Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from Revelation 4 in his series called Missions as the Triumph of the Lamb.
In the seven sessions we have, we’re not going to cover the entire book of Revelation, but we will try to get through several large chunks. We begin with chapters 4 and 5. Chapters 4 and 5 together constitute one vision, but chapter 4 is to chapter 5 what a setting is to a drama. Chapter 4 sets the stage; chapter 5 unpacks the drama. This evening we will look at chapter 4, the setting, and tomorrow morning, the drama itself. I would like to begin by reading Revelation 4.
“After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’ At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.
And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads.
From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God. Also before the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal. In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back.
The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stop saying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.’
Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say: ‘You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.’ ”
This is the Word of the Lord.
The book of Revelation is a strange book. Let’s be quite frank. I know a friend who, some years ago, was passing out free New Testaments on a British university campus. He happened to give a copy of a New Testament to an undergraduate who had very little biblical background at all. The condition on which he gave these things out free was that the person would read them. Some weeks later, my friend bumped into this chap and said, “What did you make of that book I gave you?”
“It wasn’t too bad. A bit repetitious at the front where they sort of tell the same story again and again, but I sure liked that science fiction at the end.” Transparently, what the person is trying to do here is to find a contemporary literary category to make sense of the book, and when you read the interpretations of the book of Revelation across all of history, science fiction is probably as good of a grab as a lot of them are. Some of them are pretty amazing.
What I would like to do at the beginning of not all seven of the talks but at least at the beginning of some of them is comment a little bit about how you go about interpreting this book. Just reserving a few minutes at the beginning to comment on the clues that explain the book somewhat. In the first instance, I want to begin tangentially. I want to come it at the side door by telling you about my sister.
She’s not apocalyptic, but something in her background helps to explain apocalyptic. She’s a little older than I. When she and her husband first went out as missionaries to Papua New Guinea in 1970, they were sent to a tribe that was pre-Stone Age in its technology. You got there by flying into one of the centers (Goroka or something like that), then in a four-wheel drive vehicle in first gear off into the bush for about three days, and then you hiked in the last bit on foot for another couple of days.
This tribe was literally pre-Stone Age. That is, even its arrowheads were not made of stone. They used a hard wood like teak fastened to the end of bamboo shafts and tipped them with poison. That’s how they killed their wild pigs, and so on, to eat. It was a pretty primitive tribe. It’s not like that today.
I’ve been back to Papua New Guinea in the last four or five years, and you can get into any of these tribes with a helicopter within a few minutes from some central site. They have satellite dishes even in mud huts nowadays. It’s just another world. All of a sudden, you hear satellite phones ringing in the middle of the night out in the bush. But it wasn’t like that a mere 30 years ago.
Suppose for argument’s sake, one of these tribes was transported out to Northern Ireland. You are a master’s student in linguistics, and your assignment for reasons that may be a bit obscure is to learn this tribe’s language, so you do what a trained linguist does. You listen to all the sounds, and you write down all the different sounds using the system of phonology that you have learned. You start repeating them. You point to things, and you start figuring out how the language breaks down. You discover, of course, it’s in the neo-Melanesian class.
Eventually, you devote yourself to this language. With time, you can speak it. Then, you really devote yourself to this full time, and after five years, you’re about as fluent as any foreigner could ever be in a language. You’ve reduced it to writing. You even have a primer ready so that when you go back in you can teach people how to read their own language, if you start producing anything in it.
Now you arrive, and your job, for some strange reason, is to explain to them in their language what electricity is, without any illustrative materials like torches. How will you go about it? You will say, in their language, “I’ve come to tell you about something.… Well, you don’t have a word for it. Let’s call it electricity. Electricity is like a powerful spirit that runs lickety-split along vines.” They presumably have a word for lickety-split. I don’t know what it would be.
“It runs along hard things like vines. In fact, what we do is we loop these vines from tree to tree. Actually, we cut down the trees, take all the branches off, and put them back in holes.… Well, forget all that. We just loop these vines from tree to tree, and then we pump in this electricity at one end in this hard thing like a vine, and at the other end, it loops through the trees until it comes to our mud hut.
It comes through our thatched roof, and up inside our thatched roof, we have little round things that we make. The electricity goes in there and goes around and around so fast that it makes a little light, like a small sun or something, so you can stay up late at night. Why you’d want to, I don’t have a clue, but if you wanted to you could stay up a little later at night. You’d have like a little sun in your thatch.
