at this book, that if we really hear this book or read it with understanding, it’s going to require action from us.

So this isn’t a book of intellectual curiosities. This isn’t a book of sort of fascinating predictions in the future. This isn’t like reading Nostradamus. This is Scripture. It’s like the prophecy in the Old Testament. Even when we think about Old Testament prophecy, we tend to think of: “Oh yeah, they predicted stuff that was going to happen in the future.” That’s not really most of what the prophets did if you read the prophets in the Old Testament—unless you mean by that the prophet showing up and saying, “God’s going to wipe you all out if you don’t repent.” I mean, technically, that is a prediction of your future! [Laughter] But the point is a moral one. The point is a moral one, and if you actually heard what the prophet was saying, that would then require action from you, namely, repentance in that kind of situation, that you would change.

So, again, we have to read Revelation the same way we read other Scriptures, that if we read this and we understand it, it’s going to require us to change how we live and what we do: there’s going to be a response required from us if we want this blessing. It’s not just saying, “You will be magically blessed if you read three chapters a day of this book.” [Laughter] It’s saying, “The blessing of God will come if you really hear it and then you put into practice what you’ve learned from Christ.”

Q4: What is “the time is near”?

Fr. Stephen: So we’ve talked about what does “the time” mean when we have the definite article. We’ve talked about “the day.” I think we’ve also seen “the time.” One place where we see “the time” is the gospel reading that we hear all too often in the Orthodox Church—because I have to come up with a different-sounding sermon every time [Laughter]—of Christ casting the demons into the pigs. And I recycle my deviled ham joke every year. [Laughter] When they see—the demons see Christ coming, they say, “Are you here to torment us before the time?” So there is “the day” or “the time,” and that is a way in the Scriptures that refers to “the end.” The end. “The end is near” has a slightly different ring to it.

We also have to talk about what “near” means, because a lot of people will come to this and say, “Oh, the time is near. St. John thought Christ was about to return,” or “Whatever generation this is for is when Christ is about to return.” But “near” does not necessarily mean extension in space or time. Let me give you an example. If we say that Christ is near, do we mean, like, he’s nearby? Do we mean he’s about to show up? No, but if I say, “Christ is near to each of us,” you know what I mean. [Laughter] Even though if you try to parse that out in terms of time and space, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you still know what I mean.

This is conveying a similar kind of idea. The end, the final judgment, the time when things are put in order, that time is near to all of us, because for any one of us it could come at any moment, not just in the fact that Christ could return at any moment, but that any one of us could face our end at any moment. The idea here is that it’s why it comes after “the one who hears it and who keeps it.” The idea is there is a sense of urgency about you taking the action, hearing and understanding and taking action, because hearing and then procrastination is very easy. [Laughter] “Yes, I ought to do that, and one of these days I will. One of these days I’ll get around to repenting. I’ll start taking this stuff more seriously. I’ll start praying more; I’ll start going to church more. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, but, you know… I’ll get there.” And so it’s to communicate the end is not somewhere far off in relation to you where you can procrastinate; it’s near, so don’t. That’s the idea.

Verse four: “John to the seven churches which are in Asia: grace to you and peace from him who was and who is and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne.” We’ll pause there. Now you may notice, that sounds like the beginning of a letter. We’ve just read a whole bunch of epistles; we’ve just read a whole bunch of letters, and they all kind of start that way. In fact, that’s how or similar at least to how St. John started his epistles that we just finished reading, and that’s because—this is a letter. I mentioned last time that this first part that we’re going to talk about tonight and maybe next time, too, consists of seven basically cover letters. So this first part that we’re reading is a general letter, the rest of chapter one.

So this is a letter addressed to all seven of them, and then, starting in chapter two, there’s going to be one letter that’s specifically to each church. When the person showed up with the copy of the text of Revelation, it would have at the beginning the general letter to all the seven churches, and then the letter to that particular church, and then it would go into the rest of the text.

