22:18–19 Protecting the Canon?
2:1–22 Condemning Opponents?
See comment on galatians 1:9.
2:10–11 Which Celestial Beings?
In 2 Peter the author is condemning false teachers, and specifically their pride and presumption. We would understand it if he then aimed some verses against their slandering angels in some way, but suddenly he refers to “celestial beings” that are not angels, for the angels are presented over against them in the very next clause. Who could these celestial beings be? Have we in fact entered some science-fiction world of dark monsters? Are these simply mythological, or a figment of Peter’s imagination?
And if they are real, what is their significance for Christians today?
The false teachers of 2 Peter were known for their immorality. The author says they will be condemned, for they “despise authority” or, better, “despise the authority of the Lord” (2 Pet 2:10). Not surprisingly, then, these people have nothing but contempt for
The concept of celestial beings of one type or another has already been mentioned in 2
Peter. In 2 Peter 2:4 the author mentions the sinning angels of Genesis 6:1–4. Jude 6
refers to them as “the angels who did not keep their positions of authority.” They are kept in prison, waiting for the final judgment, a picture we also see in 1 Peter 3:19–20.
Now in the passage under consideration, Peter refers to “glorious ones” (a more literal translation than “celestial beings”). While some commentators believe that these are church leaders, the language appears too exalted for that. They could, of course, be good angels, but a natural reading of the passage shows a contrast between these
“glorious ones” and the angels mentioned in the next clause. Also, the parallel passage in Jude 9 refers to the archangel Michael’s dispute with Satan, which Peter has generalized into the behavior of angels in general over against that of evil angels (perhaps because he did not think his readers would know the story to which Jude refers). Therefore we conclude that by “glorious ones” or “celestial beings” Peter is referring to evil angelic beings of some description.
That such beings exist is clear elsewhere in the New Testament. Paul refers to “rule and authority, power and dominion” (Eph 1:21) and “thrones or powers or rulers or authorities” (Col 1:16). He also mentions that Christians fight against “the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12). Furthermore, Revelation 12 and Daniel 10 refer to battles among spiritual forces in the unseen world. In other words, there is plenty of evidence in the New Testament for the existence of evil celestial beings, in terms of either fallen angels or other types of celestial beings. Nowhere is this terminology explained to the church nor is detailed information about these realms offered (perhaps to prevent our entering into the speculation and fascination evident in some intertestamental Jewish writings), but it is everywhere assumed that they exist.
The false teachers 2 Peter opposes, then, speak disrespectfully, even slanderously, of such beings, even though they are far weaker than these spiritual beings. But the angels, who are more powerful than these beings (our author may be thinking of archangels, since an archangel is mentioned in Jude) would not make such an accusation against them before the Lord. The contrast shows the magnitude of the foolishness of the false teachers.
Why would they slander celestial beings? We do not know. Perhaps they had been warned that if they continued in their licentious ways they would fall under the power of such beings. (We do not call them demons, for we do not know if demons are the same as or different from such beings; they may be far more powerful than demons, who appear in the New Testament to attack or control single individuals and so may be low-level evil spiritual beings.) They may have scoffed at their existence or boasted of being able to control them. All such presumption is dangerous.
What does this mean for the church? The church is called to take the existence of an infernal hierarchy seriously. Spiritual powers do rule in this world. But the church is not called to spend time learning a lot about such powers or to speak against them, although the Lord could, of course, give a person a prophetic word to speak to that realm. Paul lists the means of spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6, and although they include prayer, they do not include direct confrontation with celestial beings.
Unfortunately, in our fascination with such powers we may be tempted to speak against them (without a direct command of the Lord, but simply to try to demonstrate
“our authority”) or to live in fear of them. Peter expects them to be taken seriously, but the way they are taken seriously is by living a holy life free from the desires and pride to which they appear to be related (and which pastoral experience reveals to be the principal means by which they control a person). This means that the New Testament does take such celestial beings seriously, but wants Christians to focus on Christ, not on the dark powers. If Christians live in intimacy with and obedience to Christ (unlike these false teachers), then such beings can do nothing ultimate to them.3
[3 For further information on this area, see C. Peter Wagner and F. Douglas Pennoyer, eds., Wrestling with Dark Angels (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1990).]
2:20 Worse Off at the End?
Christians recognize that before people know Christ they are in bad shape, for they live under the judgment of God, who has commanded all people everywhere to repent and believe the gospel. It is therefore not hard to see how Christ enables people to escape from the corruption of the world, since this corruption is tied up with their pre-Christian life. Nor do most of us lack for examples of people who have again been
“entangled” in the world after they knew Christ; we may even know some who after initially turning to Christ have later totally rejected the gospel in word as well as in action (although most of our “backslidden” brothers and sisters would still confess to the truth of the gospel, even if it is playing no active role in their lives). Yet 2 Peter 2:20 does more than make these common (if sad) observations. It states that such people are “worse off” than before their initial conversion. How can this be the case?
Aren’t they still Christian even if they are backslidden? Will they not go to heaven despite their sinful life? And isn’t this “better” than their original state? Isn’t salvation by faith, not works? What 2 Peter says appears incompatible with our concept of a God of grace and mercy.
When we read this verse in context, we recognize that the people being discussed are the false teachers whom Peter opposes. They were once orthodox Christians who were
“cleansed from [their] past sins” (2 Pet 1:9), or “washed” (2 Pet 2:22). They had come to know Jesus Christ, and this was a personal knowledge that released them from “the corruption of the world,” or, in Pauline language, the power of sin over them had been broken. And they had come to know “the way of righteousness” (meaning a righteous lifestyle; 2 Pet 2:21). It is not that in some way they had been taught poorly or had not experienced the power of God freeing them from the world and its desires. They had experienced all of this. They were in every way righteous and orthodox.
But now they have done exactly what they are enticing others to do (2 Pet 2:18–19).
They have claimed freedom, but their freedom is a freedom to live according to their desires. These desires have mastered them. They have rejected “the way of righteousness” or “the sacred command” (perhaps the teaching of Jesus or even the Old Testament standard of righteousness). They are back doing what they did before they were converted, but now they are claiming Christian justification for it.
Peter says that such people are worse off than before they were converted. He takes his words from the story in Matthew 12:45 and Luke 11:26 about the person cleansed from a demon who ends up in a worse state because the demon returns with seven others. The implication is that the person is in more bondage than before. Yet although verbally 2 Peter is closer to the statement about the demonized person, we are reminded even more of Luke 12:47–48, in which Jesus says that the person who does
not know his master’s will is beaten with few blows, while the one knowing it and still disobeying is beaten with many blows. Applied to the people in 2 Peter this indicates that the knowingly disobedient people he refers to will get a worse punishment than they would have received had they never been converted. They had been introduced to Jesus and experienced the power and freedom of his lordship, but now they have turned their backs on his teaching and are walking in willful disobedience.
This, then, is the state of the apostate, including the moral apostate who still tries to rationalize his or her sin with Christian theology. As Hebrews 10:26–27 says, “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.” These people knew the truth and had been freed from their sin, coming under the rule of Christ. Now because of their web of rationalizations Christ is no longer Lord and they “deliberately keep on sinning.” Peter has already told us of their end: “Blackest darkness is reserved for them” (2 Pet 2:17).
God will still forgive them if they repent, but people who have rejected truth they once knew fully and have woven a fabric of doctrine to justify their sin will be most unlikely ever to repent. This letter, then, appears to be more aimed at those people the false teachers are beginning to deceive (see 2 Pet 2:18) than at the teachers themselves, for while the teachers are not beyond grace, they are certainly not listening to the ideas of the author.
The teaching of this passage (and of the New Testament in general), then, is that people are responsible for what they know. To reject truth one has once appropriated is far more serious than never to have known it. Furthermore, only those who follow the way of righteousness, who are really following Jesus as Lord and have therefore been freed from the corruption in the world, are on the way to the kingdom. To claim to be “saved” while living in sin is self-deception of the worst type. It not only blinds one to one’s own state, but it may deceive those who were getting along well in the faith, dragging them back into the quicksand in which those living in sin are themselves trapped.
This verse, then, is not implying that righteous living saves a person, but that salvation means repenting from a sinful lifestyle, turning to Christ as Lord, and living under his kingship. Where the results of this process (such as a freedom from the power of sin) are lacking—even if they once were present—we have no right to think for a moment that such people are in the kingdom, especially if they show no grief for their sin and are not attempting to forsake it. Furthermore it is dangerous to imply that such people are headed to heaven (even if without “reward”), for it cheapens the grace of God and implies to others that they too can take the “low road” to heaven and get in without truly submitting their lives to Christ. Such an implication could effect the same result that the false teachers were trying to produce in Peter’s day, that is, entice a believer who is in the process of escaping the “corruption in the world” back into the entrapment.
See also comment on hebrews 6:4–6; 10:26; 1 john 5:16–17.
3:10, 12 The Earth Renewed or Destroyed?
See comment on revelation 21:1.
3:11–12 Speeding Up Its Coming?
It is surprising to read in 2 Peter 3:12 that the coming of the day of judgment can be speeded up. Can it be true that the behavior of Christians can speed up (or delay) the day of God? In what way can they do this? And what does this mean for the idea of the sovereignty of God? Does he not decide about the “times and seasons” without any input from us and our behavior?
The whole of 2 Peter 3 concerns the return of Christ. Two terms are used: “coming”
(sometimes left untranslated as “parousia,” 2 Pet 3:4) and “day” (2 Pet 3:10). The
“day” here is the “day of God” rather than the usual “day of the Lord.” “Day of God”
also appears in Revelation 16:14. It probably appears here because “the day of the Lord” occurs three times in the previous verses and so a change in terminology is demanded by good style.4 [4 This is seen also in the use of “God” and “Lord”: 2 Peter 3:3–7 uses “God,” 2 Peter 3:8–
10 uses “Lord,” 2 Peter 3:11–13 uses “God,” and 2 Peter 3:14–16 uses “Lord” first and then “God.” There seems to be a deliberate switching back and forth between the synonymous terms.]
This “day of God” will be marked by the destruction of “the heavens” by fire, including the melting of the “elements.” We are not told exactly what will be the mechanism of this process, but it is clear that it is caused by the “day of God” and therefore not a natural catastrophe or something touched off by human carelessness. God will remove the old heaven and earth, says Revelation 21:1, preparing the way for a new heaven and new earth (which 2 Pet 3:13 mentions). Peter refers to this event not to scare Christians, but to remind them that everything done or built on this earth is temporal.
Therefore living in radical obedience to God pays the only lasting dividends, and this
“day” is the time when they will receive those rewards.
Christians are to “look forward to” or “watch expectantly for” this day. This means keeping it in their awareness, and living in the light of it. For the New Testament writers eschatology determined ethics. That is, what one believed about the return of Christ would determine how one lived. If people have the lively expectation that Peter wants them to have, then they would live a holy life, whatever the immediate consequences, for they would be so expectant of ultimate reward that temporal losses would make no difference.
Yet Christians are also to “speed” the coming of that day. Jesus himself told his followers to pray for that day, for the Lord’s Prayer contains the line “Your kingdom come.” Furthermore, the church prayed “Marana tha” (1 Cor 16:22), translated in Revelation 22:20 as “Come, Lord Jesus.” But Peter probably is referring to something more than prayer. There was a strong Jewish tradition based on Isaiah 60:22 (which in the Septuagint uses the same word for “speed” used here) that the coming of Messiah was held back by the sins of the people and that repentance would hasten this day.
Peter appears to agree with this. He has talked throughout the letter about holiness. In the verse immediately before this one he has exhorted the people to “holy and godly lives” (2 Pet 3:11), and two verses later he summarizes with “Make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him” (2 Pet 3:14). Therefore what is said here is that the holiness of Christians both expresses their expectation of that day and hastens its coming.
If Christians have this much influence over the timing of the coming of Christ, what does that mean for God’s sovereignty? Peter has already explained that. In 2 Peter
3:8–9 he stated that God is patient; time in our terms is not an issue to him. What is his issue is that he does not want “anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
The special focus of this concern in 2 Peter is the Christian community, which is being polluted by sin. God is sovereign, and in his sovereignty he has determined to bring as many people to repentance and obedience as possible. (Peter does not explain what factors will make God call a final end to his efforts.) He has chosen to take human choices into account in setting the time of the return of Christ. What this means for Christians is that if they really desire the coming of the kingdom they had best get on with repentance and holy living so that they cooperate with God in preparing for the end.
Peter has taken our breath away. On the one hand, the vision of the earth that we know dissolving into a fireball along with all of the accomplishments and monuments of human culture shakes our security to the extent to which we are invested in this age.
On the other hand, the idea that our lives, to the degree they are holy, may speed the coming of Christ and thus the whole timetable of the universe produces a sense of awesome humbling privilege. Peter hopes that together these images will prod Christians to that expectancy of Christ’s return and the holy living that will in fact speed it along, for this is God’s holy sovereign will.
1 John
2:15 Love Either the World or the Father?
How can John say that we are not to love the world? Isn’t John being too absolute in saying that if one loves the world, there is no love for God?
John uses the term the world six times in 1 John 2:15–17, but he also uses it seventeen more times in 1–3 John. The world in 1 John is not the planet, the people on it or the creation, but the human sphere in which we live. It is, then, the sum total of human culture and institutions, the collective living human community. This community is controlled by Satan (1 Jn 5:19; compare 1 Jn 4:4). It is therefore at root hostile to God and those who are committed to him (1 Jn 3:13). In fact, “the world” is where the false teachers go when they leave the church (1 Jn 4:1, 3, 5). This is different from the meaning of “the world” in John 3:16, where it refers to humanity. “The world” in 1
John focuses on this culture, which is at root hostile to God.
The Christian’s relationship to such a world can hardly be a friendly one; they are to have a totally different orientation (Jn 17:15–18). To maintain this orientation they must have victory over the world, not in the sense that the world is conquered and becomes Christian, but in the sense that the world does not conquer them or force them back into its own lifestyle and way of thinking. Rather, Christians live within the world as Christ would (1 Jn 5:4–5; 4:17).
This makes it clear why a believer cannot love the world. To love is to be emotionally invested in something; in Scripture this investment includes caring for or serving the object of love. Those things which characterize the world are “the cravings of sinful man” or, better, “the desires of the body,” “the lust [better, “desire”] of his eyes” and
“the boasting of what he has and does.” Obviously the Christian has bodily desires and also looks at things and desires them (the English words cravings and lusts are too
strongly negative to carry John’s meaning accurately), but the issue is whether the Christian is emotionally invested in these desires. Many people have only these desires to live for, but Christians have someone beyond the world to live for, namely Jesus.
Thus although they experience the same desires they sort them out according to the principles and priorities seen in Jesus.
We cannot be totally emotionally invested in two contradictory directions. We choose either God and his values or the world and its values. If Jesus is truly Lord (and John has written extensively of obedience to Christ as being the essence of loving him), then it will be his values that will determine our emotional investments.
The natural human desire to be accepted and to “fit in” will not find these verses comfortable ones. The Christian will always live in tension with the world, suspicious of, if not rejecting, much of the product of human culture. The countercultural lifestyle of the Christian invites rejection, for living by different values suggests that the values of one’s neighbors are inadequate. The tension is there. The pain is real. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot love both God and the world. At the same time God shows that he understands when John also writes, “You … are from God and have overcome them [those who are of the world], because the one who is in you [Jesus, through the Spirit] is greater than the one [Satan] who is in the world” (1 Jn 4:4).
See also comment on james 4:4.
2:18–22 Who Is the Antichrist?
See comment on 2 thessalonians 2:3.
2:27 What Is the Anointing?
What type of anointing is it that 1 John 2:27 claims the Christian receives? Is it anything like what was received in the Old Testament? Why does John then say that this means that “you do not need anyone to teach you”? How does an anointing teach us something? Can we now dispense with human teachers altogether?
This verse is a continuation of a thought first introduced in 1 John 2:20, “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.” References to both anointing and knowing the truth appear in each of the two verses. In the Old Testament the anointing given kings and priests was with oil to consecrate them to ministry. There is clearly a consecration or initiation going on in this passage as well, but there is no mention of oil. By the time of Tertullian (a.d. 200) anointing with oil was practiced in the context of baptism, but there is no evidence that such a practice occurred as early as the New Testament period. In the New Testament oil is only connected with anointing the sick for healing (Mk 6:13; Jas 5:14–15). Yet the practice of the later church does give us a clue to the meaning here, for the oil meant the reception of the Spirit. Even in the Old Testament the anointing of kings (1 Sam 16:13) and prophets (Is 61:1) is connected with the Spirit coming upon them. Jesus at his baptism is said to be anointed with the Spirit (Acts 10:37–38; compare Acts 4:27; Heb 1:9), and in Luke 4:18 Jesus quotes, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me” (Is 61:1), which was the theme of his ministry.
Jesus was never anointed with oil (other than perhaps the perfume poured over him at
the end of his ministry in Bethany), but he was anointed with the Spirit, which came upon him at his baptism. It is quite appropriate (and probably a deliberate play on words) that Christians, who are followers of the Christ (which means Messiah, or
“anointed one”) should bear that same anointing (the root of “Christ” and “anointing”
are the same in Greek).
Paul indicates that Christians have been anointed with the Spirit when he says, “He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come” (2 Cor 1:21–22; the grammar indicates that this is one event, not several). The experience of the Spirit was a normative part of early Christian initiation. Paul explicitly denies the modern idea that one is not supposed to experience or feel anything at conversion when he argues that one knows if one is a Christian because of the presence of the Spirit within (Rom 8:9; see 1 Jn 3:24; 4:13). Acts also connects the reception of the Spirit to Christian initiation (Acts 2:38; 3:19; 8:15–17; 10:44–48; 19:5–6).
In the New Testament, then, baptism is normally associated with the experience of the Spirit, as are repentance from “dead works” and commitment to Christ. The four form a complex, but they are not interchangeable with each other. All need to be present for the complete initiatory experience. The data of Acts shows that at times the order of the events is different, and in some cases the various parts are separated by some time.
But the assumption of the New Testament writers is that all four are present. Thus in 1
John 2:27 the anointing is something that has been received at a past point in time, the point of Christian initiation. However, John is not discussing baptism here, and therefore does not identify the anointing he is talking about with baptism.