In addition, we make other square things in great, great big mud huts that we call factories. In these great big mud huts, we make square things with round flat things on top. The electricity dances around those, too, really, really fast. It gets so hot you can boil water in your clay pots without any smoke inside your mud hut.”
How am I doing in explaining electricity? “What’s the matter with these people? Are they stupid or something?” No, of course not, but the fact remains I haven’t said anything about the molecular atomic nature of matter. I haven’t talked about power generation, distinguished AC and DC. I haven’t talked about storage systems, units of measurements … volts, amps, ohms.
I haven’t talked about resistors. I certainly haven’t talked about transistors or microchips, computers, or Boolean algebras on which all of computing is finally based. I haven’t said anything about that. I haven’t talked about hydroelectric generation or generation through nuclear power. How do I get this stuff across to them?
The problem, of course, is not that their children are dumber than our children. It’s that they are not exposed to all the things which we simply take for granted. If they migrate to the West, their children have a very good chance of doing better at school than our children do, as children of immigrants often do. They try harder. It takes three or four generations sometimes before we can lower them down to our level.
The problem, you see, is want of experience in the world we simply take for granted. Now the question becomes.… How do you talk about the throne room of God? The problem, again, is want of experience. We’re so alienated from this God that at the end of the day it’s not too surprising if we’re reduced to talking about him in symbol-laden terms, in similes, in metaphors, and in analogies.
The electricity is like a spirit that runs through hard things like vines that come into our thatched roofs and produces something like a sun. When the biblical writers in the mercy of God are caught up into the third heaven, as Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, he sees things, he says, that are not lawful to be uttered. That’s literally what the text means.
It’s an ambiguous expression. It can mean either he’s not permitted to talk about them or, quite frankly, you just can’t do it. The reason why you can’t do it is because he has now had the experience they haven’t had. What kind of categories do they have? How do you talk about the throne room of God when, quite frankly, we haven’t been there and our sin-blinded, earthbound, mortal eyes just can’t imagine what it would be like?
You’re restricted to metaphors and symbols and things. You start talking about opals and diamonds and rainbows and creatures with eyes all over the place. You have to understand how those symbols work or else you will fail to understand what this vision of the throne room of God is like.
In other words, this kind of writing (apocalyptic literature) is peculiarly useful for showing us things beyond our common experience, for unveiling things. That’s what apocalyptic means. Apokalypsi in Greek means revelation. It unveils things before our eyes in categories we can, to some extent, understand even though, in fact, they are all metaphors and similes of one sort or another.
We’ll find other principles that need to be borne in mind as we plunge in, but let’s begin immediately with chapter 4 and unpack it as we go along. John writes, “After this, I looked …” After this. That is, after the initial vision of the exalted Christ in chapter 1 and after the particular revelations to the seven churches of chapters 2 and 3. “After this, I looked …”
He has entered into some new phase now. “And a door was standing open in heaven.” This door turns out to be not some portal through which he is invited to peer so he may see things that would otherwise be opaque to him nor some vision of the future exactly. That’s not quite right. He’s actually invited to enter heaven, to be transported, as it were. Whether this is in the body or out of the body, I doubt if John knows any more than Paul knows in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12. He says he was caught up into the third heaven, into paradise.
The Jews had various enumerations for heaven, but when they counted three, the first heaven was what we mean by the atmosphere, the heavens through which the birds fly. The second heaven was what we mean by, roughly, the universe. That is, you look out and see the stars, the domain of the celestial lights. The third heaven was the very abode of God. To say that you’re caught up into the third heaven is to say that you’re caught up into the very abode of God.
Paul says, “Whether in the body or outside the body, I don’t know.” Whether it was a visionary experience, caught up in the Spirit, he doesn’t know. I doubt if John knows, but he’s caught up, and the voice he first hears, speaking to him like a trumpet.… That’s the voice of the exalted Christ. That’s identified for you in chapter 1. It’s the voice of the resurrected, exalted Christ that says, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.”
John writes, “At once I was in the Spirit.” Already, in the inaugural vision in chapter 1, verse 10, he says, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day when the first vision came,” so, “At once I was in the Spirit.” Either he’s experiencing another vision or is caught up into a higher state of exaltation. I don’t know. Now we come to what John sees. Five things.
1. The centrality and indescribable majesty of the Almighty
He says, “There before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircled the throne.” Transparently, this is meant to be a vision of the throne of God.
