Rev 1:3 - The Precious Word Is A Blessing

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3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.



The reading aloud of letters and documents was the common means by which the early church received doctrine, and news. The epistles were read by an elder in the presence of the congregation and copied and passed on to other congregations.

Blessedness can be taken to refer to happiness. "Happy is he who..." Some (though not I) might use the word "fortunate"; "Fortunate is the one who...." But I prefer to take the word "blessed" as a reference to something received, rather than some mere feeling generated by it. "The one who reads (or hears) has been blessed (by God)" in the very act of reading or hearing. God’s wisdom has been ordained to pass into and through the mind and lips and ears that speak and receive these very words of God. Blessed are they upon whom this providence falls.

Do we have this attitude today? Is it counted as a blessing from God Himself that we can both speak and hear the Words that spring from the Divine Mind? Do we stop and think? Do we realize the value of the treasure that is entrusted to us? Do we savor it as it passes across our lips? Do we reverence God in His words as they reverberate in our ears bringing thoughts from the eternal Mind?

In Western Society we all too often take for granted what we have available in leather-bound, gold-edged super abundance. Where we have multiple copies of the Bible in versions galore, bound up with concordances and interspersed with commentary from the sages of the ages, the very glut seems to so dull our senses that we lose all measure of the preciousness of what we have been given.

Not so in the early church where scraps of Apostolic letters were hastily copied and passed from town to town, where they were read, often in secret. People didn’t have their own private copies of Paul’s letters all bound and gathering dust on the basement shelf. What they could get they devoured reverently and hungrily. It is the same today in prisons and mission fields and in the still deep dark holes of the world where God’s precious saints crave a single page of Holy Writ and where some have a few pages that must sustain them for untold periods. Some indeed have only what they have committed to memory.

But we upon whom the riches of plenty have fallen are often exactly like the Israelites of old, who either became dissolute in times of ease, or who complained and nit-picked at the provisions God gave.

John understood when God had spoken. He understood the eternal value of God’s thoughts. He revered the God who spoke and therefore received the privilege as a blessing from God to be treasured. Today he might be considered a Bibliolater, or the worshiper of a paper Pope for such a reverent attitude towards the "words" of God. But not by me.