John also does not identify the anointing with the Word, although he does not place Word and Spirit over against one another. In 1 John 2:24 we read, “See that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.” The “what you have heard from the beginning” is the apostolic witness to Christ (1 Jn 1:1–3), which in the Gospel of John became Scripture. Those anointed are not the false teachers who have rejected this apostolic witness and left the orthodox Christian community, but precisely those who have accepted the witness, in which it remains. We see a similar continuity between the Spirit and Christ in John 14:26 and John 15:26. There is no conflict between the Spirit and the gospel tradition.
Yet the two are not the same. The anointing is not “that which you have heard,” but a complement to it, the Spirit within.
Those who have the Spirit (in whom it “remains,” a continuing action), then, “do not need anyone to teach” them. This again parallels what we read in John 14:26 and John 15:26, not to mention the ongoing revelation of John 16:12–15. John has at least three reasons for writing this. First, the false teachers were probably claiming to have some secret knowledge into which they had been initiated and which the orthodox Christians did not have. Nonsense, says John, you yourself have the real, not the counterfeit.
Unlike them you have Truth himself within.
Second, these people already have received the apostolic witness and remain in it, the anointing of the Spirit showing them that it is indeed true. There is no need for supplementary teaching, for they already have what is true. Third, the Spirit within will guide them into truth. While teachers may be helpful and an exhortation or teaching like 1 John useful, John trusts that the Spirit himself will be the real teacher, showing them the true and exposing the false, just as Paul trusts that the Spirit will lead
Christians into righteous living (Gal 5:16, 18, 22–26) and James expects the “wisdom that comes from heaven” to bear the proper fruit (Jas 3:13–18). Christians who are listening to the Spirit should “smell a rat” when they see false versions of the faith or outright evil, and they should recognize the family likeness in that which is of God.
Unfortunately, Christians often do not listen to the Spirit, and when they do their perceptions can be warped, so the external guidelines of Scripture are always necessary. Furthermore, in the process of conversion the human teacher also instructs students in the truth, the apostolic witness, which they must accept and remain in to receive this anointing. Again John does not separate Word from Spirit or substitute one for the other, but he does recognize that the Spirit should be giving true discernment to the believer. Since he still has a place for the Word, John also has a place for human teachers, yet he recognizes that they may fall into error and it may be hard for Christians to sort out the true teacher from the impostor. It is the discernment taught by the Spirit that John believes will enable the believer who is committed to Christ to see correctly in this situation. The human remains important, but the divine Guide is the one in whom John places his ultimate confidence.
This passage is difficult, then, in two ways. First, it relies on our understanding the Jewish background of anointing so that we will connect it with the Spirit and Christian initiation. Second, it expects our experience of the Spirit to be real enough that we will understand that the Spirit himself does indeed teach us and lead us into truth. The challenge of the verse is to live in this experience, not in rejecting the role of the Word, for John never does that and in fact easily slips back and forth from Spirit to Word, but in so walking in obedience to the words of Christ in Scripture and the inner voice of the Spirit that we recognize immediately when the world tries to seduce us through that which claims to be Christian but is tainted in some way.
2:29 Everyone Who Does Right Is Born of God?
See comment on 3 john 11.
3:9 No One Born of God Will Continue to Sin?
Most of use are quite conscious of sinning from time to time. Does this mean that we are not born of God? If we read three verses earlier, in 1 John 3:6 we find “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” This sounds even worse. Even stranger is the fact that in this very context the elder can write, “This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence” (1 Jn 3:19). These passages are hardly likely to set our hearts at rest! Could they mean that if we sin after our conversion or baptism we are damned (as was thought by some in the period of the church fathers)? If not, what do these passages mean? How can we truly set our hearts at rest?
This passage, which includes the whole of 1 John 3:2–10, is quite difficult, and there have been a number of solutions suggested:
1. One group of commentators notes that the verbs for “sinning” in these verses are in the present tense, which in Greek is a continuous tense. The NIV [NIV New
International Version] stresses this continuous aspect by translating “keeps on sinning”
and “continues to sin” and “go on sinning.” The argument is that while true believers may sin on occasion (so 1 Jn 1:7–9), they will not habitually sin. The weakness of this position is that it depends on a grammatical subtlety which an interpreter cannot stress in other places in the New Testament where this tense is used. Furthermore, in 1 John 5:16 the same tense is used for a believer seen by a fellow believer “committing a sin.”
Here is a true believer who is doing the same thing that is denied in 1 John 3:6, 9. Why doesn’t the NIV [NIV New International Version] translate consistently and so translate this passage “continuing to sin”?
2. Another group of commentators, noticing 1 John 5:16–17, suggests that “the elder”
is thinking of two types of sin, a “sin that leads to death” and a “sin that does not lead to death.” The true believer cannot sin a “sin that leads to death,” but may sin the other type of sin. What these sins are is debated, some thinking that they are deliberate versus involuntary sins and others opting for other distinctions among sins (such as the difference between mortal and venial sins in the Roman Catholic tradition). Yet if this is what the elder means, why does he wait until 1 John 5:16 to mention this difference?
His terms here appear rather absolute.
3. Still others suggest that John is pointing to an ideal or expressing a tension in the Christian life between the ability not to sin, expressed here, and the reality of sin, expressed in 1 John 1:7–9. That interpretation is also possible, yet does it adequately express the strength of the language used here?
4. Finally, there are commentators who suggest that this passage must be taken in the context of the whole of 1 John, which shows that John is arguing on two fronts. On the one hand, one group the elder opposes is arguing that they are beyond sin. He addresses them in 1 John 1:7–9. Another group is arguing that their sins do not matter, since they are enlightened within. He is addressing them here. The weakness of this position is that the author does not make any clear distinction between groups. He does not say, “Now addressing the other group,” or make any similar transition.
How can we evaluate these positions? Any conclusion which we draw must be both exegetically and pastorally sound. On this basis, I believe that while none of the four solutions is impossible, it is the last of them which is the most likely.
The elder is addressing a church situation in which there are some people who hold that Jesus was not really incarnate, probably believing that he only seemed to be a human being. Such beliefs in their full-blown form (which happened in the second century) are the foundation of Gnosticism, a system of belief in which salvation is based in knowledge or enlightenment and in which the physical world is disparaged, while the spiritual world is held in honor.
With respect to sin there are two directions that Gnosticism took. One direction was to deny sin. On the basis of ascetic practices and inner enlightenment the Gnostics believed that they were beyond sin. Naturally such beliefs were underpinned by a good dose of denial. The author addresses such people in 1 John 1:7–9. Rather than think that we are beyond sin and deny that what we do is sinful, Christians should confess their sin and get it removed.
Another direction that Gnosticism took with respect to sin was to claim that sin was irrelevant. Sin was something done in the body, and the body, in their view, was (at
best) simply the outside shell of a person. The real person was the spiritual being who through enlightenment was living in communion with God. So one’s body might be sleeping with a prostitute, but one’s spirit was not involved in the act. In this passage the elder is addressing such people in no uncertain terms.
Starting in 1 John 3:6 the author makes a series of contrasts: (1 Jn 3:6a) no one who lives in God sins, (1 Jn 3:6b) no one who sins knows God, (1 Jn 3:7) those who know God live righteously, (1 Jn 3:8) the one who sins belongs to the devil, (1 Jn 3:9) the one born of God cannot sin. Thus we have an A B A B A pattern, shifting back and forth between those who sin and those who do not sin. The person who is saying that it is fine to sin, since sins are only part of the body and thus irrelevant, is condemned in no uncertain terms.
So what is the elder saying? He is saying (1 Jn 3:6) that if believers remain in Christ (which the NIV [NIV New International Version] translates “who lives in him”), which means to stay in intimate connection with Christ, they will not sin. Christ is not the one producing the carelessness about sin that could be seen in the semi-Gnostic opponents of the elder (we say semi-Gnostic or proto-Gnostic, because the full Gnostic systems did not develop until the second century). Far from it, the one who sins is showing that to that extent he or she does not know Christ. The next statement makes the point clear: it is the one who does right who is righteous, for that is what Christ is. If a person really knows Christ, they will live like him. On the other hand, sin shows a person’s inheritance in the devil, so acceptance of sinful living shows where such people are from. It is these very works of the devil that Christ came to destroy.
Then the author makes it clear in the verse we started with that being born of God puts a new nature in a person and that new nature will not sin. John has already admitted that Christians do sin (1 Jn 1:7–9), but that sinning is not due to the new nature. The author draws from the Old Testament picture of God’s putting a new “heart” into believers (“I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees,” Ezek 36:27). This was later picked up in intertestamental literature such as 1 Enoch 5:8
(“And then there shall be bestowed upon the elect wisdom, and they shall live and never again sin”; compare Psalms of Solomon 17:32; the Rule of the Community from the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1QS 4:20–23; Testament of Levi 18:9). The elder, with a background in John 3, expresses this using a picture from typical first-century ideas about human procreation: the male’s sperm (seed) determines what the child will be like. So God’s spiritual “sperm” determines what his children will be like. Those born of God have a nonsinning nature. This is a far cry from the indifference to sin asserted by the opponents.
One way which a believer can see this difference practically is in the love of fellow Christians. The love of fellow Christians is what God has implanted in our heart, while neglect or hatred of fellow Christians shows that we are pseudo-Christians (not born of God, 1 Jn 3:10–18).
So how do believers set their hearts at rest? By noting the nature of God within them, giving them love for fellow Christians and leading them into other righteous deeds.
Will “our hearts condemn us”? Yes, they will, for all people will sin from time to time.
Yet the God who put his very nature in the believer is greater than “our hearts.”
Is 1 John saying that a true Christian will never sin? No, for he has already admitted that true Christians do sin and will be liars if they deny this truth (1 Jn 1:7–9). What he
is saying is that a true Christian has within him or her by virtue of their new birth a power not to sin. God within them is causing righteous living. He is not causing sin. In fact, the secret to not sinning is intimate fellowship with Christ, or “remaining in Christ,” as John puts it. If a person does not experience this new life in them, if they can be indifferent to sin, then they are likely not born of God, as Paul also says (1 Cor 6:9–10; Gal 5:19–21). On the other hand, even if a person is struggling with temptation and at times falling prey to it—indeed because they are struggling and cannot be content with simply sinning—they can have the assurance that because they know the power of God within them impelling them away from sin and toward the love of their fellow believers, they are in fact one of his children and his new life in them will win out in the end.
Here, then, is the tension. We have the picture of a life totally free from sin which will be ours in the future. We have the reality of that new life already being within us. And we have the realization that that new life is not yet totally victorious, so that we must admit our sins, confess them, and appropriate that new life again each day.
See also comment on john 5:28–29; romans 6:2, 7; hebrews 10:14; 2 peter 1:4.
4:2 Confessing Christ Come in the Flesh?
See comment on 2 john 7.
4:7 Everyone Who Loves Has Been Born of God?
See comment on 3 john 11.
5:6–8 By Water and Blood?
Christians have rightly written and sung about the blood of Jesus, for his atonement is central to the faith. But in 1 John 5:6–8 we discover that there is water as well as blood; we do not have songs about water. What does it mean to come by water and blood? Why are they placed alongside the Spirit as witnesses? And how do inanimate things bear witness?
Historically there have been three different types of answers to these questions. First, some of the church fathers linked the water and blood to the “blood and water” that came out of Jesus’ side when he was pierced by a spear (Jn 19:34). Yet the essence of the cross was not that water flowed, but that blood was shed. In fact, no other New Testament text mentions water in connection with the cross. At the time of the spear-thrust Jesus was already dead; it only proved that he was in fact dead. Finally, the order of words in John 19 is different from that in John 5:6–8, which indicates that the author was not thinking of the Gospel passage when he wrote.
Second, others have seen a sacramental emphasis here. The blood stands for the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist, the water for baptism, and the Spirit for the reception of the Spirit in Christian initiation. In that case part of the background would be John 3:5, being born of water (baptism) and the Spirit, and part would be John 6:53–56, the eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood of the Son of Man. This interpretation fits better with 1 John 5:8 than with 1 John 5:6, for the verb here indicates a completed
act, not a repeating sacrament, while in 1 John 5:8 there is a present-time ongoing witnessing. Yet even there the order of the three terms is not the same as that in normal Christian initiation in which baptism (water) precedes both Eucharist (blood) and reception of the Spirit. Nor is the order the same as that in John 3:5. Finally, it would be unique to find the single term “blood” standing for the Eucharist. Even in John 6 both flesh and blood are mentioned. At the same time, since the Johannine writings are full of double meanings, it is quite possible that this is a secondary meaning implied by the author; namely, that in the Christian rites we reflect on the historical events in the life of Christ.
Third, and probably correctly, scholars have seen the water as standing for the baptism of Jesus and the blood for his death on the cross. The two events mark out respectively the beginning and end of his ministry. The context in 1 John argues that “Jesus is the Son of God” (1 Jn 5:5). What John is saying is that the human Jesus is in fact the divine, preexistent Son. This very Son is the one who had a real human existence marked by baptism and the cross. He is Jesus Christ; that is, both the human man and the divine Savior. This emphasis is reasonable in the face of the heresy John was refuting that denied that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (1 Jn 4:2). He was really human, John states, for he was baptized, receiving the Spirit and entering upon a ministry open to all to see, and he died a real death marked by real blood. This whole life history of Jesus refutes the claims of the heretics.
How, then, do these inanimate elements bear witness? It is obvious that the Spirit is the central witness of the trio and the one most emphasized by John. His ongoing witness in the heart of the believers is clear throughout 1 John. The other two are historical events, but they stand as things that happened, a silent testimony to all who will accept their witness. To deny the reality of Jesus’ humanity is to fly in the face of the historical data. They function as witnesses the same way that piles of stones and other inanimate objects could function in that way in the Old Testament (see Josh 22:27).
Their importance is that the Spirit witnesses to something that is real—real historical events—not to something that happened only in the suprahistorical realm.
Readers of the Authorized or King James Version will notice that in the NIV [NIV
New International Version] and other modern translations 1 John 5:7 does not contain the three who “testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit.” The reason for this omission is quite simple. The clause appears in late manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, not in the early ones. And in the Greek manuscripts it does not appear before the sixteenth century. As a result, scholars universally conclude that the original text of 1 John lacked this statement, which was probably added by a pious scribe in the margin at some later time as a “Praise the Lord” and got copied into the text by a still later scribe (doubtless thinking that the first scribe was putting in the margin something that he had accidentally left out).
These verses, then, underline the importance of the real historical nature of the life and death of Jesus. Christians do not believe that salvation comes through actions that only took place in the realm of ideas or the spiritual world. Nor did Jesus come simply as a revealer of the truth, his deeds being incidental. Rather, Jesus came to do something as a real man in space and time and history. He lived a real life, accomplished a real ministry, and died a real death. The markers of the water of his baptism and the blood of his cross point to this reality. To this the Spirit bears witness. And, in a secondary sense, the celebration of the Christian sacraments point to this historical foundation.
5:14 Praying According to His Will?
All Christians believe in prayer, for the New Testament teaches us to pray; but some of the verses make us struggle with prayer. This is one of those verses. It forms part of the conclusion of 1 John and leads into a “health wish” (a standard part of the ending of Greek letters). It is not the place where we would expect radically new teaching on prayer, but a repetition of truths that the readers already know. Yet even what was a repetition for them may raise questions for us. What does it mean to ask “according to his will”? Does “he hears us” mean that he grants our request? If so, doesn’t this fly in the face of the Christian experience of prayer? In other words, what is this
“confidence” that John believes we should have? Is it something that makes sense in the light of the prayer experience of the church?
John has spoken of “confidence” three times before this in this letter. Twice it has to do with the return of Christ and the final judgment (1 Jn 2:28; 4:17). Once it has to do with prayer (1 Jn 3:21–22). In all three it is a confidence that we have before God; it is this relationship with God, not our relationship with the world, that is the issue.
The confidence here is that “if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” John makes it plain in the next verse what “hears us” means: “We know that we have what we asked of him” (1 Jn 5:15). Therefore the hearing is not simply that God registers our request, that there is a heavenly “Ah, hum, I see; I heard that.” Instead it is that God hears and answers the request, the same thing that the expression means in John’s Gospel (Jn 9:31; 11:41–42).
This answered prayer is conditioned by “ask … according to his will.” In the Johannine writings there are a series of conditions for prayer:
Passage
Condition:
John 14:13–14
Ask “in my [Jesus’] name”
John 15:7
Remain in Jesus/His words remain in you
John 15:16
Ask “in my [Jesus’] name”
John 16:23–27
Ask “in my [Jesus’] name”
1John 3:21–22
We obey his [God’s] commands
John 5:14
Ask according to his [God’s] will
All of these conditions boil down to being in an intimate relationship with God/Jesus.
To “remain in [Jesus]” or “ask in [his] name” is to be in such a relationship with him.
To “obey his commands” or for “his words to remain in [us]” are expressions of this relationship as one lives in obedience to the declared will of God/Jesus. This, then, is what asking according to God’s will means; it is to ask in submission to that will.
Such a condition does not surprise us, for in Matthew 6:10 we are taught to pray,
“Your will be done.” Yet what John is talking about is not a general prayer, for such general prayers get general answers. In fact, if the Lord’s Prayer is an outline for prayer and not a prayer itself, it too is not expressing a general wish. Instead, John is talking about knowing and praying the specific will of God in a given instance. This is not always pleasant; nor does one come to know and submit to this will easily. Jesus in Gethsemane also prays, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mk 14:36). He did not come to this submission without a struggle. He appears to have begun his prayer dreading what was coming and hoping that there might be a way in the will of God for it not to happen. In his struggle in those hours he apparently saw clearly that the Father had only one way, the cross. Therefore Jesus comes to the place of submission to that will. But it was not easy; it was not without groans and cries and sweat.
John, then, is suggesting to his readers a relationship with God in which they too will pray God’s will back to him. It may be no easier for them than for Jesus, who, although he wrestled with bigger issues, did not have a background of sin and disobedience to fight against and had a more intimate relationship with the Father than believers experience. But the process is analogous. Believers live in obedience to God (having repented of sin); now they come in prayer, perhaps already knowing the divine will, but otherwise listening and praying until they know that they are in line with God.
It is then that the confidence comes that this prayer will indeed be heard.
But why pray if one is only praying God’s will back to him? Such a question, of course, tries to unravel the mystery of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Yet without being able to solve that mystery, we can answer the real issue it poses. That answer is relatively straightforward. God in his sovereignty has chosen to work his will through human prayer. It appears to be his will not to do what he might like to do if human beings will not pray for it. On the one hand, this makes prayer a privilege.