John does not want his readers who either are about to face persecution or, in some cases, have already faced persecution to forget above all earthly thrones are still other thrones until, finally, there is only one throne. If you’re a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, the throne of Caesar must seem prodigiously great, but John wants his readers to understand that above all thrones there is one final throne. That’s a great deal of what this chapter is about.
Yet, when you try to draw a picture of what is on this throne, it’s just an impossible task. Part of the problem is the ancients didn’t classify their stones the way we do. This jasper is probably white, an opal or a diamond. In those days they didn’t know how to cut diamonds symmetrically, so they didn’t appear more or less translucent, the way ours do. Learning to cut diamonds symmetrically is a fairly recent discovery.
The carnelian.… The King James Version has the sardine, but believe me … it’s not a fish. It was sometimes called a sardius because it was mined at Sardis. It’s probably a carnelian, a scarlet red gem. The emerald, like ours, is green. This rainbow or iris, multicolored. Why this description? The best analogy I can think of is a visit to the Tower of London and seeing the Crown Jewels.
Have you been? Probably only foreigners like me ever go there. When we lived in England off and on for many years, we made sure we brought our children to see them. You line up in a queue and eventually get inside. All of the Crown Jewels are enclosed in glass cases with well-hidden security systems everywhere and spotlights shining down on them.
Gold-encrusted swords, jewels that are bathed in light and surrounded in the poshest velvet, crowns from various periods of the British monarchy, and so forth. Circling all through these display cabinets are two paths. If you go on the inner path, you’re supposed to keep walking. The guards say, “Keep moving. Keep moving.” A little sign says, “Do not stop.”
If you go on the path that’s three feet farther back, then you can actually stop and stare and look. I’ve been through both ways. You can go to the closer one, and actually, you’re only this far away from the glass case. It’s just quite amazing. All these jewels! It’s not the wealth that is intriguing. It’s the play of light on all these jewels. Those jewels are simply spectacular with all of the light refracting through them.
If you get outside the vision of one of the guards and actually stop when you’re only this far away and then you move your head a millimeter, the refraction changes. It’s like a kaleidoscope in jewels. You move your head again back and forth, and the pattern is just spectacularly entrancing. You could stay there.… “Move along. Move along.” Then you go to the next case and hide behind that one. It is really very entrancing indeed.
How do you describe a God who is purer than the driven snow, who is more magnificent than the most stunning sunset, who is more entrancing than a million twinkling stars, who is more nourishing than the best of foods, whose love is firmer and yet more tender than that of the wisest and best of parents, who is more awesome than all the unleashed forces of nature? How do you describe a God like that?
You see, perhaps part of the force of this is that he is not described in any way that would enable you to draw a picture. It reminds you of the vision of God in Ezekiel, chapter 1. Do you remember this mobile throne vision in Ezekiel chapter 1, with wheels within wheels and this great chariot that serves as a kind of mobile throne for God?
Eventually, as you begin to see the creatures that are supporting this ark on which God rests and you get closer and closer, there is a voice from above the expanse over the heads of the creatures that are supporting this expanse. High above on the throne was a figure like that of a man (1:26). Not a man’s figure. Like that of a man.
As you get closer, “I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.” It was simultaneously brilliant, but it was defused, so you couldn’t quite draw it. “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” Try and draw that.
I know we have to think about God, but we make a big mistake if we try to think of him as a souped-up human being, a grandfather figure with a long white beard, a sort of Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, thundering figure, half-naked, well-built, with muscled arm, thundering something to you, looking somewhat disgusted. A kind of Superman figure in medieval garb.
So much bigger. The whole point is that this an indescribable majesty. Our visions of God are simply too small. Even the best of us and most experienced of us have only small glimpses of the majesty of this God.
2. The divine throne is enhanced by spectacular heavenly beings.
Verse 4: “Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads.” I need to tell you there have been two schools of thought across the centuries as to whom these elders represent.
One view is these elders represent Christians, or believers, both from the Old Testament and the New. Twenty-four? Twelve plus twelve. The 12 tribes of the Old and the 12 apostles of the New. They have white raiment and crowns on their heads. These could be the rewards given to overcomers as in chapter 3, verse 4. They’re clearly emblematic in some sense.
Moreover, this is based in part on a translation you find in the King James Version again, the Authorized Version, in the next chapter, where these people say, “Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood.” If the elders actually say that (“Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood”), that settles it. They’re Christians, all right.
Most translations say, rightly, as in the NIV, “You have purchased men for God from every tribe and tongue. With your blood you purchased men for God.” That is, the elders speak of the men and women the blood has purchased, not of themselves as having been purchased. That is, there is a difference introduced.
