Revelation 1: 4b – 8
11/22/2009

　　The early Christians came up with new titles for Jesus because they needed ways to describe their ongoing experience of him. We may not use all of those titles today, but we need to experience him as the risen Lord and pledge our lives to him.

According to some observers of the broad Christian world, a significant number of people who would formerly have identified themselves as "Christians" are now choosing to call themselves "followers of Jesus" instead. That’s apparently driven by the perception that "Christian" has come to have certain baggage attached, such as assumptions about a person’s habits and politics that may not be true. An article in Newsweek earlier this year noted that on the social-networking website Facebook, more than 900 groups use some variation of "follower of Jesus," and that that label is also popular among small groups that meet regularly for ecumenical prayer.

Whether the move to find new terms to label our faith is a good idea or not is a discussion for another day, but it alludes to something more basic: the terminology we use to describe Christianity’s founder, Jesus Christ.

One good place to begin that discussion is with the book of Revelation.

To the best of our knowledge, Revelation was written about A.D. 95, during the last days of the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian. By that time, which was 60 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity had spread widely but thinly throughout the Roman Empire, and it had not yet become an officially accepted religion. Thus its adherents could claim no special protection from the empire.

Domitian himself was an ardent supporter of religion, but not of the Christian religion. Rather, he strove to revive the ancient Roman faith. As far as we know, he did not directly persecute Christians, but early Christian writers speak of him as no friend of Christianity, probably because he was so zealous in propagating paganism. While there was no state-directed persecution of Christians during Domitian’s reign, apparently persecution on the local level occurred in places throughout the empire.

The Christian who wrote Revelation, who identifies himself only as John, apparently viewed these scattered incidents as the leading edge of a larger persecution of the church. That view colors much of what he says in Revelation, which he wrote as a letter to some churches in Asia Minor.

In the opening paragraphs of Revelation, John says that he has a message from God, which is mediated by Jesus. He goes on to identify Jesus as follows: "Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth." In so saying, he names Jesus first by a title that had been used for him since the time of his earthly ministry — Christ, which is simply the Greek word for "anointed" and has the same meaning as the Hebrew word Messiah.

In the days of his flesh, Jesus acknowledged that he was the Christ, but here, John goes beyond that. He uses three additional titles for Jesus that Jesus did not use to identify himself: the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. What this suggests is that following the resurrection of Jesus, the church’s understanding of Jesus enlarged beyond their view of him as the Messiah, and they began to use new titles for him that were not in use during his time on earth. They did that because they were now experiencing him not as a wandering prophet or teacher walking through the lands of Galilee and Judea, but as a risen Lord living in their hearts.

That is not to say that the church was inventing titles out of thin air; each of these titles has biblical precedence. And neither were the early Christians making claims for Jesus that were unwarranted; it was simply that as they encountered the challenges of their lives in a society where Christianity was an unpopular, upstart faith, they discovered the presence of Jesus with them, and that they needed additional terms to describe that presence.

So in addition to identifying Jesus as the Christ, John used three more titles here:

The first is "the faithful witness." Jesus came to earth because of God’s love for us and God’s desire to reconcile us to himself. Jesus both told us about the truth of God and demonstrated it in laying down his life for us. In that sense he was a faithful witness, giving testimony to God’s love. But doing that kind of witnessing can be costly, as the crucifixion shows. In fact, the Greek word that’s translated "witness" in this title for Jesus is the same as the word for "martyr."

The church — or John himself — borrowed the term "faithful witness" from Psalm 89, where it is part of the covenant God made with King David. There, David and his descendants are described as "the faithful witness in the sky." Here in Revelation, John applies the term to Jesus. This term probably had extra significance for John’s readers, for many of them were called on to be faithful witnesses to the Gospel, too, and some were being martyred for it. In fact, Revelation, just a chapter later, refers to a Christian named Antipas who had been recently killed because of his testimony. Jesus, speaking to John in a vision, calls Antipas "my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you."

