He Who Speaks

Our text this morning is Revelation chapter 1, verses 9 through 20.

Revelation 1:9–20

And uh, I mean, I'm excited about starting this series.

I'm really looking forward to the messages that follow.

Um, but I want to begin our thoughts on this series, and before we really dig into the passage, by just asking a real simple question.

When I say the name Jesus Christ, what comes to your mind?

Some of you may think of Jesus the baby in a manger, especially around December each year.

Some of you may think of Jesus the teacher or the healer.

Maybe just now when I said Jesus Christ, you're thinking back, you're picturing some guy in a toga and sandals healing people.

Maybe some of you immediately picture Jesus crucified on a cross or even an empty tomb.

But I'm excited this morning to remind us all that Jesus is today not only risen, but ascended, glorified, and exalted and enthroned at the right hand of his Father, ruling the nations, commanding angelic battles, and orchestrating events in the lives on a micro and a macro level that the redeemed will spend all eternity marveling over.

When's the last time you prayed to Jesus, the exalted one?

Not Jesus the lowly, but Jesus the mighty King.

This is a shift in our thinking.

When so much of the gospels, which is about half of the New Testament, talks about Jesus' life.

We tend to keep Jesus in first century Judaism and forget that he is alive today, ruling the world, exalted at the right hand of his Father.

The news flash is that Jesus is no longer a humble carpenter.

He was a humble carpenter.

He was rejected.

He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

But that was Jesus' humiliation.

Since then, he has been exalted, and it is this Jesus today that we worship and praise.

Jesus, who is sovereign over all.

I agree with that, I like that, but let me just tweak one word.

What comes to your mind when you think about Christ is the most important thing about you.

He is the sun in our solar system, and everything else revolves around him.

And if anything else supplants Christ in us, or if we have a weak view of Christ, there's not enough gravity there to hold all the planets of your life in orbit.

If we have a small, genie-sized bobblehead Jesus that gives you a thumbs up every day on your dashboard, then we have someone, in the words of Christian sociologist David Wells, someone who rests lightly and inconsequentially on our daily lives, on our vocations, our families, and our churches.

So as we think about Revelation chapter one and what John gives us, this vision of Christ, not as a babe in a manger, not as a crucified Lord, but as the exalted, the one who's been given the right and privilege over all authority in all the universe by his Father.

When we think about this Jesus, we're really going to open up this message in this series sort of like a pilot in any kind of Netflix series.

You know, the pilot episode is, it just basically kind of gets you acquainted with the main character, especially.

And the main character of the revelation of John is Jesus Christ.

In fact, the title of the book is not just Revelation, or as some people say, Revelations.

It's like Walmarts with the NASA.

No, it's just not there.

It's not there, don't say it.

Kroger's.

It's called The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to John.

It's the revelation, the unveiling of a fresh view of Jesus Christ and everything else in relationship to him in the past, present, and the future.

And so this message will be focusing, this message particularly, even as we open up this series on Christ's message to the seven churches, is really, I don't have any higher aspirations than us getting a fresh glimpse of Jesus Christ Himself.

Who exactly is this Jesus Christ who has such an important message to the churches?

Because if he's no one important to us, it really doesn't matter what he says to the church.

But it does matter because he is infinitely important.

We'll find our answer to this question about really who is this Jesus?

How is he presented in Revelation chapter 1?

Revelation 1 · chapter mention

We'll find it in three ways in our text, which is Revelation 1, 9 through 20.

In verse 9, in the preceding verses, 5 through 7, preceding 9, we're going to see a list of Jesus's titles and deeds.

Basically, titles that are ascribed to Jesus and deeds that are ascribed to him, attributed to him.

Secondly, in verses 10 through 16, we're going to see a physical description of Jesus, which is really amazing.

A physical description of the exalted Christ.

And then number three, in verses 17 through 20, Jesus' own self-description.

So this text is all about Jesus.

But before we dig into the verses of the text itself, I just want to give you a little bit of background information about the passage.

So this book of Revelation, the very last book in the Bible, is something we call apocalyptic literature.

And apocalyptic, contrary to popular narratives, apocalyptic has nothing to do with zombies or World War Z or the Book of Eli.

