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Revelation (Part 7)

Revelation 4:1–4

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 4:1–4


We are stunned, Lord God, that even the highest of angels in your presence never cease their praise, singing gloriously and constantly. 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. So grant to us, we beseech you, a renewed vision of your sovereign, transcendent glory that we, too, may never cease in worship. Grant, too, we ask, that as we read the next chapter and try to understand it, we may join in worship of the Lamb that was slain. For Christ’s sake, amen.

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.’ ”

Revelation 4 and 5 constitute one vision, and it is programmatic for the rest of the book, as we’ll see. If you understand this vision, some of the rest of the book begins to unpack. It is really divided into two parts and conveniently this time at the chapter break. The first part is to the second part as a stage setting is to a stage drama. In other words, chapter 4 sets the scene for what takes place in chapter 5. In chapter 4, there is really no drama. There’s no story line. There’s nothing unpacking. There’s praise in heaven, but it’s incessant.

What you have in chapter 4, then, is what heaven is like, a vision of the transcendent God. What you have in chapter 5 is a vision of the redeeming God. That is to say, a story line begins to unpack in which God’s purposes for bringing about redemption are unpacked in a plot line. We’ll look at chapter 4 first to the break, then take a break, and look at chapter 5.

Now I want to say a little bit more about the nature of apocalyptic literature. I’ve said some things already. I want to say one or two more things. We’ve already seen that apocalyptic is a literary genre. This will become important. We’ve seen already (we’ll see a great deal more) that the book of Revelation does take up symbolism from the Old Testament. We’ve seen that it is full of symbolism, but now I also want to point out that there is an inherent difficulty in people like us, mortals, talking about the throne room of God.

An illustration I sometimes use in this regard concerns the years when my sister was a missionary in New Guinea with her husband. This goes back some time now, 20 or more years. Nowadays, the tribal people in New Guinea, even up in the mountains, are all more or less pacified, but you’re only one generation away from cannibalism. She was at the tail end of that period.

Some of the tribes 20 years ago were so “primitive” (primitive from the point of view of Western technology) that they were pre-Stone Age, in fact in their technology. They did not even use stones on their arrowheads, they used hardwood like teak on bamboo shafts. So from a technological point of view they were primitive.

Now suppose, for the purpose of my illustration, that one of these tribals came out and learned the English language well. Then from this tribal, you learned his or her language well. You spent years working at it. You learned enough linguistics to know what’s going on. You learn the language, as difficult as it is. None of the Neo-Melanesian languages, for example, (there are 850 languages just in Papua New Guinea alone) has any passive voice, so you learn to convert all passives into actives and figure out what the subject would be.

You do it automatically. You are really fluent in this tribal language. Let’s say it’s Nali. Now you work for some company or other that requires that you get dropped back into this tribe, and by some stretch of the imagination you are not allowed to bring with you any visual aid, but you are to explain to these people the mysteries of electricity in their language.

Perhaps you’re softening up the territory for a future market. Who knows what you’re doing. You don’t ask questions like that in illustrations. So your mandate now is to go back to these people, let’s say the Nali, and you’re going to explain to them in their tongue the mysteries of electricity. How will you proceed?

Well, you tell them (you’re now speaking in their tongue), “I have come here to explain to you the mysteries of um … well you don’t have a word for it. We’ll call it, in your language, ‘electricity.’ I’ve just now given you a new word for your language: electricity. Electricity is like a powerful spirit that.… It runs along hard things like vines, only these hard things don’t grow.

People make them. They make them in buildings where you make things. (They don’t have a word for factories.) We string them from tree to tree. Actually what we do is chop down the tree, take off all the branches, and stick it back into the ground. (Forget that. That’s a bit complicated.) These hard things like vines get looped from a place where you pump in this hard stuff like spirit.

You pump it in hard at one end. It goes as fast as you can blink along this hard thing like a vine. This hard thing like a vine, it’s connected to your house, to your mud hut. (Let’s get the vocabulary right.) In your mud hut, it’s connected to a squarish thing with round things on top. This thing like a powerful spirit goes around and around the round things on top of the square thing, just lickety-split, as fast as you can go. (I don’t know how you say lickety-split in Nali, but I’m sure there’s a way.)

It goes around lickety-split as fast as you can imagine so that that round thing gets really hot and you can in fact heat water without having a smoky fire in your hut. On top of all of that, you can also stick this hard thing like a vine into a little round thing on top of your thatched roof, and when the spirit goes around in there, it’s like a little sun.

