But that is not all; the once dead, now living Eternal One, by way of his own death and resurrection now holds the keys of death and Hades. Two matters are being asserted here by John: first, Christ himself has been raised from the dead to live forever; and second, in so doing he has stripped death and hell of their power. As a great preacher in the black tradition once told it on an Easter Sunday, playing the role of Satan, he shouted to the demonic host, “He’s got away! He’s got away! And He’s got the keys!”
One should note finally that everything about this vision is intended to describe a theophany, a divine self-revelation. First, there is the careful collage of images that combine the heavenly and earthly Son of Man, and do so with images used only for God. Second, there is the prostrate John, who is reassured with the “right hand” and the “do not be afraid” that he is safe in the Divine Presence. But especially, third, there is the self-disclosure language of verses 17–18, language that deliberately echoes God’s own language in verse 8. For John all of this is certified by the resurrection: “I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever!” For John that is the “key” to everything that follows; having experienced death, Christ through his resurrection has stripped Satan of his means of power—death and Hades—and thus “holds the keys” for loosing from Satan’s grip those who are his own.
The christophany itself is then followed by the commission given to John to write . . . what you have seen, which is then elaborated so that his readers will understand that what follows has to do with both what is now and what will take place later.17 The rest of the book then follows along these lines. Chapters 2 through 5 are all about “what is now,” while chapters 6–11 are about “what will take place later.” These two concerns are then taken up in greater detail in chapters 12–14 and 15–22, respectively. But before any of that, John is given the interpretation of the two sets of seven, the seven stars and the seven golden lampstands, since these items will figure significantly, as the first matters, in what follows (chs. 2–3).
Couched in the language of Jewish apocalyptic, what is being interpreted is the mystery of the seven stars . . . and of the seven golden lampstands. The seven stars, John is told, are the angels [angeloi] of the seven churches, while the seven lampstands are the seven churches. The word angeloi is one of the more difficult to put into English in much of this book, since its basic meaning is simply “messenger”; but in the Greek Old Testament it was used especially to refer to the heavenly messengers who have been regularly referred to as “angels” in English. Thus the NIV translators have tried to cut through the difficulty by putting “angels” in the text, with a footnote that offers the alternative, “messengers.” None of this is problematic for this introductory passage; but when John is told at the beginning of 2:1 to “write to the angelos of the church in Ephesus,” then the mental pictures that are conjured up by such a word do become a bit more problematic. Whether John intended a heavenly messenger or not is moot, as is his language that suggests that each church has its own angelos. What John seems most likely to have intended is not that each church had its own angel, as it were, but in keeping with the apocalyptic genre, that a different (perhaps angelic) messenger was appointed to deliver Christ’s message to each of the churches, while at the same time each church becomes privy to the others’ mail!
Thus John is herewith commissioned to write . . . what you have seen, and to deliver the individual messages of chapters 2 and 3 to each of the seven churches, while he is delivering the whole to each of them as well. And all of this is quite intentional on John’s part; each of the churches is to take heed to what Christ has to say to them individually, but they are also to learn from what he says to each of the others. It is the apocalyptic genre that allows such things to happen, without the option of any of his readers either to mourn or gloat vis-à-vis the others. They are all in this both individually and together; and they must all pay careful attention to what Christ says to the others, even as they are to pay special attention to their own letter.
1. The Greek word itself, of course, has made its way into English as “apocalypse,” which by definition for most people means “any widespread destruction or disaster” (the fifth entry in the Random House American College Dictionary).
2. This phrase recurs in 1:9, and is repeated in reverse order in 20:4.
3. That is, the sevenfold Spirit.
4. Daniel 7:13.
5. Zechariah 12:10.
6. From the Random House American College Dictionary.
7. Greek λύσαντι, which is read by all the early and most important witnesses, as well as by half of the later majority; perhaps as a mistake of hearing, the other half of the later witnesses have λούσαντι (“washed”), which had the misfortune of being present in the manuscript that stood behind the KJV.
8. The word is further used to describe the fate of the woman Jezebel in 2:22.
9. See at the end of this verse, plus 12:17; 14:12; 17:6; 19:10 (2x); 20:4; and 21:16.
10. In the apocryphal Gospel of Peter 35 and 50, although it might appear earlier in Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians, in a reference that is in considerable dispute.
11. See Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians.
12. See Daniel 7:13
13. Although the number of lampstands is Johannine, the description of them as “golden” reflects both Israel’s original lampstands in Exod 25:31–40 and that appearing in Zechariah’s vision in 4:2.
14. Greek ὅμοιον. This is the first of 21 occurrences of this word in the Revelation—47 percent of the total in the NT. But since 14 of the others occur in Matthew and Luke, all in parables and three of which they have in common (in