Apocalypse literally means, it's just a transliteration of the Greek word to unveil.

It just means the unveiling, or as we translate it in our scriptures, the revelation.

It means something is going to be unveiled and made plain to see that formerly had been hidden behind the scenes.

Typical of apocalyptic literature is a lot of imagery because sometimes there's things that really can't be put into words very well.

When John is describing Jesus, think about the cosmic language.

I mean, his face is shining like the sun.

Like, what does it even look like?

It's hard to put into words things that have been hidden from our five senses that have been revealed in a vision, as happens to John.

And so often apocalyptic literature is characterized by symbolic imagery that reveals mysterious and providential workings of God behind the scenes and his plans for the future.

I've got a thesis this morning.

My thesis is that through the Apostle John, God is pulling back the curtain into the spirit world to reveal how things look from the divine perspective.

That's what apocalyptic literature does.

But in this case, it's revealing a fresh vision as we pull back the curtains and peek inside a fresh vision of Jesus Christ in his exalted state.

And along with this, I'm afraid that this vision of Jesus Christ that we're going to see carries very little resemblance to the Jesus we often pray to.

And the Jesus we sing about.

And the Jesus we talk about.

The writer of Revelation is the Apostle John.

He was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, and he was the last surviving apostle and the only one who didn't die the death of martyrdom.

Although they tried.

Tradition says that he was, they put him in a vulning oil, but it didn't kill him.

And so they exiled him in the year uh 95 A.D.

under the reign of Domitian, who was a pretty cruel Roman emperor.

John the aged man was exiled to an island called Patmas.

Patmas was a tiny island in the Aegean Sea, which sits right between Greece and Turkey, which makes the the riding of John's, the month of John's writing, probably around late November, around Thanksgiving.

I mean, if you're between Greece and Turkey.

Too soon.

Oh, sorry guys.

Sorry.

You knew it was coming.

Padmus, only 10 miles long and six miles wide, was most was a rocky, treeless island that not too many people like to live on nowadays.

There's actually a monastery and a university there, but it wasn't so posh when John was there.

It was a place for political prisoners.

And John was sentenced there under Domitian.

But the very next year, after John, who also has a gospel by his name, John the apostle wrote a gospel.

He wrote three letters: 1 John, 2nd John, and 3 John, and then Revelation, which is about 20% of our New Testament, a very important apostle and writer in Scripture.

But John, the very next year in AD 96, when Domitian was assassinated, because the Senate hated him.

Domitian was a military guy.

He was the younger brother of Titus who'd conquered Jerusalem, the younger son of another military leader.

And so he basically just kind of ruled things with an iron fist.

The Senate didn't like it, they had him killed after 15 years of putting up with him.

And his associate, Nerva, took his place, and under Nerva, John was allowed to leave Patmos the very next year and return to Ephesus.

Otherwise, he probably would have died there.

In our text, we meet these seven churches of Asia.

John addresses his letter actually in verse 4 to the seven churches.

The whole revelation is written to these seven churches that are in Asia.

And he lists them by name in verse 10.

They are Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.

So basically, before we jump into our text, here's the main idea of the passage.

Namely, the Apostle John is recounting his vision of the resurrected and exalted Christ, who then commissions John to deliver a message to these seven churches of Asia.

That's what our text is all about.

The seven churches were located in seven different cities in Asia Minor.

If you were wondering why they have such strange names, well, they're just the names of the cities that they're in.

And they're listed by John in a specific order.

And I have a map here that uh shows the location of these uh seven cities.

You can see where Patmos is.

The closest to Patmos is Ephesus, and that's the first church he addresses.

And then he addresses Smyrna and Pergamum, Thyatirus, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea in that order because that's probably the sort of the route that John would take as he labored among these churches.

He was very familiar with having thought about this introductory information, now let's look at our text.

Look at in your Bible at Revelation chapter 1, verse 9.

Revelation 1:9

I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patnus on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

John says, Here I'm on this island, and I'm here because I was preaching the gospel and they exiled me.

Notice that he mentions Jesus twice in this verse.

When he mentions Jesus, it's not the first time he's mentioned Jesus in the letter.

We're sort of, our text is not at the very beginning of the letter.

And so when he mentions Jesus, he's assuming everything else that has been said about Christ.

