Revelation 1:17-18

JOHN’S SIGHT OF CHRIST

‘And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.’

Revelation 1:17

It is tempting to expend imagination upon the scene, to try to collect in the mind the astonishing imagery of the vision; to see the seer in his prostration, in his awe and trance, and above him the countenance that shone as the sun, and the lips from whence issued sounds as of the moving seas. But imagination fails as soon as it attempts such a misnamed realisation. It is better to fall back at once upon the spiritual essence of the scene, which is to realise it indeed.

I. We have here man seeing himself in the act of seeing God, in the act of seeing the face of the Son of God, the Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father. What to me this great passage says, and what I humbly take up and testify to before you, is that the sight of God, the sight of the Christ of God, in a light which shows us just His holiness, in a light not yet transmitted through the revelation of His redeeming work and mercy, is an awful thing. ‘At this also the heart trembleth, and is moved out of its place.’ ‘Woe is me, for I am a man unclean; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.’ Yes, and yet—suffer me to press this truth home with all the earnestness I can—and yet, awful as that sight is, it is—in measure, for we can bear it only in measure in its reality—it is a profoundly salutary thing. Deep in the heart of all genuine religion lies conviction of sin, lies the sense of sin, the having been brought in truth and fact to something of Isaiah’s cry, and Job’s abhorrence, and John’s prostration. And yet there are few elements of religion, I fear, less common in our time, less recognised as essential by the ‘religious world,’ if I may use that strange phrase, less developed and unreservedly and heartily enforced from the Christian pulpit. I do not mean a morbid introspection. Nay, what I speak of is not inlook but outlook. I do not mean an unwholesome dwelling upon the pathology, so to speak, of special sins. I mean a something at once deeper and higher; a waking up of the deep of conscience to the awfulness of sin as sin; to the dread wrong and guilt of man’s least disagreement with God; to the spiritual fact of sin’s being ‘the abominable thing that He hateth’; to the exposure of sin in the light of His law, till sin (in the magnificent tautology of the Apostle) becomes ‘exceeding sinful,’ because of discord with the will of God.

II. The view of man, contrite, broken, and laid low by the vision of the Holy One, now raised, and reassured, and blest exceedingly, in the Name and only in the Name, of Him Whom he has seen. Here is indeed a reassurance and revival. Here is strong consolation, strong indeed, for its whole material and texture is Jesus Christ. Not one word is said of reasons for peace inherent in the prostrate man. Not one word is said, in that transcendent moment, about even the sacred past of Galilee and Judea, about holy intimacies and companionship, in the cottage, in the field, on the shore, or on the waters. John is for that moment just a mortal and a sinner, cast down before the glory of the Christ of God. And the reason why of the ‘Be not afraid’ spoken to John by the Christ of God is not at all ‘It is thou.’ It is altogether ‘It is I.’ Mark well the successive terms of this supremely characteristic utterance of the Lord Christ; characteristic because it is His witness to Himself. ‘I am the First and the Last, and the living One.’ Here He attests His original eternity. From Alpha to Omega He is; He lives. It is His, in His unbeginning and necessary oneness with the Father, not to become but to be, with a being infinitely lifeful. What was thus then is thus to-day. In all things the same yesterday and for ever, Jesus Christ is in nothing more magnificently the same than in this, that He, for the pardon, for the peace, for the empowering and blessing of the sinful soul of man, is—not something, not much, but all. ‘Christ Jesus,’ writes John’s brother Apostle, Paul, ‘of God is made unto us wisdom, even righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.’ The vast range of our need is responded to by the circle, the faultless sphere, of His supply. Righteousness to justify the ungodly, sanctification to separate the believer from sin to God, Redemption, ‘even the redemption of our body,’ into the final glory—Christ is all this, Christ is all. Can I for a moment forget on the other side the vastness of the range of the truth as it is in Him? The manifold aspects of even the central facts of grace? No; but neither can I forget, and may you and may I profoundly remember in life, and indeed in death, that all the while the central secret of the Christian gospel is sublimely simple. It is Jesus Christ, all things for the Christian; it is Jesus Christ, all things in Him.

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘I accept these words as they stand. I read in them a true record of the actual experience of a real man. I believe that on that far-off Lord’s Day, upon the rock of Patmos, John of Galilee, venerable, saintly, full of the Spirit, full of the powers of the world to come, fell down as if dead at the feet of the really manifested Lord. I believe that he was touched, then and there, with real contact, by the Lord’s right hand, and that there fell upon his soul, then and there, the Lord’s articulated utterance. It was no mere phase of the action of John’s mind, nor evolution of his consciousness, nor transmission through his personality of a mass of previously generated human thought. It was the voice, the word, the mind of Jesus Christ; the assurance of John, given by Jesus Christ, that he need not fear, and that the reason not to fear lay altogether in the person, and the work, and the life of Jesus Christ Himself.’