I belong, in fact, to another group of interpreters across the centuries who hold that these elders are a high order of angels. Let me give you at least a few of the reasons and show you how they function in this chapter. Later on, they offer the prayers of God’s saints to God. They convey them to God. We’ll see this early tomorrow morning in chapter 5, verse 8, and an angel does this in chapter 8, verse 3. It seems to be one of the angelic functions.
Moreover, angels under various guises are very common in apocalyptic literature, usually wearing white and not infrequently wearing crowns. In chapter 14, verse 3, Christians appear to be singing a new song, a song of redemption which not even the elders can sing. Has it ever crossed your mind there has arisen a Redeemer for fallen human beings like you and me and not for fallen angels? Angels can never sing a song of redemption in participatory categories. They can’t do it, and the elders can’t sing this new song.
Paul refers to certain ranks of angels as thrones, principalities, and powers. They are on thrones here. Perhaps, this is also supported by the vision of chapter 7, verses 9 to 11. There is a great multitude around the throne, the multitude of the saved, of the redeemed. There are second concentric ranks of heavenly beings: angels, elders, and the four living creatures. In other words, angels, elders, four living creatures.… It sounds as if the elders are in ascending order of angelic beings.
That’s what it sounds like, and lest we miss the point in chapter 7, the same order of things is found in chapter 19, verses 1 to 4. These elders may refer to heavenly beings as early as Isaiah 24. That’s another long discussion, but in any case, this throne is surrounded by 24 elders, and they have crowns of gold on their heads. They are themselves enthroned. They enhance the throne.
Supposing you get to know me a little this weekend, and lo and behold, you’re visiting Chicago later in the summer, and you manage to get my address. One Saturday you show up on my door at 8:00. “Hi! Do you remember me from Summer at the Castle?” “Come on in. You’re just in time for breakfast. Do you like blueberry pancakes?” Maybe you’re going to come out now! You come in and sit down, and we talk about what you’re doing with your summer. Maybe you’re off to a camp somewhere yourself. We chat and so on.
Supposing you decided instead that you’re making a trip to North America and you drop in on President Bush. You arrive at the White House and you press the doorbell and say, “Hi. I’m just dropping in. I’d like to see you.” No. It doesn’t work like that, does it? Why not? Because the more important you are, the more you’re surrounded by flunkies. I have no flunkies around me. None. I’m not shielded by anybody. The more important you are, the more security people you have and cabinet people and secretaries. You know, flunkies.
If you’re very important, even your flunkies have flunkies, and your flunkies’ flunkies have flunkies, so that you’re surrounded by all of these very important people who themselves are surrounded by security people and secretaries and so on. There’s no way you arrive at the White House.… You can’t find a doorbell to push, anyway, and there’s no way dear ol’ George is going to arrive in his Stetson and jeans and invite you in for blueberry pancakes. It’s just not going to happen.
How do you approach the throne of God? We have so stressed in Christianity (rightly, in one way, as we’ll see tomorrow) our access to God that we forget God is different from us. He is separated from us. He’s not just sort of a big comfortable teddy bear in the sky. He’s not simply a grandfather figure who will always pick you up on his knee.
He’s surrounded by high orders of angelic beings who themselves are royal. Later on, they participate in the praise of heaven, as we’ll see. Later on, we’ll see they cast their own crowns before him showing that all of their authority, all of their own majesty is derived so at the end of the day only God is God.
3. We find a series of quick vignettes to stress the holy separateness of the Almighty.
Verses 5 and 6a: First, “From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder.” Second, “Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God.” And third, “Also before the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal.” Let’s consider these quickly.
A) The storms
I’m a Canadian, and when I was a boy I was brought up in French Canada in the Saint Lawrence Valley system. There we have some of the most spectacular thunderstorms on God’s green earth. I know you get thunderstorms here in Northern Ireland, but with all due respect …
I know my dad was born here and it’s the Emerald Isle and it’s beautiful and it’s green, but you don’t know anything about thunderstorms. You just don’t. You don’t have the heat here to do it. What you need for that kind of thing is continental heat. That’s really what you need plus, then, massive movements of air bringing in cold and hot together. Then, these spectacular clouds and clashes of systems. You see hail coming down this big on occasion.
When I was a boy living in the little town of Drummondville, our storms always came from the southwest, and on a really, really hot day (36, 37, 38 degrees) the sky would start darkening off to the southwest. Pretty soon, it was so black you couldn’t see the horizon. This was in the middle of the day. You just couldn’t see the horizon.