Christians are invited to work together with the Creator of the universe. He has chosen to make their freely willed prayers part of his plan. On the other hand, this gives prayer a security. If a believer does not correctly perceive the will of God, God is not bound to answer that prayer. We do not have to walk in fear that we will mess up the universe through ill-advised prayers.
This passage is often read as if it meant, “If we ask anything, according to his will he hears us.” We do the asking, and then God decides if it is his will to hear us. This is not the relationship with God that John is presenting, for it is no confidence at all. Instead, he is presenting a relationship in which meditation on the words of Jesus (and obeying them as they are understood) and listening prayer are central.1 [1 For more information on listening prayer, see Joyce Huggett, The Joy of Listening to God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986).] Out of this struggle to hear and then, perhaps, to will that will oneself, the Christian prays. That prayer, says John, rising like incense to the Father (Rev 5:8), will certainly be heard, receiving whatever it is that is requested. This is not only the theory of John, but it is
also the experience of the numerous people of prayer down the centuries who have taken the time to learn to pray in this
5:16–17 A Sin That Leads to Death?
Is there a sin from which there is no recovery? There is certainly no problem with the concept that one should pray for a fellow Christian who sins. With John, Christians recognize that “all wrongdoing is sin” and that all of it separates individuals from God.
Thus prayer and restorative counsel (Gal 6:1) appear to be in order when we observe a fellow believer who has sinned. Where John causes problems, however, is in mentioning “a sin that leads to death,” for which prayer is not in order (not that it is necessarily wrong, but that it is useless). What type of sin is this? And what type of death is intended—physical or spiritual death? Since we ourselves fall into sin at times, the questions are of practical importance to each of us. This is no mere resolving an academic problem of Scripture.
This passage occurs at the end of 1 John, right after an encouragement to pray (1 Jn 5:13–15). According to John, it is because “we know that we have what we ask from him” that one should pray for the “brother” who sins. James has a similar structure in the conclusion of his letter. After talking about prayer for healing (Jas 5:13–16), he notes the encouragement to pray that Elijah’s example gives (Jas 5:17–18) and then talks about turning a sinner from the error of his or her way and thus saving him or her from death (Jas 5:19–20), the purpose of his book. This structure of health wish plus purpose statement in the conclusion of a letter was typical of one form of Greek letters. Thus it is not surprising that in his conclusion John also has a modified health wish before reaching his final purpose statement (probably 1 Jn 5:20).
But what type of life and death is John talking about? This is a modern question; it was not one for John’s readers, for the brevity of his reference assumes that they would know what he was talking about. We have to discover this from the rest of his letter.
We note, then, that 1 John uses the term life thirteen times, seven of them in this chapter. Since he means spiritual life (eternal life) in every other case in which he uses the term, we would expect that this would also be the meaning here. Likewise the two other places where he uses death (both in 1 Jn 3:14) refer to spiritual death, not physical death. So even though in the New Testament sin can lead to physical death (1
Cor 11:30; compare Acts 5:1–11; 1 Cor 5:5) and physical sickness (Jas 5:15–16), it is unlikely that that is the meaning here. This is especially true in that in both his Gospel and epistle John sees physical death as something already transcended by the believer (Jn 8:51; 11:26; 1 Jn 3:14).
What, then, is the sin (not specific acts of sin, but a quality of sin) that leads to this spiritual death? In the Old Testament some sins carried the death penalty, while others did not (Num 18:22; Deut 22:26). In particular, deliberate or willful breaking of the commandments required death, while inadvertent sin did not (Lev 4:2, 13, 22, 27; 5:15, 17–18; Num 15:27–31; Deut 17:12). Both of these distinctions were common in first-century Jewish literature as well. While all of these Old Testament references are to the physical death of the offender, it would not be surprising for John to reinterpret the concept in terms of spiritual life and death, for that is his focus. In this he had help from Jesus, who referred to a category of sin that would not be forgiven (Mk 3:28 and parallels). What type of sin is this? For Jesus it was observing the activity of the Holy Spirit and calling it the devil’s work. Similarly, John has been concerned with a group
of apostates, people who were part of the Christian community and have left. What is their sin? They are continuing in (and therefore condoning) sin, they are hating and separating from their fellow Christians (thus not living out the command of love), they love the world and they even deny that Jesus has come “in the flesh” (probably a denial that Christ had a real human body). These are not casual errors or lapses into this or that sin, but a knowing and deliberate turning away from the truth they experienced in the Christian community. While they would probably still consider themselves Christians, John knows that their standards and their doctrines are quite different from those of his group.
Why, then, doesn’t John say that one should pray for them? The answer is because such prayer is useless. It is not that it is absolutely wrong to pray. While John clearly does not intend Christians to pray for the forgiveness of such people, he words himself carefully so as not to forbid it. The issue is that these people are not repenting or about to repent. Like the people envisioned in Hebrews 6, they have known the truth and experienced the fullness of what God has, but have turned away. While God would surely forgive such people if they did repent, no argument will change their minds.
They have left the true Christian community. They “know” they are right and John’s group is wrong. Asking for their forgiveness is useless. Forgiveness comes to the repentant, not those willfully persisting in sin.
But that is not John’s focus. His point is that Christians should pray for other members of the Christian community who sin. Why should they do this? First, God seems to prefer to grant forgiveness through confession to another and the other’s praying (as in Jas 5:15–16). Psychologically this makes the repentance much more concrete and thus lasting. Second, sin is to be taken seriously. Today’s slip, if persisted in, could turn into deception, and the brother or sister could slip farther and farther from God until they become part of the apostate group. The time to intervene is not when the person has become hardened in turning away from God, but when the first sin is observed. If one prays then, life will be granted and the individual will not slip further away from God.
John, then, is calling for two things that are often poorly practiced in the church today.
The first is the taking of responsibility for the spiritual well-being of fellow Christians; that is, for observing errors (the point is that one “sees” the sin; it is observable), correcting the sinners (Gal 6:1–2) and praying for their forgiveness. The second is the taking of sin seriously, realizing that it can indeed lead to grave consequences if persisted in, and thus living in and calling others to live in a holy fear before God. John has no intention of our living in fear that we have sinned “the sin that leads to death,”
for the very fear is an indication of our repentance and thus that we have not sinned such a sin. John has every intention of calling us to lead lives open to each other so that we give and receive correction and thus not only keep each other from deliberate rebellion and its consequences, but also assist each other in walking in close fellowship with the God who is light (1 Jn 1:5).
See also comment on mark 3:28–29; hebrews 6:4–6; 10:26.
2 John
1 Who Is the Chosen Lady?
The little books of 2 and 3 John may well have served as cover letters to personalize the general letter 1 John. Whatever their purpose, they are addressed to individual people or groups. But what or who is this “lady” to whom 2 John is addressed? Why would the elder write such a letter to a lady? What was his relationship to her? Was she a real lady at all? And if this is a lady, what implications does that have for church leadership?
Three different views have been held on this topic. First, some of the earliest commentators on this text read the Greek as if “chosen” or “lady” were the personal names of the woman receiving the letter. In the first case her name would be Electa (as in Rom 16:13), and in the second Kyria (which would be the Greek equivalent of the Aramaic name Martha and does occur in Greek literature). But unfortunately there is no definite article with this Greek term, so it is unlikely that it is a proper name.
Second, another group of scholars have seen this as an honorable title for a certain woman leader in the church, although she remains anonymous (as does the author, who simply uses his title “the elder”). This would mean that a woman was serving at least as a house-church leader and possibly a city-church leader at the time 2 John was written. Such a situation is certainly possible, for women such as Phoebe (Rom 16:1–
2), Euodia and Syntyche (Phil 4:2) probably served in such capacities. However, the decision on the meaning of the term (as well as that of “your chosen sister” in 2 John 13) depends on the context of this particular letter, not on historical possibility.
Third, and most likely, is the interpretation that the “lady” is a church. It is not that the second interpretation is impossible, but that the switch in Greek to the second person plural in 2 John 8, 10 and 12 (before returning to the second person singular in 2 John 13) appears to indicate that the elder has a group in mind, not an individual. Likewise the situation in 2 John 9–11 appears to fit best in a group of house churches, not with a single individual. In fact, 2 John 9–11 would be rather strong words to address to a person whom one “loves” and who has children “walking in the truth” (although not all the “children” are). Therefore, although it is possible to explain the plurals as references to the woman and her children, the letter fits better as a message to a church, which is in turn greeted by the church in which the elder is presently residing.
The background for this interpretation is clear. Jerusalem is often seen in both testaments as a mother (see Is 54:1–8; Gal 4:25; Rev 12:17; 21:2). Furthermore, the church is viewed as the bride of Christ (see 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:22–32). In fact, if she is his bride, the title here is especially apt, for she is certainly chosen in that she has heard and responded to the call of God, and she is therefore a “mistress” (the more archaic translation of the Greek term translated “lady”), which is the feminine form of “lord”
(“lord” in Greek is kyrios and “lady” is kyria). She participates in the rule of her husband. As in the biblical passages in which a city’s or a nation’s citizens are her children (such as Mt 2:18 citing Jer 31:15), so the individual church members here are the children.
Why would the elder write so cryptically? One reason would be to bring out his theology of the church, making it meaningful by making it personal. Another reason would be to avoid naming names that would identify the church for Roman authorities.
If this letter fell into the wrong hands it would look like a relatively innocent personal letter, while it was really a letter supporting a church. Even beyond its content, then, it gives us an example of supervisory support in the early church (when there were no offices of bishop or superintendent, which were later developments in the history of the
church)1 [1 Since none of the Johannine letters are “signed” except by the title “the elder,” we do not really know who wrote them. Tradition has assigned them to the apostle John, but there are problems with this tradition and thus good reason to question whether any of the twelve apostles were associated with the Johannine literature. Thus this “elder” may well have had no formal office beyond that of “elder”—his supervision was informal, based upon his spiritual authority, not his formal position.] and of the warm mutual relationships among churches.
7 Who Are the Heretics?
We live in an age in which all sorts of people call themselves Christian, even if their continuity with historic Christianity is tenuous at best. This is not a new problem. All three of the Johannine letters deal with problems with schismatic groups, and in 1 and 2 John one of the characteristics of these groups is that they are heretical. But what are we to make of the heresy described in 2 John 7? In what way might a group call itself Christian and still “not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh”? Even the vast majority of our semi-Christian heresies acknowledge Jesus. What does it mean to
“come in the flesh” anyway?
As I have noted, the Johannine community was struggling with heretical teaching. In 1
John 4:1 we read that “many” false prophets have left the church community for the world. In 2 John 4 we read that “some” of the Christians are walking in the truth, while in 2 John 7 we learn that there are “many deceivers.” The impression is that the majority of the church is defecting and going “out into the world,” probably to form their own groups based on their own doctrines.
The root of the heresy in both 1 John 4:2–3 and 2 John 7 is the denial of “Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh.” There is a grammatical difference between the two passages that may indicate a shift in emphasis, but the root concept is the same in both. In Johannine terminology to confess something is not simply to agree that it is correct, but to acknowledge one’s allegiance to it. So to confess Jesus Christ would be to state that one is committed to him as Lord. But why does John use the double title “Jesus Christ” and “in the flesh”?
This phrase in 2 John is designed to rule out christological heresy. Two types of heresy appeared in the second century, arising out of roots already apparent in the Johannine writings in the first century. The docetic heresy, on the one hand, argued that Jesus was not a real human being (not truly “in the flesh”), but only appeared to be human.
He was truly Christ; the Christ was a spirit that appeared to materialize. Being a spirit, of course, he did not die on the cross, but in one way or another only appeared to suffer and die. (The term docetic comes from the Greek word meaning “to seem or appear.”) The Cerinthian heresy, on the other hand, argued that Jesus was really a human being, but that at his baptism the Christ spirit came upon him, forsaking him at the crucifixion. Therefore the Christ did not die, although Jesus did. Although we do not know exactly what the heretics John is fighting believed (and some of them may have believed an early form of both of these heresies), the phrase in 2 John guards against both of them. According to John, a true Christian pledges allegiance to Jesus Christ, not just the Christ. And the believer acknowledges that this whole entity, “Jesus Christ,” has come from God and is really human. The form of the phraseology in 1
John 4:2–3 stresses Jesus’ having come from God and becoming truly incarnate. The form here in 2 John 7 stresses that Jesus remains incarnate and did not in some way
“split apart” at death or the ascension. In John’s view, an incarnate, truly human, truly divine Jesus Christ presently exists.
In 1 John 4 the heretics claim to be inspired by the Holy Spirit when they teach what they do about Jesus. This does not mean that they were under direct Spirit-control at the time of their speaking, but that they were claiming that this was what the Spirit had taught them. John says that one can tell the true Spirit of God by the doctrine he teaches. The true Spirit has the right doctrine; the spirit that does not lead people to pledge their allegiance to the orthodox Christ is in fact not the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of antichrist. This statement is not grounds for calling up spirits and trying to get them to speak through people and making them affirm or deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, but it is grounds for examining the doctrine of the person who claims prophetic inspiration and seeing if it corresponds with the orthodox confession.
In 2 John we do not hear of the spirit-inspiration of the heretics, but they are themselves called deceivers and antichrist. It appears that they were trying to infiltrate the orthodox house churches and were actively recruiting people to their way of thinking. That is why they are deceivers and why the people need to “watch out” that they do not lose what they have in Christ (2 Jn 8).
The Christian church finds its unity not around this or that doctrine, but around Jesus Christ. To reject the real Jesus, either by denying his true humanity (being “in the flesh”) or by denying his divinity (by denying that Jesus was really the Christ), is to break with the faith and to split from the church community. It is not that doctrine is the key issue, but that it expresses the distinguishing characteristics of the person to whom one is committed. The one not committed to the real Jesus Christ does not know either the Father or the Son, according to John. Unfortunately the church often has not kept this fact central. On the one hand, it has been willing to accept some who do deny its Lord, and, on the other hand, it has been willing to split over doctrinal differences that do not call into question real commitment to the true Jesus Christ. This letter reminds us of what is really central. It is Christ who unifies his church. Without him we have no unity. With him we have a unity that no human being dare try to destroy.
10 Do Not Practice Hospitality?
Schismatic or heretical teaching poses a big problem for any church. People begin to listen to the deceptive teaching and may soon end up slipping away to join the sectarian group. Yet 2 John 10 poses a problem for Scripture readers in that it appears to contradict an important Christian virtue, that of hospitality, not to mention the virtue of love. Is it love not to welcome a person into your house, even if you do not agree with his or her beliefs? Does not hospitality extend even to non-Christians, rather than just the Christians with whom we happen to agree? Furthermore, Christians struggle with knowing how far to take this verse. Does it mean that one may not invite inside the Jehovah’s Witness (or the Mormon) who just knocked at the door? Does it mean that it was wrong to say a polite “good morning” to that person?
It is clear that 2 John is dealing with a serious problem in the church, not simply minor doctrinal differences or even significant differences over noncentral issues. A group of teachers who had left John’s church did not “confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” By this John probably means that these teachers argued that God was too holy to have become truly human, so Jesus only appeared to be a man. In fact, in one way or another his humanity was an illusion. This is a problem combated by the Gospel of
John (Jn 1:14, “The Word became flesh,” as well as many references to Jesus’
emotions) and two of the three Johannine epistles. In other words, these heretics were denying a central part of the gospel rather than arguing over peripheral doctrines, important as some of these doctrines may be.
Second, we noted in a previous chapter that 2 John is addressed to a church (referred to as “the elect lady”). We need to understand what this church was like. It was normal until the mid-third century for Christians to meet in houses. (It was not until the mid-fourth century that house churches were outlawed and church buildings became the only legitimate place to gather as Christians.) Given the size of rooms in even a large house in those days (due to the limitations of building materials), it is unlikely that a house church would grow beyond about sixty people. In fact, there were many reasons to keep them smaller. Since most people had only their feet for transportation, several small groups conveniently located would be more accessible than a single large group.
This also tended to make the churches take on the character of the neighborhood in which they were located. Furthermore, given that the meeting involved a meal (which developed into the symbolic meal presently celebrated in the Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper), one would not want to crowd the room too much, for space was needed for tables and dishes of food. Finally, smaller groups enabled the church to attract less attention and thus avoid persecution as much as possible. Most house churches, then, probably served twenty to forty people.
Therefore we need to view the early church as a series of small house churches. While Paul, for example, might write a letter to the church in Rome or Corinth, that single church would in fact be made up of a group of such cells. For example, in Romans 16
Paul greets several house church leaders and their groups by name.
Third, hospitality was important to the early church. Christians would travel from place to place and need safe and wholesome places to stay. Some of these travelers were apostles, prophets or teachers. When such a person came to a church, they not only brought news of the situation of the church in other places, but they also brought a fresh stream of ministry. Lacking our easy access to books and other media, this was an important way for a congregation to increase its knowledge of the faith as it received insights and graces that initially had been given to another congregation and were now shared. We see the synagogue practice, which the early church copied, in Acts 13:15: “Brothers, if you have a message of encouragement for the people, please speak.” Furthermore, the house-church services were relatively informal, so discussion and questions gave many people an opportunity to share their ideas.
Therefore what 2 John is referring to is the need to recognize that not every traveling Christian is to be received with such warmth. If in fact it was discovered that the visitor was carrying the serious christological heresy that John describes, the person was not to be greeted as a brother or sister in Christ (as would have been customary, often including in those days a kiss on both cheeks). Nor should the person be received into the house church and allowed to spread false teaching there. Otherwise the whole
“cell” might become infected with the distorted ideas, and they might later spread them to other house churches, making the whole city church sick (or else splitting the church into two alternative structures, both of which claimed to be the true church).
This verse, then, is not intended to apply to individual Christians greeting people at the doors of their homes, but to churches and house groups. In such contexts it is wise for leaders to be assured of the orthodoxy of visitors before giving them a platform from
which they can spread their views, even the platform of an official welcome as a visiting Christian leader. Christian hospitality stops where danger to the well-being of the church begins; love does not go to the extent of endangering one’s fellow Christians nor of allowing those who deny the Lord one loves to peddle their wares in that Lord’s church.
