It is as if the I Am said, “I Am as you are” – I am the First and the Last.
Jesus, the First of all things and of all beings, identified with the Last. Here we read of the ministry of the gentle and Good Shepherd and His care for one of His sheep: “And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not I am the First and the Last: I am He that lives, and was dead and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen and have the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:17-18). We are saved because of what He did as the Lamb of God, the One destined to be slain from the foundation of the world (see Revelation 13:8). What had its beginning in Jesus also had its ending in Jesus. He triumphed and finished the work of salvation, atonement, and redemption. He was in the midst of a war that had been waged over the ages. Jesus experienced life as a human, and in dying as a human, He defeated the curse of death. On the Cross, Jesus was challenged to work a miraculous deliverance for Himself He was called to come down so that He might be believed. Those things were never attempts to prove His identity. His many signs and wonders were done to complement the words He spoke. He wanted His hearers to be certain about who He claimed to be. The name He put forth was “I Am that I Am” or Yahweh: “And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and He said, Thus shall you say unto the children of Israel, I Am has sent me unto you” (see Exodus 7:14).ĭuring His public ministry, Jesus made several “I Am” declarations. The Lord introduced Himself this same way to Moses at the burning bush. These words in Revelation were nothing new in terms of defining Him. We have to embrace the always present nature of God. All things begin with Him, all things end with Him, He is all and in all, He is timeless, He is from everlasting to everlasting, from eternity to eternity. He is, was, and always will be God the Son. Jesus emphasized the reality of His eternal being again and again. He made sure his mind and heart were available to the move of God. Living by the leading of the Spirit and according to established worship patterns, John put himself in position to hear from the Lord. The early church began to set aside Sunday after the Ascension of Jesus as a way of honoring the memory of His Resurrection. Surely, it was his practice to gather and worship with other believers on this day. John is likely talking about a Sunday when this trumpet sound was heard by him.
And we could say that for us as believers in Him every day is a Lord ’s day. No matter what situations we are facing we can live in the Holy Spirit and honor the Lord ’s day. Let us make note of these two important pieces of information. The Revelation he would record in writing came to him first while he was “in the Spirit on the Lord ’s day.” Living by the leading of the Spirit and according to established worship patterns, John put himself in position to hear from the Lord. The Roman authorities banished him to the Isle of Patmos, which was sort of an Alcatraz-like chunk of land positioned in the Aegean Sea off the coast near the city of Ephesus in what is now part of modern Turkey.ĭid these circumstances stop John from following after the Lord? They did not. They flooded the scene with an ocean of Truth. His words, John wrote, poured forth from Him. Jesus spoke and what He said could not be ignored. It cuts through the air and arrests our attention, like the sound of the horn blown by an ambulance or fire truck on its way to an emergency. The sound of a trumpet is a sound that pierces the atmosphere. In Revelation 1, the visions communicated to John reveal the aged Apostle hearing “a great voice, as of a trumpet” and as “the sound of many waters” (Revelation 1:10, 14). These words were sounded out loudly and in waves. Jesus uses these words toward the end of our Bibles, in the early part of the book of Revelation. If we listen to and read the things Jesus said about who He is, this can help us to discover Him as ever faithful and ever true. And it’s something we need to grasp perhaps now more than ever. He let this be known in certain terms, lest some fall for deceptions that lead to misunderstanding and disaster. When He talked of His identity, Jesus spoke with clarity and definition - always. The message was this: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God there is none like Him. The placing of “the” is indicative and points out the specific and exclusive nature of the subject.
This article is one of limitation, a narrowing word in its work as a modifier. Notice the use of the definite article “the” before some of these words. These were words Jesus used to describe Himself.
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