GOD'S NEW WORLD, DAY 10 (kingdoms in conflict)
“I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” (Rev. 1.9)
The book of Revelation was written for Christians
who were both at risk of being actively persecuted for their faith and who had
to follow Christ in the midst of an empire whose ideology was all-embracing and
all-demanding. Rome understood itself to
be endowed with divine legitimization – whatever served the glory of the empire
was thus “good”, “right” and “just”. However
ruthless the means to acquire this “glory” – whether genocide or what amounted
to the wholesale theft of the economic resources of conquered lands – they were
justified so long as they served the end of propping up the myth of Rome’s
eternal destiny to rule the earth.[1]
In contrast to this Roman imperial ideology,
John spells out the God-of-Israel version of reality in the opening verses of
his book, and what John says here is a clear signal to his readers/auditors that
this book, more so than any other New Testament document, is subversive and dangerous,
both to those who read it and to those about whom it is written (think of
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Orwell’s 1984 and you’ll get the flavour
of John’s Revelation). In the “epistolary
greeting” of Rev. 1.4-8[2],
John refers to Jesus as “the faithful witness…and the ruler of the kings of the
earth” (1.5; cf. 1 Tim. 6.13). This is
fascinating – Jesus is the ruler of the kings of the earth (cf. Rev. 11.15;
12.10)! Indeed, as the “Son of Man”, who
reveals himself to John a few verses later (Rev. 1.13; cf. Dn. 7.13-14; Rev.
1.7), Jesus had been enthroned “at the right hand of God” and had received an everlasting
kingdom which embraced “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev.
5.9; cf. Dn. 7.14, 27). John is
reminding his readers up front that in spite of all the apparently irrefutable
evidence to the contrary, they find themselves in the kingdom of God and of his
Messiah – no matter what the Roman imperial propagandists might say. John is claiming that the imperial ideology
is both delusional and doomed to destruction.
The fact that John evokes Daniel 7 here is
fascinating. Dan. 7 is a dream in which
Daniel sees a series of four pagan empires who are each judged and condemned by
the Ancient of Days, who sits enthroned in heaven. After the empires (symbolized by beasts! Yes, John will use this same strategy later
in his book) are destroyed, the rule of the kingdom of God is conferred on the
Son of Man, the embodiment of God’s people who had been exalted to God’s throne
“on the clouds of heaven” after having suffered at the claws of the four beastly
empires. The kingdom of the Creator always
displaces the kingdoms of the earth, and that is why it is so dangerous, both
to those who serve God’s kingdom non-violently, and to those who resist its
paradoxical power (victory through martyrdom).
What John is setting us up for in chapter 1 is a showdown between the
kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world!
John is telling his readers that they have ring-side seats to the
ultimate (spiritual) battle in the history of the world. Not only that, but they have a part to play
in this contest between the Creator and those dark powers whose proxies are “the
kings of the earth”. John cannot be
clearer – there is only one Lord of the world, and he will no longer share
power with the tyrants of the earth.
John is making sure that his readers have
not forgotten that they are on the side destined to win (i.e., overcome,
conquer). Once again, this victory will
be accomplished by the same means as that of Jesus, which is why John also calls
Jesus “the firstborn of the dead” (1.5; cf. 1.17-18). Jesus conquered by shedding his blood and
dying on the cross, motivated by love for those who would follow him. In 1.6, John alludes to a key text from the
book of Exodus, where Yahweh addressed the Israelites, recently rescued from
slavery, and told them that their destiny as his people was to be “a kingdom of
priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19.5-6).
This is a crucial move on John’s part – he is identifying his readers
with the people of God of ancient times, he is telling the members of his
audience that they are part of the same people that was delivered from Egypt
(another pagan empire) centuries earlier – the plan of God has not changed, and
they are called to faithfully play their part in this, the ultimate chapter of
the story of the Creator and his rebellious world.
[1] The (lost) glory of ancient Rome has haunted megalomaniacs
throughout history and Julius Caesar, who had laid the groundwork for
centralizing governing power in one person, i.e., the emperor (and paid the
price on the Ides of March 44 B.C.), has often been imitated by those who would
restore the Roman empire, or something equivalent to it – whether it be
Charlemagne’s “Holy Roman Empire” in 9th-century Germany (which
survived until the 19th century) or Napolean’s conquest of Europe in
the 19th century, or Hitler’s Third Reich of the 20th
century. Even the American Founding
Fathers (1776) included a line on the seal of the U.S.A. taken from a poem by
Virgil, in which the poet hailed the accession of Caesar’s heir, Octavian (aka
Augustus), to the imperial throne as a “new world order” (see verso of the
American 1 dollar note; the phrase, of course, is in Latin: “novus ordo
seclorum”, i.e., the Age of Saturn or the “golden age”). The Americans were not, however, the first to
see themselves as the heirs of Rome. The
“Czars” of Russia bore the title of “Caesar” (in Russian). Moscow was hailed in the 15th
century as a “Third Rome” after the original and Constantinople (now Istanbul),
which had been built by the emperor Constantine the Great in the 4th
century as the new capital of his empire.
The fact that so many have tried to imitate ancient Rome and its heroes
down the centuries speaks to what the ancient Romans firmly believed – that with
the advent of their empire, human civilization had reached its peak, its full
potential, its divinely-ordained destiny (“divine” here does not, please note, refer
to Yahweh, the One God of Israel, which is of course why the New Testament is
such a subversive collection of documents…).
[2] it seems like Revelation “begins” three times – in 1.1, 1.4 and 1.9
– and also has several “conclusions”: cf. chapter 22.
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