Well, we’re looking at this great book – the last book of the Bible – the book that has created lots of controversy. A book that’s very often taken literally, with the effect that mistakes are made in the application and understanding of what the book is teaching.  

What we saw last time is that John right at the very beginning of his book tells us how we should understand and handle it. When we read the things that we’re going to read in this book, we’re not so much to visualize them as we are to interpret them, because John was told quite clearly that these things were signified to him. In other words, there were signs, they are symbols, that have to be interpreted rather than visualized. So, when I read of a beast emerging from the sea, I’m not to imagine a great prehistoric beast coming up out of the literal sea, there is some other significance that I’m to look for – because it’s being signified by that means.

When you’re reading Revelation remember it’s in signs and needs to be unpacked. Well, in the introduction we were told three things about the book, we were told it was a revelation, a testimony, and a prophecy. To be a revelation it means that it’s uncovering things that are hidden and disclosing those things to us, and thereby giving us access into God’s presence, to his purposes, and to his power that is at work both inside and outside created reality from the present day until the last day. It’s a testimony concerning Jesus Christ who is the mediator, who brings us to God. And it is a prophecy. And as a prophecy has a word to say to us in every age. It’s not just about the future, it’s a word for today. And that word for today is to bring us – God’s people – to greater faithfulness to God, by recognizing and resisting false teaching, by confessing and acknowledging our allegiance to Jesus, and by keeping the faith and by keeping on in our Christian lives in difficult days. 

So, it’s a revelation, a testimony, and a prophecy. But it’s something else, and in the passage today we learn what that’s something else is. It is a letter. In its written form, it is a letter. We’re going to look at the beginning of the letter today, but it’s a letter; it ends like a letter like any other letter in the New Testament, with a customary benediction that you will find elsewhere in the New Testament.  

“The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints.” 

Well, it’s a letter. The sender is John, that’s all he tells us about himself; in spite of it being a very common name at the time, he just says John. We have a clue as to which John this is because, as we saw last time, there are some significant words in the very beginning of the letter that point us back to John’s Gospel. The word “to signify” for example is the word that John in his gospel uses of the miracles of Jesus. He says they were signs, they signified something far more significant. The feeding of the five thousand signified that God had sent down bread from heaven, this time Christ as the Living Bread, and that the people who ate the bread – we are to eat of Christ who has come from heaven – and the bread of heaven will give life to the world, for example. So “to signify”, “to testify,” that’s another word that John in his in his gospel, uses all over the place. It’s one of the hallmarks of John’s Gospel that it is a witness, a testimony to Jesus Christ.  

So, the sender is John. We suppose John the Apostle. Those who are on the receiving end of the letter are described by John as the seven churches that are in Asia. Now there were more than seven churches in Asia. There were at least 11 that we know about from the New Testament, so why the number seven? Well, go back to that word that John uses, the things that are “signified” to us. The numbers are signified to us too, and the number seven is a very important word. It’s all over this book of Revelation. And we remember that the law of first mention is very important in the Bible. If we go back to the first mention of seven days, you’ll remember that in the account of creation seven days are mentioned there to denote fullness, wholeness, and perfection and completeness. So that’s the way in which this number is going to be used throughout this book. 

You find Jesus will speak a word to each of these seven churches. And there are seven selected because they represent all the churches of Jesus, the church in its entirety throughout all the ages of time right up to the present, and they include our church. Jesus is going to speak to our church.  

And like every other letter in the New Testament, John begins with a blessing. A blessing, he says,  

“Grace to you and peace.” 

Revelation 1:4

These words are used by the Apostle Paul regularly in his salutation when he writes a letter to people. You find it in the Apostle Peter’s letters, you find it in the book of James – “Grace and peace.” These are two fundamental blessings of the gospel.  

Grace as you know refers to favor, but it’s undeserved favor. It’s favor shown to those who actually deserve something worse. They deserve judgment, they deserve condemnation, but instead they are shown grace as a gift. Unmerited favor that they do not deserve and could not buy and will never earn. Grace is a gift, and it comprehends the gift of salvation, it comprehends not only the gift of salvation, but the gift of strength, for the struggle of everyday life. 