3 John
7 Receiving No Help from Pagans?
Christianity, like first-century Judaism, is a missionary religion. In the first century, however, there were none of the organized societies and fundraising methods of our present age. The missionaries were assisted by voluntary giving from the people they met or else they were self-supporting, like Paul. But what does 3 John 7 mean in saying that the group of missionaries John is referring to received “no help from the pagans”? Is it that they did not accept any funds from non-Christians (the implication of the NIV [NIV New International Version] translation), or is it that they did not accept any funds from Gentile Christians (one interpretation of the NASB [NASB New American Standard Bible] and KJV [KJV King James Version] translations)? And what implications does this practice have for our evangelistic methods today?
The Johannine letters mention two types of groups that “went out” from the Christian community. The first group is the heretics, who leave the church and go out into the world (2 John 7). The second group is the one mentioned here, which went out “for the sake of the Name.” The Name is Jesus (Acts 5:41; Rom 1:5; Jas 2:7). They were
“going out” on his behalf, probably as evangelists since they were among “Gentiles” or
“pagans.” The term “pagans” (more literally “nations” or “people-groups”) could indicate a Jewish-Christian mission not willing to accept funds from Gentile Christians (perhaps to keep from being rejected by the Jews) and thus be translated “Gentiles” (as it often is in other contexts in the New Testament), but there is no other indication that the Johannine community was Jewish-Christian. Therefore the term is probably being used in the sense in which it is in Matthew 5:47, which distinguishes “brothers” from
“pagans/Gentiles.” In other words, it means “unbelievers.”
Missionaries (this English term includes those called evangelists and apostles in the New Testament) had no regular means of support in the New Testament period. Paul notes that his mission was supported by the work of his own hands (Acts 18:1–4; 1
Thess 2:9). In rare cases he received funds from already established churches (Phil 4:14–19, which indicates that the Philippian church was alone in supporting him).
Other missionaries (and at times perhaps Paul himself) may have had private family funds to draw on. But they held to the principle Jesus taught, “Freely you have received, freely give” (Mt 10:8). There was no fundraising, nor were collections received for the support of the missionary. While hospitality might be accepted from those who received the gospel (see Lk 10:5–7), Paul at times refused even this support (1 Cor 9:3–18).
What are the reasons for this behavior? First, of course, is the principle that the gospel is free. Even to appear to be charging for the gospel or to be making one’s living by presenting it was viewed as contradicting this principle. Second, plenty of pagans were charging for their “gospels,” such as Cynic and Stoic traveling philosopher-beggars
(some of whom grew rich), and the devotees and priests of various cults. For example, a monument set up in Kefr-Haunar in Syria by a self-styled “slave” of the Syrian goddess boasts that when he went begging on behalf of his goddess “each journey brought in seventy bags” of money. For this reason Jesus forbade the taking of a “bag”
(Mt 10:10), for then his disciples would not be able to carry anything with them when they left a town, making it obvious that they were not profiting by their mission. It is important not only to be honest, but also to appear to others to be honest.
Given this information, it is not difficult to understand what is going on in 3 John.
These missionaries have left the security of their Christian community, not because they were uncomfortable there, but for the sake of their Lord. They are traveling through the area in which Gaius is located. The missionaries will need food (for they are not carrying anything with them) and a place to stay, perhaps even a short rest. To stop to earn money would detract from their travel. It is natural that Christians, especially Christian leaders, should provide them the needed hospitality along the way.
John knows from experience that one of the major house-church leaders, Diotrephes, will not receive them because he is rejecting John’s authority (which was spiritual authority, not “official” authority). Therefore John writes to Gaius, another house-church leader, requesting that he receive them, even though he may face rejection by Diotrephes because of it.
This has significant implications for Christian practice. This passage should not become an escape route for Christians who want an excuse not to support missions or their pastoral leadership. There is a clear principle that Christians should share material possessions with those giving them spiritual instruction (Rom 15:27; 1 Cor 9:11; Gal 6:6; 1 Tim 5:17–18). But, as we have seen, there is just as strong a principle that the gospel (including the healing and other ministries associated with it) should be free and that Christian workers, especially evangelistic ones, should not in any way appear to be profiting from those to whom they preach the gospel.
Given these facts and modern means of communication, it might be that the modern
“Gaius” will wish to support evangelistic ministries even when they are at a distance from his home. It should at the least mean that the modern evangelist will want to do nothing that would make the unbeliever feel that the evangelist was trying to make his living from them. One would hope that an evangelist would rather pay his or her own way like Paul than give such an impression. Given the present scrutiny of the church and the feeling in the world that the church is out for money, other church workers as well should avoid even the hint that they are charging for ministry. Instead, church members should see to it that church workers are supported without their having to talk about money. Following such principles would not only be the application of 3
John’s teaching to the modern era, but would also go a long way in avoiding the scandals that have accompanied the gospel in our present age.
11 Anyone Who Does Good Is from God?
Aren’t there good people who make no claim to be Christians? For example, aren’t there some Hindu individuals who do good? Have not kindness and even self-sacrifice been observed among many nations and religions? Are these people therefore from God? And what about the professing Christian who does evil? Have not Christians, for example, been convicted of crimes? Are they therefore not from God?
This particular verse is part of a whole series of Johannine statements, including 1 John 2:29 (“If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him”) and 1 John 4:7–8 (“Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love”). Each of these statements connects righteous living in some form (for example, love, doing good) to being a Christian (being born of God, being from God). Taken out of context any one of them would seem to imply that a person could deny Christ and yet qualify as being “from God.” In fact, a guru who turned out to be genuinely caring and loving, but embraced Hindu theology, might on that basis find John endorsing his claim to be an incarnation of divinity! The key to this interpretive dilemma, however, is precisely the phrase “taken out of context,” for within the context such a meaning is impossible.
In its proper context, the wider issue surrounding 3 John 7 is the behavior of Diotrephes. Diotrephes is a powerful church leader who may have the power to exclude Gaius and his house church from the wider Christian community if Gaius follows the elder’s instructions and receives the traveling missionaries. The author is telling Gaius not to follow evil but good. The verse in question, then, suggests that Diotrephes is not from God or has not seen God, for he is doing evil, not good. This is an application of the principle that Jesus spoke concerning false prophets, “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Mt 7:16). If a person is truly a Christian, the proper lifestyle should be evident. If it is not, then, far from copying their behavior, one should doubt the reality of their new birth.
The same issue occurs in each of the other contexts. First John 2:29 begins a series of statements on righteousness (1 Jn 3:3, 6, 7, 9) that culminates in “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother” (1 Jn 3:10). The issue, then, is not whether those outside the church are or are not Christian (their status is known), but whether those within the church are truly born again. If people claim to believe orthodox theology and do not live righteously, John states, the regeneration of those people should be doubted, for their life shows that they are still a child of the devil.
The saying in 1 John 4:7–8 is in a similar context. This verse begins a series of sayings that culminates in 1 John 4:21, “Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” The upshot of the discussion is that those claiming to love God and not loving their brothers are liars. They do not really love God. In other words, in each of these three cases the point of the saying is to distinguish genuine professing Christians from those who are not genuine. One way to do this is through looking at their behavior.
The author of the Johannine literature is quite clear. No one is born of God if that person is not committed to Jesus as Lord. That this commitment includes orthodox belief is clear in 2 John 9 and 1 John 2:22–23, 3:23, 4:3. But that the commitment includes living in obedience to Jesus is also clear. In fact, there are three tests of Christian faith in 1 John (and if 2 and 3 John are cover letters for 1 John, also implied in them). One is the experience of the Spirit. But how does one know it is the right Spirit a person is experiencing? The answer is, It must be the Spirit that leads one into commitment to Jesus as being the Christ and truly incarnate; in other words, right doctrine. But can one have right doctrine without being born again? Yes, one can. This is true. Therefore the third element comes in, which is a right character or a life that
shows obedience to the Father and the Son. This fruit of the Spirit shows that the life of God is really within a person. To the extent to which any one of these three is missing, one should be uncertain about the reality of the new birth. Where all three are present, there should be no doubt but that one is truly a child of God. Therefore to isolate one of these elements and make it absolute (in this example, to isolate right character) is to violate the whole fabric of John’s argument. It is not one element alone that proves that one is born of God, but three of them together.
Our verse, then, does not in any way argue that a non-Christian who shows the characteristics of Christian living is therefore born of God—such a person still lacks two of the three marks of a true child of God. What it does say is that those who claim to be Christians should be doubted, despite their orthodox theology, if they fail to live righteously.
See also comment on john 5:28–29; 1 corinthians 6:9–10; hebrews 10:26; 2 peter 1:10; 1 john 3:9.
Jude
3–16 Condemning Opponents?
See comment on galatians 1:9.
7 Homosexuality Condemned?
See comment on romans 1:27.
9, 14–15 Are the Pseudepigrapha Authoritative?
One can search the Old Testament from one end to the other and nowhere find a prophecy of Enoch. Likewise, the archangel Michael is mentioned in the Old Testament (Dan 10:13), but not in connection with Moses. Nor do we ever hear of a dispute with anybody about Moses’ body. It is therefore obvious that Jude is using sources outside of the canonical Old Testament. What are these sources? Did Jude think of them as canonical? And what does Jude’s use of them mean for our concept of the canon of Scripture?
The first question is easier to answer than the others. First, the reference to Michael is probably from a pseudepigraphal work known as the Assumption of Moses or the Testament of Moses, also used by Jude in verse 16. This first-century work is extant today, but the problem is that the ending, which should contain this passage, is missing.
However, the church fathers agree that this was Jude’s source, and a number of Jewish traditions that parallel it enable us to reconstruct the essence of this ending as follows: After the death of Moses the archangel Michael was sent to bury the body. Satan came and argued that Moses was not worthy of a decent burial, for he was a murderer, having killed an Egyptian and hidden him in the sand. Michael’s response, “The Lord rebuke you” (a phrase from Zech 3:2), was here, as in Zechariah, a call for God’s commanding word, which would assert his authority over Satan.
Second, the prophecy of Enoch is more easily identified, for it comes from 1 Enoch 1:9. While 1 Enoch was probably not in its final form when Jude wrote his letter, it is clear from his citation that at least the first part of the book was finished. This first section also contains the tradition of the imprisonment of the “sons of God” (called
“Watchers” in 1Enoch) from Genesis 6:1–4, which is referred to in Jude 6; 2 Peter 2:4, 9; and 1 Peter 3:19–20 (see also comment on Gen 6:1–4). It appears that these stories were favorites in the churches that 1 and 2 Peter and Jude represent.
The other questions are difficult because we find these few references to pseudepigraphal works in such short biblical books. Clearly Jude parallels the prophecy of Enoch with the words of the apostles (Jude 17); likewise the story of Michael and Satan is not differentiated from the biblical stories he cites in Jude 11. Jude (and probably 2 Peter, which refers to both of these topics but does not use direct references) obviously considers these stories true and authoritative. In fact, in labeling the 1Enoch reference “prophecy,” Jude appears to recognize it as divinely inspired, for he certainly would not cite a prophecy that he believed was not from God. This much is clear.
But did Jude recognize the books these stories come from as canonical, or did he just cite the stories themselves as authoritative? That question is impossible to answer. We have no evidence that anyone in the New Testament period, Jew or Christian, wanted to include these works within the Old Testament collection used in the synagogue (or church), although the Apocrypha was bound into biblical codices as early as the fourth century.1 [1 The Apocrypha are the books and additions to books written during the intertestamental period that are found in the Roman Catholic canon but considered at best semicanonical in Protestant traditions. The pseudepigrapha are Jewish works, mostly from the period of 100 b.c. to a.d. 100, which no modern Christian group has included in their canon. Examples of Apocrypha include 1 and 2Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach, while 1 Enoch, Assumption of Moses, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Jubilees are examples of pseudepigrapha.] But the issue of what should or should not be in the canon of Scripture was not being asked in the church at the time Jude was writing.
Even the Jewish debates about canon between a.d. 70 and 90 were not over issues that we would consider central to the canonical debate. This, of course, is the reason that Jude can make these citations so casually. He did not have to deal with our post-Reformation questions of canon.
What we can say is that Jude did consider the Old Testament authoritative. He also considered authoritative at least two pseudepigraphal writings and the tradition of the apostles (in whatever form he had it, written or oral). Even though he uses only two brief citations from these works, his failure to differentiate them from the Scripture he does cite indicates that in his mind there was probably no distinction to be made. Nor does he inform us that only these two passages are to be trusted, and the rest of the books rejected. However, all of this information we gain by “reading between the lines” in Jude. He does not say anything directly about the issue. While the later church did not believe that any of the pseudepigrapha were inspired Scripture, it did accept Jude with its use of them. In other words, it did not endorse whatever views Jude may have had about the works from which he took these citations, but it did endorse the explicit teaching in his letter.
This is not a clean and neat answer to our question, but no such answer is possible.
First-century Jews used the Old Testament, but alongside it various Jewish groups read and valued a number of types of supplementary literature, ranging from the Apocrypha to the Dead Sea Scrolls to the pseudepigrapha. Early Christians likewise valued the Old Testament and gradually acquired collections of gospels and letters as they were
produced and gathered. But they also read many of the works in the Apocrypha and other Christian literature such as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, binding many of these works into their Bibles as such codices began to replace scrolls.
The situation was relatively fluid and imprecise. Only as the challenge of heresy forced the church to decide which books should be read in church and which should not were the lines begun to be drawn more clearly. Jude was written long before this time. It is therefore wrong to expect in him the precision of the later distinctions. It is also wrong to look at his casual use of what was being read in his church and assume that he meant to equate these works with Scripture in the sense that we use the term. Rather, we need to accept him on his own terms, but also to accept that the Holy Spirit through the church has given God’s people increasingly clear direction about what bears his full imprimatur and what does not.
Finally, this brings us to an issue in biblical interpretation. What is considered authoritative or inspired in a biblical author is what they intended to communicate or teach, as that can be determined from the text. Often we can discover information that the author accidentally gives us about what he believed, the social class he came from, or the way his church assembled. While this is interesting information and may give us background that helps us understand what the author means by what he does intend to communicate, it is not in itself inspired. It may form a historical precedent for how a church or person might live or might believe, but it is not normative. If Jude accidentally reveals that he saw 1 Enoch on a par with Scripture, that is interesting, but since it is certainly not in the least his intention to give us that information (in fact, he was totally unaware it would even interest us), it does not form part of the teaching of Scripture. The same can be said about the meeting of churches in houses in Acts or the indication in 1 Corinthians 15:52 that Paul at that time believed he would be alive when Christ returned. As interesting as this is, it should not form the topic for a sermon or the basis for a doctrine. It does provide information about the history of the early church and examples of what might be legitimate today, but it is not normative.
Once we master this distinction, we will realize that the incredible wealth of information that can be gathered from Scripture (which makes it come to life as we see the writers as real people in a real culture) must not obscure the message from God that these men wished to communicate to their generation and that we believe is still a message for us today.2 [2 For more information on this distinction, see Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1982), especially chapter six.]
24 Possibility of Falling?
See comment on hebrews 6:4–6; 10:26; 12:15; 2 peter 1:10.
Revelation
2:6 Who Were the Nicolaitans?
See comment on revelation 2:15.
2:13 Where Does Satan Live?
This verse seems a little strange, for it mentions that Satan had his “throne” in the city of Pergamum in Asia Minor. We are accustomed to thinking about Satan as traveling everywhere in the world (Job 1:7; 2:2); is there really a locality in which Satan himself lives? Does he have an actual throne? And is it visible? Should this affect our own decisions on our place of residence? How did the church in Pergamum experience what John is writing about?
On the one hand, it is clear that Satan, as a finite being, must have a localized existence. Unlike God, he is not omnipresent, so he must be somewhere (and not be everywhere) at any given point in time. But Satan is also a spiritual being, probably the one identified in Ephesians 2:2 as the “ruler of the kingdom of the air.” This means that he does not appear to be physically localized in our material sense, but rather lives in the spiritual world (or heavenlies) through which he has access to the physical world.
Although we do not fully understand the relationship of the spiritual to the physical, we would be surprised to discover that Satan had limited himself to a specific physical locality by setting up his throne in a given city. Indeed, what we find elsewhere in Revelation is that when he rules on earth he does so through a human being whom he controls (see Rev 13:2).
On the other hand, Pergamum is a place known to us from history. It was an independent city until 133 b.c., when its last king willed it to Rome. It thereafter became the capital city of Roman Asia, the seat of the proconsul who as the senatorial governor of the province had an almost unlimited power for the period of his office.
By 29 b.c. the city had become the center of the imperial cult with a temple erected to
“the divine Augustus and the goddess Roma.” The city also had a great temple to Zeus Soter (Savior Zeus), and its citizens worshiped the serpent god Asclepius, who was the god of healing. This history gives a rich background for identifying the city with Satan.1 [1 A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1978), p. 109.]
Any of the images we have mentioned would have served Satan well. Asclepius as a serpent (found on the coat of arms of the city and used as a symbol of medicine today) would remind one of Satan as the serpent and dragon in Revelation. The altar of Zeus was said to have been thronelike, the temple dominating the city. He was, after all, the king of the Greek gods. But the central image in this passage appears to have been that of Roman rule.
The key to this identification is the reference to Antipas, a Christian martyr. Given that the proconsul did have the power to put people to death, this probably indicates official persecution (although it may have been localized). Where else but at the center of imperial rule would the church be more likely to come into direct conflict with Rome? Imperial rule was not separated from imperial cult. While educated people did not take the cult seriously—they looked on it as a patriotic ceremony, much as pledging allegiance to the flag is seen in the U.S.A. today—the church saw in it a clash between the call of Christians to worship God alone and the demand of the state to have one’s ultimate allegiance. What is more, the state always kept a watchful eye on unsanctioned societies. The growth of the Christian community and its influence in the lower classes, especially among slaves (who had been known to revolt in Rome itself), was threatening. Here was a group who called Jesus, not Caesar, Lord, a group that could not be controlled. The clash was inevitable. Antipas had been martyred. And in the aftermath of his martyrdom the church must have lived in fear, for they were located in the very seat of Roman power and could hardly escape the notice of Rome.
This throne of Caesar, then, is the throne of Satan. Satan is not identified with Rome totally; he is independent of all of his tools. But in Revelation 13 it is Roman rulers through whom Satan works, and Roman power is in this sense the throne of Satan. It is the means through which Satan rules and controls that area, in this case Asia Minor.
