Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 4:5–11
So if these elders say, “Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood” to Jesus, then these elders represent the church. If that were the case, we could still make very good sense of the passage. Nothing critical depends on it. Nevertheless, with all respect, I don’t think it will work. Let me tell you why.
In my view, the NIV rendering in chapter 5 is right. The elders say, “You are worthy because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” In other words, not us but people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, so you cannot use chapter 5, verse 9, as a supporting text for that first view.
Also, in chapter 5, verse 8, they offer the prayers of God’s saints to God. In apocalyptic this is an angelic function. Just as Daniel has angels related to nations and Jesus mentions little children having a guardian angel, so we’ve seen here that the angel of the churches probably correspond to churches. Now these angels are sort of liaison officers, who present the prayers of the people to God. An angel does this explicitly in chapter 8, verse 3.
It has been part of medieval Catholicism that has tried to see these as mediating saints to whom we can pray, but even if they are angels who pass on the prayers of God’s saints, there is no instance of people addressing their prayers to angels. They have some kind of mediating function, but they’re never addressed in prayer. Never. We’ll look at what this passing on the prayers of God’s saints means in chapter 5 in the second half tonight.
More importantly, in chapter 14, verse 3, Christians appear to be singing a new song that not even the elders can learn. Now that’s very important. The new song in the book of Revelation is bound up with redemption. It’s the song of the redeemed. The elders can sing, as we’ll see in chapter 5, about a new song of redemption in that they’re talking about something new, not just creation but redemption, but then it’s always about other people.
Now suddenly the believers themselves in chapter 14, verse 3, sing a new song that not even the elders can learn. In the next place, although white is sometimes a symbol for the clothing of the conquerors in chapters 2–3, it’s also a common symbol in apocalyptic and in the New Testament for what angels wear. It’s not uncommon. Acts 1:10, Matthew 28:3, and many places.
Moreover, Paul refers to certain ranks of angelic beings as thrones, principalities, and rulers. These people are all sitting on thrones. They don’t have to be, therefore, triumphant Christians or the like. More important yet, the view these elders represent a high order of angels is strongly supported by the vision of chapter 7, verses 9–11, where you have around the throne concentric circles: first a great body of the redeemed, then concentric ranks of heavenly beings (angels), then elders, and then the four living beasts.
In other words, the elders are placed between angels generically and the four living beasts, the highest order of angelic beings that are picking up from the Old Testament, cherubim and seraphim, about which I’ll say more in a moment. The same ordering occurs in chapter 19, verses 1–4. The term elder may refer to heavenly beings as early as Isaiah 24.
Farther on, an elder often comes to John and explains what’s going on. Sometimes it’s an angel, sometimes it’s the exalted Christ, and sometimes it’s an elder, but in apocalyptic literature it is very common for an angel to explain what’s going on. There’s your seer who’s seeing things. The seer says, “What on earth does this mean?” and the angel comes along and says, “Well, this means such-and-such.”
An elder has that function from time to time in the book of Revelation, as we’ll see, which also suggests that it’s an angel. So with all respect to those who disagree, I nevertheless think that these elders represent a high order of angels around the throne. If there are 24 of them, I suspect that has very much to do with exactly the same sort of symbolism bound up with the angel of each church. Do you recall that?
The letter is addressed to the angel of the church, so there’s a kind of angel corresponding to the church, an angel in heaven corresponding to what’s going on down here. So there are angels for the people of God, and the 24 of them represent, thus, the angels for the people of God. I think it’s as simple as that; 12 plus 12 is significant in that connection. It’s the heavenly counterpart theme again. The 12 plus 12, the 12 of the old covenant and the 12 of the new.
Well, in any case, whether that interpretation is correct at this point doesn’t matter very much, because what is more important from the point of view of what is going on in this chapter is their function. What do they do? How do they operate? We’ll see by the end of the chapter that their function, along with that of the four living creatures, is to praise God constantly. Thus, they enhance the throne.