It might still be clear overhead or clear at least to the northeast, but completely dark in the southwest. Now the winds are coming up, and the trees are beginning to sway. Where we lived there were a lot of poplars around, and they began to sway back and forth as the winds began to gust. You’d watch this storm come in, and then way off in this hiddenness, in this darkness, in this blackness, you’d see a sudden lightning of something. You wouldn’t see any actual fork lightning at this point. The whole thing would illuminate a little bit, and you’d count the seconds.
One … two … three … four.… Sound takes about five seconds to travel a mile. You’d get to 28 … 29 … 30, and then you’d hear it. You knew it was off five or six miles away yet. It got darker and darker. Now you’d see the form of the cumulonimbus clouds above your head, with dark shapes spiraling through them.
The wind up there was so strong the clouds were just sweeping along. Now you see the actual forked lightning. One … two … three.… You’d get to 16 or 17, and the thunder was already spectacularly loud. You’d watch it. It would get closer and closer. The wind is really up now. Often, winds of 30, 40, or 50 miles an hour. That was common in these storms. Of course, these are also the storms that can suddenly build tornadoes as well, too.
You’re standing there watching this, and suddenly, there’s a raindrop. This is not Irish mist. This is a raindrop the size of a small bucket. Splat! Splat! If it hits your head first, your head is drenched. You already have a wet head. Splat! Splat! You have about three seconds before this thing just opens up and dumps on you. It just comes down, and you’re wet right through very quickly. By this time, you’re counting the seconds. One … two … three … four.… You get to six … seven … eight …
Then the thunder begins to roll, because it’s not just one little lightning flash and then one … two … three. It’s a flash there and a flash there. Flash! Flash! They’re all around you. It just rolls in and rolls in and rolls in at a very high decibel noise. If you’re really lucky, you’ll actually spot a lightning bolt hit a tree. The tree would just crack apart or explode in flames or a branch would come off. It might only be a half a mile away. Bang! The noise comes in on you. That’s a thunderstorm.
They have storms like that in the Middle East, too. God’s throne is surrounded by storms. Do you see the effect? In times before nuclear power, the greatest energy human beings could think of was simply nature unleashed in violent storms. You didn’t tamper with that. It wasn’t able to be domesticated. It wasn’t something you could harness. You feared it. You kept away from it. You sought shelter.
Of course, that’s what happened when God gave the law. Read Exodus 19:16. “On the third day in the morning there were thunders and lightnings, with a thick cloud upon the mountain, so that all the people in the camp trembled.” That’s the background of this. God discloses himself, and people tremble. This is not just a cute, cuddly God. He’s the other side of the storms you dare not traverse.
B) The seven lamps
They’ve already been identified for us in chapter 1 as the seven spirits of God. Again, there’s a dispute about whether this is referring to the Holy Spirit in the sevenfold categories you find in Isaiah, chapter 11, or if these, too, are high orders of angelic beings. I could go into a long excursus into which is which. It doesn’t really make any difference in terms of the general effect. The general effect, again, is this distances God from us, because you don’t have right access to him. You don’t have immediacy to him. He’s distanced by his agents.
That’s true even in the warmest Christian understanding of the role of the Spirit. The Spirit comes and mediates God’s presence to us, yes, but the Spirit’s presence is also a reflection of the fact that Christ is absent. The Spirit is only the down payment of the promised inheritance. We are not yet before the throne in physical splendor. We are there judicially. We gather around the throne, but there is a sense in which the very presence of the Spirit is also a mark of the fact that we’re not there yet.
C) The sea of glass
When we think of a sea of glass, we might think of the Sargasso Sea or something like that, where it’s one of the few seas in the world that are sometimes perfectly tranquil and calm. Then you have sea of glass clear as crystal. No. It’s a bad translation. The word clear is dokos. It doesn’t mean clear at all, as in transparent, so you can see a long way down and watch the fish swim.
It means glittering, glistening, and I suspect the sea here is not calm at all. After all, in the ancient world they didn’t have glass like our glass. They didn’t know yet how to make clear glass. Their glass had so many imperfections in it that, as you held it up to the light, it sparkled, it glistened, and it glimmered, because the light would refract differently off the different thicknesses or the imperfections.
In other words, when you say clear as crystal or a sea of glass, you think today of clear glass and perfect calmness and smoothness and clarity and seeing a long way. Some of have tried to understand this as symbolism of God’s omniscience, but this isn’t apocalyptic symbol of omniscience. There’s another one for that we’ll see in a moment.
