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word, however, is not John’s, but God’s. Thus this remarkable introduction to the letters and visions that follow is punctuated by a divine word from the Lord God. First, God announces himself as the One who embraces all that language could possibly express, the Alpha and Omega (in English, “the A to Z”), and thus everything in between. Whatever human language could possibly express regarding God and all reality, the God who is speaking to John and thus standing behind this Apocalypse is the eternal, all-embracing God, who stands at the beginning of all things and is continuously there, and thus at the end—and this only from our limited point of view, since God is eternal and therefore timeless. Thus God is also the One who is, and who was, and who is to come, a choice of word order that is hardly accidental on John’s part. Whatever else is true about God, he is the Eternal One, always the “I am”; so John begins with the present tense, and then points backward and forward to stress God’s eternal nature.

      The final word then punctuates what has preceded by stressing that God is the Almighty, language that recurs throughout the Old Testament, and which occurs twice (vv. 4–5) in the oracle from Zechariah 12 that immediately precedes the one John has just echoed. This designation, which occurs elsewhere in the New Testament outside the Revelation only in 2 Corinthians 6:18, will occur some eight more times in this book. Thus John concludes with a word that stresses the absolute, unparalleled power of the one and only God; he alone is “the Almighty.” It is not difficult to see in this emphasis a Christian response to the Empire, whose emperors and armies had caused her to regard herself in terms of invincibility.

      One should note also, finally, that the description of the divine speaker as “the Lord God” and “the Almighty” is language once again derived directly from the prophetic tradition. In this case John is reflecting Amos 4:13 (in the LXX), where the oracle concludes, “the Lord God Almighty is his name.” In the present instance, and almost certainly for effect, John divides up this divine name by inserting the phrase “the One who is, and who was, and who is to come” between “the Lord God” and “the Almighty.” Thus the concluding self-identification puts most of the emphasis on God’s being the Eternal One, but whose identity here concludes with God’s being the All-Powerful One.

      At the conclusion, one might ask further, why all of this as a way of introducing John’s Apocalypse? That is, how does it function so as to introduce the reader/hearers to what they are about to encounter? The answer to this seems to be twofold: first, it theologically grounds what they are about to see in God the Trinity; second, at the same time, it focuses especially on Christ and his work, which John does both by description (v. 5a) and by doxology (vv. 5b–6). Thus the way is paved for the introduction to the first vision in verses 12–20. But before that, in a piece of extraordinarily straightforward historical narrative, the readers are given the circumstances of the author and the cause of his writing.

      The Dramatis Personae: John Introduces Himself and His Recipients (1:9–11)

      9I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. 10On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, 11which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.”

      If one thinks of the Revelation in terms of a majestic drama, then the function of the first chapter is to introduce the reader to the three primary dramatis personae. Thus verses 1–8, which function very much as the preamble to the whole, at the same time introduce the major “player,” Christ himself. The function of the present paragraph is to situate the second “player,” the author John, in his own context, while at the same time introducing his primary readership, who are the third major “player,” and who will then be elaborated in some detail in chapters 2 and 3.

Thus John begins with an extended identification of himself and his present situation, locating himself both relationally and positionally. He first identifies himself as his readers’ brother and companion, which he then elaborates in three ways, held together by a single definite article (the) and each modified by the concluding phrase, that are ours in Jesus. The order of these identifying words is especially noteworthy. First, John is their companion in suffering. Interestingly enough, the Greek word translated “suffering” here is thlipsis, a word that will occur only four more times in the book, three of which have to do with the present plight of believers (in 2:9 and 10 to describe the situation of the church in Smyrna, and in 7:14 to refer to that of the martyrs). This is the word that describes their present situation in the world dominated by the Roman Empire.8 It is a word that also occurs frequently in Paul’s letters to describe the current situation of believers in an otherwise hostile world.

      But John is also their “companion” in the kingdom, the word he used to describe believers in the doxology in verse 6. Here is the word that especially reminds them of the “kingdom” greater than that of Rome, since the latter’s rule is only temporal, and thus temporary. Finally, John is also their companion in patient endurance, another word that will recur in the letters to the seven churches (2:2–3; 2:19; 3:10) and will be part of the reminder vis-à-vis emperor worship in 14:12.

Notably, each of these realities (suffering, the kingdom, and endurance) finds its place and significance as ours in Jesus. Thus whatever else may be true of John as a Christian prophet, he is also part of a believing community with whom he shares both the life of the kingdom and the associated hostility from the same Empire that executed their Lord. It is of further interest that this designation of our Lord by his earthly name alone, which will recur at the end of the verse, will appear seven more times in the Revelation,9 and in each instance it has to do with his own “witness,” or “testimony,” as in the rest of the present sentence.

      At the same time John also locates himself geographically: I . . . was on the island of Patmos. This is a little piece of land in the Aegean Sea about forty miles southwest of Ephesus. Whether it was otherwise inhabited in John’s day cannot be known, since it is basically a mountain crest jutting up out of the sea, about eight miles long and five miles wide and shaped like an elongated C. John’s presence there suggests that it was probably used by the Romans as a penal colony, whose amenities in John’s day simply cannot be known. It was almost certainly under the political jurisdiction of the province of Asia, and thus of Ephesus. The reason John was a prisoner on Patmos is clear enough—because he was a follower of the risen Christ. His way of putting it is simply to repeat what he says about the present book in verse 2 (q.v.): because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

Finally, John locates himself temporally and spiritually, as being in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. This is the first known instance in written history of the term “the Lord’s Day,” which only by the mid-second century10 is used undoubtedly as a term to refer to Sunday, as the day on which the resurrection took place—or at least the day the tomb was discovered to be empty, since we do not know when the resurrection itself happened. Two items are especially noteworthy here. First, the English possessive “the Lord’s” is not in the Greek genitive (possessive) case, but is rather an adjective coined from the noun “Lord,” and means something like “in honor of” or “pertaining to” the Lord. Although some debate surrounds this word, it should be noted that by the mid-second century this word was used to distinguish Christian from Jewish devotion,11 thus indicating that it had already been in use for a considerable length of time. Given the significance of Sabbath observance for the earliest followers of Jesus, who were Jewish, the only possible explanation for the phenomenon of calling Sunday “the Lord’s Day” is the probability that they held a weekly remembrance of the resurrection.

      In this setting John announces, I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet. Whether John intended this to mean that the voice itself sounded like a trumpet, or whether this is merely associative language (the voice had the effect of a trumpet call) cannot be known.

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