And so I want to just very quickly look at verses five through seven.

We're not going to read those, but I'm just going to basically give you a list of seven or so titles and deeds attributed to Jesus.

So in our first part of this passage, verse nine, we're going to look at Jesus' title and titles and deeds.

Which actually I didn't mean to mean for a pun there, but there is a pun there.

Titles and deeds.

It's like a real estate sale or something.

Okay.

Jesus' titles, things said about him, and things that he did.

How about that?

The first thing we see in verse 5 is Jesus is called the faithful witness.

Interesting that Christ should be called the faithful witness.

You see, John in his gospel, I mean, John had lived three and a half years with Jesus, and he had seen Jesus before friend and foe bear witness to the truth of God without backing down.

John records in John chapter 18, verse 37, that the very end of Jesus' earthly life, when he stood before Pontius Pilate, the Roman pontiff, before his crucifixion, Jesus said this.

John 18:37

Pilate, for this purpose I was born, and for this purpose I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.

Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.

And of course, Pilate famously responds with a scoff, what is truth?

You see, Pilate, like you and me, often approached truth as if we were sort of dropped out of an airplane and parachute into a strange world we know nothing about.

And here we are just scavenging around looking for little bits of truth to make sense of our world.

He approached it philosophically.

He didn't approach it as if there were a God who created it, who designed it, who created us, designed us, and put us here, and then has revealed himself to us and has revealed the nature of ourselves and our nature around us.

Pilate was living like we do most days, as if there's no God, or at least no God, that has spoken truth about himself and about our world.

But God in Christ, however, as the creator and ruler of everything, Jesus is the author and the interpreter of reality.

You ever thought about that?

Jesus didn't come just to tell us some amazing things or tell us about himself and give us some uh some truths to live by.

He came as the creator of reality to tell us about reality.

And when propositional statements match reality, we call those truth.

So when Jesus comes to bear witness about the truth, he's basically coming to tell us about the way things are.

And he was uniquely fitted for that because he created reality.

Acts chapter 17, the Apostle Paul talking to the Athenian philosopher says, in Christ we all live, move, and have our being.

Acts 17 · chapter mention

We exist in and by Christ, in the very being of God.

Therefore, when Jesus came to tell us about the truth, he was coming to tell us about the way things really are, even things we can't see as finite humans or understand in full.

Secondly, he is called the firstborn of the dead in verse 5.

In Jewish culture, the firstborn had all the rank second only to the Father.

Paul used this designation also of Jesus in Colossians 1.18.

In Colossians 1.18, he says this Jesus is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might have preeminence.

In other words, the firstborn from the dead, which is the same phrase that John uses here in Revelation 1 about Jesus, it speaks of his preeminence.

He's the firstborn from the dead.

He is um, because he's he's referring to Jesus' resurrection, but Jesus is not just a guy who was raised from the dead, he is the prototypical one risen from the dead who conquered death, as we'll see a little later.

Thirdly, the ruler of the kings on earth.

Do you think about Jesus as being ruler of the kings on earth when you watch the news and you see stuff that's happening?

And um, this nation that's, you know, uh maybe North Korea who's practicing its nuclear warheads by shooting them into the ocean and just kind of menacing other nations, daring them to try to tick them off.

Do you think, man, I'm thankful Jesus is a ruler of all the kings on earth?

Because he is, that's the truth.

Jesus said he was.

He said to Pilate, he says, you know, Pilate said, Don't you know that I have the authority to like kill you right now?

And Jesus says, You have zero authority unless it's given you by my Father in heaven.

He bore witness to the truth, and that's the truth.

It's true about Kim Jong-un and whoever else.

Jesus is the ruler of the kings on earth.

Late in Revelation, in fact, um the masses of the redeemed sing a song that goes like this: Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty, just and true are your ways, O King of the nations.

In Revelation 19, we see Jesus literally has written on his thigh and uh on a sash that he's wearing the name King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

But not only is Christ this exalted, powerful, scary creator and ruler of the universe, but notice in verse 5 he says, He is the one who loves us, and who has freed us from our sins by his blood, and who has made us a kingdom, priests to God.