No. The sea is surging. It’s surging, and the storms are firing over it, and the lightning is flashing, and you can see, then, the sea sparkling and glimmering in this turmoil of storm and violent color. After all, we’ll see a little further on in the very last of these seven talks, the sea for the Hebrews was not emblematic of adventure or rest or peacefulness.
We might go to the seashore today for our holiday, so it has positive connotations for us, but the ancient Hebrews were not seafaring people. It has taken the Brits to write poems like Masefield’s “Sea Fever.”
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
They have saltwater in their veins, but the ancient Hebrews didn’t. The one time when they had a navy, under Solomon, they had to hire the sailors from Tyre and Sidon, pagan ports up the coast. They didn’t have anybody trained that way. As a result, the symbolism of the sea in the Old Testament is bound up with chaos, with confusion. “The evil are like the sea, which churns up mud and mire.” That’s the symbolism of the book of Isaiah.
What this is saying, again, is the entire fallen order of things, chaos, stands between us, between John the seer, and God. God is distanced from us by his mediating agents. He’s distanced by the sheer spectacular display of energy in the storm. He’s distanced from us by this fallen order, this sea of chaos. What is it John says in his very last vision? “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and there was no more sea.” There was no more fallenness, no more brokenness, no more chaos, but here there is still sea. God is separate from us.
A number of years ago in North America (I hope this one was never afflicted upon you) there was a chorus that was being sung in a lot of our Sunday schools, “He’s a great big wonderful God.” Did that afflict you over here? It always made me think of a great big wonderful teddy bear. I’m sure it meant to be reverent, but somehow it left something to be desired.
Here is a poem from the Middle Ages. The English is old, but this is the way they sang about God in the Middle Ages. It was translated, believe it or not, in the seventeenth century, so this is seventeenth-century English, but it was originally sung in Latin.
Thou wast, O God, and Thou wast blest,
Before the World began,
Of thine eternity possessed,
Before time’s hourglass ran.
Thou needest none Thy praise to sing,
As if thy joy could fade;
Could’st Thou have needed anything,
Thou could’st have nothing made.
Do you hear what that is saying? If God were the sort of God who needed people to stroke him, he wouldn’t have been the sort of God who could have made anything in the first place.
Great and good God it pleased Thee,
Thy Godhead to declare;
And what Thy goodness did decree,
Thy greatness did prepare.
Thou spak’st and heav’n and earth appeared,
And answered to Thy call;
As if their maker’s voice they heard,
Which is the creature’s all.
Now here is a genuinely great big wonderful God. The holy separateness of the Almighty.
D) The four living creatures
They are transparently the highest angelic beings, and here they are found orchestrating the praise of the Almighty and reflecting the transcendent administration of the Almighty. They orchestrate the praise of God and reflect his transcendent administration. The symbolism here is drawn from two Old Testament passages.
One was read earlier (Isaiah 6) where you find these seraphim, these angels with six wings covering their faces, and so forth, and some of it is drawn from the book of Ezekiel where, in fact, these creatures that support the throne are cherubim. One of the things apocalyptic does is it mixes its metaphors.
It takes a bit from here and bit from there and puts them all together and makes this sort of new configuration. This is a way of saying you are now dealing with the highest level of angelic beings surrounding the throne, God’s supporting cast, as it were, around the throne orchestrating the praise of God.
Here’s what the text says. “In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back.” You can’t draw that either. It would look stupid, but it’s a way of saying God’s throne is omniscient. It sees everything. God’s administrative reign is never fooled because it sees everything.
“The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle.” That is taken right from the book of Ezekiel. Again, the symbolism is pretty transparent. In the ancient world, the lion then, as now, was the king of the beasts, so God’s throne is royal.
In the ancient world, some gods were pictured as young bullocks. The Egyptian god Apis was pictured as a young bullock simply for its strength. God’s throne is strong. The face like a man.… Believe it or not, that’s supposed to represent intelligence. The flying eagle? Probably compassion, care, swiftness, because the kind of birds they have are sort of like a vulture, actually.
They have a certain pattern for training their young to fly. When the young are old enough in the view of the parents to fly (they’ve been in the nest long enough), the mother will actually boot them out of the nest, and the father will be down below, circling, ready to catch them if there has been a miscalculation.