It is therefore also the means through which he persecutes the church of God.
The relevance of this passage to Christians today is obvious. While there may not be any recent martyrs in some Christian localities, many, if not most, Christians live under governments that claim absolute allegiance (“My country, right or wrong”). John reminds us that all such claims fly in the face of absolute obedience to Christ. They are satanic in origin. To the extent that the country decides to enforce its claim, either ceremonially or in action, a clash with a faithful church is inevitable. The closer one is to the center of government, the more certain the clash and the more inescapable the consequences. As Satan’s throne appears behind whatever the architectural façade of our capital may be, the Christian will be forced to decide whom he or she serves. John lets us know that the decision is difficult, but he is encouraging us to be faithful, even if it means following in the footsteps of Antipas.2 [2 An encouragement in this direction is found in John White’s excellent Magnificent Obsession (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990).]
A secondary application is also probable. Paul speaks eight times of “principalities and powers,” which are part of the demonic hierarchy of Satan’s kingdom (see Eph 6:12).
Some such forces are on occasion identified with a particular people or land (see Dan 10:13). Thus, some demonic spirits appear to be localized, an idea that is confirmed by the experience of many Christian workers.3 [3 See C. Peter Wagner, “Territorial Spirits,” in C. Peter Wagner and F. Douglas Pennoyer, eds., Wrestling with Dark Angels (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1990), pp. 73–100, for one description of this phenomenon.] This means that some areas may be more directly under the control of such powerful beings than are others, or that the being that controls a given area may himself be more powerful than the one controlling another area. Paul lists various articles of armor with which Christians are armed for battle with such beings (Eph 6:13–18). He does not mention direct prayer against them (such as “binding them” or
“casting them out”), but rather exemplary Christian faith and conduct, such as the conduct that probably got Antipas in trouble and the faith that sustained him through his martyrdom.4 [4 This does not imply that Christians are never called upon to pray directly against such beings, but that such activity is not their normal occupation; it should be engaged in only at the direct command of God.]
If this analysis is accurate, then some Christians should recognize that they live in very difficult territory. Such a recognition is not a call to move, but an acknowledgment that the situation they face is tougher than normal and therefore the virtues they must arm themselves with are more than normal. At the same time, this verse reminds us that Christ is in total control of these powers. Even our martyrdom is under his control.
Although our area of the battle may be tough, there is no danger of losing. The important thing is that we, like the believers in Pergamum, hold out and remain faithful, even in the face of death itself.
2:15 Who Were the Nicolaitans?
Revelation has many strange symbols and images, but there are also unusual names. In Revelation 2:6, 15, the unfamiliar name blocks understanding. Here in two verses in letters written to two different churches (Ephesus and Pergamum) we discover the Nicolaitans. Presumably the author believed that the readers of the letters would know who they were, but we are not in their position. What were their practices, and why
The earliest identification of the Nicolaitans, found in the church fathers, was as followers of Nicolas of Antioch, a proselyte to Judaism, who was one of the Seven (Acts 6:5). Unfortunately, none of the writers seems to know much about the heresy, and one, in fact, argues that Nicolas himself was orthodox but had been misunderstood. While it is possible that some of this information is accurate (there have been Spirit-filled church leaders who have lapsed into heresy), this looks like an attempt to find some name in Scripture to use to identify this sect. Nicolas may have simply had the misfortune of bearing the wrong name. Still, even if the Nicolas of Acts had nothing to do with the movement, it is probable that some Nicolas was the leader of the group (after all, Nicolas was a reasonably common name).
A second identification common in some theological circles is to look at the Greek etymology of “Nicolaitan” ( nikan and laos meaning respectively “conquer” and
“people”) and argue that this was a group that suppressed the laity in favor of the developing clergy. However, this explanation is determined more by modern concepts of clergy and laity than by any first-century information, for such terminology (such as the use of laos for only a section of the church) was unknown this early. Etymology is a notoriously dangerous way to discover the meaning of a term. Furthermore, there is nothing in the text to support this meaning.
The clue to the real meaning of this term is found in the identification of the Nicolaitans with “the teaching of Balaam” in Revelation 2:14–15. Not only is it possible that “Nikolaitan” is a Greek form of “Balaam” (as understood by the rabbis), but, more important, this interpretation fits both the text and the first-century situation.
John identifies the teaching of Balaam with two problems: “eating food sacrificed to idols” and “sexual immorality.” The early church constantly struggled with compromises with paganism, as we see in Paul’s long discussion in 1 Corinthians 8–10, as well as in the conclusions reached in Acts 15:20, 29. Both of these center on food offered to idols, Paul’s conclusion being that one could eat such food if purchased in the marketplace, but one should not go to a meal in a pagan temple. Following this Pauline rule, however, would cut one off from membership in trade guilds, patriotic celebrations (including ceremonies honoring the emperor, considered essential to good citizenship, although not taken seriously by the upper classes as religious events) and many family celebrations. We can easily see the pressure to rationalize and thereby develop a compromise.
The issue of sexual immorality is more difficult, for it is also mentioned in Revelation 2:20, 22, in the case of Jezebel (an Old Testament code word for a New Testament woman leader of the church in Thyatira, indicating her spirit and God’s evaluation, rather than the woman’s actual name). On the one hand, sexual immorality was a problem in the early church, as Paul’s discussions show (1 Cor 5:1; 6:12–20; compare Heb 13:4). In the middle of a pagan society that accepted the use of prostitutes (although wives were expected to remain faithful), it was difficult to remain obedient on this point and relatively easy to compromise. On the other hand, “sexual immorality” was used in the Old Testament for involvement with pagan deities. For example, the Old Testament Jezebel was not to our knowledge physically immoral—
she was likely faithful to Ahab all her life—but she did lead Israel into Baal worship.
Since Israel was God’s “bride,” such involvement with other gods was called
“adultery” or “sexual immorality.”
Furthermore, the line between the two meanings of “immorality” was difficult to draw.
Sexual immorality was involved in the Peor incident (connected to Balaam, Num 25:1–
18), but the biggest issue was that the women were Moabites or Midianites, pagan women, and they led the men to eat feasts associated with their gods and then to worship the gods themselves. In other words, the sexual immorality was wrong because it was associated with the worship of other gods, a commonplace in the pagan world in which many temples had prostitutes in them through whom a man could become “joined” to the god.
If, then, John is taking the Old Testament examples as the basis for his discussion, the sexual immorality is figurative, standing for their worship of other deities, which was implied in their attending feasts in idol temples. If, on the other hand, he is using the Old Testament examples loosely, he may be indicating two related problems, attending feasts in idol temples and engaging in extramarital sexual intercourse, probably with prostitutes. The difference between the two explanations is narrow. Both types of problems are condemned elsewhere in the New Testament, however one may interpret this particular passage.
The Nicolaitans, then, appear to be a group that corrupted God’s people by suggesting compromise with the culture of the day. Rather than worship God and him alone, they suggested that it was appropriate to engage in patriotic ceremonies (such as feasts associated with the worship of the emperor) and other cultural institutions (for example, trade guilds, something like our modern unions or professional associations, and their worship). It is possible that either as part of these ceremonies or as a separate area of compromise they also permitted the use of prostitutes (perhaps as an accepted part of the “business ethic” of their day). Jesus (who is speaking through John) was not impressed. In fact, he threatened judgment on the church.
While the exact issues are different, similar compromises face the church today. Each society has its own “idols” that it expects all its citizens to worship, whether those idols be the government itself or some values or practices of the society. These “idols”
are the places at which the values of the society conflict with total allegiance to Christ.
Furthermore, the Nicolaitans are still with us under a variety of names, for there are always people who in the name of being “realistic” or under any number of other theological justifications counsel compromise with the dominant culture. This passage warns us that Jesus will not “buy” these justifications. He demands nothing less than total loyalty to his own person and directions. Anything less than this will put those who compromise in danger of his judgment.
6:10 A Call for Revenge?
See comment on psalms 137:8–9; 139:20.
7:4 Who Are the 144,000?
The doorbell rings on a Saturday morning and two people stand on the porch offering literature about the return of Christ. If questioned, they might reveal that they are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their motives for their door-to-door activity are not simply to
gain converts for the movement, but rather to gain merit for themselves through their exemplary zeal. Their hope (faint though it may be, given the number of Witnesses worldwide) might be to become one of the 144,000 who will reign with Christ. While there are certainly a number of more important places at which orthodox Christians would take issue with these Witnesses in terms of doctrine, what they say about the 144,000 remains troubling, not because it is believed, but because we ourselves do not know what this number means.
The problem with the number is that it is clearly symbolic, but the question is, Symbolic of what? Three major scholarly options have been given. The first is that this figure is symbolic of a group of Jews whom God will redeem at the end of the age.
The second is that this is symbolic of a group of martyrs whom God preserves for martyrdom. The third is that this number is symbolic of the whole of the church, which God will protect through the tribulation at the end of the age. Only an examination of the data will show which of these is most likely to be correct.
John’s picture draws on two Old Testament images. The first is that of Passover (Ex 12:12–13), during which the blood on the doorposts of the Hebrews’ homes was a sign protecting them from the judgment that the Egyptians were receiving. The significant elements in Exodus are that the world around the Hebrews was experiencing judgment and a God-given sign protected the people of God from this judgment. The second Old Testament image is that of Ezekiel’s man with an ink horn (Ezek 9). Again, the context is one of judgment. Again the people true to God are marked to be spared. In this case “a man clothed with linen who had a writing kit at his side” goes through the city and marks a Hebrew taµw, which in those days was an ×
or a +, on the forehead of each person faithful to God.
There may also be a New Testament background for John’s picture. In 2 Corinthians 1:22, Ephesians 1:13 and Ephesians 4:30, Paul writes that Christians are sealed with the Holy Spirit. While the Spirit is not said to protect believers from anything, the image is one of security. Likewise, “the Lord knows those who are his” stands as a seal in 2 Timothy 2:19. While there is no evidence that John had read any of these books, the fact that Paul used sealing language implies that it was used around the church before John wrote.
In the picture in Revelation 7 the judgment of God announced in Revelation 6 is held back until the sealing is complete. The sealed are identified as “the servants of our God.” The image is that of Ezekiel, both in the placement of the seal on the forehead and in the idea of only a remnant (in Ezekiel a remnant of Israel) being sealed from the judgment. This theme is picked up again in Revelation 9:4 in the fifth of the trumpet judgments, in which the “locusts” are to hurt only those “who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads.” The sealed are protected in the midst of judgment all around them.
In Revelation 14 the 144,000 are “the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth.” They are described as celibate virgins, which in Revelation means that they have not been seduced by the forces of evil nor made a compromise with idolatry.
They are also totally truthful. “They were purchased from among men and offered as firstfruits to God and the Lamb” (Rev 14:4). The firstfuit picture appears in James 1:18
for all Christians in relation to the world and in Romans 11:16 for Gentile believers in relation to the full repentance of Israel.
Who are these 144,000, then? The theory that they are the martyrs of the last days is attractive, but in the end unconvincing because nothing is said in these passages of their being martyrs. Instead it appears that all of the “servants of God” are sealed.
These “servants” are part of a larger group that is not serving God. That many of these folk might become martyrs is reasonable, given the persecution described in Revelation 13, but John says nothing to make us think that they are exclusively martyrs.
The theory that they are the Jewish believers of the end time is also attractive since the tribes of Israel are named. However, there are also problems here. Both the order of the tribal list and the names included are unusual. For example, both Manasseh and his father, Joseph, are included (Joseph apparently standing for Ephraim). Dan is missing, although he is present in Ezekiel’s end-time list (Ezek 48). Thus John appears to indicate that the list stands for something other than any known form of Israel. Yet another problem is that most of “Israel” is not saved (that is, is not in the 144,000), while Paul’s expectation (Rom 11:26) is that “all Israel will be saved.” If both John and Paul have versions of Christian expectation about the Jews, there must have been two competing expectations in the early church. Finally, in Revelation 7 these folk are called simply the “servants of God,” which is not a term unique to Jewish believers.
Likewise the description of them in Revelation 14 could fit any believer who is faithful to God and does not compromise with the “beast” and the “false prophet.” In Revelation 9 all who are not sealed are tormented. Does this mean that Gentile believers are tormented while Jewish ones are not? And doesn’t a Jew-Gentile distinction within the church run counter to all of Paul’s arguments about God’s breaking down the walls between the races? These reasons persuade me that this cannot be the correct explanation.
The 144,000, then, stand for God’s faithful people, Jew or Gentile. They are, just as the text says, “the servants of our God.” The image of Israel is probably drawn from the picture in Ezekiel 9. Just as all of the tribes of Israel present in Jerusalem (the last stand of Judaism before the exile) were included then, so all of the tribes of humanity will be included in the end. The 12 X 12 X 1000 stresses the completeness of this number; all of God’s servants from all of humanity are sealed. The purpose of their sealing is to protect them not from temptation or martyrdom, but from the judgment of God. This is God’s church of the end times, when God’s judgment is coming to a peak. Since they are faithful, there is no reason for judgment to fall upon them. In Revelation 7 the image of the 144,000 protected on earth is coupled with a parallel image of the church in heaven, an encouragement to persevere. In Revelation 14 the 144,000 are in heaven, for in the same chapter is the harvest of the earth. The final judgments, which will destroy everything and everyone in their path, are about to begin. No wonder that the church is withdrawn before that final curtain comes down.
What does this image say to the church today? On the assumption that we live in the last days (which in New Testament thought runs from the time of Christ to the end), our Jehovah’s Witness friends are right to wish to be numbered in the 144,000. The sad thing is that they are going about it the wrong way. It is not a limited number to which one gains entrance by merit, but the complete number of God’s faithful servants.
One is counted in that number if he or she does not compromise the faith by going after the idols of the world and does not live in falsehood, but speaks and lives in truth.
Another way of putting it is that “they follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (Rev 14:4).
In the context of Revelation this means that they follow him in heaven (and perhaps in his conquest of earth in Rev 19), but they do so in heaven because they have already
been his followers on earth, whatever the cost.
9:1 What Is the Abyss?
The term Abyss occurs nine times in five different passages in the New Testament. In Luke 8:31 it is the place to which demons do not wish to be sent. In Romans 10:7 it is translated “the deep” and is the opposite of heaven, the one being above the earth and the other below. In Revelation 9:1–2 the “shaft [or well or pit] of the Abyss” is opened. In Revelation 11:7 there is a “beast that comes up from the Abyss.” And finally in Revelation 20:1–3 Satan is chained and thrown into the Abyss for one thousand years, the shaft being locked and sealed over him. This is the New Testament data that we have to work with.
The Greek translation of the Old Testament uses “Abyss” to translate “the deep” (Gen 1:2; Ps 42:7; 107:26) and “the depths of the earth” (Ps 71:20). In the first group of passages it refers to the deep seas or primeval deep from which solid ground is separated and which in some Hebrew cosmologies lie under the earth. In the second passage it refers to the place of the dead. These probably give us the background of Romans 10:7 (either the place of the dead into which no living person can go or the deep as opposed to the heights of heaven), but they do not help us with Revelation.
In the intertestamental literature we discover what a first-century Jew like the author of Revelation thought of when he wrote “the Abyss.” In 1 Enoch 10:4 a rebellious angel is bound and cast into darkness in a hole. This hole seems to be distinguished from the final place of judgment, a place of fire mentioned in 1 Enoch 18:11 and 21:7, although this is also a pit. Likewise in Jubilees 5:6–11 the fallen angels are bound in a pit. With this background we can now understand John’s image.
The Abyss is apparently the prison of demons and fallen angelic beings (some Jews believed demons were fallen angels, while others distinguished them as being their offspring). This explains the fear of the demons in Luke 8:31. They wanted to remain free, not be placed in prison. Jesus apparently allows them freedom because the time of judgment has not yet arrived. Likewise it explains why Satan is imprisoned in the Abyss, for it is the standard place to imprison such beings.
Yet the Abyss can be opened. In Revelation 9 it is opened to let out what are apparently demonic beings to torment people. These beings are not unorganized, but have “as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon” (Rev 9:11). The name means “destroyer” in either language.
The identity of this ruler is unclear. Is he an angel, perhaps the one who opens the pit and then is sent to control the host he allows out? John normally uses “angel” for one of those loyal to God; there is also plenty of evidence in Scripture to accept the idea of a destroying angel. Or is he one of the host allowed out, himself a fallen angel or demon? The evidence is fairly well balanced, but given John’s use of the term “angel,”
we suspect that the first suggestion is correct.5 [5 John uses “angel” in Revelation almost as many times as it appears in the whole rest of the New Testament put together. While there is one time when it does refer to fallen angels (Rev 12:7, 9, the dragon’s angels) and one time when it might do so (Rev 9:14–15), the vast majority of the time it refers to God’s angels.]
Not only do these demonic beings come up out of the Abyss, but “the beast” does as well. Revelation 11 does not explain this being, but given the connection of “the deep”
with the sea, John identifies him as the beast “coming out of the sea” in Revelation 13:1, a world ruler who is inspired by Satan himself. This identification is repeated in
Revelation 17:8, which combines elements of both the previous passages. In Revelation 11 he fights against God’s witnesses, although they are protected by God until the time of their martyrdom.
The Abyss does not appear in the final two chapters of Revelation because it is no longer needed. After Revelation 20 there is no need for a prison. The time of the final judgment has arrived, and both the devil and those belonging to him are cast into their final place of torment, the lake of fire (Rev 20:10).
How should Christians relate to this information? Certainly the images in these passages are fearful. But other elements are at work as well. As previously noted, the witnesses in Revelation 11 are protected until such a time as God allows them to be injured. In all of the passages it is God and his angels who have the keys to the Abyss.
Nothing comes out that God does not allow out. The beings that get out are not released to do their own will (although they may think that that is what they are doing), but to serve God’s purposes. Finally, in Revelation 9:4 we read that the demonic beings from the Abyss are not allowed to touch those who have “the seal of God on their foreheads.” Who are these? They are “the servants of our God” (Rev 7:3), who remain faithful to God and the Lamb (Rev 14:4–5). These people are not necessarily protected from martyrdom, but they are not able to be tormented or truly injured by the creatures of the pit. God remains in control even of the devil and his hosts. Thus, those who serve God should have no fear of the creatures of the Abyss, but instead should have a concern for others who do not walk under the protection of their Lord. This is an implied call to evangelism and to total faithfulness, even in the face of martyrdom.