This, of course, speaks of Christ's incarnation of his earthly ministry, as he ushered in the kingdom of God, and then as he went to the cross and ransomed us by a sacrifice of himself on the cross.

And then when he rose again and before he ascended, he commissioned his church to go into the world as his ambassadors on the earth, and then when he departed, sent his Holy Spirit to empower us to do that.

He has made us a kingdom of priests to his name.

These are the things that Jesus has done.

John wants to remind us of.

Then he says, and he is returning to judge the world.

He is coming with the clouds.

And we're going to see in this a little bit as we look into Daniel chapter 7 briefly that this is a messianic passage that talks about the apocalyptic end of the age when God himself comes in the person of Christ with the clouds.

Daniel 7 · chapter mention

And John uses that same imagery here.

He's returning to judge the world in righteousness.

I want us to transition and look at number two, at Jesus' physical description.

With all this sort of background information about who Jesus is said to do and the things that we know he has done, let's think about how Jesus himself presents himself and how John describes him.

Look in verse 10.

I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, saying, Write what you have seen in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamum, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.

When I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands, one like the Son of Man.

So here is the aged John, exiled on Patmos, and I have in my mind's eye Tom Hanks and castaway, kind of the long beard, you know, talking to the volleyball.

And here John is just, he says it's on the Lord's Day.

He's just worshiping the Lord.

Lord's Day for Christians is the first day of the week because that's when Christ was risen from the dead.

So here he is, Sunday morning, like we are this morning, worshiping God in the spirit, and he hears a voice behind him.

It's a powerful voice.

It sounds like a trumpet blaring behind him.

He's thinking, who is playing the trumpet at this hour?

And he turns around and listened to this description.

He says that Jesus' voice first was like a trumpet.

He sees the Son of Man, which is also referenced to Daniel, the one who's going to come with the clouds, that he is walking in the midst of the golden lampstands.

And his voice is like a trumpet.

For just a context's sake, think about when in Isaiah chapter 6, the famous story, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

We're really familiar with that passage.

And Isaiah, before he was a prophet, saw this vision where God apocalyptically pulled back the curtains and he saw into the throne room of God in heaven.

And what did he see?

He saw these huge angelic beings called seraphim, which means flaming ones, these bright creatures with six wings hovering over the throne and crying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who, or Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.

And what he says, this huge temple and this huge throne in this massive room, he said that at the voice of the seraphim, as they cried day and night, it shook the doors of the temple.

Can you imagine that experience where these voices are booming so loud, these angelic beings, that the temple uh posts of heaven are shaking at their voices.

So, what that tells me is that if the creator is greater than the creatures, that Jesus has the capacity to be far more um uh powerful than that with his voice, it tells me that Jesus was using his inside voice.

Some of you kids know what that means, right?

Jesus was probably whispering, he's probably thinking, how can I do this without just like killing John?

Okay.

John.

And John hears this trumpet blaring, knocks him off his feet.

Wow, think about this picture of Jesus.

His form was like the son of man, which had its most basic meaning.

Is he looked like a human?

Because in Revelation, there's plenty of images of creatures and beasts and things that don't look at anything like a man.

There's uh dragons and there's beasts that arise out of the ocean with seven heads and ten horns.

But this looks like a man.

This is a man.

But more than merely being in a human form, this phrase is loaded with prophetic and apocalyptic significance.

For example, in Daniel chapter 7, which really in the New Testament or in the entire Bible, there's only two books that really can be called apocalyptic books, Daniel and Revelation.

Daniel 7 · chapter mention

Although there are passages, um, like Isaiah 6 and a bunch of others that are just brief little vignettes throughout some of the prophets and even in the gospels as Jesus talks about the end times.

But Daniel and Revelation go hand in hand speaking about the end times.

And in Daniel chapter 7, which is about 600 years before Jesus came, the prophet Daniel sees a vision all of a sudden one day, and in this vision, four beasts rise out of the ocean or out of the sea.

Daniel 7 · chapter mention

And each of these beasts are fierce, but the one after it is even more fierce, more fierce, more fierce, and more fierce yet.

And each one conquers the other in turn and rules over the earth in turn before being conquered by the other.

But then lastly, so I'm gonna read this to you.

This is Daniel 7, 13, and 14.

I saw in night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man.

