CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Revelation 1:9. Companion.—As having a full share in the experience of those who confess and serve Christ. Tribulation.—The work of the threshing roller (tribulum). The troubles and persecutions of Christ’s Church were, in the control of Christ, separating the chaff from the wheat. Kingdom.—Or recognised present rule of the Living Christ. Patience.—Or effort to bear, endure, and wait, which is becoming to those who know that Jesus lives. Patmos.—A barren island, now Palmosa, used by some Roman emperors as a place of banishment. No historic record of St. John’s exile has been found.
Revelation 1:10. In the Spirit.—This means in a rapt, contemplative, absorbed state of mind; but such a state of mind may well be thought of as wrought by the indwelling Holy Ghost. It is the mood of mind which prepares us for spiritual visions. Lord’s day.—An important statement. What put St. John into this rapt condition was his meditation on the mystery and glory of his Divine Lord, as the Risen, and Living One. Great voice.—Thinking about Christ, he suddenly seemed to hear Him, and then even to see Him, in marvellous symbolic form.
Revelation 1:11. For the Churches mentioned see notes on each epistle.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Revelation 1:9-11
A Sublime Commission.
I. To whom did it come?—John; without any reasonable doubt, John, the beloved apostle. Certainly the most fitting of the apostles to deal with the new conception of the person, and present mission, of the Living Christ. But he puts in no claim to be heard on the ground of the insight which his mystical temperament brought him. He does not even claim on the ground of his apostleship. There is a great tenderness in his simple appeal to a common experience. It is as if he said, “You are in much anxiety and distress for Christ’s sake, and so am I. You are trying to be patient and trustful under the strain, and so am I. My experiences have brought to me most comforting and reassuring visions; I will tell them to you, so that you may be comforted by them, as I have been.” It is precisely the mission of those who have much common experience, and some unusual experience, in Christian life, to cheer and help their Christian brethren. Nothing brings soul so near to soul as companionship in tribulation, and fellow-experience of the need of Divine patience.
II. Under what circumstances did the commission come?—St. John was at the time separated from his people and from his ministry. It was a time of forced seclusion, and lonely meditation, with such natural associations of sea and sky as might help to fitting moods. Take into due account St. John’s mystical temperament, meditative habits, recent trying experiences, sense of having a trust from Christ, and immediate surroundings, we can see that he was the fitting man to receive this commission, and that it came at a fitting time. Such a series of visions probably occupied the apostle for many weeks, and the series could only be maintained when he was undisturbed by immediate claims of duty. The strange times of life are often the great times of life. Illustrate Luther at the Wartburg, Bunyan in Bedford goal.
III. What form did the commission take?—A series of visions, not in any chronological order, but apparently visions of the same scenes taken from different points of view. St. John received the commission from One whose voice was as arresting as a trumpet-call. But it was no vague blare of trumpet; it spoke in intelligible language, though using strange figures and symbols.
IV. To whom was the message to be sent?—To seven particular Churches. Why to these? Possibly because they were grouped in one district, and bore one general character. Possibly because they had become the special “diocese” of St. John. Possibly because they would effectively illustrate the main varieties marking the Churches that make up the one Church of the redeemed. It is clear that our interest is not to be wholly absorbed by the particular epistles to particular Churches, since the message is to the whole Church of all the ages; and we have only to see that the various forms of strain and tribulation through which the Church passes are necessary, because the discipline must be adapted to a variety of conditions. And this variety of conditions is represented by the description of the states in which the Living Christ found these seven Churches. The Church has its own particular temptations and trials in each successive age. It may always cherish this assurance: in the hands of Christ they bear direct disciplinary relations to its particular weaknesses, or failings.
