Revelation Chapter One, Authorship

 Revelation 1:1 The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants–things which must shortly take place. And He sent and signified it by His angel to His servant John,

I have in my possession a copy of the original AV, or King James Version of the Bible. Its title for this book is as such: “The Revelation of St. John the Divine.” The title carries with it a fundamental error in understanding. It is not a revelation of John; it was a revelation TO John, vouchsafed by Jesus Christ.

Verse 1 begins with that simple and profound clarification. “The Revelation of Jesus Christ.” This is the proper working title for the book. Toward the end of Revelation we read, “for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” Revelation 19:10, KJV. The Holy Spirit is who gives life, we are told, John 6:63. Furthermore, man only lived when God breathed His Spirit into him, 1 Corinthians 15:44, 45, Genesis 2:7, 7:22, see also Job 33:4. Then I do not think it strains the text beyond credulity to suggest that Revelation 19:10 implies that Jesus and the testimony concerning Him are the animating elements that give Scriptural prophecy life. Revelation is a revealing of Christ, because our Lord is the center and summit of all Biblical prophecy. He is its Author and its focus.

God the Father gave this revelation to the Son, and the Son is delivering said revelation to His servants. Who are these servants? We are, Romans 1:1, Galatians 1:10. This is further explained in Revelation 1:4, when John clarifies that this message is for the churches: first the seven Asiatic churches he was immediately writing to, and then to all the body of Christ abroad who would receive it in their wake. The church is the purchased possession of God, who bought us with His own blood, Acts 20:28. All Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and all Scripture is to be read and taught by the church as a harmonious unit. 

The things that Christ was about to show were, according to His words, going to take place shortly. Before these things take place, the book is paused, as it were, by John’s greeting and commentary on the Asiatic churches, again beginning with verse 4. This intentional pause seems itself to indicate a gap between the reception of this message and its fulfillment. First will come the church age, in which Christ builds His church before removing it from the earth, at which point these things, which begin in earnest in chapter 4, begin to occur.

The final portion of the verse indicates that Christ our Lord sent and communicated it (NASB rendering) by His angel to John. This aligns with the fact that John interacts numerous times with angelic presences in Revelation after his commentary on the churches in chapters 2 and 3. The perspective of the book shifts after chapter 3, the angelic messenger finds John, and begins to unveil the events that will occur in the final days of planet Earth. The Psalmist wrote of angels, “[He] makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire,” Psalm 104:4. We read from Stephen’s testimony that the Mosaic Law was received by the direction of angels, Acts 7:53. Moreover, Paul attests the same, saying, “and [the Law] was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator,” Galatians 3:19. God employs angels as messengers, such as in Zacharias’, Mary, or Joseph’s case around the time of Christ’s birth.

John would witness and record these events by the hand of angelic mediators, but not before writing his praise and rebuke for the seven Asiatic churches that comprise the next two chapters. Before all of this, however, John will explain why he was selected and the value of the prophecy of Revelation to the reader in the next two verses.