John speaks of Jesus in overtly political terms from the very outset. Jesus is “the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5) who made John, John’s readers, and the worldwide cadre of Christ-followers “a kingdom, priests to his God and father, to whom be the glory and the power (kratos) into the ages” (Rev. 1:6). As Kraybill rightly observes, this is “political language, calling followers of Jesus Christ to alternative allegiance and alternative identify.”¹ Those gathered in Ephesus or Smyrna or Pergamum might have been uncomfortable to hear such claims being spoken aloud, even in a private house, since the vast majority of their neighbors would have identified the emperor Domitian as the one who holds such dominion and acknowledge Rome’s empire to extend over “every tribe and people and language and nation” (13:7), even as visual marvels like the reliefs in the Sebasteion in Aphrodisias proclaim.² But here, “honor and power” are ascribed to Jesus “into the ages of ages” (1:6). Domitian is answerable to Jesus; Jesus’ kingdom will outlast Rome’s.

All who have been gathered under the lordship of Jesus now constitute an alternative “kingdom,” one that stands alongside and will supersede the “kingdom of this world.” While John affirms alongside other early Christian voices that Jesus “loved us and freed us from our sins” (Rev. 1:6), the accent of Jesus’ redemptive work falls on the establishment of this alternative kingdom and the “ransoming” of people from every temporal demographic grouping for this alternative kingdom: “You are worthy … because you were slain and with your blood ransomed for God [people] from every tribe and language and population and nation and you made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will rule upon the earth” (Rev. 5:9-10).³ We see this group – those who would constitute the citizenry of the New Jerusalem, whose names are registered in the Lamb’s scroll of life – again in 7:9-10:

a great crowd that no one could enumerate, from every nation and tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb, having clothed themselves with white robes and palm branches in their hands, and they exclaim with a great voice, saying, “Deliverance belongs to our God who is seated upon the throne and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9-10).

As Kraybill rightly concludes, for John “the global church, encompassing all who truly know and follow Jesus, is the Christian’s most important place of belonging.”⁴

In John’s context, this awareness of the translocal, translingual, transnational, transtemporal nature of the Christian movement was likely intended to encourage the small communities of Christ-followers in any given city that they were part of something much larger – not nearly the deviant and powerless minority that their neighbors would have them believe themselves to be. They were part of a movement, a kingdom, that would grow beyond the capacity of people to enumerate, that would unite a greater variety of people across the ages than any empire had been able to unite by the usual means of conquest, coercion, and seduction.

John shared Daniel’s conviction that every empire that arises will also fall and that the kingdom of God would supplant every temporal state (cf. Dan. 2:21, 36-45; 7:15-27). This is the essence of the narrative of Revelation, the story of how “the kingdom of this world” becomes “that of our Lord and of his Anointed – and he shall reign into the ages of ages!” (11:15). John presents Jesus at the outset of Revelation as the “one like a Son of Man” and appearing in a manner reminiscent of the “Ancient of Days” (Rev. 1:12-16). These details take the audience back to Daniel 7 and serve further to identify Jesus as the one whose kingdom succeeds all the empires of the world. God’s acts of judgment upon these empires signal that God has taken the reins of history:

We thank you, Lord God, the Almighty (pantokratōr), the One who is and the “he was,” because you took your great power and you exercised kingly rule. And the nations were enraged, and your wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged and to give the reward to your slaves – the prophets and the holy ones and those revering your name, the small and the great – and for destroying those who are destroying the earth. (Rev. 11:17-18)

The scenes following the judgment of “Babylon” (another signal that “the Lord our God, the Almighty [pantokratōr], exercised rule,” 19:6) narrate the transfer of power from the temporal kingdoms to the reign of Christ and his faithful ones in the last era of “secular” history before the breaking in of eternity – the reign of “the souls of those axed on account of the testimony of Jesus and on account of the word of God, and whosoever did not worship the beast or its image and did not receive the stamp upon the forehead and upon their hand. And they came to life and reigned with the Christ for a thousand years” (Rev. 20:4). We note in passing the astounding privilege accorded those who had gone the farthest distance in demonstrating their allegiance to the kingdom of God and of his Anointed One. Finally, John narrates the transformation of history itself as God’s kingdom is fully manifested on (a new) earth in the New Jerusalem, which moves the throne of God and the Lamb to the terrestrial sphere (21:1-22:5).

The state, any state, is “something ‘provisional’,” not “something final, definitive.”⁵ The preservation of any particular empire is not the Christ-follower’s highest priority. Living for – and as the loyal citizens of – the kingdom of God is. Indeed, to pray “may your kingdom come” (Matt 6:10) is to declare a fundamental detachment from the state as one is praying for its displacement! John would counsel, at the very least, keeping a certain cognitive and affective distance from any state. American readers are reminded that their hope is not ultimately in America. For all America’s strengths and potential, it is still another empire that will fall. If we identify America with our hope, we set ourselves in servitude to the powers of this age and we deny the hope that John, in concert with all the Scriptures that look forward to the kingdom of God, sets before us. We need, rather, “a hope which confronts the fallenness of the American principality; a hope … emancipated from moral naivete about any supposed unique destiny for the nation; a hope freed from vainglorious delusions that America is a holy nation.”⁶ The eventual decline and fall of America, moreover, is no setback to God’s bringing about the consummation of the kingdom.

At the same time, John reminds us that our highest allegiance in the present is to the multinational, multilingual, multicultural body of people that Jesus has ransomed to constitute a kingdom for God (Rev. 5:9-10; 7:9-10), for these are the people who will be our fellow citizens “into the ages of ages.”⁷ Embracing this theological conviction might move us to shift our interests and priorities away from those of the political party with which we identify toward the interests of our fellow-citizens of God’s kingdom, whatever the political entity in which they reside. The first question I ask about a person might shift, for example, from “is he or she in ‘my’ country legally?” to “is he or she a fellow citizen of the kingdom of God, to which – and to whose citizens – we both owe our primary allegiance and who, therefore, has a claim on my care?” Clarice Martin observed the power in John’s naming first-century slaves not merely as “bodies” (somata) – the common designation – but also “human souls,” reminding the readers of the humanity of the people that Rome has commodified (Rev. 18:13).⁸ One wonders about the similar power of renaming those whom many in our society, including those in the halls of power, call “illegals” in ways that remind us all of their humanity that transcends their legal classification – and all the more those who belong to the household of faith.

The manner in which John draws attention to the kingdom of God also calls us to examine the lines that partisan politics draw vis-à-vis the lines that the population-ransoming work of Christ both draws and erases. This includes calling into question the tendency for political “tribalism” to lead many Christians to consider themselves more closely attached to and allied with the people of their political party than to other Christians whose consciences have led them to align with an opposing political party. John might have us rather keep in view that day when people ransomed from all manner of political parties will stand together in the one, unified kingdom of God – long after every nation that hosted those political parties has been buried in the sands of time – and to approach the short-lived politics of the present from that standpoint, not least for the sake of the witness it would bear.⁹

The material in this post will appear in modified form later this year in David A. deSilva, Living in an Unholy Empire: Revelation’s Call to a Higher Allegiance (Hendrickson Publishing, 2026).