It involves not only those things, but the gifts that God gives to the church of spiritual gifts, including the orders of ministry within the church, and the gifts that each of us has to minister to one another within the body of Christ. All of that is the grace that is given to us. 

And peace – peace is the gift of grace, and it refers to the objective state of all those who believe in the Lord Jesus objectively before God, they are in a state of peace. Hostilities have ceased. The wrath of God no longer is faced or is pointed in our direction. There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Hostilities have ceased and we are reconciled to God. 

And we find ourselves this morning in a state of reconciliation, having had our sins pardoned and us being reconciled to him in that way. Grace and peace. Peace flows out of grace, and that peace that we have is not only peace with God objectively, but the peace of God kind of overflows into our hearts and into our mental attitude and into our state of being. It’s not only a status before God, it’s a state men and women who are believers are in, a state of peace. The peace of God that guards, that garrisons or guards, our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. 

Now where does this grace and peace come from? That’s the question that we’re going to ask and answer today. And I want you to notice as it unfolds in this passage, this is part of the revelation, this is part of the testimony in the prophecy that has been provided for us because here we’re going to have a mystery unfolded before our eyes. Here we’re going to find the most profound meaning behind that word “revelation” right at the very beginning of this book. 

Here we’re going to discover the final and most full prophecy ever given about the revelation of God to his people. And it concerns the holy Trinity. Grace and peace come from God the Father first of all. I want you to notice that there are three “froms,” three froms here: the first from in the Greek reads like this: 

 “From he who is.” 

And that’s grammatically nonsense in English, we would never say that. Well, maybe you would say that, but in English we would not say that because it would be improper use. We would say as our translation says, correcting John here and inadvertently correcting the Holy Spirit,  

“From him who is and who was and who is to come.”  

Revelation 1:4

But the grammatical form of the original is absolutely vital to understanding the importance of the text. From he who is. Wilcock puts it like this: 

“He is the subject of every sentence, who governs every other part of speech, and is himself governed by none.”  

Michael Wilcock

In other words, grammar doesn’t govern “he who is.” Or as Kiddle puts it:  

“Even a paraphrase of the name of the unchanging God must be preserved from declension.” 

Martin Kiddle

If you don’t know what declension is, then you’ve never studied Latin, you’ve never studied Greek, and you’ve never learned to decline your words. But there’s no declining the name of God. It has, it’s in a place all by its own.  

That’s what John is teaching us here. From he who is. He is the one being. He is the one who is. There’s an echo here of the declaration that God made to Moses when he saw the burning bush, when Moses saw the burning bush and God speaks to him from the burning bush. He’s seen this bush burn or he’s seen the fire burning in the bush, but it’s not burning any of the bush. The fire is not consuming anything. It’s just burning by itself. 

And God speaks from the fire to Moses. And God introduces himself by the first usage of that word or, or for the first revelation of that word to Moses, the significance of the word LORD – Yahweh – and he says it means I am, I am he, I’m the one who is. I am that I am. The One who, whose essence, what is it for God to be God? For God to be God it simply means to exist. “I am,” he says. And that means that God is changeless. God is immutable. That God is timeless, he’s eternal. That God is beyond us, he is uncreated. He is a self-sufficient one, like the fire that burned and didn’t consume anything. To have a fire you need something to consume. When we light a fire, but this fire burns on its own stream as it were. God is like that self-sufficient, independent of everything else, on his own. As Ramsey puts it: 

“The very name of God must burst through all the ordinary laws of human language in order to find fitting terms, that no human language can bear the burden of this name. It’s too weighty, too big, for it to be carried by anything else.”  

James Beverlin Ramsey

So, listen to him, as he introduces himself: “He who is.” He’s the being One. “He who was,” the was One. “He who is to come,” the coming One. Here is the timelessly eternal, eternally unchanging God. The past, the present, the future appear to God in the eternal I am. Now, the Jewish rabbis in the Targum saw the connection with Isaiah 41, where the Lord says,  

“I, I am the Lord, the first, and with the last, I am.” 

Isaiah 41:4

It was common for the rabbis to say that God’s being had all the tenses of the verb “to be.” All the tenses of the verb “to be” are needed in a sense to describe God. He, he is now what he always was. He will be what he is now, and ever was, without any variation, any shadow due to turning.  