God, likewise, says in the book of Exodus, “You have seen how I have borne you up on eagles’ wings.” That’s the imagery. “You weren’t ready to fly. You should have been, but you weren’t ready to fly, but I came and swooped under you and bore you up on eagles’ wings.” In other words, God’s throne is characterized by royalty, by strength, by intelligence, and by care, by compassion. That’s what God’s throne is like, and all of it with perfect knowledge.
“Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around.” The six wings language, of course, comes from Isaiah 6, and there we’re told what they mean. “Two wings to cover the face …” That is, reverence and humility. Even the highest order of angels dare not gaze on God. “… covering their feet and lower parts.” There was a symbol for modesty.
“… two by which to fly …” Speed to execute God’s commands. “… and eyeballs everywhere.” Even on both sides of the wings. Again, you can’t draw that. A wing with eyeballs everywhere? It looks stupid. It’s a mixed metaphor again. The point is, God’s throne sees everything.
4. The worship and praise of heaven
“Day and night they never stop saying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.’ ” This is a direct quotation, of course, from Isaiah 6. This is sometimes called the Trisagion, the thrice holy. These are the only two places in all of the Bible where creatures address God, “Holy, holy, holy.” Thrice holy.
What does that mean? What does it mean to say God is holy? Sometimes you’ll hear preachers and theologians saying, “The Hebrew word means something like separate.” Are these angels saying, “Separate, separate, separate is the Lord God Almighty”? It sort of lacks something, doesn’t it?
Holy is bound up with morality somehow, too, isn’t it? “Be holy, for I am holy.” Doesn’t that mean something like, “Be very good,” or something? Are the angels saying, “Moral, moral, moral is the Lord God Almighty”? Again, it lacks a wee bit of something, doesn’t it? Holy has a number of different usages, but at its heart when it is predicative of God, it is as close as can be to an adjective for God himself.
God is holy. God is Goddish. God is God. He alone, in that sense, is holy. In that sense, you see, he’s separate from us. He is everything God is, but he is never not God. All the rest that is is not God; it’s a created something. In that sense, only God is holy. Only God is God. In that sense, holiness is the sweeping characteristic that embraces all of God’s other characteristics and attributes. In a derived sense, that which is associated with God can be holy.
For example, the shovel that takes out the ash from the altar in the Old Testament is called holy, but not because it’s moral. A shovel isn’t moral even if it does take out the ash from the altar. It’s not moral, but it’s holy in that it is reserved exclusively for God, for that particular task, for the taking out of the ash from the altar where the morning and evening peace offerings are offered up to God, where the sacrifices are slain and burned before God on Passover, and so forth. This shovel is reserved for God. It’s holy.
In that sense, we are holy if we are reserved for God at all. If we have been blood-bought, if we’ve been purchased, we’re God’s. If we’re on that side of the ledger, we’re to be holy. If we are God’s, there are entailments for us that are not there for shovels. What it means for a human being to be God’s is a little different from what it means for a shovel to be God’s. In that sense, then, we are to be like God in all the ways we can be.
Suddenly, we find texts that say, “Be holy, for I am holy.” Then you are introducing all the notions of morality and integrity and righteousness and character. In that sense, holiness suddenly becomes what is sometimes called a communicable attribute of God. That is, an attribute of God that he can share with us.
There is no text that says, “Be omniscient, for I am omniscient.” Omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. We will never be omniscient. There is no text that says, “Be omnipotent, for I am omnipotent.” Omnipotence is not a communicable attribute of God, but the texts do say, “Be holy, for I am holy.”
You start off with these texts that almost mean God is God, and then there is a sense in which we, his image-bearers, are to be like him, possessed by him, owned by him, on his side, and as his image-bearers, acting in ways consonant with all that he is, all that he stands for, all that his character is like, save in those areas where his attributes are not shareable with us. They’re not communicable.
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” It’s remarkable when Isaiah sees this vision of God, his immediate response after these words, his immediate conclusion, is, “Woe is me; I am a sinful man. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips.” If you really do see something of the sheer godhood of God, if you see how spectacularly Goddish he is, then inevitably, you see not only your finiteness but your rebellion. How unlike God I so often want to be, how unlike God I so often am.
“Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne …” We’ve just been told they do so day and night and never stop saying it. “… the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne …” That is, they acknowledge constantly that all they have from him is derived, “… and say: ‘You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power …’ ” Why? “ ‘… for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.’ ”
Let me explain this, because it is very important. I’ve been doing university missions in one part of the world or another for something like 30 years, and over those 30 years, questions have changed quite a lot. Last autumn, I was at Yale University and had a question I don’t think anybody has ever asked me before. The questions are changing. They’re very interesting.
