Revelation 3:21

THE CHRISTIAN CONQUEROR

‘He that overcometh I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne.’

Revelation 3:21 (R.V.)

This is the last of seven honours set before the Christian conquerors in the epistles to the seven Churches, and the throne of which this blessing speaks is itself described in St. John’s next vision. What are the plain realities which underlie the imagery? But we see at once that this throne means the centre of Creation, that the glory of it is as of One invisible, and except by His own will unknowable, and that in that heart and centre of all things lives One who has suffered, One who has died, One who is and who ever has remained sinless: the Lamb that has been slain and dieth no more is in the midst of the throne. Perfect sympathy with pain, perfect deliverance from evil, are there in absolute life and light, and the Lamb, the Victor-victim, speaks and says, ‘He that overcometh I will give to him to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame and sat down with My Father in His throne.’

I. He that overcometh.—When St. John wrote, people like that faithful martyr, Antipas, were overcoming by their own blood, and the whole apocalypse shows a world about to be red with martyrdoms. Yet even then the word overcoming is used in these seven brief letters in connection with trials and difficulties which were not necessarily to end with them. That was only the supreme method of solving such problems of life as were otherwise insoluble. There were final conflicts in those days in which the forces of God and of the world were grappled together in the lives of men: the spirits of light and darkness incarnated themselves in men’s daily action in forms so violent that he who meant to give God the victory in His own life could often do it only by giving his own life over to the death. But if the extremity of the struggle is not now commonly suffered to work itself out to the same bitter end—with the knowledge of the onlooking world it never could be suffered now—yet similar and sometimes the same problems have to be solved in men’s lives still, and still the Christian is called to overcome, and still he can often be victor only by being first a victim as the Lamb was, and if he overcomes, his place is still henceforth the centre of all things. He sits with Him on the throne in true sympathy with the pain of this world, and also having himself a share in this world’s deliverance from pain and from all evil.

II. The word used here for conqueror does not imply one who has conquered. It is not in the flush of triumph that Christ assures to us His throne: it is literally, ‘He that is conquering, I will give to him to sit with Me.’ While the battle is raging he shall have My peace; while he is but starting he shall be at the goal—as the boy has his prizes and his scholarships, not because he is a finished scholar, but because he is longing and learning to be one. And as this continues all through life to be the law of life, so in the kingdom that is coming effort is victory, and victory is only encouragement.

III. What, then, are these problems, which once could only be solved by readiness to die for the right solution, and which still present themselves for solution—for solutions, on the rightness and wrongness of which, almost all, if not all, about us depends? There are the problems seemingly outside of our own lives; there are the expenses of civilisation to be met—the expenses of civilisation, about which it is so hard to say how far they are necessary and likely to continue; while it is essential that we should make the very utmost efforts, and yet none but holy efforts, to reduce them. Such problems when St. John wrote were all the awful wickedness of the age, the conventional false worships, which were then the cementing of the State and of all society, slavery, gladiator shows, one vast licentiousness of life. Men and women died freely in combating such things, for there was that within them which was a perpetual war with the spirit of these things. Among the problems outside us are such expenses of civilisation still: licentiousness of life, the classes that are sacrificed to it, the tender age of corruption. Again, the miserable, unclean, indecent abodes which are all that civilised towns and villages offer and grudge to their myriads or their hundreds. Again, our submissiveness to wealth, and our submissiveness to numbers, and our extreme difficulty in the way of simplicity of life or of speech; and now, even now, the ancient difficulty seeming to begin again, of how to live and talk and think Christianly among unbelievers. The duty and the necessity of taking some steps in solution of these problems has never ceased to be, and is not ceasing to be, most pressing. The circumstances which envelop some of them are as full of horror as ever they were in the old world; and yet some such horror seems to be the youngest offspring of progress. And so great is the obscurity on others of them that we cannot see whether they are accidental or essential to that progress. There are among us those whose earnestness to solve these problems at any cost to themselves, is not less than the eagerness which embraced death rather than not bear witness to the truth. And if it seems that Christian society with us is not with sufficient activity and pronouncedly enough scattering the remnants of heathenism and their freshest recombinations, that can only be because individual Christians are not active enough in combination and decided enough in their tone. It is the individual which rules the social after all. One who does his own honest part in healing the world’s sorrow and lightening the world’s burdens, and is not ashamed to say he does it for Christ, he is the overcoming one who helps to solve the world’s greatest problems. That is the part which must be greater in the world to come than it can be now. For we shall not find ourselves able to do these things except in the spirit of Christ.

Archbishop Benson.