11:2–3 Symbolic Numbers?
In addition to its unusual personages and symbols, Revelation has some numbers that are difficult to decipher. Those in Revelation 11:2–3 are as confusing as anywhere. In fact, they are so confusing that commentators from all positions approach this particular passage with caution, admitting that in the end they are not certain of their identifications. What does it mean for the holy city to be trampled for 42 months? And who are these witnesses who prophesy for 1,260 days? How do these periods of time relate? We can only give tentative answers to these questions.
The context of Revelation 11:2–3 is the sixth of the series of trumpet judgments, the penultimate judgments of Revelation. This second “woe” (the last three of the seven trumpet judgments are called “woes”) blew in Revelation 9:13; its judgment is finished in Revelation 11:14. This last part of the judgment contains both the numbers we mentioned above and the three and a half days that the witnesses (the main subjects of this last judgment scene) are to lie dead before their resurrection. Although the three and a half days are a separate issue, the other two numbers are the same, for it does not take much math skill to discover that 42 months equals three and a half years.
Likewise the 1,260 days equals 42 months of 30 days each or three and a half years of 360 days each. Furthermore, in Revelation 12:14, the end of the next chapter, we discover that “the woman” will be protected for “a time, times, and half a time,” or three and a half years. Therefore Revelation has three different ways of referring to the same length of time.
It is clear that this time period is symbolic. In Daniel 7:25 the fourth beast will oppress
the saints of the Most High for “a time, times, and half a time.” The same timing is mentioned in Daniel 12:7, although two other periods of 1,290 (43 months) and 1,335
days (44.5 months) respectively are mentioned in Daniel 12:11–12. Daniel 8:14 notes a period of 2,300 days (76.7 months or 6 years and 4.7 months) when the “little horn,”
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, would suppress Judaism. (This ruler, who deposed the last Zadokite high priest in 170 b.c. and suppressed sacrifice in Jerusalem from 167 to 164
b.c., is the model for much that happens in Revelation.) John does not use all of these numbers from Daniel. What he does use is the 3.5-year period, a period during which there will be oppression and the rule of “the beast,” but also the protection of “the woman” and the activity of “the two witnesses.”
When it comes to identifying this period and these individuals there are three basic schools of thought. One group sees the temple as a literal rebuilt temple in Jerusalem and the witnesses as two specific individuals. Given the nature of their miracles, they appear to be most like Moses and Elijah, the greatest of the Old Testament prophetic figures. The 3.5 years, then, is also a literal period at the end of the age during what John calls “the great tribulation,” when the antichrist, who will be a world ruler, will oppress the temple worship. The problem with this view is that the oppression excludes the altar and inner court of the temple, which makes it appear to be more a symbolic temple than a literal one. Who would control the outer court of the temple and ignore the inner one?
A second interpretation sees the temple and Jerusalem (where the two witnesses are active) as symbols for the Jewish people. The antichrist oppresses the Jewish people as a whole in the end of the age for 3.5 years, but the faithful remnant (the worshipers in the inner court) will be protected (perhaps meaning the same thing as the protection of
“the woman” in the next chapter). During this period of protection in the middle of the reign of evil, two eschatological personages will witness to the Jewish people (symbolized by Jerusalem), calling them to Christ. This interpretation has the advantage of retaining the sense of literality in the first interpretation, while avoiding the problems it faced in viewing the temple as a literal temple.
A third interpretation sees the temple and Jerusalem as symbols for the church and the world. The inner court is the true worshipers. The outer court is those members of the church who are corrupted by the world (the Nicolaitans and followers of Jezebel; see Rev 2). The holy city (Jerusalem) is the world outside the church. The church is oppressed by evil for a definite period (the 3.5 years normally are interpreted symbolically). Yet during this period witness will go on (the two witnesses being symbols for the witness of the church), although the witness will entail martyrdom. The strength of this position is that it takes seriously John’s calling Judaism “the synagogue of Satan” (Rev 2:9; 3:9) and Jerusalem “Sodom and Egypt” (Rev 11:8), therefore assuming that John would not be interested in preserving either Judaism or Jewish institutions such as the temple. Furthermore, each of the pictures receives an interpretation from within Revelation. The problem is that in most apocalyptic scenarios (including intertestamental apocalyptic) there are real people and places with which the author is concerned, not simply symbolic groups. This interpretation appears to loose itself from history in any form.
Obviously, we cannot be sure of the interpretation of this passage. Too many good Christian scholars have taken too divergent positions to speak with any dogmatism.
But from my point of view the second interpretation appears to fit John’s perspective best. In his day the temple was gone and Judaism was oppressed. This, he says, will
continue. There will be a period of intense persecution in the end of the age, when the embodiment of evil himself, the antichrist, will rule (at least in the Roman world). The Jews, symbolized by Jerusalem in Revelation 11, will be “trampled on” by this ruler, but a remnant that is faithful to God (the inner court of Revelation 11 and perhaps the woman of Revelation 12) will be protected. Just as there will be an embodiment of evil, so witness will be embodied in two individuals who will come in the spirit of Moses and Elijah. After 3.5 years they will be martyred, then raised to life. Yet this will lead to a turning of the Jews as a whole to Christ (Rev 11:13). It will also happen just before the final end of the age (which, if John is using Daniel’s chronology, should happen within two or three months). This interpretation fits with Jesus’ predictions about Judaism (Lk 21:24) and the temple (Mk 13:2 and parallels—there is no mention of its rebuilding) and takes the symbols as meaning something concrete.
This, then, is our understanding of what John anticipated in the end of the age. He appears to believe that it would happen within a short time. It did not happen that way during his lifetime, but perhaps we should look at the rapid spread of Christianity within the Roman Empire as a parallel to the repentance of Nineveh in Jonah. It led to the eventual repentance of Rome and perhaps, like in the case of Nineveh, to a putting of the judgment on hold. That is certainly in tune with the desire of God for repentance (rather than judgment) within Revelation. This may move the judgment picture to the end of the age, whenever this may happen to be. Yet will the judgment happen any less concretely or even any differently than John envisioned it 1900 years ago? Only our hindsight from heaven will reveal the truth—and the fully correct interpretation of this verse—which God alone knows.
12:1–3 Who Are the Woman and the Dragon?
The images presented in Revelation are vivid. The one in Revelation 12:1–3 is part of a set of pictures that serve as a prelude to the final end of the age, since the seventh trumpet, the penultimate judgment, has already blown. Yet what are we to make of this picture? Who is this woman? What is this dragon? How do we interpret such images, which remind us more of Greek mythology than of most Scripture?
John’s images are intended to be meaningful, but at the same time he uses them because they can also be fluid. Both the woman and the dragon have a fluidity about them that allows them to be useful to the author.
First, we look at the woman. There are two women in this section of Revelation. The first is this woman, God’s woman. The second is the woman of Revelation 17, a prostitute. The opposition reminds us of the two women of Proverbs 1–10, the one lady wisdom and the other the loose woman. Here the first woman is clothed with heavenly glory, the sun, with the moon being under her feet. The second woman is clothed in “purple and scarlet,” colors of earthly emperors. The first woman has twelve stars for a crown. The second woman has gold and jewels. The first woman gives birth, but the second woman appears sterile. There is a contrast in every way.
We recognize that the second woman is Rome; is the first woman Jerusalem? There have been several answers to that question. Some scholars point to the twelve stars and argue the parallel to twelve patriarchs. Indeed, the whole picture, including the sun and the moon, reminds us of Joseph’s dream (Gen 37:9). Other scholars look at the incident of the birth of the child and claim that the woman is Mary. Still others point
out that the sign appears in heaven, so this must be some idealization of the people of God, God’s true bride. I do not see that one must choose among these interpretations.
Jewish thought often oscillates between the one and the many. For example, in the servant songs of the second part of Isaiah the servant is sometimes Israel (Is 49:3) and sometimes an individual (Is 49:5), and in Daniel the Son of Man (Dan 7:13–14) and
“the saints of the Most High” (Dan 7:18) also alternate. So in our image the woman is God’s people, the faithful of Israel. The woman is also Mary, who individualized that faithful group in giving birth to the Messiah.
In the second part of the chapter the image of the woman shifts, for she is persecuted.
Is she still the faithful in Israel? Or is she now the wider people of God, Jew as well as Gentile? Certainly in her flight to the wilderness we are reminded of Jesus’ words (Mk 13:14; Lk 21:21), which the Jewish-Christian church acted upon just before a.d. 70.
Does it then mean that God will protect a Jewish-Christian group? Or should we remember his words in Matthew 16:18 that “the gates of Hades” would not overcome his church, therefore interpreting this as a reference to his whole church? Perhaps the correct answer is both. The image is that of the flight of Israel from Pharaoh into the wilderness and the flight of the church from Jerusalem in the a.d. 66–70 war. This shows that God will care for and protect his church, specifically during the time when the forces of evil reign apparently triumphant, the 1,260 days. All of the lies and demonic forces that the dragon can spit out cannot destroy this church. But at the same time the dragon makes war with the woman’s children, the Christians. So while the church as a whole is protected and cannot be stamped out, Christians as individuals will experience the anger of Satan, even martyrdom.
Second, then, we have the dragon. This image is drawn from Old Testament pictures of Leviathan, the many-headed sea monster (Ps 74:13–14). The monster is sometimes mythological in the sense that he is not identified with any historical embodiment, and sometimes a specific enemy of God’s people, such as Egypt (Ps 74:14; Ezek 29:3) or Assyria (Is 27:1). This picture was medi-ated to John via Daniel, who describes a fourth beast with ten horns (Dan 7:7). John, of course, makes very clear about whom he believes Daniel is talking (or in terms of whom he is reinterpreting Daniel), for he writes in Revelation 12:9, “The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.” Yet this dragon also has an earthly embodiment. The “beast coming out of the sea” (Rev 13:1) has seven heads and ten horns like the dragon, as does the beast the great prostitute rides (Rev 17:3).
And as the prostitute parodied the woman clothed in the sun, so the dragon parodies someone else. Revelation 12:3 notes that he has seven crowns, while in Revelation 19:12 the “King of kings and Lord of lords” has many crowns on his head.
The dragon naturally tried to destroy Christ, the child in the story. John is not interested at this point in the life and death of Christ, but moves from his birth to his ascension. However, we must remember than in his Gospel the “lifting up” of the Son of Man is both cross and ascension, so this does not mean that the cross is absent from his thought.
John’s concern is with the war of the dragon against God’s people. The war has two phases, a heavenly and an earthly. The heavenly phase is fought by Michael, “the great prince who protects your [that is, Daniel’s] people” (Dan 12:1), and his angels. The dragon has swept one-third of the angels with him in his fall, so he also has angels to fight with. But he is the loser. Even though God never appears on the scene, but fights through his angels, the victory is secured. Satan loses his access to heaven. When does
John see this as happening? Although some scholars refer this to the original fall of Satan, it probably happens at the end of the age, for it happens after the child is caught up to heaven. Furthermore, there is plenty of Jewish testimony to the idea of Satan’s having access to heaven during world history.
There is also a battle on earth. The human beings apparently do not see their foe. Yet they defeat the devil. In fact, the outcome of the war in heaven appears to be parallel to that on earth, just as Daniel’s prayers in Daniel 10 appear to be parallel to a battle going on in the spiritual realm, a battle he knows nothing about until he is informed. In Revelation the human beings win, not because of their strength and wisdom, but because of their trust in “the blood of the Lamb” and their open confession of their faith in him. They were so firm in this trust and confession that “they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death” (Rev 12:11). The devil could make martyrs, but each martyr was the devil’s own defeat. The martyr was safe with God in heaven; the devil’s power over the person had crumbled. In other words, the primary means of spiritual warfare is commitment to God and his redemption in Christ, a commitment so openly confessed and so radical that even death will not shake one from it.
This battle is fought throughout the Christian age, but it is most intense at the end of the age. In this period of 42 months the devil is fully aware that he has lost, both in heaven and on earth. Now he just wishes to destroy, to “make war” against “those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (see Rev 12:17).
The reason John is writing this picture is so that such people will hold on until martyrdom or the end of the age.
Like all of his apocalyptic pictures, this one is not intended to scare Christians. It does portray them as characters in an eschatological battle of gigantic proportions, but at the same time it portrays the limitations of the devil himself, not to mention his angels, and his final end. Furthermore, it portrays the protection of God over his saints, as well as his eventual victory. This is designed to encourage the Christian to stand fast, whether he or she is living in the ongoing struggle of the Christian age or in the intense struggle of the final phase of that time. Dragons may be the stuff of fantasy, but in this case the fantasy is real, even if hidden in the spiritual realm, and the stakes are high.
Yet the outcome is sure for those who remain firm in their commitment to Christ.
12:7–8 Satan in Heaven?
See comment on job 1:6–12.
12:11 Overcame by the Blood of the Lamb?
Our acquaintance with video games and fantasy may prepare us for the use of some strange weapons in warfare, but Revelation 12:11 has some of the strangest ones, even given the context of fantasy. When we read about overcoming Satan by “the blood of the Lamb,” don’t we wonder how this is done? Blood is an exceedingly strange weapon. Furthermore, how does testimony function as a weapon? It isn’t a type of curse or magic, is it? And while we may understand the usefulness of the courage implied in not loving one’s life, how can these other things be weapons in a spiritual battle?
The context is that there has been a war in heaven between the devil and his angels and the archangel Michael and his angels. Michael, fighting in the name of God, has won.
However, as the scene shifts to earth with the fall of the dragon, John inserts a hymn into the passage, which comments on the battle that has just taken place. First, the devil is called “the accuser of our brothers” and apparently had access to the presence of God to accuse Christians up until this point. Second, the battle itself is described, but we no longer hear of Michael and his angels. Instead we hear of the deeds of human beings.
It is clear from the setting that John is painting a picture of parallel scenes. One is a heavenly battle with angelic participants. The other is an earthly battle, with the devil on one side and the Christians on the other. Yet the two appear to be parallel. The casting down of Satan from heaven is attributed to the faithfulness of Christians on earth. The heavenly battle is apparently influenced by the earthly. It is analogous to Daniel 10, in which Daniel prays for twenty-one days. He is eventually told that his prayer had been answered the first day, but that there had been a heavenly battle preventing the answering angel from getting through to him until Michael came to take over the fight. All of this time Daniel is praying on earth, oblivious to the battle in the spiritual world. Is the author there implying that Daniel’s struggles in prayer are part of what is affecting the outcome of the heavenly battle?
What, then, are the weapons of this earthly battle? The first is “the blood of the Lamb.”
John has already referred to the death of Christ, saying that the Lamb (Christ) appears
“looking as if it had been slain” (Rev 5:6). Furthermore, John has confessed “to him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” (Rev 1:5). So this image of blood indicates what Christ has done for the Christian on the cross. It is a weapon, not in that it is flung in the teeth of Satan as a talisman, but in that the Christian is committed to it. It is this sacrifice in which the Christian trusts, and it does not fail him when the accuser roars out his accusations.
The second weapon is “the word of their testimony.” Revelation 1:5 presents Jesus Christ as “the faithful witness.” In Revelation 2:13 Antipas, “my faithful witness,” has been put to death. The theme of witness or testimony (the same Greek word can be translated by either English word) flows from one end of the book to the other. This testimony, then, is the confession of obedience to Christ. It is not the story about what Christ has done for us (which is the common modern evangelical meaning of the term), but the statement that one is loyal to Christ and therefore will not compromise.
Because it is something spoken, probably in the context of a demand for the explanation of one’s behavior, it is a word.
The third item really is not a weapon, although it is in a parallel clause. Rather, it is an attitude of mind that underlies the other two: “they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” As Jesus said, “He who stands firm to the end will be saved”
(Mk 13:13). If death remains a threat to a person, then there is a point at which they will compromise their commitment to the blood of Christ and certainly a point at which they will mute their word of testimony. The genuineness of commitment is seen when the heat is on. Those who pass the test are those who will not cling to life even under the threat of death, if it would mean compromising on their commitment to Christ.
In this context the devil has been presented as “the accuser of our brothers.” This is the war that he wages against the people of God, for his weapons are lies and accusations.
But these people have not believed the lie, for they have seen through Satan’s deception to the reality of Christ. They know that life is not more precious than obedience to Jesus. And the accusations of Satan have no hold on them. Accuse as he will, he will only receive the response “I am trusting in the blood of Christ.” And should he accuse them of being hypocrites, their faithful word of testimony even in the face of threatened death shows such an accusation to be completely false.
In other words, John is not saying that Christians win the battle against Satan by talking about the blood of Christ, telling Satan about that blood (he already knows about it all too well), or using it as a magic word in prayer (“by the power of the blood of Jesus”). Instead, Christians trust in the power of the death of Christ with a quiet confidence that is inwardly lived and outwardly confessed in word and deed (life matching speech), no matter what the threat. This radical commitment, John claims, is what defeats Satan.
John does not present this as super-Christianity, for martyrs only. Rather, it is normal Christianity. It is a Christianity that does not love Babylon (his image for the world and all it has to offer in power, wealth and advancement, as Rev 18 shows). It is a Christianity that is dedication to Christ, or, as he puts it, a faithful witness. This for him is spiritual warfare. No demons are necessarily seen,6 [6 This does not imply that John in any way rejects the expulsion of demons from the demonized, for this activity was universally part of the essence of spiritual warfare. Demon expulsion, evangelistic proclamation, healing the sick and caring for the poor are all part of the lifestyle of the gospel, but they flow out of the more basic trust in the blood of Christ and concomitant personal commitment to him, rather than replace it.] just as Daniel saw no spiritual battle, but despite the lack of visible pyrotechnics, the devil is cast down. In such faithfulness the devil discovers that his time is short.
13:1 Who Is the Beast from the Sea?
John may well have drawn his basis for the picture of this beast from Daniel 7, which lists a series of four beasts. The first three are similar to recognizable animals, although with additions or modifications. The fourth is compared to no known animal, but is simply “terrifying and frightening and very powerful” (Dan 7:7). The only physical description is that it has iron teeth and ten horns. The beast in Revelation appears related to that one.
This beast is an embodiment of Satan. The seven heads and ten horns on the beast are copied from the picture of Satan in Revelation 12:3. And this is no wonder, for “the dragon [Satan] gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.” He represents the power of Satan on earth and is to Satan what Christ is to the Father. He is even more a pseudo-Christ in that he receives a mortal wound from which he is healed, a mimicked death and resurrection. Because of this event he is worshiped on earth.
