REVELATION, BOOK OF.—Whatever perplexities may still attend the interpretation of the Apocalypse, there can be no question as to the place which it assigns to Jesus Christ, or the copiousness and variety of the references which the writer makes to His Person and His work. For him the fact of Christ conditions the whole of human history. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8), and He is the Bridegroom-Judge, whose eagerly expected coming will bring to a close the history of the world that now is. And what is true of the world’s history is also true of the book itself; its whole contents are a ‘revelation’ (Apocalypse) of Jesus Christ (Revelation 1:1), a revelation which proceeds from Him, and is mediated ‘by his angel’ to ‘his servant John.’
It will be convenient to examine the references and the doctrine which lies behind them in the order of our Lord’s experience, beginning with His life on earth. In the first place, it is noteworthy that the human name ‘Jesus,’ borne by Christ when He was on earth, which is rare in the writings of St. Paul and absent from those of St. Peter, occurs here nine (or ten) times. The martyrs are ‘the witnesses of Jesus’ (Revelation 17:6); their witness is ‘the testimony of Jesus’ (Revelation 1:1 etc.); and it is by this simple human name that the Divine Speaker describes Himself (Revelation 22:16). In this usage we may see an indication of authorship by one who had ‘known Christ after the flesh,’ to whom the name He had then borne was both familiar and dear. If authoritative criticism no longer permits us to see direct allusions to either the birth or the ascension of Jesus in the story of the ‘man-child’ contained in ch. 12, His death by crucifixion is very pointedly alluded to as an historical fact (Revelation 11:8), His victory in Revelation 3:21 (‘as I also overcame’), and His resurrection in Revelation 1:5, Revelation 1:18. His twelve Apostles find mention in Revelation 21:14, and there are echoes of His teaching as recorded in the Gospels in Revelation 3:5, Revelation 3:10, Revelation 7:17, Revelation 21:6 and Revelation 21:23.
These recollections of Jesus of Nazareth have not been obliterated by the vision of the exalted Christ; rather are the two elements held together in a singular harmony of conviction. Passing to the second, we find that the richness of the conception of Christ which marks the Apocalypse may be gauged by the variety and significance of the aspects in which He is presented—the Word, the Lamb, the Shepherd, the Bridegroom, the Judge, the King of kings. Here only outside the Fourth Gospel does Christ receive the deeply significant title of ‘the Word of God’ (Revelation 19:13), and the idea of pre-existence which the name carries with it also lies behind the declaration twice repeated, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’ (Revelation 1:17, Revelation 21:6). but the commonest and the most characteristic title of Christ in this book is ‘the Lamb’—a title which is used by the writer with great freedom, as though it had come to have for him almost the force of a proper name (cf. Revelation 21:9, Revelation 21:23, Revelation 21:27, Revelation 22:3). The use of the name is, however, rooted in the conviction of the redemptive efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice; it suggests the aspect of His work which is most prominent to the mind of ‘John.’ it should be noted that the word itself is not identical with that applied to Jesus in John’s Gospel (John 1:29, John 1:36); it is a diminutive and a neuter; but the meaning is the same, and the sacrificial reference is indubitable. The Lamb stands ‘as though it had been slain’ (Revelation 5:6); He is hailed as One who has ‘redeemed us to God by his blood’ (Revelation 5:9); the adoring saints in heaven are those ‘who have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (Revelation 7:14, cf. Revelation 1:5). These latter passages emphasize the ethical consequences of the Atonement, and trace them to the ‘blood’ of Christ in the same way as the First Epistle of John. The spiritual principle of the Atonement is suggested by the figure of the Lamb itself, in which are combined the attributes of lamb-like character—meekness, gentleness, and purity—and the sacrificial function historically associated with a lamb. At the same time, ‘the Lamb,’ originally a figure for Christ in the sacrificial aspect of His work, takes on, besides, attributes which belong to Him in other of His functions, and so we read of ‘the wrath of the Lamb’ (Revelation 6:16), of ‘the Lamb’s book of life’ (Revelation 21:27), of kings making war with the Lamb and being overcome by Him (Revelation 17:14), of ‘the marriage of the Lamb’ (Revelation 19:7), and, finally, of the Lamb as ruler of the heavenly city (Revelation 22:3), as at once the temple of it and ‘the light thereof’ (Revelation 21:23-24). Thus, while every aspect of the work of Christ, whether in earth or heaven, finds adoring record here, there is a subtle recognition of the fact that all the forms of His relation to men spring out of the fundamental function of redemption.
