Rev.1:17,18 – And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death.
This is the final victory of our Lord Jesus Christ. He has conquered death for all time. Jesus was the first man to be permanently raised from the dead. Those whom had been raised from the dead by God’s miraculous power in the past ultimately surrendered their body to the grave. Not Jesus’s body. He had conquered death once and for all and at the resurrection all of us will experience His victory over death and hell. The empty tomb of Christ still speaks to us generations later, this is what Jesus was telling John that day in Patmos, I have totally and finally conquered death and hell. Here is how Barclay describes this.
“Death has its gates; and Christ has the keys of these gates. There were those who took this claim – and some still do – as a reference to the descent into hell. There was a belief in the ancient Church that, when Jesus descended into Hades, he unlocked the doors and brought out Abraham and all God’s faithful people who had lived and died in the generations before. But we may take it in an even wider sense; for we who are Christians believe that Jesus Christ has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, that because he lives we too shall live, and that, therefore, for us and for those whom we love, the bitterness of death is forever past.”
John was surely taken back to that first Sunday when he visited the empty tomb for himself. Jesus was alive – John believed it when he entered the tomb, now he was seeing the ramifications of that morning, death had been defeated for everyone who believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. John had seen a lot in his life beginning at the seaside in Galilee with the miracle catch of fish, three years of signs and wonders, the empty tomb, and now the visitation on the beach in Patmos. Now he was about to be taken up into heaven to see the final chapter of God’s plan for this world.
