Revelation 2:26

Triumph here consists in unflagging attention to the duties of a Christian vocation. The ἔργα are (Revelation 14:12; Revelation 19:8) the normal activities of this calling, viewed as the outcome of a personal relation to Jesus; they are “his,” as commanded by him and executed in his strength. The general idea of this and the following verse is that the only irresistible force is the force of a life which is able to resist seduction and compromise, because it holds to faith and purity. The promise of reward, preceding (as in Revelation 3:5; Revelation 3:12; Revelation 3:21) the appeal for attention, is couched in terms of messianic conquest (from Psalms 2:8-9). In a more or less figurative form, the rule of the saints, a cherished hope of Jewish eschatology, had its own attraction for some circles of early Christianity (see on Revelation 5:10 and 1 Corinthians 6:3; and for ῥάβδῳ, the well-known flail wielded by Horus, the Egyptian god of requital or warfare): evidently it appealed to their eagerness for a righting of present wrongs and a reversal of the immoral sway of captain ill over captive good. The ἐξουσία ἐπὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν (by which they are not governed but shivered in irreparable ruin; cf. Isaiah 30:14; Jeremiah 19:11) is defined with ferocious detail in 27; the whole description is modelled on a traditionally messianic application of (LXX) Psalms 2:8-9. For the shepherd's staff as a royal sceptre see E. Bi. 4317. ὡς κἀγὼ κ. τ. λ., God, Christ, and the individual Christian as in Revelation 3:21 (John 17:16-22). “Illud ὡς aliquam similitudinem, non paritatem significat” (Rosenmüller). John 21:15-17 is not “a deliberate correction of this terrible sentence” (Selwyn, 195), but the mature expression of Christian solicitude in a different province, from which messianic incongruities have been wholly purged.