We can now, we can only conceive of eternity, you and I, in terms of time, therefore, God stoops to our creatureliness and kindly describes his eternity in the only language that we know. I am, I was, and I am to come. Grace and peace come to us from God the Father.  

Secondly, grace and peace come to us from God the Holy Spirit. I told you to look out for that device of from-ness and here we have it again:  

“and from the seven spirits who are before the throne.”  

Revelation 1:4

Now, since grace and peace are divine gifts, since they come from God the Father and now we see them being, it being declared that they come from the seven spirits, we must conclude first of all the seven spirits belong in the create in the Creator side of the divide between Creator and created things. If they come from the seven spirits, they come from a divine source, so right in the very beginning that’s what we have to conclude. The seven spirits do not refer to angels, they don’t refer to any created beings. They must refer to a divine Being. 

Then we have the symbolic significance of the number seven – wholeness, completeness, perfection. You turn to chapter 3, verse 1, you find Jesus described as him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. In chapter 4, verse 5, the seven torches of fire are the seven spirits of God. Chapter 5, verse 6, the Lamb has seven horns with seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God sent into all the earth. God out there, the spirit out there, seeing everything, recording everything, researching everything, knowing everything from a God’s perspective. In chapter 3, verse 1, Jesus is addressing the churches as the one who has the Holy Spirit. 

At the end of every letter when Jesus speaks to them, he says to them, there’s a blessing for those who have the ears to hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Or in chapter 4, verse 5, the Holy Spirit is the one through whom God and the Lamb rule the earth. The seven, in chapter 5, verse 6, the seven horns with seven eyes signifies the powers of the Holy Spirit sent into the whole earth to execute God’s rule. 

And each of these things in a sense is a is a visual, symbolic display of what Jesus says quite straightforwardly in John 16: 

“When the Holy Spirit comes, he will convict the world of sin, and righteousness, and judgment.”  

John 16:8

You know there’s an Old Testament background to this. In Zechariah chapter 4, the prophet has a vision, he sees seven candlesticks and he sees seven pipes that lead from a reservoir in which there is olive oil. And the reservoir is feeding these seven candlesticks, and the seven-fold candlestick represents the witness of Israel, that is, the church, to the world. And the vision is explained to Zechariah. “What is it?” you know, he’s wanting to know what it is he’s looking at, and he’s looking at the witness of Israel, he’s looking at the witness of the church in the world. And the angel says to him,  

“Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.”  

Zechariah 4:6

The church will shine in the world the church will show the Light of the world to the world by the Holy Spirit of God who comes to refresh and sustain. and because the Holy Spirit will come, the angel says to Zechariah,  

“The great mountain – the obstacle that lies before you – all the difficulties that are before the church as it seeks to witness to the Lord in the world – that will become a plain.”  

Zechariah 4:7

The Spirit of God will make it a plain. As we gather today the church universal, right around the globe today, is struggling, it’s struggling in one way or another. The church is struggling in this pandemic to articulate a clear Christian message to the world about the pandemic and what’s happening in this pandemic. The church right across the world is either meeting in uncomfortable circumstances such as we are, or not meeting at all because they’ve been banned from meeting. In the UK right now this Sunday, none of the churches will be meeting at all. And that for the next several weeks. So, the church is facing a problem. And there’s the normal problems that the church faces. The increasing secularization of the world is no longer something theoretical, it’s practical. It’s nipping at our heels. We may not, we may not, our children may not have the freedom to worship that we have today.  

And it seems if you sit back and think about it long enough, it seems like it’s a great mountain, a great obstacle, a great heap of obstacles. And the Holy Spirit is sent to the churches to make the mountains into a plain. And the Holy Spirit is the fullness of all that we need as a church.  

You know, when the Messiah was being identified in Isaiah chapter 11, this is what was said about the Messiah: 

“And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel, and of might, and of knowledge, and of the fear of the LORD.” 

Isaiah 11:2

The seven- fold power, resources, strength of the Spirit of God – all that we need. So let me put it like this, when the Messiah comes, he will have the whole, the complete, the perfected endowment of the Spirit for the work that he will do and be. 