You can have your own little, private sun on top of your thatched roof so that … it’s like having your day extended. If you wanted to stay up late at night (I can’t imagine why) but if you did, you could see what you were doing.” How am I doing in explaining electricity? So far I have said nothing whatsoever about the molecular, let alone the atomic or subatomic nature of matter. I’ve said nothing about electrons being stripped off and pummeled down conductors. I have not made any distinctions between conductors and resistors at all.

I haven’t introduced standards of measurement: volts, amps, and ohms. I haven’t said anything about the subatomic particles. Certainly I haven’t mentioned quarks. I haven’t said anything either about semiconductors, which brings us into transistors and radios and all that sort of thing and into computers and all that. I haven’t said anything about how you generate this power.

I might make an analogy with lightening, but it sort of comes and goes, doesn’t it? Generate power, direct and alternating current, storage facilities? I haven’t said any of those sorts of things. I haven’t introduced microwaves. I haven’t mentioned radios or television. How am I doing in explaining electricity? What’s the matter with these people? Are they stupid or something?

No, of course not. They immigrate to America and their children have a very good chance of beating your children at school. Immigrant children often do. They try harder, especially if they come from a culture where education is valued. It takes us three or four generations to bring them down to our level.

They’re not innately stupid. That’s not their problem. The problem, rather, is their utter want of experience in this area. We are brought up with exposure to electricity in all of its doo-dads all the time. So, of course, it’s taught in school in one fashion or another from a very early age, but we’ve got categories for all of these things. Hard things like vines.… We know about wires.

We turn on switches and we expect little lights to shine. It’s our whole surrounding. We’re brought up with it. They don’t have any of the categories. They’re not stupid. They simply do not have the categories. I’m explaining too many new things too quickly. Well then, how shall we talk about the throne room of God?

We haven’t been there. Even the few who have … in vision, transport, some sense, some sort in Ezekiel or Isaiah or whatever … how do they put it? As in Ezekiel 1, a passage I briefly referred to the first day. “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” You can’t draw that.

In other words, symbolism, and thus apocalyptic literature, becomes a peculiarly useful literary genre for talking about transcendent realities. Our experience of God is so poor that inevitably our language is in very large part analogical. It is the language of analogy. In this case, it’s not simply because we are sort of formally, but innocently, ignorant like the Nali.

We are formally and culpably ignorant. We are sinners by nature and by choice. We don’t want to know God, at least not very much. We wouldn’t mind knowing him provided he could be decently domesticated and we could control him, but to know him so that he is the center of everything, the very God of very God. Nuh-uh. Much too frightening.

So some of the language that is used here then, I want to say, is peculiarly appropriate precisely because it is evocative. It calls to mind images and so on but leaves you with nothing that you can draw. That’s extremely important so that we do not domesticate God. Now then, let’s begin with the first part, the introduction. Then we’ll break it up into five major points.

In verses 1 and 2a, John writes: “After this, I looked …” After what? Obviously, after the visions and instructions of the first three chapters. He’s had the initial vision of chapter 1, the formal command to write the material in chapter 3. What comes next? “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.”

That has to be Jesus. There is no one else that could refer to, because the voice speaking to him like a trumpet in chapter 1 is identified as that of the resurrected Christ. Now Jesus in heaven addresses John in his vision who is looking up into heaven through some open door and Jesus says, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.”

“After this” What does that mean? If you belong to the premillenial dispensational camp to which I have made brief reference already.… I will unpack those categories a little farther down the pike … then what you are inclined to hold here is that the second “after this” (the “after this” at the end of verse 1 as opposed to the “after this” at the beginning of verse 1), means after this world order, after this church age, I will show you what must take place after this the kinds of things described in chapters 2 and 3. I will show you what must take place after anything you’ve experienced so far. After this.

Then in 2a, when John is caught up into heaven, he represents in that view not simply himself, but the entire church. So this becomes a rapturing of the church out of the way in this interpretation. Thus, the church is now in heaven. What happens down below from chapter 4 all the way to chapter 19 is really an embrace of a seven-year period of tribulation.

That’s what you’ve got. Chapter 4 to 19. It’s got nothing to do with us directly right now. Then after that, you have the millennium in chapter 20. What you have then in chapters 4–19 is a kind of announcement in advance of what will take place after Jesus comes back to take the church out of the way on this interpretation.

