Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

1:4-6
at the mercy of an environment; He is not defined by
any external conditions; all things exist in terms of His
inerrant Word. Threatened, opposed, and persecuted
by those in power, they were nevertheless to rejoice in
the knowledge of their eternal God who “is to come,”
who is coming continually in judgment against His
adversaries. God’s coming refers not simply to the end
of the world but to His unceasing rule over history. He
comes again and again to deliver His people and to
judge the wicked. 15
Second, St. John speaks of the Holy Spirit as the seven
Spirits who are before His Throne. Although some
have tried to see this as a reference to seven angels, it is
inconceivable that grace and peace can originate from
anyone but God. The Person spoken of here is clearly
on a par with the Father and the Son. The picture of
the Holy Spirit here (as also in 3:1; 4:5; 5:6) is based on
Zechariah 4, in which the prophet sees the Church as a
lampstand with seven lamps, supplied without human
agency by an unceasing flow of oil through “seven
spouts to the seven lamps” (v. 2) – the interpretation of
which is, as God tells Zechariah: “Not by might, nor by
power, but by My Spirit” (v. 6). The Holy Spirit’s filling
and empowering work in the Church is thus described
in terms of the number seven, symbolizing fullness and
completeness. So it is here in Revelation: “To the seven
churches . . . grace and peace be unto you . . . from the
seven Spirits.” And the Spirit’s work in the Church
takes place in terms of God’s dominion and majesty,
before His Throne. This is, in fact, a marked emphasis
in the Book of Revelation: The word Throne occurs
here forty-six times (the New Testament book that
comes closest to matching that number is the Gospel of
Matthew, where it is used only five times). The
Revelation is a book, above all, about rule: it reveals
Jesus Christ as the Lord of history, restoring His people
to dominion through the power of the Holy Spirit.
The word Throne is used particularly in Scripture to
refer to God’s official court, where He receives official
worship from His people on the Sabbath. 16 The entire
vision of the Revelation was seen on the Lord’s Day
(1:10) – the Christian day of corporate, official
worship; and all the action in the book centers on the
worship around the Throne of God. St. John wants us
to see that the public, official worship of the Sovereign
Lord is central to history – history both as a whole and
in its constituent parts (i.e., your life and mine). The
Spirit communicates grace and peace to the churches,
in the special sense, through public worship. We can go
so far as to say this: We cannot have continuing
fellowship with God, and receive blessings from Him,
apart from the public worship of the Church, the
“place” of access to the Throne. The Spirit works in
individuals, yes – but He does not work apart from the
Church. His corporate and individual workings may be
distinguished, but they cannot be separated. The
notion that we can have fellowship with God, yet
separate ourselves from the Church and from the
corporate worship of the Body of Christ, is an
altogether pagan idea, utterly foreign to Holy Scripture.
The Church, as the Church, receives grace and peace
from the sevenfold Spirit; and He is continually before
the Throne, the special sphere of His ministry.
“Our lives are congested and noisy. It is easy to think of
the Church and the sacraments as competing for our
attention with the other world of daily life, leading us
off into some other life – secret, rarified, and remote.
We might do better to think of that practical daily
world as something incomprehensible and unmanageable
unless and until we can approach it sacramentally
through Christ. Nature and the world are otherwise
beyond our grasp; time also, time that carries all things
away in a meaningless flux, causing men to despair
unless they see in it the pattern of God’s action,
reflected in the liturgical year, the necessary road to the
New Jerusalem.” 17
The third member of the Godhead (in this liturgical
order) is Jesus Christ, spoken of by St. John under three
designations: the faithful Witness, the Firstborn from
the dead, and the Ruler of the kings of the earth. R.
J. Rushdoony has forcefully pointed out how the term
Witness (in Greek, martyr), has acquired connotations
foreign to the word’s original meaning: “In the Bible,
the witness is one who works to enforce the law and
assist in its execution, even to the enforcement of the
death penalty. ‘Martyr’ has now come to mean the
exact reverse, i.e., one who is executed rather than an
executioner, one who is persecuted rather than one
who is central to prosecution. The result is a serious
misreading of Scripture . . . The significance of Jesus
Christ as ‘the faithful and true witness’ is that He not
only witnesses against those who are at war against
God, but He also executes them . . . Jesus Christ
therefore witnesses against every man and nation that
establishes its life on any other premise than the
sovereign and triune God and His infallible and
absolute law-word.” 18
The theme of Christ as the preeminent Witness is
important in Revelation, as we noted above on v. 2. By
way of supplementing Rushdoony’s analysis, we may
14. Philip Carrington, The Meaning of the Revelation (London: SPCK, 1931), p.
74. In effect, the whole phrase is one proper noun, and indeclinable. The
grammatical problem arises from St. John’s attempt to render into Greek the
theological nuances contained in the Hebrew of Exodus 3:14: I AM WHO I
AM. St. John is not afraid to massacre the Greek language in order to get
across a point, as in John 16:13, where he “incorrectly” uses a masculine
pronoun in order to emphasize the Personality of the Holy Spirit (Spirit in
Greek is neuter, but St. John wanted to stress that He is truly a He and not
an It).
15. There are several good discussions of the various meanings of Coming in
Scripture. See Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1945, 1947), pp. 175-91; Loraine Boettner, The Millennium, pp.
252-62; Roderick Campbell, Israel and the New Covenant (Tyler, TX: Geneva
Ministries, [1954] 1983), pp. 68-80; David Chilton, Paradise Restored, pp. 67-
75, 97-105; Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1930), pp. 70-93.
16. See, for example, 1 Chron. 28:2; Ps. 132:7-8, 13-14; Isa. 11:10. Cf. Meredith
G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980), pp.
20 f., 39ff., 46, lllff. As Geerhardus Vos observed, the significance of the
Tabernacle in the Old Testament is that “it is the palace of the King in which
the people render Him homage” (Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments
[Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1948], p. 168).
17. Alexander Schmemann, Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in
the West (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminay Press, 1979), p. 226.
37