And here we’re being told in Revelation that not only the Messiah, but the Messiah’s people – the whole church represented by the seven – the whole church will have the whole Holy Spirit in order to equip the church to do what it was sent to do and to be in the world. 

And even when the church is persecuted, we will find that the strength of the Spirit brings is sufficient for us, it is enough for us, to meet all of our needs. It’s the Spirit with the Father and the Son gives us grace and peace, gives us all the grace, “My grace is sufficient for you. He places his perfection at our disposal. And grace and peace comes from God the Spirit. 

And then thirdly, grace and peace comes from God the Son. Yes, the One who was given this revelation to pass on to John by the angel. Once again you see the word “from”:  

“and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” 

Revelation 1:5

Where are these two pivotal gifts of God, the divine gifts of God, where do they come from? They come from God the Father, they come from God the Spirit, they come from God the Son. Equally from each of those, but they are the gift of God, they are divine gifts. God the Son, the Son in his oneness with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, is the source and cause of all the gifts that God gives and communicates. 

Now notice how he’s described, how Jesus is described here. Each of these descriptions, by the way, comes from Psalm 89. He’s called the faithful witness: 

“His throne shall be established forever…a faithful witness in the skies.” 

Psalm 89:37

We have today a faithful witness in the skies: the Lord Jesus Christ ascended and glorified. He is the great prophet of our God. He came into the world. They were so impressed by what he said.  

“This man has the words of eternal life.” 

John 6:68

He came into the world to bear testimony to himself as the Savior, to himself as the Son of God. He says to people, you read this in John chapter 3,  

“Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak what we know, we bear witness to what we’ve seen, but you don’t receive our testimony.” 

John 3:11

He says later on,  

“He who comes from heaven is above all, he bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony.…For he whom God sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure.” 

John 3:34

Jesus comes as a witness to the peoples, Isaiah said. He is the faithful witness. You can trust what he says.  

Secondly, he’s the firstborn from the dead. This again from Psalm 89: 

“I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.”  

Psalm 89:27

He’s the faithful witness. As the faithful witness, Christ bore faithful testimony before the world. And they crucified him. But God raised him from the dead, and he is the firstborn of the dead, that is, he is gone ahead of us. Because, as Paul argues, because God raised him from the dead, he will raise his body — the church — his people from the dead. Paul writes to the Colossians: 

“He is the head of the body [the church]. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.” 

Yes, he has the preeminence, he’s the firstborn. But as Paul goes on to argue, First Corinthians 15: 

“Because he was raised, we shall be raised.” 

Because he lives, we shall live. Firstborn of the dead. 

And thirdly, the ruler of the kings of the earth. What did Psalm 89 go on to say:  

“I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” 

Psalm 89:27

The resurrection is the demonstration of his victory. The resurrection is God saying “Amen” to everything Jesus had said. God believes it. God the Father believes it. The resurrection is God putting a seal of approval, if you were, on the human Jesus who has acted on our behalf,  

“in raising him up and setting him at God’s right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority, the power and dominion, above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the age to come.” 

Ephesians 1:20-21

He is the ruler of the kings of the earth. This has been God’s purpose from eternity. God has revealed his plan for the fullness of time,  

“that he might gather together in one all things in Christ.
Things in heaven, things on earth things under the earth
according to the purpose of him who works all things
according to the counsel of his own will.” 

Ephesians 1:10-11

That’s what he was always going to do and as such he will overthrow all antagonists to God’s kingdom. We mustn’t forget this lesson from the book of Revelation – we’re in a battle, we’re in a war. Antichrist is all around us, the spirit of antichrist is all around us. The Antichrist will one day come. But what the book of Revelation says is this: Christ was crucified, God raised him from the dead and gave him glory. 

And we may fall like the two testifiers that you read about in Revelation later on, who are left dead on the street, but we will be raised from the dead. The lesson of the book of Revelation is this: we win in the end. The Lamb wins and triumphs in the end. Well, such theology leads to doxology.  In verses 5 and 6, we turn towards Christ, because that’s how the faithful respond. They respond to Christ. 

Look at these great words, now it’s the church speaking, “To him who loves us.” John uses the first-person plural “us.” He’s emphasizing that the whole believing community share in this joyful doxology – “glory to him” – to him who loves us.  