Once we get past—I was going to say past the first century, but since this was around 95 or 96, that’s pretty quick. [Laughter] In the early second century, then, it all gets compiled. So we’ve got the general letter, then we’ve got all seven of the letters to the individual churches, and then we’ve got the text of the book is what we have in our New Testament. But this is sort of the cover letter, where St. John is going to address the churches in general, explain what this book is, try to give it some context, give an introduction, a little more pithy than mine last time. [Laughter] And then he’s going to kind of directly apply it to those individual churches and what’s going on there and how it should affect them, because we’re going to see each of those church is dealing with different things, shall we say, and is doing better or worse.

Now, there is a weird early modern way of reading the book of Revelation. There’s lots of weird ways to read the book of Revelation, let’s be honest. There’s a weird early modern one where they tried to turn the seven letters into, like, seven ages of the Church, and tried to track them onto Church history somehow. I mean, hey, they didn’t have journals at the time or dissertations, so I don’t really know what the exercise was about, but somebody thought this a fruitful exercise. The biggest problem with that, of course, is that, again, these are letters to actual churches full of actual people. How would they have thought, “Oh no, this letter that he wrote to us is actually a prediction of how the Church will be between the years 1200 and 1450.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Sort of a weird code.

So, no, these were cover letters written to actual people whom St. John knows. He’s lived and worked in these communities. He founded a couple of these communities. So they have a relationship, and he wants them, each of the churches, as they need to receive it, to hear it, put it into practice, and get what they need to get out of it.

The other thing I will note—well, two more things I’ll note here in the introduction. He says, “Grace to you and peace from him is and who was and who is to come.” The way that— And that’s the way it’s always translated in English. There’s a problem with the way it’s translated in English, because when you hear that, it sounds like, “Is, was, and is to come” sounds like: present, past, future. I’ve even heard people do sermons and write things based on that and try to connect that to the name Yahweh in the Old Testament. It means “he who is…” Here’s the problem with it. That “who is to come” is literally “who is coming.” “Who is and who was and who is coming,” like from Point A to Point B. So, yeah. [Laughter] That’s not the future of “to be.” It’s not “who is and who was and who will be”; it’s “he who is and who was and who is coming.”

Why is that important? Because, in addition to weeding out those bad over-interpretations, “he who is, o on,” is a Greek translation of Yahweh. So that’s where he starts. He’s clearly talking about not just any god; he’s talking about the God of Israel, the God of the Old Testament. And that “was,” then, is a reference back to the Old Testament, the old covenant. And then “who is coming” refers to God visiting. I know we’ve talked about this before. This is language you see a lot of times in the prophets that says, “God will visit his people” or “He will visit their iniquities upon them.” And we hear “visit”; we think, “Oh, isn’t that nice! He’s coming for a visit. We’ll set out a nice potluck.” This is less like that and more like: “Wait till your father gets home” kind of visit. [Laughter] Like, he’s going to come visit and he’s going to sort some stuff out, quite literally. Justice is going to happen when he shows up. So you need to prepare for his visit in the sense that you want to be on the right side of that visit so it’s a pleasant visit and not on the wrong side of that visit so it’s an unpleasant visit where you get straightened out.

That’s how the day of the Lord is talked about—the day of the Lord, literally the day of Yahweh in Hebrew—that’s how it’s talked about in the Old Testament. So he’s talking about God; he’s talking about God coming and doing this. But by saying that, by applying that to God—he’s talking about God the Father here, because he’s about to talk about Christ, but he’s connecting what we would call the second coming of Christ to the coming of God. He’s uniting those two things as one event. We’ll see that here as we go forward.

Also, “the seven spirits who are before his throne,” this is another thing where people… Like, you notice the capitalized “spirits”? I think it’s because people are trying to make this Trinitarian.

