We live in a culture of fear. Not one fear, many. The fear of marrying into the wrong family. The fear of a last-born marrying before a first-born. The fear of whistling at night, of the wrong bird crossing your path, of a bad dream. People bring me these fears more often than you would think, and underneath almost all of them sits the same thing. A fear of what will happen. A fear, in the end, of death.
The apostle John knew a bigger fear than any of these, and it is worth sitting with what he did about it.
A vision that put him on the ground
In Revelation chapter one, John sees the risen Christ, and his first response is not comfort. “I fell at his feet as though dead.” That is not unusual in Scripture. Daniel fell on his face. Ezekiel fell on his face. On the mountain of transfiguration, when the Father spoke his delight over the Son, the disciples fell to the ground, terrified. Paul, on the road to Damascus, fell before a light brighter than the sun.
There is a pattern here. Whenever someone in Scripture truly sees who God is, the response is not to nod along. It is to fall down.
That should give us pause. In some traditions, church members are encouraged to bow to the clergy, even to fall before them. That is a mistake. Later in Revelation, John falls before an angel, and the angel stops him at once: “You must not do that. I am a fellow servant with you.” Ministers, of all people, need to hear this. When someone tells you they have seen God, ask what their demeanour was as they said it. Meeting the living God is not a casual thing.
But here, in chapter one, when John falls before Christ, he is not told to stop. That is the point. This is no angel, no fellow servant. This is God himself, and John’s response is the right one.
Four reasons not to be afraid
Jesus lays his hand on John and says two words: fear not. Then he gives four reasons, one after another, for why that command can actually be trusted.
He says he is the first and the last. Nothing precedes him, nothing follows him. He is present at every beginning and every end of our days, which means nothing that happens to us sits outside his knowledge.
He says he is the living one. Life flows from him. But every living thing dies, so he adds the next line before we can ask the obvious question: he died, and is alive for evermore. He has already tasted the one thing that ends every other life, and it did not hold him.
And then the line that settles it. He holds the keys of death and Hades. A key means access. It means control. Whoever holds the key to a room decides who goes in and who is kept out. Jesus is telling John, plainly, that he decides who lives, and for how long, and what lies beyond. Nothing we fear, tribe, timing, tradition, curse, is bigger than the one who holds that key.
What this means for our fears
None of this makes death painless. We have buried people we loved this year, and the grief has been real. These verses do not ask us to pretend otherwise. What they do is put death itself under Christ’s authority, not beyond it. There is no such thing, from where Christ stands, as an untimely death. From where we stand, it can feel that way. From where he stands, the days were already numbered.
That changes how we pray. Not as people who have given up and simply accept whatever comes, but as people who ask, and then leave the answer with someone who is not guessing. Ask him to heal. Ask him to help. Then pray as Christ prayed in the garden: let your will be done.
And if you have never come to this Christ, the invitation is simple. The one thing worth fearing is not death. It is standing before the one who holds the keys to it, without him as your friend. Come to the one who has already dealt with your biggest fear. He holds your future, and he can be trusted with it.