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The big faux pas at any classical music concert is to applaud between movements. You must wait until the end of the work, and the person who accidentally claps too soon pretty much draws the frowns of the entire concert hall upon themselves as a musical ignoramus and philistine.
So it was very refreshing to hear a maestro explain, back in the 90s, that when the concertos of Hayden and Mozart were first performed, it was normal for people to clap not only between movements, but even mid-movement after hearing bits that they liked.
The book of Revelation is full of these moments of spontaneous applause, moments where the glory of Jesus Christ is unveiled by some tremendous statement or scene, and where the author or the angels or both burst into acclamations of praise. In Revelation 1:5-8 we see the first of these ebullient eruptions of applause by John. Within it we hear and learn seven brilliant things about Jesus Christ.
1. How Jesus looks at us: “To him who loves us” (Rev. 1:5a).
Everyone yearns for love, for someone to like us, care for us, protect us, and even live for us. Parents more or less fail in their love. Husbands and wives are regularly defeated by their own selfishness. Friends can fade and vanish.
But Jesus loves you perfectly. He is committed to you. He wants the best for you, delights in you, wants to be with you, and rejoices in your well-being and improvement. He is grieved when you make bad decisions. He wants to protect you and is angered by those who harm you. He gladly sacrificed his own good for your benefit.
Jesus loves you personally, perfectly, and permanently. And this leads to the next point.
2. What Jesus has done for us: “[He] has freed us from our sins by his blood” (Rev. 1:5b).
By refusing to do what God commands, and by insisting on doing what he has forbidden, we are chained. When we steal and lie, for example, we self-mutilate the image of God that we bear. We demean our humanity by possessing things, and a reputation, that do not belong to us. We deny others their rightful property and true perspective. Our sin chains us to guilt and God’s eternal wrath in the Lake of Fire.
On the cross at Golgotha Jesus freed us from these heavy black chains of guilt “by his blood.” “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin,so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Our sins were imputed to him and borne by him. He suffered the wrath of God in our place. His blood frees us to look at our death and eternity with perfect peace, and even longing and joy.
3. What Jesus has made us: “A kingdom, priests to his God and Father” (Rev. 1:6a).
By freeing us from our sins, God’s Son brought us into his kingdom. We are the subjects of King Jesus, living under his rule, provision, and protection in a kingdom that transcends this world (John 18:36).
The eighteenth-century Huguenots lived under the absolute rule of Louis XV and cruel laws that outlawed Protestant worship. Huguenot men were punished by rowing the king’s galleys until death. Huguenot women were locked into dungeons and forgotten. Huguenot pastors were hanged, or worse. How vital to know that although they were subjects of a cruel and anti-Christian earthly kingdom, they were first and foremost subjects of King Jesus. They had peace, knowing that King Jesus would in time banish unjust earthly rule and complete his good and perfect Kingdom.
And we are a kingdom of priests, as Peter said,
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Pet. 2:9)
In the Old Testament only the priests could draw near to the presence of God in the Tabernacle. It was death for anyone else. Even then, only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies once a year with blood, with evidence that their sin had been atoned for. Jesus has made us all to be like those priests. We have been cleansed by his blood and live by the Spirit of God 24/7 in the true Holy of Holies, the very presence of God:
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own. (1 Cor. 6:19)
4. What we owe Jesus: “To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (Rev. 1:6b).
For all that Christ has done, we ascribe to him “glory and dominion.” Glory refers to weightiness, heaviness, importance. God’s glory is the manifestation of his weighty presence and attributes. His Tabernacle was thus filled with “the glory cloud,” a visible manifestation of his presence. In response to God’s glory, we glorify him.
We glorify Jesus by praising his love, wisdom, holiness, eternity, and omniscience (he knows all). We also acknowledge that he is the strong and all-powerful one, that all power in the universe comes from him. We have been freed from our sin to praise and delight in God’s superb and infinitely glorious Son, Jesus Christ.