Q4: Seven?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, that’s the problem. [Laughter] You’ve got God the Father and you’ve got Christ in the next verse, and so they’re like: “Hey! There’s the word ‘spirit—s.’ Let’s try and make that the Holy Spirit.” [Laughter] And then you get sort of lengthy sort of prognostications on how the Holy Spirit is sevenfold or seven is the number of perfection so it’s saying the Holy Spirit is perfect. And then you’re like: Yeah, but it’s still plural… [Laughter] And the basic problem with that is that this has a very obvious referrent. It’s just that people aren’t that familiar with it.

So if you want a place to look for this in the Orthodox Study Bible, you can go to the book of Tobit. When St. Raphael shows up in the book of Tobit and identifies himself—he’s sort of in disguise for a while. But when he identifies himself, he identifies himself as Raphael, “one of the seven angels who stands before the throne of God.” And you find this all through Second Temple Jewish literature, that there are seven archangels—“arch” meaning chief—there are seven chief angels who stand before the throne of God. Their names are listed all over the place in Second Temple Jewish literature; the Church Fathers, all the way through to late antiquity list the seven archangels. We have the synaxis of the holy archangels. Most of them aren’t as well known as St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael. There’s also St. Uriel. Then the other three names shift around.

So there’s seven, they’re described as standing before the throne of God. When you see the seven spirits who are before his throne, before the throne of God, Jewish people reading this in the first century would have said, “Oh, the seven archangels.” That’s not to deny the Trinity; it’s just to say he’s not talking about the Holy Trinity right here. There are going to be places where he talks about the Holy Spirit; he uses “spirit” in the singular there, not the plural. So that shouldn’t be capitalized.

Q1: Was he thinking maybe there’s a spirit assigned to each parish?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there are seven angels for the seven churches that he’s going to get to, but he doesn’t identify them as the archangels in particular.

So then verse five: “And from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth.” Even though it’s not the end of the verse, we’ll pause there because they actually did a good paragraph break there in the New King James. So now from Christ—and how is he identified? “The faithful witness.” Why would St. John identify him as a witness? You need two witnesses to establish the truth of something, so he’s got God the Father and he’s got Christ as two witnesses to what he’s about to tell them. He’s also “the firstborn from the dead,” so he’s seeding in there the idea of the resurrection already, that it’s not just that Christ rose from the dead and that’s amazing and wonderful, but firstfruits: the firstfruits is the first of your crops. So when the first of your crops springs up, you’re like: “Good! We’re going to have a harvest this year. They didn’t all die!” [Laughter] So that’s the beginning of something bigger. So Christ’s resurrection is the beginning of the resurrection in the broad sense, not just of humanity but of the whole cosmos being restored and transfigured. And then “and the ruler over the kings of the earth.” Who are the kings of the earth in this case?

Q2: Domitian, the Roman emperor.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of includes Domitian, yes, but what he’s really got in view here are the demonic powers.

Q2: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: Which includes Domitian, because he was worshiped as a god. [Laughter] And the genius of the emperor, as it were, which— The word “genius” originally meant a sort of spirit, a divine spirit that possessed certain individuals, so when you’re calling someone a genius, you’re calling them a demoniac, technically. [Laughter] But that line in Greek and Roman culture didn’t exist, essentially. Socrates says in a couple points in Plato’s Dialogues that he’s possessed by a demon, and that creeps us all out, but they understood it differently. In fact, at one point it’s really creepy: he says he has a demon that whispers wisdom to his soul. That kind of freaks you out, right? But that was seen as a good thing. This is the touch of the divine. That’s why they have this wisdom that seems supernatural. That’s why they have this power in the case of the Roman emperor that seems superhuman.

So, yeah, they viewed that as a good thing. You see that a little bit in the book of Acts when there’s the enslaved woman who’s demon-possessed, whose owners are using her as a fortune-teller to make money. And they cast the demon out of her and the owners are mad because they’re like: “Man! We were making good money!” [Laughter] But that was the same kind of thing: that kind of oracular power came from this. So it’s related to Domitian in that he was seen to be the human end of this divine rule which, from the perspective of early Christians like St. John, was actually demonic rule. The imperial rule of Rome was not divine in the sense of being holy or godly or wonderful, but demonic and oppressive.