Notice it’s presently he loves us. It’s a reality right now he loves us. Well, how do I know that Jesus loves me, right now, today? How do I know that he loves me? Well, the Holy Spirit goes on to say you know that he loves you presently, currently, right now, because of something that happened past tense. He loves us because he loosed us, he freed us from our sins by his blood. He loves us now because at cost to himself, by virtue of his own shedding of his blood in a sacrifice, in a brutal death life violently taken, we can know his abiding love because of this completed action of his death for our redemption. Here we have the basis for calling him “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” 

We were loved and we are loved because we were freed by him. He loved us before he did that, he loved us as he did that, he loves us still, he will love us for all eternity. He loves us. He has made us. Here as a whole church, he has made us a kingdom. He’s talking to every one of us – men, women, boys, and girls. Wherever we are in the world, he has made us kings together with him. 

Behind this is the prophecy of Daniel 7. The Son of Man is given an everlasting dominion, a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. And no sooner are we told the Son of Man – that is the Lord Jesus himself, the God-man – is given a kingdom that will not be destroyed, no sooner are we told that then we’re told this – that the kingdom, the dominion, the power to rule – will also be given to the people, of the saints of the Most High. That embraces all of God’s people, right now. We shall reign with him. We are already reigning with him in the heavenly places and made priests to God our Father. Right now, even, we don’t have to go through anyone else in order to approach God, right now we go straight to God with our prayers and our praises. Right now we go boldly into the presence of God because we’ve been cleansed by the blood of Jesus. We offer up our own sacrifices of praise. To Christ belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. 

John ends his salutation by pointing us to the coming of the Lord. 

“Behold he is coming.”  

Revelation 1:7

Do you remember the beginning it said, how did, how did God the Father introduce himself? Or was he introduced to us?  

“him who is, he who is, he who was, he who is to come.”  

Revelation 1:4

How will God the Father come to us? Jesus will come to us. I mentioned this before, I mentioned it again, we’re heading up towards Christmas. I have to get Christmas in every week now, the decorations will be going up in our house momentarily, much to Christine’s dismay. But in Isaiah chapter 9, what is Jesus called? Everlasting Father? How on earth can Jesus be the Father if the Father is the Father?  

“Because if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” 

John 14:9

The holy Trinity always acts as one, because it’s only one being. God is only one being.  When Jesus comes, the Father comes, and the Holy Spirit comes.  

“I and the Father are one.” 

John 10:30

And when the Lord Jesus comes at the end of history, the Father and the Spirit come to consummate the age, to bring an end to the age.  

“Behold he is coming with the clouds, and every eye shall see him.”  

Revelation 1:7

Every eye will see him. This is going to be a cosmic effect that transcends the centuries, the millennia that have passed. Every human being that’s ever lived or ever will live will at the same time be confronted with the reality of Jesus Christ in a divine event. You can’t imagine it, you can’t visualize it, because any imagination or visualization that you do will be limited by the horizons of your being a creature, being locked in space and time. 

But when God reveals himself it will be something that transcends space and time and history. Every eye will see him, those who pierced him will look upon him they’ve pierced. Does that include the people that actually crucified Jesus? Yes, but I’m going to tell you something else –  that includes every man, woman, boy, or girl who has rejected Jesus Christ. But when we disbelieve him, when we reject him, we vote for the people who put drove the nails into his wrists and into his feet. We vote for the soldiers who pierced his pericardium with their spear. For those of us who believe, of course, that piercing is a message of salvation, because he was pierced for our iniquities. They crucified the Lord of glory, but the Lord of glory is life for us.  

Well, here’s the message, and then it’s round off by Jesus speaking:  

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was, and is to come, the Almighty.” 

Revelation 1:8

Here is one who is the beginning without beginning. Here is one who is the end without end. Here is the totality of a thing. Alpha, Omega, A, Z. The phrase includes infinity, eternity, and the boundlessness of God’s life and love embraces all while it transcends all. I am. And with it Jesus puts his signature right at the very beginning of the book. And he leaves us with this glorious thought: here we are, we have grace and peace much needed for our journey here, and to get us from here through our lives into glory itself. And they are the gift of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.