Supposing you were to arrive at my house in Libertyville unannounced, unbidden, on a Saturday morning at 8:00. You rang the doorbell, and I opened it to you, and I am wearing blue jeans (if I’m about to start some project or continue a project, they’re very worn, tattered, paint-splattered blue jeans) and a flannel shirt. I recognize you from the class, and I say to you, “Oh, come on in. Joy is just making some French toast for the children” or “We’re having pancakes today, sort of a treat on Saturday. Come and join us.”
Now supposing instead you go to DC and go to the White House and you press whatever is their equivalent of a doorbell, if you can get close enough before the security people clobber you. Do you really expect Bill Clinton to arrive in worn blue jeans and say, “Oh, you’re one of the citizens of the nation. Come on in. Hillary is making pancakes for Chelsea.” Well, that’s pushing it a little. “Would you like to come in and sit down?”
No, no, no. You don’t do that to the queen of England either. Why not? In fact, in my house I flip the pancakes. I can’t cook, but I can flip. The children aren’t interested in eating what I cook; they’re interested in watching me flip. What’s the difference between Clinton and me? There are a lot of differences, I’m sure, but in this peculiarity, what’s the difference?
It’s because he’s way up there. He is surrounded by functionaries. It has always been that way. The higher up you are in the pecking order, the more functionaries surround you. It doesn’t have to be a political pecking order. I tried to get ahold of Chuck Colson for something or other a couple of years ago. I wanted him to write an article or speak at a meeting I was organizing in honor of Carl Henry.
Do you have any idea how hard it is for an ordinary yokel Christian to get ahold of Chuck Colson and speak to him face to face? There are endless lackeys to go through. I finally managed it, but I pulled strings. I knew people. That’s how I did it, and we finally did get him. You never get Chuck Colson to phone you back. He has functionaries and lackeys. He’s important. I’m not. It’s the way it works.
So then how will you approach God? In fact, that turns out to be one of the major themes of this chapter. Before you get the good news of chapter 5, there is a tremendous amount of emphasis on God’s transcendence, his otherness. Before you get to the throne, this God is surrounded by lackeys, but even the lackeys of heaven are spectacular beings who sit on thrones themselves and who never stop singing the praises of heaven.
They’re emblematic of more and more angels who are surrounding the throne, which is unpacked further. It’s a typical thing in apocalyptic literature. You have a glimpse of it here, and it’s unpacked later. So in chapter 7 and again in chapter 19, around the throne.… It’s going to be unpacked even a little farther on in this chapter.
What happens? The 24 elders do all of this. They lay their crowns before him. By the end of chapter 5, there are thousands upon thousands of angels and ten thousand times ten thousand. You don’t saunter into the presence of this God. So what these 24 elders do in terms of the description of the chapter is to enhance the throne.
3. The holy separateness of the Almighty.
Chapter 4, verses 5–6a. There are three quick bits of symbolism. First, lightning and thunder; second, the seven lamps; and third, the sea of glass. What do we make of them?
A. The lightning and thunder.
Verse 5: “From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder.” What does that mean? There are parts of the world that get earthquakes. There are parts of the world that get volcanoes. There are parts of the world that get drought. There are parts of the world that get sandstorms.
I grew up in a part of the world that got electrical storms. That varies very much from place to place. It’s hard to find a decent electrical storm in southern England, for example. Oh, you get the odd thunderstorm, but they’re such Mickey Mouse things that are hardly dignified by the name. In this area, it’s sort of middle level. You get some. They’re not bad, but they’re not first-class.
Where I grew up in Canada, you really did get first-class electrical storms. The weather patterns of North America tend to funnel up the Saint Lawrence system. When I was a boy, I remember being on the porch of my parents’ house. Way off to the west-southwest, way off in the distance, already the sky was so black you couldn’t distinguish between the ground and the sky. The horizon was just obliterated. The whole sky was cloudy. Maybe off in the east there was still a little bit of blue, but it was disappearing quickly.
