His name is the Word of God

Nineteen weeks of self-portraits have been things: fire, a hammer, honey, a lamp, a sword, seed, milk, a mirror, goads and nails, gold, washing, dew, a stone, a plumb line, a trumpet, bread, an arrow, an inheritance, a table.

The last one is not a thing.

And His name is the Word of God.

John gives the rider four names in six verses. Faithful and True. A name written that no one knows but Himself. The Word of God. And on His robe and thigh: King of kings and Lord of lords.

One of those four is the title of this volume.

Which is why the volume could not have ended anywhere else.

It opened in Week Three with John’s prologue — in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Between that and this rider lie sixty-six books, and the same man wrote both sentences.

And notice what has changed and what has not.

In the prologue the Word becomes flesh and pitches a tent among us, full of grace and truth. Here the same title belongs to a rider whose eyes are like blazing fire, whose robe is dipped in blood, and out of whose mouth comes a sharp sword — the weapon from Week Four, still coming from His mouth.

So the last self-portrait Scripture gives itself is the strangest and the simplest. Every other image told you what the Word is like. This one tells you who He is.

Which is the whole reason a study of the Book cannot stop at the Book. Jerome said it in Week Three — ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. John 5 said it in Week Seventeen — you search the Scriptures, and these testify about Me, and you will not come.

The volume has spent twenty weeks on words on a page. And the page has been pointing the whole time at a Person who wears the same name.

One detail keeps it from being tidy, and it belongs here at the end. There is a name written on Him that no one knows but Himself.

There is a discipline in ending here rather than a flourish. A volume about a book, closing on a Person, is not changing the subject at the last minute. It is admitting what the subject was.

Even at the last, with the whole canon closed and the rider named four times, something is not disclosed. The reader gets everything he needs and not everything there is — which is Deuteronomy 29:29 from Week Sixteen, standing at the end of the Book as it stood in the middle.

The four designations in Revelation 19:11–16 are usually read as a deliberate accumulation rather than a list of alternatives: character (Faithful and True), mystery (a name unknown), office and nature (the Word of God), and rank (King of kings and Lord of lords).

The robe dipped in blood is disputed. Some read it as His own blood, others as the blood of His enemies, since the following verse describes treading the winepress of God’s wrath — and the robe is already dipped before any battle occurs, which is the strongest argument for the first reading. Honest commentaries state the difficulty.

The sword from His mouth appears three times in Revelation — 1:16, 2:16 and 19:15 — and uses rhomphaia, the broadsword, rather than the short blade of Ephesians 6. The distinction was studied in Week Four.

The armies of heaven follow Him wearing fine linen, white and clean — the same clothing given to the bride in 19:8, four verses earlier. The thread from Week Eleven and the rider are dressed alike.

The rider is followed by armies wearing fine linen and riding white horses, and no weapon is described in their hands. The only weapon in the scene comes out of His mouth, which is consistent with every other picture of Him in the book.

Look it upG3056 λόγος logos, word · G4103 πιστός pistos, faithful, trustworthy · G228 ἀληθινός alethinos, true, genuine · G4501 ῥομφαία rhomphaia, broadsword

Where this touchesRevelation 19:11–16 · John 1:1–14 (Week Three, Day Three) · Revelation 1:16 (Week Four, Day Two) · Isaiah 63:1–6 · Deuteronomy 29:29 (Week Sixteen, Day Six). The nineteen earlier self-portraits were fire and hammer, honey, the lamp, the sword, seed, milk, the mirror, goads and nails, gold, washing, the fire in the bones, dew, the stumbling stone, the plumb line, the trumpet, bread outranked, the polished arrow, the inheritance and the table.