How would you describe colors to a blind person? To someone who has never seen any color before? It would be pretty difficult, wouldn't it? You might say that red is hot or that blue feels cold. But that would be easiest of them all. What about purple, or orange? Kinda tough, right? It’s difficult for us to describe colors because we need to use our other senses to imagine them. That this color feels this way, or feels like this. It is all difficult because we have to use metaphors for each one, and metaphors can only be so helpful in understanding something. That is the exact tension that we find ourselves in, in Revelation Chapter 1. John has this revelatory vision and is tasked with writing it all down and sending it to the seven churches that were named. Throughout the rest of the book, John has to use “like” and “as” statements to try to communicate all that he has seen. But our language is linear and bound and we must remember that John’s words here are not always literal and shouldn’t be taken as such. John sees this great figure that he says is like the Son of Man, wearing a golden sash, with a burning gaze, with shoes of bronze, with hair white like wool, whose voice was like the mighty ocean waves. All of these metaphors point to a description of Jesus, in all of His glory, standing before John with a new task in mind for him. In the vision that John has, Jesus is standing in the middle of the golden lampstands that represent the seven churches. This is to mean that Jesus is right in the middle of his people, amidst their persecution, amidst their difficulty. That We serve a God who will never leave us or abandon us and that He can be trusted because of His glory and might. The churches are represented as lampstands because as Jesus taught us in Matthew 5, we are to be a light on a hill, a candle placed on a lampstand to give light to everyone in the house. We, as the church, are called to hold forth the light of Christ, the truth of Gospel, for the sake of a dark and broken world. And in that goal of bringing light into a dark world, Jesus is there. In the middle of His people. Bringing both comfort and strength to finish that work.