In the west-southwest it was completely dark, and the poplars began to sway. Way off in the west-southwest, you’d see a little lightning. You wouldn’t see lightning. What you’d see was a sort of illumination of the dark, and you’d start to count. “One, two, three, four, five, six …” Because you knew that light gets there in a twinkle of an eye, but the sound takes about a mile for five of those. So you’d start counting. You’d get up to 28 or 29, and then you’d hear the thunder, and you’d think, “Five or six miles away still.” You’d wait a few more minutes.
By now, those poplars.… Soft wood, you know. They’re bending 20 degrees, 25 degrees off center, swaying. By now the whole sky is very, very dark, and the first bits of rain come down. Not your fine English mist but Splat! About the size of your fist. Splat! Swaying back and forth. Splat! It just takes one of them to hit you and you know it. Splat! Then suddenly the heavens just open. It just dumps down on you. If you step out from the porch and back again, you’re drenched.
By now, in the west-southwest you’re counting “… 13, 14 …” Boom! Boom! Boom! It’s only two or three miles away, and now it’s not just a vague illumination on the horizon; it’s spectacular displays of forked lightning from cloud to cloud and cloud to ground. You’re watching this, and if you’re really fortunate, occasionally you’ll see one within the half-mile vision of your eye hitting a tree. Splat! And an oak just opens up. And a scared little boy went back inside the house.
In the days before nuclear power, there was no greater display of sheer raw energy known to human beings than nature unleashed, and a really good one was terrifying. It is still pretty terrifying. Ask the people of Kobe. Around God’s throne, emerging right from the throne, is terrible thunder and lightning. That’s what you have here. On the one hand, this will be reminiscent, for people of biblical background, of the giving of the Law.
When God comes down on Mount Sinai, the whole mountain is shaking from the thunder and lightning, and the people cry out, “We don’t want to get any closer to this God. Moses, you stand in for us. You talk to him for us. We can’t get closer to this God. He’s too terrifying.” Why? Because they saw God and they were scared? No, they just saw some of his milder manifestations, what we think of as terrible thunderstorms, and they were scared. At least they had the sense to be scared.
“And it came to pass on the third day in the morning that there were thunders and lightnings and thick cloud upon the mount, so that all the people in the camp trembled.” So Exodus 19. Now John sees it all again. So is he going to wander into the throne room of God and say, “Hi, God; I’m here”? Everything in this chapter is distancing God from us. Do you see that?
B. The seven lamps.
They were introduced in chapter 1, verse 4, and then repeated again in 1:20. Bound up with the seven spirits of God. What does that mean? “Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God.” What does that mean? Well, again, I’m not positive. There is one interpretation that takes these to be an odd way of referring to the Holy Spirit. The sevenfold Spirit of God or something like that, based, in fact, on the Greek rendering of Isaiah, chapter 11, verse 2.
In Isaiah, chapter 11, verse 2, one of those lovely messianic passages that picture what it will be finally, we read, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest upon him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” That sevenfold list is sometimes taken to be a way of referring to the one Spirit.
Clearly, Isaiah 11 is not saying there are seven spirits, the Spirit of wisdom, then the Spirit of understanding, and there’s another one called the Spirit of the fear of the Lord, then there’s another one.… It’s not saying that. It’s a different way of describing the same unique Spirit. So also here. These seven spirits of God may simply be the Holy Spirit.
If that is the meaning, then it is important to remember that although the Spirit of God in one sense brings God to us, in another sense he is a symbol of God’s distance from us. If in Paul’s thought, for example, the Spirit of God is the down payment of our promised inheritance, the “presencing” of God with us, or in John’s thought, the agent whom Christ has left behind until Christ comes back, then as wonderful as he is, it’s also a sign that Christ hasn’t come back, that he’s only the down payment and the full inheritance isn’t here yet.