Note on Patmos.—One of the Sporades, the south-eastern group of the islands of the Ægean. According to tradition, as given by Victorinus, St. John was condemned to work in the mines—which, if trustworthy, must mean marble quarries, as there are no mines, strictly speaking, in the island. Christians were sent to the mines (Roman Christians to Sardinia) at least as early as the reign of Commodus, and this was much the commonest punishment during the Diocletian persecution, in which Victorinus himself suffered. In St. John’s time it was commoner to put Christians to death. But the tradition is probably right: “deportation,” confinement, without hard labour, on a lonely island was then and afterwards reserved for offenders of higher secular rank.—W. H. Simcox, M.A.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Revelation 1:9. The Kingdom and Patience.—What wicked men have done with Divine Revelation as a whole, good men have done with that part of it which we call by itself “the Revelation.” You commonly divide the enemies of truth into such as believe more than they ought, and such as believe less than they ought. Superstition the crime of the first, infidelity the crime of the other. These are the errors that divide the readers of the Apocalypse. One order of readers goes too far, professing to understand so as to expound and clear up the whole of it; another order almost entirely pass the book by, as if the Canon never contained it. Never give to mysteries the go-by because they are mysteries. There would be nothing left for you to love, nothing to admire, if you banished all but what you could comprehend. Learn what you can, and follow on to know the mysteries of God’s words and ways. How came these two words “kingdom” and “patience” together, as if they properly belonged to each other? And how can we be “companions “with John in these two things? The first thing we have to admire is “the patience of Jesus Christ.” Was it to the glory forsaken before His death, or the glory inherited after His death, that the word “kingdom” alluded? The latter must have been intended. St. John could be no partner in the glory that preceded the Advent. Nor could any of us be companions in that glory. So that the kingdom was the “kingdom” that followed the “patience.” But the two epochs in Messiah’s career—the earthly and the heavenly, the atoning and the triumphing—seem, in the text, as if run into one another, as it were, without a break. Nay, the “kingdom” is actually put before the “patience,” to perfect the union between the dying and the living for evermore; to illustrate the hold He had upon His reward while He was earning it; the “joy that was set before Him,” supporting and staying His spirit while enduring the cross and despising the shame. These are the very twin doctrines of our salvation: that Jesus Christ suffered, else we are yet unforgiven; and that Jesus Christ now reigns after the suffering, else we preach in vain, and believe in vain. The “patience “takes away our sins. The “kingdom” preserves us from sinning. But if Jesus was manifested to take away our sins, He was manifested also to set us an example, so that, besides being believers in His kingdom and patience,” we are, in our degree, to share in both the one and the other. How may we become companions with Christ, as well as pensioners on His sacrifice? We are not glorified as soon as justified. We must be “made perfect through suffering.” And we, too, “have need of patience,” and in experience of tribulations we become companions in the patience of Jesus Christ. But there is no “patience” where there is not also the “kingdom.” As men we suffer; as redeemed men we sit enthroned. The servants of the Saviour live a double life. “As unknown, and yet well-known; as dying, and behold we live,” etc. Take, then, the patience, lest you mount too high; and take also the kingdom, lest you sink too low.—Henry Christopherson.
John’s Banishment.—It has been beautifully said that his “banishment from his earthly home lifted him nearer a heavenly one; there he saw a glory he never witnessed in Jerusalem. So Martin Luther, during his confinement in Wartburg, translated the Scriptures, and had the enjoyment of a freedom and repose to which thousands outside were strangers” (Cumming). The banishment of John is not the only instance in which God has made the wrath of man to praise Him. “Satan is not always wise. For him it would have been better had he never persecuted Paul. He put him in prison, and there he wrote some of his beautiful epistles, which have done more for the world’s good than all his preaching. He had better, for his own interests, have never put poor John Bunyan in gaol, for there he wrote the book which has immortalised his name, and done, perhaps, more injury than any other work, save the Bible, to Satan’s kingdom.”—Thomas Jones.
The Efficiency of the Passive Virtues.—Kingdom and patience! a very singular conjunction of terms, to say the least; as if in Jesus Christ were made compatible authority and suffering, the impassive throne of a monarch and the meek subjection of a cross, the reigning power of a prince and the meek subjection of a lamb. What more striking paradox! And yet in this you have exactly that which is the prime distinction of Christianity. Christ reigns over human souls and in them, erecting there His spiritual kingdom, not by force of will exerted in any way, but through His most sublime passivity in yielding Himself to the wrong and the malice of His adversaries. It is a kind of first principle, in a good life, that the passive elements, or graces of the Christian life, well maintained, are quite as efficient and fruitful as the active. Nothing discouraging need be said concerning what are called active works in religion, when we point out the efficiency of those virtues which belong to the receiving, suffering, patient side of character. They are such as meekness, gentleness, forbearance, forgivingness, the endurance of wrong without anger or resentment, contentment, quietness, peace, and unambitious love. These are gathered up in the comprehensive term “patience.” These are never barren forces; they are, in fact, the most efficient and most operative powers that a Christian wields, inasmuch as they carry just that kind of influence which other men are least apt and least able to resist. Power is not measured by exertion. A right passivity is sometimes the greatest and most effective Christian power.