The second place where this beast appears is in Revelation 17:3. This chapter explains (Rev 17:8–13) that the symbolism has more than one meaning. The ten horns are ten kings who rule along with a great ruler and support that ruler. The seven heads are both seven hills (a transparent symbol for Rome) and seven kings. Unlike the ten who rule simultaneously, these seven come one after another. John is living in the time when the sixth of them is ruling. The beast himself is an eighth. Yet, inspired by Satan as he is, his real origin is in “the Abyss,” the place where Satanic spirits are imprisoned.
Because of the transparency of the symbolism in Revelation 17:9, it would seem that if
we knew how John counted the rulers of Rome, it would be fairly easy to discover who the beast was. He should be the eighth emperor of Rome, John living in the age of the sixth. The fact that the Roman Senate declared several emperors to be divine and that some, especially Domitian, claimed divinity during their lifetimes, and one, Caligula, tried to have his statue erected in the temple in Jerusalem, adds to this impression (compare Rev 13:8, 14). Unfortunately we do not know either with whom John would start such a count or whether he would skip some of the emperors who reigned only a short time. Nor are we sure exactly when he lived, for a good case has been made for the time of Domitian (a.d. 91–96, the traditional date) as well as that of Galba (a.d. 68). Neither of these dates would meet the requirement of having an eighth emperor fitting the description of the beast.
Yet there is a further problem with the identification of this beast. As we have seen, the seven heads have two meanings, one of which is Rome (the seven hills) and the other seven kings. Some see these kings as literal rulers of Rome (as in the scheme above), and others see them as kingdoms or empires. In Daniel 7:17 the term translated
“kingdoms” in the NIV [NIV New International Version] is literally “kings” in Aramaic. That means that John could be shifting from a vision of literal Rome and its emperors to one of a succession of empires.
Finally, in apocalyptic scenarios there is often a place in which the writer “fades out”
from the present historical circumstances and sees beyond them to future events. A good example of this is Daniel 12:1. Daniel 11 gives us a picture of the conflict between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, culminating in the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–163 b.c.). If one reads 1 Maccabees or Josephus’s histories, it is easy to identify everyone. But in Daniel 12 we are no longer in the realm of history. We are seeing beyond the period of Daniel 11 to the end of history. Since the beast “once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss” (Rev 17:8), John appears to be suggesting that an evil force that had once been destroyed (or perhaps consigned to the Abyss) would reappear, not that a new emperor would appear. This would go beyond anything present in the Roman Empire.
What, then, can we say about the beast? John saw in his vision a personage coming at the end of time who would be the devil incarnate and demand worship. This personage would be accompanied by a second who would seem to be harmless enough (“two horns like a lamb,” perhaps suggesting a likeness to Christ, the Lamb), but would speak for the devil (“he spoke like a dragon,” Rev 13:11). The second personage will direct worship toward the first. The appearance of these two will be associated with the three-and-a-half-year period of intense persecution at the end of the age. John saw this in terms of the Rome that he knew, perhaps expecting in his own heart that it would happen in his lifetime. We have previously suggested that the vision of Revelation may have been delayed, like Jonah’s, due to the widespread conversion to Christianity in the Roman Empire. Whether or not this is the case, all scenarios of the end (such as Paul’s in 2 Thess 2) agree in seeing an embodiment of evil, like Antiochus IV Epiphanes was in his day, before the incarnation of good, Jesus Christ, appears.
What this means for the church is that its expectation of the end is not one of gradual improvement or Christianizing of the world until Christ appears, but one of evangelization in the face of persecution, a persecution that will become most severe just before the end. Certainly many Christians have felt they have lived in the times of the beast, such as those living under Napoleon or Hitler or Stalin. Yet they have been wrong in that the end has not come. But will those who live in the age of the real beast
have any better insight? None of us evaluate our own times well. The important thing is that Christians respond appropriately to persecutors, whether a beastlike person (such as Hitler) or the genuine beast. John’s picture shows that the beast is under the ultimate control of God. His time is limited. His coming and destruction are under the power of God. His persecution will be used by God for the perfection of God’s church.
The response expected, then, is firm commitment to God. That response will not be wrong in the face of any persecution, even if we are not sure whether or not it is the genuine beast.
13:18 His Number Is 666?
I can be described by a number of numbers. I have a Social Security number and a Canadian social insurance number. I am one number to the Society of Biblical Literature’s computer and another to CompuServ Information Service. We expect this in our computer age, but we are surprised to find people in the Bible described in terms of a number and correctly suspect that the numbers are something more than identification for filing purposes. In the previous chapter I introduced the concept of the “beast coming out of the sea.” His description was problematic, but the one thing about him that has caused more difficulty and speculation than any of the others is his enigmatic number noted in Revelation 13:18.
It is not surprising that numbers had meaning in the symbolic world of John’s vision, for they had more than numerical meaning in his outer world as well. Numbers and letters were interchangeable. For example, many rabbinic scriptures to this day do not use Arabic numerals, but instead use Hebrew letters to stand for the various verse and chapter numbers. This led some rabbis to interpret Scripture via gematria, the turning of names into numbers and vice versa. For this reason many scholars believe that the fourteen generations counted three times in Matthew 1 are related to the name David, for DVD in Hebrew (the vowels were not written) would be 4 + 6 + 4, or 14.7 [7 In transliteration the Hebrew alphabet runs < B G D H V for the numbers 1–6.] The Greeks did a similar thing with their own alphabet. In the early Christian Sibylline Oracles Jesus is enumerated as 888.
It was only with the spread first of Roman and then of Arabic numerals that this practice died out for most of the Western world.
We would expect, then, that the number 666 would stand for something, especially that it would stand for a name. One theory is that it stands for Nero Caesar. Nero is selected because he persecuted Christians and a legend arose after his suicide that he had not died, but had fled to the east and would return in triumph. Two false Neros tried to fulfill this legend and failed. Still, Nero Caesar in Greek totals 1,005, so one has to transliterate the Greek name into Hebrew to get the required 666. Did John, who wrote in Greek, expect his readers to know Hebrew or Hebrew letter values?
Two other methods to obtain the name of an emperor have been attempted. One added the values of the initial letters of the names of all of the Roman emperors up until a certain point (something that the Sibylline Oracles also does). Another used the abbreviation for the title of Domitian, another persecuting emperor. Unfortunately, for the first theory at least one of the emperors must be left out of the list to get an even 666 from the emperors’ initials, and while we know of the abbreviations of Domitian’s title, they do not appear together anywhere, which weakens the second theory.
Another solution has been via the observation that 666 is the triangular number of 36
(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 and on up to 36). The number 36 is the triangular number of 8 (1 + 2 +
3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 = 36). The beast, of course, is the eighth king (Rev 17:11).
Triangular numbers were seen as sinister in contrast to the square numbers, which are assigned to the martyrs (Rev 7:4) and the heavenly city (Rev 21:16). While this math is interesting and fits the Greek concern with geometry (because they did not have a mathematically useful system of numerals), it does not come up with a name. Nor can we be sure that such a complicated system was in John’s mind. After all, there are other triangular numbers in Scripture that are not sinister at all, such as the 153 fish in John 21:11.
None of the solutions above has been found completely satisfactory. Perhaps the best observation is that 666 consistently (three times) falls short of the number of perfection, 7, and the number of Christ, 888. Rather than refer to a specific name, 666
may indicate that the person will be a parody of Christ. He will not come up to perfection, but as the prostitute of Revelation 17 mimics the faithful woman of Revelation 12 and the dragon in Revelation 12 mimics Christ in Revelation 19, so the beast mimics the incarnate Christ, being the embodiment of evil (the devil not being capable of true incarnation). Beyond this we can only observe that when such a personage appears, those who are wise in John’s terms (which means first of all that they have divine insight) will recognize him and see that 666 does indeed fit.
16:15 Blessed Is He Who Keeps His Clothes?
What does it mean to stay awake? Does it mean that the blessed Christian will not be asleep in bed when Christ returns? How might a Christian be naked at such a time? Are we to fear this coming happening when we are in the bath? Particularly because the verse is an exhortation from Christ himself, we readers of Revelation want to be sure of what this means.
The context of this verse is the pouring out of the first six bowls of the final judgment of God. The previous verse mentioned that the way has now been prepared for the final battle of “the great day of God Almighty.” The next verse describes the gathering of the nations for that battle, which will not take place until Revelation 19:11–21. Yet when that battle does take place the people of God are with their king, so they obviously have been gathered together, an event often referred to as “the rapture” (Mk 13:27; 1 Cor 15:51–52; 1 Thess 4:16–17).
The wider context of this verse is the sayings of Jesus that he would come “like a thief” (Mt 24:43; Lk 12:39; compare Mk 13:32–37). This image is picked up by Paul (1 Thess 5:2, 4; compare 2 Pet 3:10) and has already been mentioned once by John (Rev 3:3). The point of all of these sayings is that a thief does not announce his coming, but surprises the inhabitants of the house by coming when they are out or least likely to suspect his or her presence. Stealth and surprise are the chief weapons. To say that the day of the Lord is like this is to say that it too will come when least expected.
As Jesus noted, no one knows the day or the hour (Mk 13:32); those who have claimed to have calculated it have always been proved wrong. But this does not mean that one cannot be prepared; instead it means that one must always be prepared, like servants waiting up through the night for their master to return from a party (Lk 12:35–40).
John has been writing about the gathering of the world’s armies and the final battle
between the beast and Christ. The alarming events in the world or even the expectation that this gathering must take place before Christ could return could distract his readers from their central focus, namely faithfulness to and expectation of Christ. He, not the armies of the antichrist, is to be their central concern. Therefore it is quite appropriate that the voice of Jesus himself interject a warning in the middle of the gathering storm, just as he previously interjected a blessing about the death of Christians to contrast with that of the destruction of “Babylon” (Rev 14:13).
The warning is to “stay awake” or “watch.” The image is that of the watchmen at their posts, alert for any sign of their lord and expectant of his coming. As we saw above, this picture is drawn from the sayings of Jesus. This alertness, of course, implies that the Christian will be found doing what the master has commanded him or her to do, which includes sleep at appropriate times.8 [8 As one Christian teacher pointed out, so long as one is obeying Christ, whether sleeping or raising the dead, “the pay is the same”—both are simply obedient servants.] The wakefulness, then, is not the avoidance of physical sleep, but a moral wakefulness that does not allow the world to lull one into a laxity about the directions that Christ has given and the standards he has set.
The picture of the watching servant is connected to that for nakedness. When lying down to sleep, a person would take off the outer garment and use it as a blanket, or perhaps lay it aside altogether and sleep under a blanket or covered in straw (as rabbi Akiba and his wife were forced to do since they had only one outer garment for the two of them). A poor person’s clothing was his or her most valuable possession; a thief would not miss the chance to steal it upon breaking into a house during the night (see Lk 10:30). Likewise if a person were asleep but would have to rush out in an emergency without taking the time to get clothed, he or she could lose the outer garment (see Mk 13:15–16). To be without that outer garment in public would be to be “naked” in terms of that culture (something like being in a shopping mall clothed only in underwear in our day). Jesus thus counsels keeping one’s “clothes with him” or
“guarding their clothing” to prevent the surprise of the moment finding them
“shamefully exposed.” The Mishnah reports that the captain of the temple would go around at night and, if he found temple police asleep at their posts, take their clothing and burn it, forcing them to leave the temple naked.9 [9 So F. F. Bruce, “The Revelation to John,” in G.
C. D. Howley et al., eds., The New Layman’s Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1979), p. 1703.] In this text the surprise of the moment finds the believer similarly “undressed.”
The clothing of the Christian is mentioned several times in Revelation. Those in the church of Sardis whose deeds are not right have soiled clothes, while the worthy ones will be dressed in white (Rev 3:4). The church of Laodicea is naked and needs to purchase white clothing to wear (Rev 3:17–18). The martyrs under the altar are clothed in white (Rev 6:11), as is the multitude before the throne (Rev 7:9). The key to the image of clothing is found in Revelation 19:8, in which the bride of Christ is given
“fine linen, bright and clean” to wear. Then comes the comment “Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.” If one is not acting righteously, which means following the commands of Christ, he or she is naked before him, and his coming will leave such a person “shamefully exposed.”
The two parts of the warning, then, fit together. The coming of Christ cannot be calculated. Certainly the last thing that John wishes is that his readers would try to calculate the time of that coming using the images in his book. That would be to put their focus on the world and the evil personages rather than on Christ. The goal of the whole of this book is that, given the ultimate end of all of the principalities and powers
of this world and the final triumph of Christ, Christians will remain faithful whatever the cost. They are to be prepared for the coming of Christ at all times. This means not only expecting this coming verbally or doctrinally, but also living a life appropriate to that expectation. This means living in obedience to Jesus, however crazy such a lifestyle might appear in the light of the values of this world, and “clothing oneself”
with righteous deeds. It is for such people that the coming of Christ will not be something for which they are unprepared. Instead, they will joyfully welcome it and, fully “clothed,” join their Lord’s throng as he completes his conquest of the world and ends this age.
19:10 The Testimony of Jesus Is the Spirit of Prophecy?
For a long period of time the church has relegated prophecy either to the classical prophets of the biblical period or to preaching (which is normally the gift of teaching, not prophecy). While the revival of interest in prophecy in the church began close to two hundred years ago, there has been a recent upsurge in interest in prophecy, both in scholarly circles and in church ministry. Revelation 19:10 appears to have something to say to this trend, especially since it comes from a Christian prophet. In the middle of a picture of “the wedding supper of the Lamb,” when the hopes of the church will be consummated in union with her Lord, John is overwhelmed. He falls at the feet of the angel who is explaining everything to him, bowing his head to the pavement in worship. We are not surprised that the angel stops him (and will do so again in Rev 22:8–9), but the statement that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” needs explanation. What does it mean? What is “the testimony of Jesus”? Just what is the
“spirit of prophecy”? What might either of these have to do with prophecy today?
The New Testament mentions the gift of prophecy several times, most significantly in 1
Corinthians 12–14, although Acts mentions prophets several times as well. Yet we know very little concerning what New Testament prophets spoke about, other than the words of Agabus (Acts 11:27–28; 21:1), with the exception of Revelation.10 [10 Scholars also have believed that some of Paul’s sayings and (more controversially) some of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospels are the products of Christian prophets, but since none of these are actually called prophecy, even the most sure of them must be classed as disputed in terms of being prophecy. We will therefore keep our focus on what is actually called prophecy.] This whole book is designated as prophecy (Rev 1:3; 22:7, 18–19) and is therefore our most extensive example of Christian prophecy. Within this context John says that “the testimony of Jesus” is “the spirit” of this prophecy.
Prophecy was not, of course, to be accepted without testing it to see if it were genuine or distorted in some way. Several New Testament passages address this issue.
Colossians 2:18 suggests that some Christians had been led into the worship of angels, probably through prophetic speculation. The church is called to weigh prophecy (1 Cor 14:29), for, given our fallenness, prophetic words are normally more or less words from God, not the pure word. According to 1 John 4:1, Christians are not to trust every spirit, as not all are the Holy Spirit. Finally, in Revelation, “Jezebel” “calls herself a prophetess,” functioning within the church (Rev 2:20), and the beast “out of the earth” (Rev 13:11), who persecutes the church, is called a false prophet (Rev 19:20).
All of this shows the need for knowing the criteria for testing prophecy.
The angel in this verse notes that he and the Christians “hold to the testimony of Jesus”
and that this same “testimony” is “the spirit of prophecy.” That is, it is by this testimony or witness that one can discern the genuine prophetic Spirit. But what is “the
testimony [or witness] of Jesus”? The phrase itself occurs several times in Revelation (Rev 1:2, 9; 12:17; 19:10; 20:4), while a related phrase occurs in Revelation 17:6.
There are two interpretations of it. In the first, it is the testimony or witness that Jesus bore to God in his life and teaching, carrying that witness to the point of death and still bearing it from his exalted place in heaven. In support of this interpretation we see that Jesus is called the “faithful witness” (Rev 1:5; 3:14), and the whole book of Revelation is referred to as his testimony through his angel (Rev 22:16). The second interpretation is that this is a testimony about Jesus that one makes by conforming to his commands and confessing one’s allegiance and his truth with one’s mouth. In support of this we note those who are called witnesses or who give testimony, such as Antipas (Rev 2:13), the martyrs (Rev 6:9), the two witnesses (Rev 11:3) and the victors (Rev 12:11).
Given that both of the meanings are supported in the text, we may have created a false dichotomy between them, although the accent in the “testimony of Jesus” passages appears to fall on the latter rather than the former meaning. What Jesus witnessed to in his life and death is precisely what faithful Christians are to witness to in theirs. A true testimony to Jesus means obedience to his commands and faithfulness to his teaching.
And, as Jesus openly confessed his allegiance to his Father, so the true Christian openly acknowledges faithfulness to Jesus. Life and word go together; the Christian who does not live like Jesus is a contradiction in terms, as is the idea of a secret Christian. Thus we see in Revelation 17:6 that the saints (not just the best of them) bore testimony to Jesus. In Revelation 12:17 to “obey God’s commandments” is the equivalent of holding to “the testimony of Jesus.” In Revelation 1:2, 9; 20:4 the
“testimony of Jesus” is a parallel idea to “the word of God.” The true Word of God, of course, was incarnate in Jesus (according to Jn 1), came through Jesus and is about Jesus.
That “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” then, means that true prophecy inspired of the Holy Spirit will be in conformity to the life and teaching of Jesus (who was himself in conformity with the rest of the Word of God) and will ultimately point to Jesus. By this standard one may evaluate both the life and the words of a prophet.
Revelation itself, then, is on the one hand an attempt to uphold the standards that Jesus taught and lived (such as its call to watching; its rejection of compromise with the world; its demanding that God alone be worshiped; and its rejection of sexual immorality) and on the other hand a call to value the redemption by his blood, live in accordance with his faithfulness unto death, and expect his final victory as King of kings and Lord of lords. While addressed to human beings in seven churches, its ultimate focus is Jesus. It does indeed pass its own test.