So the same Spirit who comes to presence God with us is also a way of saying that God is not yet with us, not in all of his unshielded glory. Not yet. But I’m not sure that’s the right interpretation, in any case. This label, the seven spirits of God, comes up one more time in the book of Revelation, and I will defend the position I take when he shows up the next time. I will just mention the interpretation that I take now, and then I’ll try and defend it later, because I think it can be defended at some considerable length.
I think, again, you’re dealing with seven spirits. Not the Holy Spirit; seven angelic beings who are peculiarly commissioned in a variety of important ways, who are quick to do God’s command, and who are bound up with the churches, and so forth. In any case, what it means is there are more intermediaries between John and the throne.
C. The sea of glass.
What does that mean? Some have said the transparency of it is a way of saying that God sees everything. There’s his throne, and God sort of looks down through the glass, and he can see everything below. So it’s a way of referring to God’s omniscience. I don’t think so, for two reasons.
First, there is a common way of referring to God’s omniscience in apocalyptic literature; namely, eyes everywhere. We’ll see them a little later. Eyes on the wings, eyes under the wings, eyes everywhere. It’s a way of referring in apocalyptic literature to God’s omniscience. Moreover, no less important, glass in the ancient world wasn’t clear.
Now I know our English versions here often have “clear as glass,” but the word rendered clear in Greek equally means (and in my view, in every place that it occurs in the book of Revelation does mean) sparkly or shiny. Our problem is that we hear expressions like sea and clear as glass, and what we think of is superbly clean and clear so you can look down. It’s wonderfully pure, and you can see the sand down below and the fishes swimming in it. Clear as glass … well, it has to be a very placid day.
We just talked about a thunderstorm. Placid day? Apocalyptic does mix its metaphors, but this is a real wingding of a mix. A violent thunderstorm, and now you have a sea as clear and smooth as glass. No, no, no. Glass wasn’t clear in the ancient world. They hadn’t figured out how to do that yet. It was translucent. It wasn’t transparent. The technology for clear glass took centuries and centuries longer.
No, it was sparkly like glass. As light glints off ancient glass, precisely because it’s rough-edged and can be broken and is not smooth, it glints. So you have this lightning flashing, and now there’s a whole sea in front of John. Between the throne and John you have a whole sea that is glinting. It’s sparkling. That’s what it means. Not clear. It’s sparling like glass.
What it represents, I think, is pretty clear, because this sea language comes up pretty often in apocalyptic, and it too is steeped in Old Testament structure of thought. The Jews were not a seafaring people. They were not like the Brits, born with salt water in their veins. The Jews never were a seafaring people.
Even in Solomon’s day, when they built boats and sent them off to Africa and got gold and gorillas and lions and brought back ivory and so on, who actually manned them? People from up north in Syria. They wrote up to Hiram and got some sailors. The Jews weren’t sailors. So for them, and hence for the Old Testament literature, the sea becomes a symbol for chaos, for confusion, for un-reconstruction.
That’s the symbolism that shows up again and again and again. It’s not a symbol of adventure and peacefulness or anything like that. It’s a symbol of chaos. We’ll find this out with a lot of passages and illustrations a little farther on when sea functions in that way. Thus, in the final vision of the new heaven and the new earth in Revelation 21–22, what does the text say? “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and there was no more sea.”
Now that’s not talking about the hydrological principles that are going to operate in the new heaven and the new earth. What it’s saying is the whole created order of confusion and sin and chaos is gone. In the new heaven and the new earth, whatever else there is, whatever the hydrological principles, there is no chaos. There’s no sin. There’s no decay. There’s no danger. It’s gone. That’s what it’s saying. It’s not talking about hydrology.
So here what you have is John having to cross a whole sea that represents the fallen order before he can get to God, glittering and glistening in the thunderstorm. How is John going to cross it? On all three counts, then, all of these things conspire together to talk about the holy separateness of the Almighty. That’s extremely important.