The second new title John uses for Jesus is "the firstborn of the dead." That refers to his resurrection, but by using the word firstborn, it means that Jesus’ resurrection was not an isolated event. Rather, he is the forerunner of the general resurrection of the dead.

Again, John borrowed this phrase from Psalm 89, where God promised to make David the firstborn of the line of kings that would rule Israel and Judah. John is not the first Christian to use this title for Jesus, however, for the apostle Paul also used the term in writing to the Colossians: "[Jesus] is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead ...." This term for Jesus encapsulated the early Christians’ expectation of their individual resurrections.

The third title is the ruler of the kings of the earth, drawn also from Psalm 89, where God says that he will make David "the highest of the kings of the earth." Of the three, this term possibly has the least meaning for us today, living as we do in a democracy, where we have no experience of kings. But we can understand that for the Christians living under Roman kings who often were not just or fair and who often did not have the well-being of their subjects as a goal, it was comforting to know that ultimately, even they would have to answer to Christ. And calling Jesus the ruler of the kings was also a way of saying that he was the one to whom Christians’ supreme allegiance and obedience belong.

Now John and the other early Christians knew that passages and terms they took from the Hebrew Bible and applied to Jesus were initially written for other circumstances. They knew that Psalm 89 was describing God’s covenant with David, who lived and died centuries earlier.

But they also had a conviction that scripture as a whole points to Christ as its fulfillment. Essentially, they looked at the scriptures they had before Jesus and began to read them afresh through the lens of his resurrection. And when they did that, they saw how earlier prophecies and terminology applied to what they were now experiencing with the risen Jesus. Among the earliest Christians, most of whom were Jews to start with and had been raised learning the Hebrew Bible, there must have been a time when they concluded something like, "Ah, now I see. Jesus is the one the scriptures I have known from childhood were talking about who is to come."

The church continued to add terms to refer to Jesus because they found that no single term was adequate. They did not throw out the earlier ones; they continued to call him Christ, Savior and Lord, but they also found significant meaning in speaking of him as the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth, and other new terms.

The opposite seems to be happening today. Rather than adding new titles for Jesus, we seem to be using fewer of them. If you examine Christian books that were written 50 years ago, you will likely find Jesus referred to in them as "the Master" or "our Lord" or "the Savior." In today’s Christian literature, it is more common to find him referred to simply as "Jesus."

I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Our society as a whole has become more informal. It’s not uncommon today for us to address physicians, pastors, politicians, teachers and other professionals by their first names, something that was unusual in earlier eras. And regarding Jesus, it is a good thing to understand him as approachable.

But I do think that we risk losing something important for our lives if, in not using some of the other titles for Jesus, we also forget that those titles reflect the experience of Jesus that the people who used them had.

The early Christians didn’t call him Christ because they thought it was his last name; they called him Christ because they believed he was the Messiah, the one the scriptures said was to come.

They didn’t call him the faithful witness because they were looking for a hero to celebrate; they called him that because some of them were having to pay in suffering and sometimes death for faithfully witnessing about the Gospel, and they found strength to do so when they realized Jesus was right beside them as it all happened.

They didn’t call him the firstborn of the dead because they were trying to be poetic; they called him that because first, they had experienced him as risen, and second, because they were convinced his resurrection made their eventual resurrection possible.

They didn’t call him the ruler of the kings of the earth because they thought he needed to be puffed up and flattered the way some egotistical despots do; they called him that because they were pledging themselves let him rule their lives, no matter what.

I’m not convinced it makes much difference whether we call ourselves Christians or followers of Jesus. Both should apply. But if, when we say Jesus, we are thinking about him only as a historical figure or as a good example or as a great teacher, we are missing something important, for he is also the risen Lord, alive and ready to be with us. And as the firstborn of the dead, he opens eternity to us.

But first, we need to allow him to be the ruler of our lives.