Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters. I hope you all had a great Christmas. I know I certainly did. A certain area in my life I asked for prayer for went well and now I have a whole new area. Thus, before I continue our Trinitarian Commentary, I will make the prayer requests that I have. For the first, that I will be courageous and positive and be more Christlike in my daily walk. Second, I do ask for prayer for my finances in this hard time. Third, I ask for prayer in the same area again as I am entering whole new territory. For now, let’s get to work. We will be studying Revelation 1:1 again today.
1The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John,
As I said, we will not be discussing eschatology in this study of the book of Revelation, which is a rarity for studying Revelation. Instead, we will look at what the book has to say on the one it is revealing to us, Jesus Christ. I hope we’ll all be surprised by how much it says about him in this book.
There are a number of anti-Trinitarians who use this verse to argue against the deity of Christ. It is argued that this revelation was given to Jesus Christ and since the revelation was given, that means that it was received and since Jesus received a revelation from the Father, he can’t be God.
If you can somehow find an argument against the deity of Christ in there, then you’re seeing something I’m not. I instead see bare assertions that do not have backing.
Still, I do see the assumptions and they’re hideous. This idea is that this would be something that Jesus would receive because he was in an inferior position ontologically. However, if we simply say that Jesus was in a position of submission, we do not have a problem.
This is the way we would expect it to happen anyway. Jesus is the one who is the revelation of the Father as well and when he comes to give a message from the Father, he is the go-between. In ancient understanding, Jesus would be seen as the broker who is coming on behalf of the patron to present revelation.
The early church knew this well and saw no problem with the idea of Jesus being fully God, even in other passages such as Jesus being told that he has had a body prepared for him by God. It’s the same mistake that Arians often make when they see submission and draw out a conclusion about nature that is not warranted.
Simply put, I cannot see how this is a problem for me as a Trinitarian, but I wanted to say something on it as I’ve seen several Arians use this passage. If you’re in conversation with one, simply ask them to tell you what the problem is with this verse and see if they can see the absurdity of using it on their own.
We shall continue with Revelation tomorrow.
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