I. The passive and submissive virtues are most of all remote from the exercise or attainment of those who are out of the Christian spirit and the life of faith. All men are able to be active; but when you come to the passive, or receiving, side of life, here they fail. A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works as by his patience. In this he most excels and rises highest above the mere natural virtues of the world. Just here it is that he is looked upon as a peculiar and partially Divine character. Consider the immense power of principle that is necessary to establish the soul in these virtues of endurance and patience. Here is no place for ambition, no stimulus of passion. The Christian gets the power of his patience wholly from above. It is not human; it is Divine. Hence the impossibility of it, even to great men. It is chiefly by this endurance of evil that Christ, as a Redeemer, prevails against the sin of the human heart and subdues its enmity. Jesus said, “The prince of this world is judged,” as if the kingdom of evil were now to be crushed, and His own new kingdom established, by some terrible bolt of judgment falling on His adversaries. It was even so; and that bolt of judgment was the passion of the cross. We had never seen before the sublime passivities of God’s character, and His ability to endure the madness of evil. In the cross we see Him bearing wrong, receiving the shafts of human enmity, submitting Himself, in His sublime patience, to the fury of the disobedient, and so melting down by His gentleness what no terrors could intimidate, and no frowns of judgment could subdue. Men, as being under sin, are set against all active efforts to turn them, or persuade them, but never against that which implies no effort—viz., the gentle virtue of patience. We are naturally jealous of control by any method which involves a fixed design to exert control over us; therefore we are always on our guard in this direction. But we are none the less open, at all times, to the power of silent worth, and the unpretending goodness of those virtues that are included in patience. The submissive forms of excellence provoke no opposition, because they are not put forth for us, but for their own sake They move us the more because they do not attempt to move us. See how little impression is often made upon you by the most strenuous efforts to exert influence over you, and then how often you are swayed by feelings of respect, reverence, admiration, tenderness, from the simple observation of one who suffers well. How gently do these lovely powers of patience insinuate themselves into your respect and love. Notice some of the instructive and practical uses of the truth illustrated.
1. It is here that Christianity makes issue with the whole world on the question of human greatness. That is ever looked on by mankind, and spoken of, as greatness which displays some form of active power. It has never entered into human thought, unsanctified by religion, that there is or can be any such thing as greatness in the mere passive virtues, or in simply suffering well; least of all in suffering wrong and evil with a forgiving, unresentful spirit. Christianity is here alone, holding it forth as being, when required, the Divinest, sublimest, and most powerful of all virtues, to suffer well.
2. The office of the Christian martyrs is here explained. In the martyr ages we see a vast array of active genius and power, that could not be permitted to spend itself in works of benefaction to the race, but was consecrated of God to the more sacred and more fruitful grace of suffering. The design was, it would seem, to prepare a Christly past, to show whole ages of faith populated by men who were able, coming after their Master and bearing His cross, to suffer with Him, and add their human testimony to His.
3. We see how it is that so many persons are so abundantly active in religion, with so little effect, while others, who are not so conspicuous in action, accomplish so much. The reason is, that one class trust mainly to the virtues of action, while the others unite also the virtues of patience.
4. The reason why we have so many crosses, trials, wrongs, and pains, is here made evident. We have not too many occasions given us for the exercise of patience.
5. Possibly men not religious are averted from the Christian life more by their dislike of the submissive and gentle virtues than by any distaste of sacrifice and active duty.—H. Bushnell, D.D.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 1
Revelation 1:11. The word “Church.”—St. John addresses his message to certain symbols or signs that were shown him in the vision when he was “in the spirit.” They were “seven churches.” The Greek word ecclesia is frequently translated by the English word church. It is not properly church, for church is an Anglicised term derived from a different Greek word, curiacon, which means the Lord’s place (or house). Ecclesia means originally a summoned assembly. An assembly, so called, was made up (if a quorum attended), held, and dissolved. In the New Testament, so far as affects this book, it seems to mean a body of people who have been invited, by an ordained apostle, presbyter, or householder, to worship God together in convenient places of meeting, and have accepted and acted upon the invitation. Ecclesia, not church, has a more spiritual meaning in Ephesians 1:22-23; Colossians 1:18. In these passages it includes all those who form the body of which Christ is the head, such as are elsewhere described as “called by God” to various duties and graces. In the Book of Revelation this latter sense of ecclesia is never used. If referred to at all, it can only be symbolically, but the more spiritual meaning need not be introduced. The English word church means an ecclesiastical building, and, metaphorically, all its “connection”—i.e., the baptized members of the Christian body who use it for worship. The word congregation means an assembly, and cannot properly be used to mean the “connection,” as a limitation to the baptized, either metaphorically or otherwise.