"When I saw him I fell at his feet as though dead" (Revelation 1:17)
That response of John is most strange. It would seem that he would have looked upon the face of his Master with ecstatic bliss and joy beyond words to describe....He was a beloved disciple in that inner circle who lived next to the very heart and ministry of our Savior.
He laid his head on Jesus' bosom at the Last Supper. He stood at the cross. He saw the blood and the water flow out like a fountain from his heart.
It was this beloved disciple, John, who in obedience to the loving, tender, shepherdly word of the Savior took Mary, the Lord's mother, to his home and cared for her.
Yet when he sees the Master on this Isle of Patmos, he falls at His feet as dead. I repeat, it would seem that he would have looked upon the Lord with joy unspeakable, with a bliss and a gladness that would be indescribable. Instead, great fear fell upon him.
Dr. Criswell goes on to talk about why John reacted the way he did:
The beloved disciple is looking upon unveiled deity. In the days of His flesh, in the days of the Lord's ministry in the earth, His godhead was covered over, it was shrouded, it was curtained in the flesh.
There's a second reason why John fell over as a dead man in the presence of the great God and Savior Jesus Christ and it's this: he immediately was conscious of the burden of his own nothingness, the burden of his own folly, the burden of his own insignificance, his on shortcoming, his own humanity, his own sin and iniquity. No insect would have expected to live in the furnace of the Son.
Remember Isaiah? When he describes his own experience seeing God?
"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty." (Isaiah 6:5).
Is there something wrong with the way we (I) view and approach God?
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