9 I, John, your brother, and partaker in tribulation, and in the kingdom, and in the patience of Jesus Christ, was in the island called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. 10 I was in the spirit on the Sabbath day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, like a trumpet, saying, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last; 11 Write the things which thou seest in a book, and send them to the churches which are in Asia, to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamum, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.

16 And he held seven stars in his right hand, and out of his mouth went forth a sharp sword on both sides; and His face is like the sun, shining in its power. 17 And when I saw him, I fell down at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, and said unto me, Fear not; I am the First and the Last, 18 and the living; and he was dead, and behold, he is alive for ever and ever, Amen; and I have the keys of hell and death. 19 Write therefore what thou hast seen, and what is, and what shall come to pass after this. 20 The mystery of the seven stars which thou hast seen in my right hand, and of the seven golden candlesticks, is this: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches; and the seven candlesticks which thou hast seen are the seven churches.

Comment

So, let's start reading. Open. 1, 1 is the name. "The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave Him" is a special phrase that means that it is a revelation that comes through Christ, because He Himself was the highest revelation of the Divine in the world. "Soon" is a purely apocalyptic biblical term. For God, this can mean a thousand years or tens of thousands of years. The history of the world, which dates back hundreds of millions and billions of years, in comparison with the history of mankind, shows how brief everything that happened. And if God says "soon," then even if all this happens in a million years, from the divine point of view it will be "soon."

Open. 1, 1–2. Christ sent "through His angel to His servant John" – this is not necessarily meant to mean the appearance of an Angel, as we usually imagine it; An angel always designates any intermediary between heaven and earth. "Slave" means a minister, and we must understand this word in connection with the fact that Christ says, "You are not slaves, but sons." And the ancient biblical term "ebed", "slave", means "servant", "servant", "youth", as it is sometimes translated into Slavonic. And this brings a completely different shade, a different semantic coloring, because for us a slave is always something humiliating, and Christ rejects such a name for us, but we use the words "servant of God", putting into them the old biblical meaning – "God's servant". Next comes a small introduction.

Open. 1, 3. This is a kind of dedication to readers. "Prophecy" in this case does not simply mean a prediction of the future, although some believe that the Apocalypse is reduced to simply such a prediction and, therefore, was not written for all times, but only for a certain time, say, for our own or later. But "prophecy," from the biblical point of view, is the proclamation of God's will through man, which is why it is said here — "those who keep what is written in it," that is, in prophecy. After all, no prediction can be observed, it is precisely the will of God, expressed in words.

Open. 1, 4–5. Continuation of the initiation. Asia is a Roman province that covers most of Asia Minor; Why does the author address the seven churches? There are many more churches in Asia, they were planted by the apostles Peter and Paul. But in order to depict the fullness of the universal church, John takes the seven churches, the seven main churches of Asia Minor. Seven is an ancient sacred number that denotes completeness. Obviously, these are the churches that are more subordinate to him, in which he asceticized, with which he was familiar. "From Him who is, and was, and is to come" is a continuation of the interpretation of the name of God given in the book of Exodus. When Moses asked the Lord, "What is your name?" The Lord said: "I am Who I will be." This strange phrase for us is translated as "Being". "I am Who I am," that is, "Time, eternity, all existence belongs to Me." And the Apostle John attaches to this definition of God, who owns the past, present, and future, that is, everything that exists in the world, an eschatological meaning; the future belongs to God in some special, specific sense, the future that He will possess completely, over which He will reign.

The seven spirits, according to ancient symbolism, mainly Persian, later adopted by the Old Testament Church, denote the fullness of the heavenly hierarchies. The "faithful witness" is the Old Testament prophets who existed before that, there were weak witnesses who were aware of their weakness. You will remember that Isaiah chapter 6 says, "Woe is me! I am lost! for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among the people also of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." Jeremiah said, "I cannot speak, for I am still young." There is only one Witness of God, the One Who bears Him within Himself, "the firstborn from the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth..." There is only one true authority, the supreme, that is the authority of Christ, the authority of Him Who said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto Me."

Open. 1, 5–6. These words "who made us kings and priests" remind us of the Sinai call, when God says to the people: "But you shall be with Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," i.e., a people, consecrated to God. And from this handful of people later grew the universal Church, and from now on all of us, consecrated to God, belong to Christ and, therefore, are the kingdom of priests. This is where the dedication ends, followed by a kind of epigraph taken from apocalyptic literature.

Open. 1, 7. The cloud is a symbol of the Epiphany. This means that God appears in power and glory. "Every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him" is an allusion to the words from the book of Zechariah: "They will look upon Him, Whom they pierced..." This is the Creator from whom people have turned away, Whom they have pierced with their ingratitude, and then they will weep over what they have done; it is a prototype of the Cross of Christ.

Open. 1, 8. "Alpha and Omega" are the initial and final letters of the Greek alphabet. This means that the author is addressing people who speak Greek. Then, after the dedication, after the introduction and epigraph, there is a preface.

Open. 1, 9. Patmos is not a symbolic place, but a historically and geographically concrete, rocky, deserted island in the Aegean Sea. The places of exile were different, apparently John was exiled there. Perhaps there were some quarries in which exiles worked.

Open. 1, 10. "I was in the spirit" is a biblical expression that denotes ecstasy, ecstasy, the descent of a certain spiritual charisma on a person, when he begins to speak, as it were, not on his own behalf. "Sunday Day": It is interesting that already in the first century, two or three decades after Pentecost, as we can see, Sunday is celebrated. Trumpets were old symbols of the appearance of God, we know that trumpets thundered over Sinai.

Open. 1, 11. There is a point of view that these churches actually designate different eras in the history of Christianity, and in the original books, such as those of Lev Tikhomirov, and in translated books, for example, Baptist books, this point of view is defended. But in New Testament theology it is not accepted at all. All these churches were then glorious, famous, famous, and there was nothing symbolic in them. Therefore, we have not the slightest reason to believe that they symbolize epochs. Moreover, if the epistles to these churches, to each of them, were applied to different epochs, we would always find something in common, and it is not accidental, for all these epistles refer to each church, to each age, and to each of us. The precious lines, the wonderful lines of the chapter are addressed not only to all churches, but also to the souls of men. This is the best thing in the first part of the Apocalypse of John the Theologian.