Revelation 1:5 Meaning And From Jesus Christ

Each title costs something. Faithfulness as a witness meant dying for the truth. Rising first from among the dead is what lets him bring anyone else through. And authority over earthly rulers belongs to a man one of them executed, which permanently changes what power is worth chasing.

Love comes before the washing, and that order holds the whole hope of a Christian life. Grace is not a wage paid to people who have already cleaned themselves up. The cleaning is what love does once it has chosen someone, and it reaches us in baptism and is renewed at every altar.

The faithful witness is your imagination, and it testifies to whatever you give it, without flattery and without protest. Feed it defeat and it reports defeat back to you as your life. Feed it the finished wish and it reports that instead. It is first among your powers, the ruler over every outer authority, because those authorities are only reflections of what you have already accepted within.

Sins here are simply the states you missed, the moods and assumptions that fell short of what you wanted. They are washed away not by punishment but by a change of feeling. A man is cleansed the instant he stops dwelling in the mood that failed him and takes up the one that satisfies. His own inner life does the washing.

The blood is the life-current in a person, the red stream carrying the spirit's charge through every vessel, and it is this inner life that cleanses, not an outside sacrifice. The Christ is the awakened higher self, faithful because it watches without wavering, and first-begotten of the dead because it is the first thing in a person to rise out of the sleeping flesh into full awareness. To be washed in its own blood is for the animal nature to be flooded and purified by that same rising life already in the veins.

The kings of the earth are the strong bodily drives this higher center governs from within. When the awakened self rules them, the old stains of appetite dissolve in the very life that gave them.

Blood: the life-current in the veins, the spirit's charge that cleanses and renews the whole body Kings of the earth: the strong bodily drives and powers that the higher self rules from within

Here the lover and the Beloved turn out to be one story told from both ends. The one being praised is no distant ruler but the one who loves first, who does the washing rather than demanding it, cleaning a stain a person could never scrub out alone.

Something in the heart secretly believes love must be earned before it is given, and so it keeps bargaining. The rest comes only by letting oneself be washed and simply receiving. The whole scene shows where He stands, not above the mess awaiting our climb but down inside it, faithful, already reaching for the sins we carry.