The salutation is an address and greeting of grace and peace to the seven churches in Asia from John, in the name of each person of the triune God, viz:—(1) in the name of the Father, who is designated as “him who is and who was and who is to come”,(306) i. e. whose existence is alike present, past, and future, the Eternal One, and expansion of the sacred name Jehovah, the I AM, or the I WILL BE, of Hebrew historic faith (cf. Ex. 3:14, Am. R. V., marg.); (2) in the name of the Holy Spirit, who is typified by “the seven Spirits that are before his throne” as being seven‐ fold in his operation, i. e. complete and perfect (cf. Isa. 11:2);(307) and (3) in the name of Jesus Christ, who is presented as “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth”, whose redemptive work is declared in a doxology of praise (v. 5b and 6) which is rendered unto him as the one “that loveth us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood”,(308) and whose coming again is notably heralded—a pivotal thought throughout the book.(309) The descriptive phrase “the firstborn of the dead” is an evident recognition of Christ as the first to conquer death by resurrection. The closing part of the salutation (v. 7‐8) is exclamatory and parenthetical, and forms a kind of prelude to all that follows, affirming the certainty of the second advent as if already present, and introducing at this point the divine witness, which is generally attributed to Christ who speaks as God, affirming himself to be the source and end of all things, the Eternal and All‐Ruler, whose word stands as surety for the fulfilment of the visions. The fact of God as All‐Ruler (Παντοκράτωρ, “the Almighty”),(310) and the realization of that fact in history, “constitutes the deep undertone which pervades every part of the Apocalypse, and rises here and there into its loftiest strains”. Terms like this, never applied to any but God in the Old Testament, and well understood as belonging only to the Divine Being, are freely used of Christ in the Revelation, showing how fully his divine nature was realized in that stage of the church’s experience. The connection of the eighth verse may properly be considered as the answering voice of Christ to the cry of John in the seventh, “Behold he cometh”!