There’s a medieval hymn with the music composed by Thomas Tallis in the sixteenth century. A poem that was written in Latin was translated into English by John Mason in the seventeenth century so that it would fit one of Tallis’ tunes. It’s in Old English, but listen to the words.
Thou wast, O God, and thou wast blessed,
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 that? If God were the sort of being that needed something, he wouldn’t have been the sort of being that could have made anything. “Could’st thou have needed anything, thou could’st have nothing made.” An older generation of theologians used to refer to that as the aseity of God. Some of these old theological terms have dropped out of usage, and it’s a bit of a shame.
The aseity of God was always considered one of his characteristics, from two Latin words a se, from himself. The aseity of God means that God is so independent, all that he is, all of his happiness, his joy, and his being comes from himself. He’s independent. He is self-existent. He doesn’t need us.
Our generation needs to come to terms with that kind of a God. God is often pictured as so badly needing us that his very joy is somehow shanghaied to our decent behavior. The poor chap is miserable all the time because we’re naughty. Or maybe God was lonely in eternity past. He sort of had to make us to cheer himself up, poor chap. That just isn’t the God of the Bible. Not at all.
If God does respond with joy or with sorrow, as he sometimes does (God is not simply an unmoved mover in Scripture, a mere rational entity; he is a personal being with personal responses, including emotions), it is not because he is captive to those emotions, as we sometimes are. They are bound up with his whole being, and they are his chosen course and path. He is self-existent. He is separate from us.
Before eternity began, God was, and he was perfectly happy. The Father loved the Son. He always did. The Son loved the Father. He always did. Their love was wonderful and complete. Read John, chapter 5. He didn’t need us.
Great and good God it pleased thee
Thy Godhood to declare;
And what thy goodness did decree
Thy greatness did prepare.
Thou spak’st and heaven and earth appeared,
And answered to thy call;
As if their Maker’s voice they heard,
Which is the creature’s all.
He made things not because he needed us. He made things because he’s a good God, and he’s so powerful that his power decreed into existence what his goodness had designed.
To whom, Lord, should I sing but thee,
The maker of my tongue?
Lord, other lords would seize on me,
But I to thee belong,
As waters haste into the sea,
And earth into its earth,
So let my soul return to thee,
From whence it had its birth.
That was a medieval view of God. I suggest to you that it’s a lot closer to the God of the Apocalypse than the God of some of our choruses. “He’s a great big wonderful God,” which sounds a bit like a great big wonderful teddy bear or something. “Our God is an awesome God.” That is much closer to it. So if the divine throne, enhanced by spectacular heavenly beings, emphasizes God’s distance, now, even more powerfully, the holy separateness of the Almighty is outlined by these three devices.
4. The four living creatures.
Verses 6b–8a. They are quite clearly, for reasons I’ll show you in a moment, the highest angelic beings, orchestrating the praise of the Almighty and reflecting the transcendent administration of the Almighty. The four living creatures. In older versions, the four living beasts. They’re living creatures. They’re living beings, literally in Greek.
The highest angelic beings, orchestrating the praise of the Almighty and reflecting the transcendent administration of the Almighty. Now the reason I say they are the highest angelic beings is because in their description, they take on some of the elements of the cherubim of Ezekiel, who are the highest angelic beings there, and of the seraphim in Isaiah, chapter 6. The angels there are seraphim. They’re pictured as flames of fire.
The language chosen to describe them is made up of language drawn from Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel in several passages, especially Ezekiel 1 and 10. The six wings, for example, correspond exactly to the six wings of the seraphim in Isaiah 6, about which I’ll say more. Moreover, the way they are designed, they’re designed to make us think of ancient imperial thrones. Sometimes ancient monarchs sat on thrones with heads of creatures sticking out.
He might sit on a gold throne, with a lion’s head sticking out this way, and a head sticking out this way, and a head sticking out behind him, and he is facing forward. Royalty. The lion is the king of the beasts. So now this throne seems to be seated on the backs of these creatures, as it were, with one head sticking out in one direction, one head sticking out in another direction, one head sticking out another direction. Four of them. Listen again.