So here's all these beasts, these grotesque things, and there's like a leopard-looking thing with a bunch of heads, and there was a bear, and there were a few other things.

The last creature had ten heads.

But then he sees a man.

And who is this man?

And he came to the ancient of days and was and was presented before him, and to him was given dominion and glory in the 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.

A son of man coming in the clouds.

Here we got Revelation chapter one, and he says in verse 7, he's going to come with the clouds.

And here we have uh later in verse 10 and 11, Jesus has the appearance of the Son of Man.

This is the one who's received all the kings of the world, the one who came with the long line of kingdoms being turned over by other kingdoms, and here Jesus as king over all will never be deposed.

What's even more amazing about this is that twice in the Gospels, Jesus quoted Daniel 7, 13 about himself.

I'll read one of those to you.

Matthew 24, 30, Jesus says, talking about the end times, then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man.

And then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Jesus was saying, Hey, remember Daniel chapter 7?

Daniel 7 · chapter mention

Talking about me.

I know you Jews right now in first century Judea are being occupied by Roman imperialism.

But actually, if we were to go back and do a little history lesson of Daniel's vision, the very last beast actually represented Rome.

So Jesus came on the heels of the Roman uh occupation, and he would, by his kingdom, set up in the earth, eventually overthrow all the kingdoms of the earth.

But Jesus says, listen, take comfort.

I'm the last king that's to arise.

There's no one after me.

And I'm a good king.

And even these people that are that are, you know, taking your tax money and then raising taxes and all the things that the Romans were doing to the Jews, Jesus would say, One day there will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and that's me.

In Revelation 1, John continues, his clothing.

It's long robe with a golden sash around its chest.

And this vestment suggests Jesus' identity as king, as judge, or as priest.

Jesus' hair is described as being white like wool, like snow.

Actually, I wouldn't mention this normally at all, but I heard this about three weeks ago.

A wonderful African-American brother was making the case that Jesus is African-American.

And he quoted this verse that Jesus' hair is like wool, maybe texture or something, but um Jesus here isn't white, he's not black, and really his Jewishness isn't even pointed out.

Jesus is the prototypical human.

It's not like he's limiting himself to being, I mean, obviously on earth he was a Jew, but Jesus in his exalted, glorified state, is the perfect human.

He's not limited to Jewishness or Gentile or color, this or that.

And so when we see a description of Jesus, his hair, it's not talking about like what ethnicity or something?

Because as far as I know, Jews don't have white hair either.

Probably right.

So Jesus transcends all the races with his glorified state, I truly believe.

And his hair is brilliant white.

His voice, or excuse me, his eyes are like a flame of fire.

Can you imagine looking into Jesus' eyes for just a moment, like you would look into the sun for just a moment as a kid?

Bad idea, kids.

Jesus' feet.

Maybe he looks at his eyes and he looks down, and then he sees his feet.

His feet are like burnished bronze.

Which means this pure metal that was uh bright and shining.

His voice here is described as the roar of many waters.

Powerful voice.

His hands, in his right hand, he holds seven stars.

And from his mouth proceeds a two-edged sword, which we later read in Revelation.

Uh, he strikes the nations with.

This is something that in judgment Christ uses against the nations in the rebellion against him.

Finally, he sums it up and says, His face is shining like the sun in full strength.

Just think about this vision of Jesus.

That's the best, those are the best words John could come up with to describe the glorified Jesus.

And really it should remind us of what happened in Matthew chapter 17 when Peter, James, and John, same John, same apostle John, was were taken by Jesus into a mount, and there Jesus was transfigured before them, because there we read a similar description.

Matthew 17 · chapter mention

But just for a moment, Jesus revealed himself to his apostles, these three apostles that he was most close to, and it says, His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.

So this was the glory that Christ had intrinsic to him all along.

This is the glory that was sort of hidden from view as he was incarnate into a little baby that was laid in a manger.

It was the glory that was hidden from view when he was hanging on a cross, when he breathed his last, but it was the glory that inevitably would come back out as he was exalted back to the right hand of the Father.

So we've seen the list of Jesus' titles and of his deeds.

We've seen this description of Jesus' physical look.

But thirdly, in our passage, in verses 17 through 20, we see Jesus' self-description.