Although there are many devout believers who hold that view, I have to say, I don’t find it supported by these texts. In the first place, it is loading far too much on the second “after this.” Now you could make a case for interpreting the “after this” this way if there were a whole lot of other factors in the surrounding circumstances, in the surrounding context, that demand it be taken this way, but there is nothing in the “after this” that supports it.

This second “after this” may mean no more than the first “after this.” That is to say, “after this,” after the division of chapter 1 and the letters have gone off, chapter 2, okay John, I will show you now what must take place next. You’ve been to this. Now what must take place next in your sequence of experiences of visions? Well I’m going to give it to you. I’ll show you what must take place after this. Meta tauta is the expression in the original, and it often doesn’t mean anything more than that. Next.

Moreover, in the second place, far more importantly, the notion of heaven being opened and someone being caught up into it is a commonplace in apocalyptic literature. The writer pictures himself as a seer who’s caught up to see things that other people don’t see. That’s the way that apocalyptic literature works.

Only in this case, God is using a genre of literature where the person really is caught up to heaven. There is reality here, but because it is nevertheless a genre of literature, then there are expectations in the reader on what is meant. “Oh yes, I understand. This happens in a lot of other apocalyptic books; the reader is caught up to have them see something.” In other words, a first-century reader who’s read a lot of apocalyptic is not going to think, “Oh I know what’s going on here. John represents the entire church and the church is being raptured out of the way.”

In other words, that whole symbol-laden interpretation depends on already adopting a whole eschatological scheme and not understanding the genre of the literature. So if you want to maintain that eschatological scheme, go in peace, but don’t make it depend on this text. I don’t think it’ll fly.

Then in the third place, I think we’ll find ample reason for seeing as we go through these chapters, 4–19, that the interpretation then offered of what those chapters really mean doesn’t fit very well with that interpretation in any case. I think that what we’ll see in these chapters is something rather different from a description of a seven-year period before the millennium.

John says, “At once I was in the Spirit.” He’s used that expression once already in chapter 1, verse 10, where he has said, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” Now that might simply mean he was very spiritually-minded and was busy worshipping and praising God or it might mean something more like he was in a spiritual trance or an ecstatic state. He was filled with the Spirit in a peculiarly powerful way. In any case, whatever it means in 1:10, it is the touchstone for introducing this inaugural vision of Christ, if you recall in chapter 1, verses 12–16.

Now he says the same thing. “I was in the Spirit.” Either this means then that he never came out of the Spirit, if I may put it that way, and now he is called to a higher exalted stance or this was the next Sunday or some other time when again he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day or some other time. Once again, therefore, he may simply be saying, “Once I was in the Spirit when this voice came to me. I was in an ecstatic state and I saw things in heaven. I was called up through this open door.”

If you press me and ask, “Was John then actually bodily transported into heaven or was it a visionary experience such that in his vision the door of heaven opened and a voice said ‘Come up here,’ and in his vision he went, but he never actually left terra firma?” My answer would be, “I don’t know.” After all, when Paul had something similar happen to him, he didn’t know.

You recall 2 Corinthians, chapter 12? He said he was called into paradise. He was called into the third heaven. Then he says, “Whether in the flesh or not in the flesh, I don’t know. God knows.” Then he says that he was called again. Then he says (repeating himself), “Whether in the body or out of the body, I don’t know. God knows.” In other words, for Paul it wasn’t a very important question. I suspect for John it wouldn’t have been a very important question, either. So if Paul doesn’t know, I don’t think that we have the right to pronounce. I just don’t know.

Just for the sake of completeness, when Paul says he was called into the third heaven, the Jews had various devices for counting heavens. Some schemas had up to 13; commonly there were seven. Very commonly also, there were three. When there were three, the first heaven is what we mean by the atmosphere, the heavens through which the birds fly. The birds fly through the heavens.

The second heaven is what we would mean by the universe or the abode of the stars and the moons and the planets and the meteors and so on. The third heaven is the one beyond that, where God lives. Thus, to be called into the third heaven is another way of saying, “I was called into the very presence of God.”

Likewise, the term paradise, Jews commonly spoke in the first century of three paradises. The first paradise was Eden, before sin entered into the world. The last paradise is the new heaven and the new earth, where again there is no more sin. That’s the third paradise. The second paradise was sometimes called the hidden paradise. That is to say, it is paradise now, only we don’t partake in it. Paradise is wherever God is. It’s the hidden paradise, to us.