This is connected to Christ’s ascension and enthronement. Before he ascends at the end of St. Matthew’s gospel, he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” So the idea here— This is another idea— We talked about how in epistles you lay the groundwork; you see the ideas. Part of the idea here is that in Christ, God is taking back the world from those who claim to rule it, and it’s now going to be returned to sort of his direct rule. And so that’s already happened in the enthronement of Christ. We’re going to see how that plays out as the book continues, but St. John is seeding that here.

Then he continues: “To him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood.” This is again Christ, who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood. Note for the record how Christ’s blood works vis-à-vis sin here again. It’s not “he who appeased the wrath of his Father who hated us and wanted to destroy us.” [Laughter] it’s not that God was thirsty for our blood but took Jesus instead; it’s that Christ’s blood has washed us and purified us and restored us. We saw that same language, remember, in 1 John, one of many connections. This is how St. John always talks about Christ’s blood. He’s analogizing the actual day of atonement, where the blood of the one goat was taken and used to purify the tabernacle.

Verse six: “And has made us kings and priests to his God and Father. To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” “Kings and priests,” I won’t do a whole— We did Hebrews, so I won’t go down a whole Melchizedek rabbit-hole here, but the idea here is that not only is kingship and priesthood reunited in Christ, but that’s passed on to all of us. Because, remember, the promise back when the first covenant was given at Mount Sinai was that they would become a kingdom of priests. That didn’t pan out so well. But then St. Peter, as we saw, 1 Peter, takes that and applies that to Christians, to Christians in the Church, says, “You’re a royal priesthood.” It’s that same language of king and priest reunited, but they’re reunited in Christ. They weren’t reunited in ancient Israel; they didn’t pull it off. In fact, they were split. The king and the priest, the priesthood, were completely separate, but they’re reunited in Christ.

And so that means, St. John is saying, that— And again we’re setting the table for what’s going to come. It’s not just that Christ now has rule and dominion over the cosmos, but that’s administered through his people. So what he’s going in reclaiming the world, reclaiming the creation for God, he’s doing that through us as Christians. He’s working through us. And how is he doing that through us? Through us going around and conquering? Through us going and having a revolution against the Romans? That didn’t go so well when they tried it. Three times. [Laughter] It went increasingly worse, in fact. No, it’s through priesthood. It’s through priesthood. It’s through taking the world, taking the creation, taking the things of the world and offering them back to God, offering ourselves to God, offering our lives to God, offering each other to God. In doing that, we then redeem them. We bring those things back under God’s rule.

And notice he ties it back around. He started out with God the Father, went to Christ, and then ties it back around to God the Father. He doesn’t have them separate off over here, but he’s deliberately bringing them together—not saying they’re the same person, but they also aren’t separate in St. John’s mind.

Verse seven: “Behold, he is coming with clouds, and every eye will see him, even they who pierced him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. Even so, amen.” So this is talking about Christ again, the “he.” He’s coming with clouds, so this is a particular reference, the cloud thing, and it’s not just to the fact that when Christ ascended into heaven, remember, he ascended sort of on a cloud and they said he’ll come back the same way; this isn’t just “Oh, yeah, he’s going to come back out of the sky. God’s up there in the sky somewhere.” That’s not what it’s going for. This is a reference back to the book of Daniel, where the Son of Man comes riding a cloud before the Ancient of Days. So when Christ refers to the coming judgment in the gospels, they’ll talk about when the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven. This is actually an image that’s taken from Baal worship. Baal was the cloud-rider, and so Daniel kind of steals that, says, “Uh-uh. That’s not him.” [Laughter]

So when it’s talking about him coming on the clouds, this is talking about him coming in judgment, it’s talking about him coming as the Son of Man with his angels to judge the world. And remember, judging means putting things back in order, which is a good thing if you’re oppressed, not great if you’re an oppressor. [Laughter] Great thing if you’re righteous; not a great thing if you’re wicked. Then everything gets put back. Last are first and first are last as a result of this sort of sorting out.

