"He Shall Be My Son"

I. The Man Who Must Write

On an island off the coast of Asia Minor sits an old man, exiled on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.1 He has seen more than a human being can bear. The dragon has fallen, the city of commerce has burned, the night has passed over him — and he has written it all down, for that was his commission from the first hour.

And then the seeing begins again, as if Scripture itself draws breath.

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away."2

A city comes down out of heaven, and in the text as this book reads it, something small and human stands beside it: and I, John, saw the holy city coming down — the man puts his own name into the verse, as if he wants to be sure that no one forgets he was there.3

A loud voice from heaven says where it is all heading, and the end of that sentence is the end of everything: "[...] and God himself will be with them, their God."4 And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.5

Then something happens that happens almost nowhere in this book. Until now angels have spoken, elders, voices like trumpets and like many waters, the Lamb. He who sits on the throne himself speaks in only two places in the whole book — at the beginning, and here.6

"Behold, I make all things new."

And then the voice turns to the old man, personally, in the imperative:

"Write, for these words are true and faithful."7

Whoever sits there listening has heard this voice before. Not from a throne — across a table. 60 years earlier, an upper room in Jerusalem, an evening meal; a young man reclined with his head against the chest of his Master, so close that the others asked him to ask what no one dared to ask aloud.8 Then the voice was a voice of flesh, and it carried no further than the room. Now it fills heaven and earth — and it still has something for this one man: write.

The old man writes.

II. "It Is Done"

What the voice then gives him to write fits into three short sentences, and each of them is larger than the book that contains them.

The first: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end."9 No more announcement, no delay, no yet a little while. The completed form. What was begun is finished, and He who says it was there before the first letter and stands after the last.

The second: "To the one who thirsts I will give from the spring of the water of life — freely."10 Nothing is paid for at that spring. It is given.

And then the third.

"The one who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be to him God and he shall be to Me the son."11

John writes it down as it falls. But this sentence is not new. It was already 1,000 years old when he heard it.

III. The Night of the Prophet

1,000 years earlier a king sits in his house and it will not let him go. "I live here in a house of cedar," he says to the prophet at his court, "and the ark of God lives among tent curtains."12 He wants to build.

And in the night that follows, the word of YHWH comes to the prophet Nathan, and it turns everything around: it is not you who will build a house for Me — I will build one for you. A son will come forth from you; he will build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom. And then the sentence that will travel 1,000 years:

"I will be to him a father, and he shall be to Me a son."13

One letter in the New Testament quotes that sentence word for word and lays it on the Son himself.14 But at the end of the Bible, from the mouth of Him who sits on the throne, the sentence sounds once more — and now it is handed out. To whoever overcomes.

Only: the sentence has changed along the way. The second half has remained — he shall be to Me the son, the same words, 1,000 years intact. The first half has not. Where the promise to David says "a father", and where the letter that quotes it says "a father", the throne says: "God".

I do not know why; the question stays where it stands.15 What I do see is what did not change. The son word. Whatever happened to the first half — the second has outlived David, and the exile, and four centuries of silence, and it returns intact at the end of Scripture from the mouth of God himself.

The king who first heard the sentence did not know, that night, where to turn. He went in and sat down — just like that, sat, before YHWH, as a child comes and sits on the floor beside its father because standing is too much. "Who am I, Lord YHWH, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far?"16

IV. Heirs

In the third sentence from the throne stands one more word with a long history: inherit.

Five sisters once stood at the entrance of the tent of meeting, before Moses and the priest and the leaders and the whole congregation, with a legal question for which no law existed. "Our father died in the wilderness," they said, "and he had no sons. Give us a possession among the brothers of our father."17

Three times they said "our father", and the man they were speaking of lay in the sand between Egypt and the Jordan and heard none of it. That is how the word sounded in Israel's Scriptures almost every time it occurred: the word of heirs, spoken over the head of one who was absent.18 The father himself never said anything back.

And here the inheritance word occurs again — in this whole last book of the Bible it occurs in this one place only19 — and everything about the sentence is the other way around. Not the children speaking about the father; the Father himself speaks. Not about an estate that must be divided by a congregation; He hands it out with his own hand, and what He hands out is no possession among brothers, but all things.

And He is there. He says it to the face of the one who receives it, and as He says it, He calls him by the word from the oldest promise: son.

What five sisters had to fight for at a tent door is given away here — by Someone who lives.

V. The Word That No Longer Occurs

Something is missing in these two last chapters, and I sat looking at it for a long time before I dared to write it down.

In the New Testament John is the writer of the word "Father"; his Gospel is saturated with it, page after page. In Revelation the word is scarce, and where it stands, it is every time "his Father" or "my Father" — the Father of Jesus.20 And in the two chapters in which everything comes home — the new heaven, the new earth, God with human beings — the word does not occur a single time more. No one there says "Father".

And God says "son".

What does stand on those pages stands there: God himself will be with them, their God.21 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads — about that forehead a whole book has been written elsewhere, and those pages stay there.22

Whoever has come here with the evening prayer no longer needs to search in these verses as one had to search in the night. From give us this day to freely: the petition for bread for one day ends at a spring without a price.23

The kingdom that was asked for every evening no longer needs to come: "and they shall reign as kings for ever and ever".24 And the last petition keeps its gravity right up to this page: there is a portion for those who stayed outside, and it stands there without a single softening, one verse below the son.25

The old man on the island writes it all down, word for word, as he has been told. But the word the voice gives him to write about the human being is not the word he himself wrote all his life. He wrote "Father", upward, from earth to heaven. He is given "son" to write, downward, from the throne to the human being.

The evening prayer is a child speaking upward. This is what comes back.