5. What Jesus is doing and is going to do: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds” (Rev. 1:7a).
Here John is referring to a Mount Everest peak of the Bible, Daniel 7:13-14. The prophet Daniel had sweated through the nightmare vision of four beasts emerging from the sea, representing cruel and powerful world empires. Think of them as the Babylonian army that swept into Judea and destroyed the temple along with Jerusalem, or the Medes and Persians who conquered the Babylonians and most of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, or as the Greek military empire of Alexander.
Then, like the sun breaking through a dismal tempest,
I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed. (Dan. 7:13-14)
Unlike the beasts, this figure is human and humane, “one like a Son of Man.” He comes with the clouds, signifying the glorious presence of God. He is both human and divine and is crowned with complete, universal, and eternal rule. Revelation shows that Jesus is Daniel’s God-man and universal and eternal king, coming with the clouds to sweep away cruel and bestial empires that scourge the earth.
Note the present tense, not “He will come,” but “He comes.” In 1836 the one hundred forlorn Texan defenders of the Alamo, besieged by 1,500 Mexican troops, held out for thirteen days for the promised relief. It never came. Christ’s people, however, can know in their suffering that he is breaking right now into history for their help and for his glory.
What a tremendous vision for those living under the fearsome shadow of Rome and her cruel and implacable persecutions. “See him coming on the clouds of heaven!”
6. What will happen as a result: “Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him” (Rev. 1:7b).
When Jesus returns everyone will recognize his glory. Even those who pierced, that is, crucified him.
The restaurant waiter snarls at the disheveled old customer in the worn greatcoat, not realizing that he is the owner, the man who pays his living. The White Witch plunges her cruel blade into Aslan’s heart, forgetting that he is Narnia’s King and Sustainer.
Robert Mounce rightly says that “those who pierced him” “extends to all those of every age whose careless indifference to Jesus is typified in the act of piercing.”[1] The soldiers who drove nails through Jesus’ hands and feet will see him in all his divine glory. Caiaphas, Herod, and Pontius Pilate will see him in the clouds. The crowds that screeched “Crucify Him!” will see him on the throne of glory. And every person on the earth today who dismisses or derides or attempts to ignore Jesus Christ will see him crowned and regaled with universal dignity and power.
And what sound will we hear from them?
7. How they will respond: “All tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev. 1:7b).
“Tribes” refers to all nations and people. Although Daniel had said, “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Dan. 7:14), Revelation emphasizes the sound of mourning. This picks up Zechariah 12:10,
When they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.
Revelation combines Daniel and Zechariah because John saw something that Daniel didn’t—that the Divine Son of Man would return in glory only afterhe had been crucified. So the world will not delight to see him but be appalled by the titanic enormity of their arrogant blunder. They will face the awful recognition that they had nailed, condemned, mocked, and rejected God’s Son and Eternal and Universal King.
When the Son of Man returns, the credulous unbelief of the atheist, which he clutches like Gollum’s Precious, will be shown for the errant nonsense that it is. The agnostic will not seem cautiously wise, but cosmically idiotic. The stupidity of those who procrastinated to repent and believe will gnaw at them for eternity, as “the worm that never dies.” The Christ-less will wail.
Then they will call for the mountains and hills to come crashing down upon them. Better that than to face justice for high treason against their own Creator and Sovereign.
“Yes! Amen!” says John in acclamation, for the thrilling vindication of the “Divine Crucified One,” the Son of Man.
What does the Son himself say? “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God.” This is the Son speaking, for he speaks almost the very same words in verse 17, “I am the first and the last,” and in 22:13, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Alpha and Omega refers to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and the other twenty-two letters that lie between: α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω. Jesus is present before, after, and during universal history.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8).
Thus, Jesus’ title, “the Almighty.” It is pantokratōr (all-strong) in Greek and omnipotent in Latin. Revelation treasures this title for Jesus; nine out of ten of the New Testament occurrences of pantokratōr appear herein.
Though Christians then and since and now and in the future face powerful earthly hostility, and even violence, there can be only one Almighty, and he is the good, holy, just, loving, and divine Son of Man.
Don’t be ashamed. Let us applaud mid-movement with John and the angels, “To him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.”
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Notes:
[1] Robert Mounce, The Book of Revelation, NICNT, vol. 27, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998 ), 51.
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