Revelation 1:2 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Who bare record of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.’ These are not John’s words. He wasn’t given the gist of a message, and then given scope by the Holy Spirit to express it in his own language, by his own literary skills, and using his own inventive mind. He transmits exactly what he has been given by inspiration – all these visions. ‘And of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.’ John published faithfully everything he was given. That word ‘saw’ is important. It is going to be repeated and then amplified, because this will be largely a book of visions, and the visions will be symbols. Everything will be communicated to John by visual symbols. Once the book gets started properly in chapter 4, we are not going to be reading about literal events. Yes, the first few chapters are literal letters to literal churches at the time, but even so, these churches are representative. In a way they represent churches throughout the age. We may all get into the state of the churches that are described in the open opening chapters of Revelation. But once you get to chapter 4, it is visions all the way. It is not literature like the rest of the New Testament. Visions are figurative. They are graphic language which speak of certain things, but the things they speak of are not exactly as the vision describes them. We get into an awful muddle in the book of Revelation if we forget we are reading the language of a vision, and instead of being concerned with what it means, what it signifies, we think that heaven actually looks like that, or we think that the various things described actually appear that way. They do not. He saw things, and all these pictures, these images represent great events, great teachings and doctrines. The affairs of the world and the church are going to be described in symbolic language, and the symbols need to be interpreted.Who is going to interpret the symbols? It is not anybody’s guess what they mean. It is true some of them are difficult, but for the most part the things that are pictured in these visions are things that are spoken of elsewhere in the Scripture. The Bible itself will interpret the symbols. Pretty well all the symbols that are used in the Book of Revelation are rooted in the Old Testament and in Old Testament pictures, so it is fairly straightforward in the majority of cases to see what the symbols mean. It is not a puzzle. It is not confusing. We do not just have to use our imagination. We say what does that represent, elsewhere in the Bible; how can we interpret it consistently?