What Jesus says about himself.

Verse 17.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.

But he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one.

I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore.

And I have the keys of death and Hades.

Write therefore the things that you have seen, those things that are, and those things that are to take place after this.

What was John's response when he turns around and sees Jesus?

He falls down as a dead man.

He becomes comatose, paralyzed by awe at this sight of Jesus.

And this is the same Jesus he had lived with for three years, walking the earth in Jesus' itinerant ministry.

But he falls at his feet as though dead.

Remember, I heard a story about some TV preacher that said that, you know, he talks to Jesus all the time.

Sometimes Jesus appears while he's shaving or while he's brushing his teeth, and Jesus kind of pops up over his shoulder and talks to him, and he talks to Jesus, and Jesus tells him, gives him a word of the prophecy about the future or something like that.

If you really actually saw Jesus, this is what happens.

When you see the glorified, exalted Jesus, you fall at your feet at his feet as though dead.

When Daniel saw even an angel, he fell down into a deep trance.

When Isaiah saw the glory of God, which was filled with smoke, he didn't even see the face of God, as he says here, but he only saw this smoke-filled room and heard these creatures shouting.

Isaiah covered his mouth and said, Woe is me, I'm undone.

He felt the weight of his own wickedness.

Here John falls at his feet as though dead, reflexively, involuntarily.

This is the appropriate response to seeing God as he is in fact.

And this is actually our story this morning.

Our story is that we being sinful people, if left to ourselves, we cannot survive the consuming presence of a holy God.

I wonder if we've forgotten that.

Because after all, I mean, people put nails, spikes in Jesus' hands and feet, nothing happened to them, right?

We forget that we're not praying to Jesus in his humiliation, we're praying to Jesus in his exaltation.

That when we preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, we're not preaching the gospel of someone who is left in a tomb or left in a manger or left on a cross.

This is the Jesus before whom the nations flee in terror.

Our story is that as sinful people, if left to ourselves, we cannot survive the consuming presence of a holy God.

The prophet Malachi put it this way, writing some 400 years before Jesus' first coming, and he asks a profound question in light of Jesus' coming.

He says, This the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.

And the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

Good news, right?

God is going to come in the person of Jesus, he's going to bring about a new covenant.

Sounds good, right?

But here's the question.

But who can endure the day of his coming?

And who can stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner's fire and like a fuller's soap.

He will sit as a refiner and the purifier of silver.

This means that apart from divine intervention, apart from grace, apart from atonement, forgiveness of sins, we would sooner survive a night floating in a cauldron of molten silver, as Malachi suggests, than to survive a moment, let alone all eternity in the presence of God.

Talk about an economic meltdown.

When Jesus comes as the refiner, all the world will be refined as silver, and who will survive?

Psalm 24 says it this way: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?

Who shall stand in his holy place?

I'll tell you who.

He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.

Jesus said, Matthew 5, 8, Blessed are the pure in heart, they'll see God.

But here's the problem.

That's not our story.

Our story is rather we don't measure up.

Our story is that we cannot abide the day of his coming.

Our story is that we cannot ascend the hill of God to be in his presence with joy, because we do not have clean hands.

In and of ourselves, we do not have a pure heart.

We have pursued empty things and exchanged God for them in our lives.

That's our story.

If left to ourselves, we would fare no better than those John later describes in Revelation.

Let me just uh I'm gonna read you Revelation chapter 6, verses 15 through 17, because this is this would be you and me apart from Jesus.

Revelation 6:15–17

Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful and everyone, slave and free, may I say oppressed and oppressor, all the same.

Hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.

For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?

Not me, not you.

Neither the heights of the mountains nor the depths of the lowest cave can hide us from the wrath of the righteous judge of all the earth.

Christ Himself is the only hiding place from his wrath.

And so we see Jesus reached down, Jesus is John's Savior, not just as John's king.

Touch him with his right hand and say, Fear not.

Jesus speaks calm to John, as he had done some 60 years earlier, after the Transfiguration, when again the disciples fell on their faces, terrified, and Jesus came and touched them, saying, Rise and have no fear.

It's only because Jesus is savior of those who trust in him that him being king of us doesn't mean our utter destruction.

Have no fear, John.

