Revelation

An elder tells John to behold “the Lion of the tribe of Juda” (5:5), and John sees “a Lamb as it had been slain” (5:6). From then on Lamb is the book’s commonest name for Christ: arníon stands in twenty-seven verses here and in one other verse of the New Testament (John 21:15). The new song says why he is worthy to open it: “for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood” (5:9). The kings of the earth hide from “the wrath of the Lamb” (6:16), the multitude have made their robes “white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14), and when ten kings make war with him, “the Lamb shall overcome them” (17:14). The book moves toward “the marriage of the Lamb” (19:7) and a city where “the Lamb is the light thereof” (21:23).

Each of the seven letters carries a promise to him that overcometh, and the last chapters keep them. The tree of life promised at Ephesus (2:7) stands by the river (22:2). The overcomer at Smyrna “shall not be hurt of the second death” (2:11), and over those in the first resurrection “the second death hath no power” (20:6). Those promised a seat on Christ’s throne (3:21) “shall reign for ever and ever” (22:5). The victory is Christ’s first: “even as I also overcame” (3:21). The beast is given power “to make war with the saints, and to overcome them” (13:7), yet the saints stand on the sea of glass, having “gotten the victory over the beast” (15:2). They overcame “by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony” (12:11).

The first thing John sees through the open door is that “a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne” (4:2). Thrónos stands in thirty-six verses of this book, more than in the rest of the New Testament together. The judgments go out from before it: the Lamb takes the sealed book from the right hand of him that sits there, and the last vial ends with a voice “from the throne, saying, It is done” (16:17). They answer the martyrs’ cry, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood” (6:10), and from the altar a voice says, “true and righteous are thy judgments” (16:7). The dead are judged before “a great white throne” (20:11), and in the new city it is “the throne of God and of the Lamb” (22:3).

An angel binds Satan in the bottomless pit, “that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled” (20:3). The martyrs “lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (20:4), and John calls this “the first resurrection” (20:5). Christians have read the thousand years in two ways. Papias held that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth, and Justin looked for a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged. Augustine read them as the span between Christ’s first and second coming, and concluded that even now, in time, the church reigns with Christ. Both readings confess what the chapter says: Satan bound and then destroyed, the saints reigning with Christ, and the dead judged before the throne.