Notice also, “every eye will see him.” Now I’m picking on Evangelicals. You can’t have a secret rapture if every eye sees him. Can’t have people just disappearing and leaving their clothes, lawnmower running across the yard, planes crashing out of the sky because the pilot was a Christian. “Every eye will see him” when this happens.

And notice: “even they who pierced him.” That is a reference to the crucifixion, but it’s actually a very specific reference, not just to the book of Deuteronomy but to the Greek version of the book of Deuteronomy. At the end of— In Deuteronomy 28-30, it lays out— It’s the end of Moses’ sort of final sermon to the people of Israel before they go into the promised land, and it ends with him setting out blessings and curses. He says, “Today I set before you blessings and curses, and you must choose.” Everybody chose curses. You wouldn’t think they would, but they all did. He says, “This is what will happen if you keep the covenant, you obey the commandments; this is what’ll happen if you don’t.”

At the end of “what’ll happen if you don’t,” at the end of the litany of all the horrible things that’ll happen, it says in the Hebrew something roughly like, “Your life will dangle,” like dangle by a thread, “and you will not understand.” That gets translated into Greek. As you can tell from the way I just translated, it’s kind of weird, ambiguous Hebrew. The way that gets translated into Greek is “And you will look upon the one you have pierced,” which early Christians, at least starting with St. John here in Revelation, connected that to Christ, that part of what would happen to Israel and later Judah, Judea, because they had turned their back on God and not kept the covenant and not kept the commandments, part of that curse was that when Christ came to them they didn’t recognize him. The Messiah finally came to redeem them; they didn’t recognize him, and they ended up being party to his death.

St. John is dropping in this little allusion to Deuteronomy, so he’s saying, when he says, “All the tribes of the earth,” next, there’s one way to read that, especially if you were a Jewish person reading this text, read, “All the tribes of the earth”: “Oh, yeah, the nations, the Gentiles. Yeah, they’ve got it coming!” [Laughter] “Yeah! He’s going to show up and smite them and make them our slaves!” But St. John kind of precludes that by saying, “including those who pierced him.” All the tribes, including the Jewish tribes, will all see him and will all be subject to judgment, and that “those who pierced him,” because of the Deuteronomy reference, is unambiguous in terms of whom he’s talking about. Everyone, all included.

Notice they will mourn because of him. You can call St. John a pessimist about how obedient to the commandments of God he thinks the world is, but I think he’s just being a realist, then as now.

Verse eight: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, says the Lord, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Once again, that is “who is coming.” But now here’s something interesting. Who’s talking there?

Q2: Which one?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it just says “the Lord.” Whom were we just talking about? Christ. That’s who the “he” has been. “Those who pierced him”: they didn’t pierce God the Father. So if this is Christ speaking, he says that he’s the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end: the beginning and the end of the Greek alphabet, says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come.” That’s what St. John called the Father back in verse four. And so we talked about how the coming of Christ and the coming of God to visit his people is united here as the same event, but if Christ is also “he who is, o on” in Greek, it means he’s also Yahweh. So we’ve got two Persons here, minimally. Two persons who are Yahweh, who are labeled as Yahweh the God of Israel. So it’s not just the Father; it’s also the Lord. We saw this God-Lord language all through the New Testament. One God the Father, one Lord, Jesus Christ.

So there’s the connection, and that title, “Almighty,” is also a title in the Old Testament. It’s Pantocrator in Greek, All-powerful, All-mighty. So this is fairly clearly— You get a lot of people who do special pleading here. It’s like: “No, no, no, no, no, no! This is the Father talking now!” There’s a big problem with that, because, remember, this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, that Christ gave to John, so why would you have the Father talking in the first person if Christ is the one giving the vision? So it’s pretty clear that for St. John here, Yahweh the God of Israel is at least two Persons: God the Father and Christ. So this isn’t something that gets made up in the fourth century. I know we’ve been through this before, but it bears repeating.