In a time when the church is rediscovering the gift of prophecy, then, this verse is very relevant.11 [11 Note, for example, Wayne Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1988); Clifford Hill, Prophecy Past and Present (Crowborough, U.K.: Highland Books, 1989); and Graham Houston, Prophecy: A Gift for Today? (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1989). Of the three, Hill’s is the best, but all of them advocate a role for prophecy (meaning a direct word from God, not simply inspired exegetical preaching) today, and two of them have the imprimatur of no less than F. F. Bruce and I. Howard Marshall, indicating these scholars’ positive evaluation of their solid exegetical basis.] It is not the messenger who should be honored, but the giver of the message, Jesus himself. He becomes the standard by which all is measured. It is Jesus who clearly distinguishes between John and Jezebel, between the true spirit of prophecy and the spirit of the antichrist. Thus the true prophet is that prophet who lives like Jesus, teaches in harmony with Jesus and points others to Jesus as their Lord and King.
20:2 Bound for a Thousand Years?
The setting is the end of the great period of persecution and the judgment of God. The war with the forces of evil has been fought and won by the rider on the white horse who is called “Faithful and True.” Then comes the scene of which Revelation 20:2 is a part. What does it mean that the devil is bound for a thousand years? Why put him in prison rather than destroy him, and why for a mere thousand years? What does this time period have to do with “the millennium,” and what does that term signify anyway?
This verse is another of those places in Revelation in which there appear to be two levels of conflict. In Revelation 12 we saw that there was a conflict in heaven between Michael and the dragon (Satan) and a parallel conflict on earth between the dragon and the saints. Here there is a conflict on earth in the physical realm between the exalted Christ, returning visibly as king, and the pseudo-Christ, “the beast,” and his “unholy spirit,” the “false prophet” (Rev 19:19–20). Both enemies have been summarily dealt with (they are tossed into the lake of fire, or hell) and their army has been destroyed by a word from Christ. All of that happens on a very physical level. But there is still the matter of the devil who inspired and embodied himself in “the beast” (Rev 13:1). Now we shift to the spiritual plane (although not to heaven, for the dragon was cast out of heaven in Rev 12).
In this prophecy Satan is taken captive by an angel, bound with a chain for one thousand years, tossed into the Abyss, the prison of evil spirits, and locked and sealed in. At the end of this period he is again released, again foments a rebellion among human beings on earth (although now in the tribes outside the Roman Empire), and in the end not only loses his army, but is himself tossed into the lake of fire, where he will remain forever (Rev 20:7–10).
“The millennium,” then, refers to this thousand-year Satan-free period during which at least the martyrs are resurrected and reign with Christ on earth (Rev 20:4–6). The question that remains is how to interpret this information. There are three fundamentally different positions on the millennium. The first, the postmillennial view, interprets this passage as a look back on history. It sees the millennium as the period at the end of history that ushers in the reign of Christ. At times this is viewed as a spiritual rule of Christ through the triumph of the gospel and at times as a literal period of one thousand years characterized by the triumph of kingdom values at the end of time. The point is that the physical return of Christ comes at the end of the millennium.
The second, the amillennial view, does not really believe in no millennium (which is what “amillennial” should mean etymologically), but in a spiritual millennium. The binding of Satan has been accomplished during the lifetime of Jesus (see Mt 12:29; Lk 10:18; Jn 12:31; Col 2:15). During the age of the church Christ reigns in heaven and the power of Satan is limited in that he cannot stop the spread of the gospel. The first resurrection is the spiritual resurrection of the person’s soul coming to life upon conversion. Therefore the millennial period (the thousand years being symbolic of a long time) overlaps the church age, the rebellion in Revelation 20:7–10 being essentially the same as that in Revelation 19:19–21.
The third position, the premillennial view, argues that the text should be taken at face value to indicate an actual period of time, during which Christ reigns and Satan is unable to deceive the nations. This fits with both the New Testament concept that
Satan is alive and active on earth during the present age (see Lk 22:3; Acts 5:3; 2 Cor 4:3–4; 11:14; Eph 2:2; 1 Thess 2:18; 2 Tim 2:26; 1 Pet 5:8) and a common idea found in Jewish apocalyptic. For example, the pseudepigraphical book 2 Enoch mentions the idea that there are seven thousand-year periods to world history, the last being a thousand-year sabbath when God returns ( 2 Enoch 32:2–33:2). A similar idea is found in a passage in the Talmud ( b. Sanhedrin 97b) and in the early Christian Epistle of Barnabas ( Barnabas 15). Other Jewish works reveal a belief in a shorter millennium (four hundred years or even just forty years) or mention no millennium. In the rest of the New Testament only one other passage (1 Cor 15:23–28) may indicate two stages in the overcoming of evil, but of course the interpretation of this passage is also disputed. At the same time, no New Testament passage excludes this view.
In John’s view the millennium consists of several elements. First, Satan is bound so that he cannot deceive the nations (Rev 20:3). Second, the martyrs are resurrected and reign with Christ (Rev 20:4–7). This means that the armies destroyed in Revelation 19:21 are in fact armies, not all the people alive. The population of the earth not destroyed in the final series of judgments remains alive and is ruled by Christ and his martyrs. Third, the end of the period is marked by the release of the devil and his renewed deception of the nations, specifically Gog and Magog, which Ezekiel 38–39
locates in the far north (Asia Minor or beyond) and the Jewish historian Josephus identifies with the Scythians, a tribe outside the Roman Empire ( Antiquities 1.6.1). All of the identifications appear to indicate that the nations outside of the Empire (now ruled by Christ) gather against the rightful King. Fourth, the rebellion is ended by the destruction of the opposing armies, the consignment of the devil to the lake of fire, the resurrection of all of the dead, and the final judgment (Rev 20:8–15). This is the end of the history of the earth, for the next chapter takes up the topic of the new heaven and new earth.
One might wonder why there should be a millennium. Several reasons can be given.
First, it is a reward for the martyrs (or perhaps the martyrs and those who did not worship the beast, but Rev 13:15 seems to indicate that these would all be martyrs). In their faithfulness they lost their lives. Now they are rewarded with a long life, reigning with Christ. Second, it demonstrates the victory of Christ. That he holds power for a thousand years will vindicate the rule God has given him and which now is hidden in heaven. His triumph is complete. Third, it vindicates the righteous rule of God, redeeming history. Is it possible that God could not rule this earth any better than human beings (and Satan)? The millennium points to the idea that God can rule righteously and justly from within history. He does not have to simply end history.
Presumably this would be when people would experience the just rulership that the world has been rejecting (and yet longing for) since the Fall.
We might further question why the antichrist and false prophet would be destroyed and Satan preserved. It is clearly not out of any love for or mercy toward Satan! The fact is that when the embodiments of satanic power have been exposed and lost their power, God has no more use for them. Their future on earth has come to an end. On the other hand, God appears to have a use for Satan, but not in the immediate future. He is used for the final probation of human beings after God has demonstrated his just rule. Thus Satan is not kept out of hell for his own sake, but is reserved for God’s own good purposes (although in his own mind he surely rejects this idea). Even to the end God remains in control, including in control of Satan.
As we saw above, the millennium is symbolic for many people. But in calling it
symbolic (or in calling it literal, my own preference) we must be careful to preserve the values that John expresses. The reign of Satan is doomed. He will be (or has been) chained. Christ will reign; his victory on the cross will be consummated. His martyrs will be rewarded. And rebellion against God will meet its end. These are the essence of the millennial teaching that must be preserved by any view. The test of a view is whether it best explains the data of Scripture and whether it preserves the values that John is trying to teach.
21:1 The Earth Renewed or Destroyed?
What does it mean to have a new heaven and earth? Why not simply renew or restore the present one? Why would there not be any sea in a new earth? What is the purpose of this change?
In this text we are in the period beyond the final rebellion and the final judgment. Satan is gone forever. Salvation history has totally run its course, for the King of kings has reigned over the world for one thousand years and each person has finally received his or her just reward. Now we are entering the eternal state beyond the struggles of human history.
Within this context there must be a renewal, a new setting for the now purified human race, an earth free from the scars of the rebellion that Satan inspired. This is a need sensed throughout the New Testament. Paul says that there is a new creation in human beings who are in Christ (2 Cor 5:17), which is in tension with the oldness of their own bodies and the rest of creation (Rom 8:19–22). Because of this he can say, “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18). Peter expresses this as “looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness” (2 Pet 3:13). Now in Revelation we get a picture of that happening. As God says, “I am making everything new!” (Rev 21:5).
There are two opinions about the newness that is being described. Some scholars believe that John is only talking about a renewed heaven and earth. The old will be purified, but not destroyed. In fact, the real issue for John, they argue, is moral purification, not physical renewal, although physical restoration must also be included.
This passage, then, describes a return to the goals left unrealized when humanity was driven out of Eden. To document their position, these scholars cite intertestamental literature such as 1 Enoch 45:4–5 and 2 Esdras 7:75 (compare 2 Baruch 32:6; 1Enoch 72:1; 91:16), all of which speak of a renewal of creation as the expectation of the Jewish groups that the respective writers represented.
While all scholars must agree that the central issue for John is moral purification, the removal of all of the taint of sin and rebellion, some scholars look at such terms as “the first heaven and first earth had passed away” and argue that what we are talking about in this passage is a totally new creation. This appears to fit the language of Peter, who writes, “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. … That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat” (2 Pet 3:10, 12). In other words, according to this view, the heavens and earth are so polluted that what is needed is something like the Genesis flood, a destruction and re-creation, but this time the destruction is done by fire, not water. This second position appears to fit
the language of Revelation best. Thus while the goal is the moral purification of the world, the moral and the physical are so intertwined (which we are perhaps beginning to understand in our ecological consciousness) that this requires a major physical overhaul, one so extreme that it is called a new creation.
The heavens that are destroyed are not the abode of God (sometimes referred to as the third or seventh heaven) but the observable heavens. Genesis 1:1 describes the creation as “the heavens and the earth.” Not just the planet, but all of creation has been polluted by sin. The whole will be remade. In this new creation there will be no sea. Having lived in Vancouver, Canada, I have a love for the sea, the scene of many happy holiday hours, a place of rest, but I must put aside such romantic feelings when I come to read Scripture, for that was not the Jewish view of the sea. In Scripture the sea is normally a negative image. For example, Isaiah 57:20 says, “The wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud.” The sea is also the chaos of water out of which the heaven and earth were originally separated in Genesis 1:2, 6–
10. While it is a creation of God (Ps 104:26), the sea is also the home of the sea monster Leviathan, whom God conquers and casts on dry land (Ps 74:13–14). It is no wonder that the pseudepigraphal Jewish work The Testament of Moses 10:6 states that when God comes at the end of the age the sea will retire into the Abyss. In Revelation the sea is the source of the beast and the throne of the great prostitute (Rev 13:1; 17:1). Such a symbol of chaos and the powers of evil could not exist in a new heaven and earth.
The new heavens and new earth likewise have a new city, the new Jerusalem. While this is not the place for detailed comment, it is true that here also there is something new. In Scripture the first cities are built by evil people (Gen 4:17; 10:10; 11:1–9). The old Jerusalem was the place in which God chose to put his name, but it was also an unfaithful city, which John could call “Sodom and Egypt” (Rev 11:8). Therefore there is now a need for a fulfillment of what sinful human beings could not produce, the true city with a God-centered community in which peace and justice are actually present.
This whole passage, then, speaks of the fulfillment of the hopes and dreams of humanity in the new creation. Human beings were created to live on earth, so a new earth will be their home. Human beings were created for fellowship with God, so he will dwell in their midst. Human beings were created for community, so a true city will be established. There is certainly a lot of symbolism in what is going on in this passage, yet the symbolism is symbolism of a new reality that straight prosaic description could not capture.
Whether or not the new heaven and earth are a renewal or a new creation, Revelation witnesses to the fact that the universe as we know it is temporal and “will all wear out like a garment” (Heb 1:11–12). Even should we interpret John as saying that the basic structure of the earth remains, he witnesses to a renewal so complete that human culture and creations have been wiped away. History as we know it has come to an end. God is beginning a new chapter in a new history, his eternal history. Yet at the same time human beings are not spirit. They are creatures with bodies, now resurrected and glorified. They do not live on clouds, but in a world and in a city. God provides for them what he designed them for in creation, a home on earth. It is not Eden, but a step beyond Eden, a more perfect development of what might have been, a new earth with a city with God in the midst. It answers an inner longing of the human heart, so it is fitting that John brings the narrative of his book to a close with this
22:18–19 Protecting the Canon?
The canon of Scripture is both an emotional issue and a theological problem. It is a problem because the New Testament never speaks of such a canon (which is natural because while it was being written it was only in the process of becoming a canon). It is an emotional issue because, as the only authoritative document of the Christian faith (in Protestant eyes), anything that might add to or detract from Scripture is highly threatening. This emotion and this theology surrounds the end of Revelation. These verses come just before the close of the book. The question that they raise is, To what is John referring? Is “this book” a reference to the book of Revelation or to the Bible as a whole? Why did John write these words? What threat to “this book” would he have perceived?
The New Testament was written in a time before readily accessible libraries, communications media and printing presses. Virtually all of the teaching of that period was done orally, for few could read. For this reason John pronounces a blessing on
“the one [singular] who reads” the book (out loud to the congregation) and “those
[plural] who hear it and take to heart what is written in it” (Rev 1:3). This process of reading such books out loud in a house church (in which the reader might be the only one who could read) would make it very easy to leave out parts of a book being read or to add to it what one wished. It would be difficult for most church members to discover the differences.
John was not the only prophet during the New Testament period to be concerned with proper preservation of his message. Paul was concerned that his message might be falsified by people bringing another gospel (Gal 1:6–9) or a prophecy or a forged letter purporting to be from him (2 Thess 2:2). There was, then, the possibility that, besides the corruption that could be put into the text in reading it, people could deliberately add their own prophetic vision to the text or edit it according to their own perception of what the author should have said.
This type of problem was not unknown in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 insist that the Law must be preserved without adding to it or subtracting from it.
Later, according to the tradition in the Letter of Aristeas, when the Pentateuch was translated into Greek, those receiving the new translation pronounced a curse upon anyone making any alteration to the text. These verses in Revelation are also a curse, and in placing this curse John is similarly protecting the integrity of his writing and may in fact be thinking of it on a level with Scripture, although a similar curse was also reportedly used by Irenaeus in one of his writings.12 [12 See Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 5.20.2 for a reference to this ending of a lost letter of Irenaeus.]
John, then, or perhaps Jesus speaking through John (since it is the revelation of Jesus Christ), places a curse to protect the document from well-intentioned or even sinister tampering. The curse itself has two parts. One protects the document from being added to on the threat of the person doing so receiving the plagues written about earlier in the book. The other protects the document from being subtracted from on the threat of the person losing his or her place in heaven, that is, their losing their place in the tree of life (the source of eternal life) and the holy city, the new Jerusalem. The curses are somewhat stylized and strong, as was the custom in the language of the day,
so it would not be wise to draw theology from them (for example, as to whether one can or cannot lose one’s place in the holy city). But the author intended them as real curses.
The question arises, then, as to whether these curses have to do with anything more than this one book. Do they include the whole New Testament or the whole Bible? Is this a notice closing the canon? We must answer these questions in the negative.
First, we are not certain that Revelation was the last book of the New Testament to be written. Some date Revelation as early as a.d. 68, placing other writings (such as 2
Peter, Jude, or the Gospel and Epistles of John) much later. It would be unwise to base an argument on an uncertain dating.
Second, at the time John wrote the Jews might not have been finished discussing their own canon issues. During the period between a.d. 70 and 90 some discussions about canon took place in the rabbinic center in Jamnia. While there is no evidence that the shape of the canon changed as a result of this discussion, it does show that even the Jews were in something of a state of flux on the matter and could discuss whether certain books (such as Esther) should be included.
Third, John wrote before there was any clear sense of a New Testament canon. There is no evidence that John had ever seen a written Gospel or a collection of Paul’s letters. In fact, it would be at least two more centuries before a fixed selection of works would be considered the Christian canon. Some of the works that would be considered seriously and then rejected, such as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Didache, had not yet been written.
Finally, while in most modern versions of Scripture Revelation is the last book (even Luther had it last, although he and some of the early English translations put Hebrews, James and the Petrine literature just before it), that was not the case in the earliest period. There was a good deal of shifting in the first three centuries, some people rejecting Revelation, some putting works such as 1–2 Clement after it, and some putting it earlier in their list of canonical books. There is no reason to think that this verse would have come almost at the end of the Bible for most Christians until the fourth century.
This does not mean that it is a good thing to add to or subtract from the Scripture.
Certainly, even if the proverbial “lost letter of Paul” were found, not to mention some work of a more modern time that people thought might be inspired, it would take the universal consensus of the church that it were inspired to add it to the Scripture, a most unlikely event and thus a miracle in itself.13 [13 Universal consensus means just that. While we might argue about whether some Christian fringe groups (such as certain Christian groups in Africa or the remnants of ancient heretical groups) should be included in such a consensus, it must at least include the basic Protestant (that is, most Protestant denominations), Roman Catholic and Orthodox branches. Who could conceive of these groups agreeing on anything, let alone that a given book was inspired by God?] Nor should tampering with the present books themselves be done lightly.
We do live in an age when some people wish to rewrite the Bible from their own ideological perspective. The only effect of this process is a distortion of Scripture and the production of a work that no one recognizes as canon. It would be better to write a separate work or a commentary selectively criticizing the existing Scripture, for either approach would be more honest. Even the scriptural authors themselves, when they wanted to reinterpret one another (as Daniel, for example, does to Jeremiah’s seventy weeks), did not change the original but wrote their own book.
Therefore John’s curse stands as a warning. Its true literal sense applies only to his own book, Revelation, but given that similar concerns were shared by Paul and others it is reasonable to argue that none of the writers of Scripture would have agreed to tampering with their works. Besides, such tampering would defeat the whole purpose of Scripture. The Scripture stands written as a witness to the revelation received in a given place and time. It is to be read, accepted (or, for some, rejected) and interpreted.
To rewrite it, however, is to confuse one’s own experience of God (or perhaps experience of something other than God) with that of the scriptural authors. It is to take the measuring line of Scripture (which is what canon means) and bend it to fit the wall that one is building in the present. In the end one has neither a measuring line nor a straight wall. It may not be the curse of John that one receives, but the resulting confusion will be curse enough and may in fact make one miss having a place in the holy city about which John wrote so glowingly.
Kaiser, Walter C., et. al., Hard Sayings of the Bible, (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press) 1997.