And then he says this, I am the first and the last.

Here Jesus lays claim to being eternal.

You ever thought about what it would take to be the first and the last?

I mean, you've probably been the first to a party and the last to leave the party, maybe the first to church and the last to leave.

That's probably Justin, right?

First there and the last to leave.

But for Jesus to be the first means that there was no one before him.

You see, in Jehovah's Witness theology, they believe that God, the one true and living God, existed when nothing was there.

And then one day he decided to create a supreme being that he would call his son, Jesus.

And through Jesus, he would then create the world and everything else.

But Jesus holds a lesser position than God, but higher than all of creation.

Jesus is the first.

There was no one before Jesus.

Not because God wasn't before him, but because he is God.

And of course, we read this in John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

The same writer, John, he opens his very gospel with the prologue.

In the beginning was the word, the Lagos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him, and without him, nothing was made that was made.

Jesus is not a creature.

He is the first.

He is soul creator.

And there will never be a time in the future when Jesus will die or his reign will decay.

Therefore he says, I am the last.

Earthly kingdoms will rise and fall.

Nations will come into existence and they will be overthrown.

Dynasties will be built and eventually disintegrate, but not Christ.

But look at history.

It happened to Egypt.

It happened to Assyria.

It happened to Babylon, to Persia, to Greece, to Rome.

It happened to the USSR.

It will happen to America.

It'll happen to China.

It'll happen to Russia.

It'll happen to North Korea.

All the kingdoms of the earth will be brought to nothing one day before the feet of Christ.

Our true home, therefore, brothers and sisters, is not North America.

It's not Ohio.

Nor our truest affiliation to be Republican, Democrat, Independent, Progressive.

Our homeland is not of this world, but rather in the presence of the true King whose reign will never end.

And so correspondingly, our deepest hopes are not to be laid on the shoulders of the kings or politicians or princes of the earth that clamor for the top of the pile, but rather to be set on the person of Jesus Christ, who is making all things new.

That's change we can vote for.

Secondly, I died, and behold, I'm alive forevermore.

Think about how many references there are to the resurrection in this passage.

You see, because we often give the cross sort of all the weight, and then, oh yeah, and Jesus rose.

Yeah, three days later, he didn't stay dead.

But actually, uh, from the time of the resurrection on, the weight of the theology is towards the resurrection, because apart from the resurrection, everything Jesus did on the cross wouldn't matter one bit.

Jesus says, I am the living one.

I died.

Yes, he mentions the cross.

Yes, he mentions implicit in that atonement, reconciliation, him bearing our sins, him suffering the curse of the law for us.

But he says, I'm the living one, and behold, I am alive forevermore.

So obviously, Jesus is not some mere spirit, some apparition that is appearing to John, kind of like Casper the friendly ghost.

Rather, he is appearing in a physical body that physically rose from the dead because once Jesus was incarnate, he never unincarnated.

And he rose from the grave because it was not possible that death could hold him any longer.

Jesus holds the patent on death's anti-venom.

And he removed the lethal sting of the grave.

Thirdly, Jesus says of himself, I have the keys of death and Hades.

This third statement, I think, further elaborates the authority over death.

He doesn't just, he didn't just rise from the grave, but in rising from the grave, he purchased for himself all authority over death.

He's got the keys.

Some of you kids have seen some movies, right?

And in the movie, the good guy gets locked in jail or something, locked in some kind of uh dungeon or something, and the bad guy's got the key, and he's walking around us jingling and he's thinking so hard.

The guy in the prison's thinking, how can I get the keys?

Rescuers Down Under is one of my favorites.

Remember the salamander trying to get, you know, he had the keys and they were all trying to get the keys from everything.

Jesus has the keys and he's the good guy.

And he's got the keys to the gate of the grave, which means he controls who goes to the grave and who comes out and when.

In his death, Jesus suffered the curse of death in our place, right?

God says, in the day you eat of that fruit, you're going to surely die.

And so death passed upon all people.

Jesus submitted himself under that curse, submitting himself to death to bear the curse.

But it wasn't in his death that he conquered the curse.

It was in his death that he bore the curse.

It was in his resurrection that he conquered the curse of death.

He is the one who died for us and who triumphantly arose forevermore.