“In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures. They were covered with eyes in front and back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, and 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.”
Again, there’s no way you can draw this. Once you have a creature with eyes everywhere, it’s pretty miserable to draw. It’s mixed metaphor. The symbolism is what you have to unpack. What is meant by it? Well, the lion, then as now, is the king of the beasts. God’s throne is a royal throne. God is King. The whole notion of the kingdom of God is bound up with the assumption that God is King. At the end of the day, God is King.
The bullock, the ox, was a common symbol for strength, endurance, stability. Hence, the Egyptians had a god called Apis that was figured like a bullock, an ox, because it was a symbol of strength, of stability. The man here, the human being.… In the physical world, this head is the closest thing we have to a symbol for intelligence. You don’t put up the head of a baboon or an orangutan or some sort of spider or even a lion, even a dolphin’s head. At the end of the day, the head symbolizing intelligence in our natural world is a human head. God’s throne rests on intelligence.
The flying eagle symbolizes either speed to execute God’s command, which is possible, or in my view, God’s protecting care. Do you remember Exodus 19:4? Don’t forget that some of the symbolism is already drawn from the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 19, the thunder and the lightning and so on. There God says (Exodus 19:4), “You have seen how I bore you up on eagle’s wings.”
Certain species of eagles, so they say, will find the mother eagle thrusting the eaglets out of the nest, usually not before they’re ready to fly. Then instead of falling down and crashing and killing itself, it spreads its wings and basically says, “Look, Mommy! Look at me!” The wings are well enough developed, and the bird learns to flap and fly.
But occasionally the mother makes a mistake, and then the father eagle, the male eagle, is circling around nearby and will actually swoop down under the eaglet and bear it back up again. Try again. God says, “You have seen how I have borne you up on eagle’s wings.” In other words, it’s an image of God’s providential watch-care for his entire people. This throne of God, thus, is royal, intelligent, strong, and providential.
The six wings immediately call to mind the seraphim of Isaiah 6, where they’re unpacked at greater length. “With two wings they covered their faces,” we are told, suggesting reverence and humility in the presence of God. “With two wings they covered their feet and lower parts …” Modesty. “… and with two wings they flew.” Speed to execute God’s commands in Isaiah 6. “Eyes inside and outside,” a regular symbol of omniscience; that is, ceaseless vigilance and limitless intelligence.
So these too are beings that John would have to navigate through to get to the throne. The importance for all of this for chapter 5 we’ll see in the next period, but already it’s a way of saying that God’s throne is characterized by certain very important things.
5. The worship and praise of heaven.
Verse 8b to the end of the chapter. “Day and night they never stop saying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.’ ” What does that mean? What is holiness? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. People sometimes appeal to the etymology, the root of the Hebrew qodesh, to say that the word means something like separate.
You can make a certain case for that, but would it be adequate to render this, “Separate, separate, separate is the Lord God Almighty”? Well, certainly the separateness of God is here assumed, but does it ring quite right? Holiness is often associated with morality, but would it do here to render it, “Moral, moral, moral is the Lord God Almighty”? No, at root in Scripture, holiness in its most focused sense.… Holy is almost an adjective for God. Whatever else God is, God is holy.
It’s almost a way of referring to the Godness of God. Because he’s different from everything else, that is, he’s separate from everything else.… You see, you do have this notion of separation. God is holy. In that sense, only God is holy, but then what he demands just to serve him is separated from other usage, so it’s only for him, and thus it becomes holy.
So under the old covenant, the censers and the things that move the ash from the altar, and so on, are all called holy not because they’re god, but in a derived sense now they’re only for God, so they’re separate from other usage. Likewise, human beings are told, “Be holy, for I am holy.” That’s not quite saying, “Be God, for I am God,” but God is separate from everything else, and we are to be separate from everything that is contaminating our being as God’s image bearers. Thus, it gets tied very quickly to morality, to ethics, to act it out, holiness.
