Ted Grimsrud—April 1, 2012

[See notes on Revelation 4]

After the throne room time of praise of the one on the throne, we move to the next part of the vision of chapters four or five. If we think of this vision as a kind of worship service, at this center point we get the main content of the service that allows us to understand the significance of the worship that precedes it and follow it.

Revelation 5:1-5—Who can open the scroll?

John sees a “scroll” in the right hand of the one on the throne. That this scroll is in God’s “right hand” emphasizes its weightiness as does the fact that it is so securely secured with seven seals (“seven,” again, is the number of completeness). Though we are not told directly, we surely are to understand the contents of this scroll to be the fulfillment of God’s work with creation, a message of final and complete healing.

But the message cannot simply be given. Someone must be found to open the scroll and bring the message to its fruition. To John’s bitter frustration, given his longing that the healing come, “no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or look into it” (5:3). We can only speculate as to why this is the case. One idea, though, is that everyone misunderstands the way the scroll is to be opened. Everyone looked for the power of domination as the power to bring history to its conclusion. Continue reading →

Ted Grimsrud—March 31, 2012

[See notes on Revelation 3]

The basic message of the seven messages to the faith communities in chapters two and three, when taken as a whole, focused on the call to those communities to maintain their loyalty to Jesus and his way in face of demands from the Roman Empire for this loyalty. These messages conclude with a promise of a place with the Lamb and his God for those who “conquer.”

The call to “conquer” is a call to Jesus’ way of persevering love. Chapters four and five now provide the bases for taking this call with the utmost seriousness and the utmost hope.

After the messages conclude, John looks and sees an “open door” in heaven (4:1). He’s taken inside and sees a throne. The appearance of the one seated on the throne is never described—confirming that this is the creator God.

So John gets a theophany in this moment of transition from the challenges to the actual recipients of the book to the terrible visions that will follow. This direct vision of God seems to be intended both to ground the challenges in the realities of the sovereign one who calls them forward and to remind the readers that the visions to come do not negate the healing intentions of the one on the throne.

Chapters four and five actually make up one vision with one main message: God is present in the Lamb who brings healing to the world. The two chapters present a kind of worship service. It begins with worship and praise from the twenty-four elders (4:4, 11), proceeds to the four living creatures (4:8), then focuses on the core content—the triumph of the Lamb. It then proceeds to more worship, including from the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders, concluding as the service began, with the elders (5:14). Continue reading →

Ted Grimsrud—March 31, 2012

[See notes on Revelation 2]

The seven messages that make up chapters two and three continue the vision John saw and heard beginning in the middle of chapter one when he hears a “loud voice” that calls him to send the visions that make up the book of Revelation to the seven churches of Asia (1:9). These messages serve today’s readers by anchoring the book as a whole in the context of the struggles of these seven churches in the late first century.

As we are attentive to the concerns Jesus conveys to the seven congregations we will discern the concerns that the later visions will also be centered on.

Revelation 3:1-6—Message to the congregation in Sardis

In the message to the congregation in the city of Sardis, we have one of the more negatively critical of the messages. As with the other messages, this one touches on characteristics of the city itself—implying that the congregation there is reflecting its environment, mostly in problematic ways.

The city of Sardis had a reputation of being invulnerable, safe from outside attack. However, in fact, several times in the past its boundaries had been penetrated by Sardis’s enemies, leading to disaster for the city. Likewise with the congregation. Jesus’ makes an extraordinarily cutting remark: “You have a name of being alive, but you are dead” (3:1). Continue reading →

Ted Grimsrud—December 10, 2011

[See the notes on Revelation 1]

The first thing to notice when we begin to look at the messages to the seven churches of Asia that make up chapters two and three is that they are part of the same vision that began in 1:9 when John hears a “loud voice” telling him to write this book that records what he will see and “send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea” (1:9-11).

John turns “to see whose voice it was that spoke to me” (1:12), at which point the first vision of the book begins. John learns that the voice speaking to him is Jesus. In the immediate vision, John sees many images that put together form a kind of Christology. Many of these images are then incorporated in the seven messages to come. As we move on to chapter two, we should not be misled by the chapter break in our English translation. The original did not have such breaks, and it would have been clear to the first listeners/readers that this one vision of Jesus that begins the series that John will report on throughout the book includes both the word-picture of Jesus presented in 1:12-20 and the messages this same Jesus gives to the seven churches in chapters two and three.

These messages, thus, tells us several crucial things for understanding the book as a whole, including not least a fleshing out of the picture of Jesus—the one who John announces with the first words of the book is the subject of the one “revelation” the book gives. These messages are not of interest only for what they tell us about the seven churches and their environments but also for what they tell us about the giver of the messages. They also, clearly, by their place in the larger narrative of the book, set the agenda for the book as a whole. If we want to understand the later visions, we must always return to these seven messages that provide the context for the visions that follow. Continue reading →