The writer of the Apocalypse, therefore, holding firmly to the humanity of the Jesus whom probably he had known in the flesh, yet ascribing to Him as the Lamb funetions of redemption, government, and judgment, offers to Him throughout his book the homage which is due only to ‘God manifest in the flesh.’ This is seen alike in the titles, the functions, and the attributes assigned to Him. Every detail of description serves only to enhance the dignity and the glory of His Person. He is ‘the Lord of lords and King of kings’ (Revelation 17:14, Revelation 19:16). To Him is attributed all the honour and authority pertaining to the Messiah and more. Angels who refuse worship offered to themselves (Revelation 19:10, Revelation 22:8) unite with all ereation to worship God and the Lamb (Revelation 5:11-13). His existence reaches back before the beginning of things created. Himself the principle from which all creation issues (Revelation 3:14, cf. Colossians 1:15, Proverbs 8:22), He is the absolutely Living One from whose lips are heard words which can be spoken by God alone: ‘I am the first and the last, and the Living One’ (Revelation 1:17, cf. Revelation 1:8). He holds the keys of Death and of Hades (Revelation 1:18)—keys which, according to the later Jewish tradition, were held by the hand of the Almighty alone. In the vision of the Son of Man which introduces the Letters to the Seven Churches, the writer takes one after another of those phrases which had been consecrated from old times to the description of the Most High God, those attributes in which He had been apparelled by prophets and psalmists, and lays them simply upon Christ as upon One whose right to bear them was beyond question. The description of ‘the Ancient of Days’ (Daniel 7:9) is transferred to Him, as well as the power to ‘search the heart and the reins,’ which is the peculiar attribute of Jehovah (Revelation 2:23, cf. Psalms 7:9). It is not strange, therefore, that to this Divine Figure is committed the unfolding of the Book of human Destiny (Revelation 5:5), the waging of the final conflict with evil, and the holding of the Divine assize.
This complete and unhesitating attribution of Divine rank and authority to Jesus Christ is the more remarkable when we give due weight to the intense Hebraism of the writer. A Jew of the Jews, his mind saturated with Hebrew thought, a true son of the race to which monotheism had become a passion, and the ascription of Divine honour to any other than God a horror and a blasphemy, the author nevertheless sets Jesus side by side with the Almighty. One meaning of the phenomenon is plain. It offers the most striking proof of the impression made by Jesus upon His disciples, one which had been sufficient to revolutionize their most cherished religious belief; for them He had the value of God. And the special aspect of His Person and work which is emphasized, as we have seen, in the Apocalypse, gives the clue to the explanation of this exalted Christology. The kernel of experience from which the process starts is indicated in the declaration: ‘He hath loosed (v.l. ‘washed’) us from our sins.’ John and those in whose name he wrote had found the sin-barrier between them and God removed, and the sin-dominion over them broken; and this experience they traced to Jesus, to what He had lone for them in dying, and in them as living again. And if, along with this their indubitable experience of forgiveness of, and deliverance from, sin, we take the universal conviction of their time, expressed in the question of the Pharisees, ‘Who can forgive sins save God only?’ we have little difficulty in perceiving the avenue along which the gaze of the Apocalyptist travelled till it beheld the throne of God as a throne which was shared also by ‘the Lamb.’
C. Anderson Scott.