And this brings us to our gospel conviction this morning.

Our gospel conviction, the good news is that Jesus Christ, God's Son, willingly suffered the pain and penalty of the curse of our sins, dying in our place, then rose from the dead, thereby destroying the power of death over himself, over us, and over all creation.

And on account of all these glorious realities, all we who trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, because of what Jesus did in his death and resurrection, are then counted righteous and are being transformed into the likeness of Jesus.

And so we with all a creation are able to look forward to enjoying the life-sustaining presence of God in the new creation as opposed to being destroyed by it.

I'll close with verse 20 here.

Jesus says to John, As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, in the seven golden candlesticks, the seven stars, they're the angels of the seven churches.

And the seven lampstands are the seven churches.

So there are stars and lampstands.

Stars are the angels to the churches, and the lampstands represent the churches.

Apocalyptic liter uh type of imagery here.

Jesus is walking in the midst of the candlesticks, which I don't know if there's much to this, but as I was thinking about seven candlesticks, you can't help but think about the menorah, right?

The seven-branched candlestick that was in the temple of God.

Um, but here we don't see Jesus standing next to a menorah.

You see him walking in the midst of the candlesticks.

It's as if the menorah has now been scattered.

It's as if the churches are meant to go out.

It's as if we're on mission.

We're not just all kind of bound together, given some kind of light.

Jesus is walking in the midst of all these candlesticks that have been separated.

I don't know, maybe there's nothing to that.

But it certainly fits with the mission Christ has given the church and Jesus walking in our midst.

There is some debate over the meaning of stars here, because stars.

Can refer to angels or to people.

And when he says that these represent the messengers to the churches, messengers is simply the word Angelos.

We translate messenger or angel.

So he could be talking about an angelic messenger or about the pastor or pastors of these respective churches.

Either way, if it's the pastors, then the message is going to be going from John to the pastors of the churches, and then they give it to the congregation.

If it's the angels, then it would fit with sort of the cosmic language he's using here, and of the fact that there are that angels are given dominion over cities and over regions.

As we read in Daniel chapter 9, when Daniel was praying and he was praying, and God wasn't answering him, and he prayed for three weeks, and at the end of three weeks, the angel Gabriel came to him and said, Brother, I came here from the first time you opened your mouth to give you an answer, but the prince of Persia withstood me for three weeks, from 21 days.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

So angels and demons have dominion and are battling it out over our heads, so to speak, over regions and cities.

So it's possible here he's talking about the angels that are over the churches or about the leaders in the churches.

Then he talks about the churches being candle candles.

We as a church are called to be a light.

And these candles, if you know anything about the menorah, they were actually little bowls where olive oil would be poured into.

And the priest would have to minister continually in the temple, pouring oil in these little lamps so they wouldn't run out, because it was forbidden that the lamp would ever go out in the temple.

Well, as churches, the oil we run on is the Holy Spirit.

And I think we're going to hear in a few weeks about Sardis, a dead church.

That was a church that the oil had run out.

The spirit was no longer in their midst, and they were effectively a dead church giving off no light.

There's one other passage I was going to read, Ephesians 6.12, that just speaks of wrestling against flesh and blood, against rulers and authorities and cosmic powers over this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.

And this should remind us that we as a church are not just, we're not wrestling against flesh and blood.

We're not definitely not competing in some church down the road.

We're not competing for a little corner of Mason.

We're wrestling against principalities and powers, cosmic powers that want to shut us up.

In our gospel vision this morning, from this passage, we can see that we who have banded together as sacred mission church, that we should be reminded that Christ Himself walks in the midst of the churches, that his word is to be our guide, that his mission is to be our mission, his power, our power, and his presence, our delight.

That is the vision from this passage that we want to go forward with.

And so in conclusion, we've seen that the Jesus of Scripture, we've seen the Jesus of history, and the Jesus of eternity.

But I wonder if this Jesus, as presented here in Revelation 1, bears much resemblance to the Jesus you know and love, that you pray to, the one that you came this morning to worship.

My prayer is that John's cosmic vision of Christ's glorious exaltation will challenge our often small and tame and pragmatic thoughts of Jesus as we live and work and witness and worship in this present age.

The Lord bless you.