Then in a still more distant derived sense, it comes to mean something like the spiritual realm as opposed to the secular realm, so that even pagan priests can be referred to once or twice in the Old Testament as holy men. They’re not holy in the sense that they’re worshiping the God who is really there, but they’re in the realm of the sacred. Thus, you have an even more derived sense.
So what you have is what this thing means at its core, and then more and more extensions of the term, farther and farther out, until it means something as weak as the realm of the sacred, but at its heart it has to do with the very godhood of God. Now the remarkable thing is that in Scripture there is only one attribute of God that is ascribed to him in this repeated way.
There is no text that says, “You are love, love, love” or “Love, love, love you are,” but “Holy, holy, holy you are” is found twice, once in Isaiah 6 in another vision of the throne room of God (some of whose symbolism has already been picked up here in the beasts and the four living creatures, the seraphim) and here.
In other words, before you come to the great truths of chapter 5, full of God’s graciousness and his provision, you have to come to grips with the fact that God is God. God is transcendent. He is not like us. He doesn’t need us. He’s distant from us. He’s not easily approachable. He is, in fact, awesome and, frankly, terrifying. He’s not dependent upon us. He’s the God of aseity. He was and he is and he is to come. He’s the Almighty.
Even the highest order of angelic beings never stop, day and night, from ascribing these things to God. “Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne …” We’ve just been told that they never stop, day or night. Whenever they do 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 a way of saying that whatever glory or authority or power they have is derived. He is the God of aseity. Whoever these 24 elders represent, they have no aseity. All that they are is derived. Whatever throne they have is derived authority. So day and night they 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.’ ”
There are two or three things you should understand about this ascription of praise. First, you are worthy in Greek, axios ei. When an emperor was crowned, the people cried out in Latin, or in the Greek-speaking world in Greek, and they cried, “You are worthy! You are worthy! You are worthy!” But John sees the throne above all thrones, and there the highest order of angelic beings address him and say, “You are worthy. There is only one who is worthy of that kind of honor.”
Why is he so worthy? Well, John has mentioned all kinds of things through the whole chapter. In that sense, the whole chapter comes along to this ascription of praise, but now he mentions one thing in particular. “You are worthy, for you created all things.” In other words, all things owe him allegiance, obeisance, and worship because he is their Maker.
You talk to people sometimes about your faith, and they turn to you and say, “Look, I’m glad for you. If it helps you, makes you feel better, I’m happy for you. I like your friendship. We can do things together, but get your God off my back. I want to live my way. This is my life. I’ll do it the way I want. If this God helps you, fine. It doesn’t do anything for me.” How do you respond to that? Well, there are all kinds of ways of responding, of course, all kinds of things that need to be said, must be said, finally should be said, but one of the things that has to be said …
It needs to be said in the gentlest, kindest way imaginable, but what still has to be said is, “I’m sorry. I can’t quit, because from my perspective, your very insistence that you want to do things your way is already a mark of how desperately lost you are. You owe him. How dare you say, ‘I’ll do it my way’? If he made you, you owe him, and the very fact that you can think, ‘I’ll do it my way’ is a wretched characteristic of all that is wrong with this world, including what is wrong with you.”
Isn’t that what we have to say sooner or later? At the end of the day, the doctrine of creation is precisely what establishes our responsibility to God. Without the doctrine of creation, you don’t have that. In a pantheistic universe, where God is simply manifested in us, un-differentiable from us, there’s no speaking of accountability to God.
Shirley MacLaine, who says, “I am god,” doesn’t feel accountable to God. But if God made us, he is worthy of all worship, all obeisance, all acknowledgement, because he created us, and by his will we have our being. Not to see that is precisely the heart of all sin. On that cheerful note, we’ll take a pause.