It was at a Q&A time after one of the meetings, and this very articulate undergraduate (he wasn’t trying to be a smart mouth; he was just articulate, concerned) said, “Why does God have to be praised all the time? For us, if we saw somebody who needed to go around being praised all the time, we’d say he has real issues, really insecure, or suffering from megalomania. If God is God and he’s perfectly secure in being God, why do we have to go around praising him all the time? Is God going to have a bad hair day if we don’t praise him?”
Of course, for a sincere Christian brought up in a Christian frame of reference, that question probably doesn’t go through our heads too often, but I have discovered it is not an uncommon question after all. It’s one people think but don’t bring up too often. It just sounds a bit irreverent, so they don’t bring it up. Whereas this fellow didn’t have any reverence in him in any case, so he thought it was a fair-game question.
As soon as you articulate it, you think, “There has to be an answer somewhere for that. Surely, it’s worth addressing.” The answer is right here. If we want the praise of all and sundry, we want the praise of all and sundry of our fellow creatures. We are trying to elevate ourselves above others to be admired and praised by them, to be thought superior by them and by ourselves. It becomes a form of self-idolatry.
But the fact of the matter is there is only one God, and he did make us. Not to acknowledge that is to deny the very ground of our existence and the spectacular glory of the God who brought it all to pass. It is pretending we are autonomous when we are not. It is acting as if we are the center of the universe when we are not. Thus, it is denying who we are and it is insulting the God who made us.
The first responsibility of creatures, the first responsibility of created beings is to recognize their creaturliness. That’s why the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. The first sin is not to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. It’s the only commandment you break every time you break any other commandment. You’re not loving God and treating him as if he’s God, the one who created all things and lays down the ground rules and who is at the center of the universe and who is different from us.
It’s not because God needs to be stroked. When Paul preaches to pagans in Acts 17, he says, “God doesn’t need anything.” It’s not as if God is going to have a bad hair day if we don’t get our praise choruses right. No. It is part of recognizing God as God and ourselves as creatures dependent upon him. Here you are overhearing the praise of unfallen heaven, of what created beings, even the highest order of angels, sing before this God without being able to gaze on the sheer splendor of his glory, keeping their faces covered, as it were, with their wings.
They, nevertheless, cast their crowns before him in a way of indicating all that they have, all that they are, and all that they do is derived because there is only one God. It’s the song of creation. That’s the significance of Genesis 1, 2, and 3. That’s why John 1 begins with creation. That’s why Paul returns to it in Romans 3. For all of our human existence and our responsibility before God is bound up with the fact that he made us.
Have you ever tried sharing your faith with a friend at university or in the job somewhere, and the friend says, “I’m really happy for you if this Jesus business helps you and gives you a spiritual edge. We all have our spirituality. For you, it might be Jesus. For me, it’s crystals. The vibrations are really helpful, and I’m quite a spiritual person, but I don’t like it when you cram your Jesus down my throat because we all have our own spiritual paths. I like you and all that, but I wish you’d stop being so obnoxious. There are different spiritual paths, and you can keep your Jesus to yourself. I’m happy for you, but it’s not my path of spirituality.”
What do you say? There might be a time and a place for backing off and being a little more restrictive for a while, taking them out for coffee and talking about fishing or what’s on at the movies. Fair enough, but sooner or later, don’t you really have to say, “You said I can’t talk about that, but at one level that’s the one thing I can’t do. Do you know why? Because God made you. Therefore, you owe him. The fact that you don’t think so is the most powerful index of the desperate situation in which you find yourself.”
Don’t you have to say that somewhere along the line? It’s taught in every part of the Bible. The ground for all of our moral accountability, the ground for understanding what sin is, is first and foremost that we’re God’s created beings. The first responsibility of the creature is to recognize his or her creaturliness, and that means to worship God as God. Let us pray.
Lord God, we confess that sometimes in our imaginations, in our discussions, and even in our worship we have reduced you unimaginably. Forgive us this sin and help us by the categories of your own most Holy Word to think of you greatly again, to anticipate the day when, by the merits of Christ, we will see you face to face, to understand that our status before you as your image-bearers presupposes, first, that you are our Maker before you are our Redeemer.
Have mercy upon us, Lord God. As we progress through this book and discover it is truly a gospel book, help us to see the frame of reference in which the gospel is expounded. We are created beings, astonishingly privileged, horribly rebellious and mangled, and loved still. In Jesus’ name, amen.