So if Paul is caught up into paradise, it’s another way of saying he’s caught up into the presence of God. In both cases, his language simply means he was caught up into heaven, he was caught up into the throne room of God, very much like John, here. So then, what is he seeing? What is he shown? What does he see? Five things:

1. The centrality and ineffable majesty of the Almighty.

The centrality and ineffable.… That is, indescribable. What older English versions spoke of as unspeakable, but unspeakable today outside of religious groups. It means it’s so awful it’s unmentionable. Verses 2b and 3: “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.”

A throne, then, first of all, with someone sitting on it. John does not let his persecuted readers or those who are about to be persecuted forget that there are thrones above thrones above thrones until there is only one throne. God is sovereign. You remember Isaiah 6:1 and his vision? “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up and his train filled the temple.” He’s sitting on a throne there, too.

Psalm 47:8: “God reigns over the nations. God sits on his holy throne.” This is the language. Now after you’ve established that, it is almost impossible to imagine just what John saw from verse 3. One of the problems is that the ancients did not employ our contemporary terminology in their classification of precious stones, but most likely jasper is either an opal or a diamond.

That is, it is almost certainly a white stone and in the ancient world, diamonds were not clear, because they had not yet learned how to cut them with perfect symmetry. That was something that was developed only within the last hundred years. So opals or diamonds, they would glitter and shine, reflect light. They could be beautiful. Refract light. But they weren’t clear. They weren’t translucent or transparent.

What the King James Version calls a sardine is not a fish. It’s a sardius or a carnelian, a scarlet red gem. It got its name in the ancient world because there were quite a few of them found around Sardis, which we saw last week, which also had gold. This was one filthy rich place. They had carnelians and they had gold.

The emerald, like ours, was almost certainly green. The rainbow, the word for it is the word from which we get the girl’s name Iris, iris in Greek. When it is cast vertically, it is used of rainbows, which is the way most of our versions take it. When it’s cast horizontally, then it generates all those medieval pictures of halos.

You ever wonder where all those pictures of halos come from? It’s on the assumption that the iris, the iris, is some radiation of light or the like that is cast horizontally. That’s where it comes from, but here it is probably in fact the rainbow. That is, a spectacular display of glory that any biblically literate person will also cast in their mind with Noah and his covenant.

So the overall impression then is of fiery, spectacular, entrancing beauty. The best illustration that I can think of in the modern world is the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Have you seen them? Some of you have. I hear that they just recast their presentation, so I don’t know how they’re set up now. I’ll find out in due course, I suppose.

The way they were set up until about a year and a half ago when I last took my children to see them, you enter the Tower of London and eventually you get around to the building where the jewels are. You get in a long line and go up and down these passages until you go down underground to see the Crown Jewels.

The Crown Jewels are encased in well-lit, glass display boxes with spotlights on them. There’s a winding two-stage path that goes around these displays. In the lower one that gets you right up next to these boxes, although there are security alarms and guards everywhere, there are little signs saying, “You must keep moving. You must keep walking. No stopping, no standing permitted.”

The guards are there, strategically placed, saying, “Keep walking. Keep walking, sir.” If you stand in the one behind a little farther up so you can look over the heads of the people down below, then you can stop if you want to and look at all of these displays. Well, the trick is to take the lower one but stop anyway. Well, not for long … you don’t want to break the rules too badly.

When you’re really close up with these spotlights shining down on sword handles. There’s a whole sword (the sword is a primitive kind of steel) and the handle is unbelievable. Diamonds the size of half my fist! Studded with jewels and gold, dripping with gems. Crowns and drinking goblets studded with jewels. Case after case after case of these things.

It’s not the wealth that intrigues me. You could never sell this stuff anyway, could you? What are you going to do with it, put it on your dinner table? But it is beautiful. It really is beautiful. The light shines on them and you stop whether you’re on the lower level or the upper level. You just gaze at it and the light is coming at you from so many refracted angles, it is spectacularly beautiful.

You hold very still. Then you move your head a millimeter to the right and it all changes. It looks different again. Move a millimeter to the left, a centimeter the right, a centimeter to the left, wiggle it back and forth! You get this kaleidoscopic display of color and glory and beauty! “The one who sat on the throne had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow resembling an emerald encircled the throne.”

How do you describe a God who is whiter and purer, morally speaking, than the driven snow? How do you describe a God who is more magnificent than the most stunning sunset? How do you describe a God who is more entrancing than a million twinkling stars? How do you describe a God, the knowledge of whom is more nourishing than the best of foods?

How do you describe a God whose love is more faithful and understanding and sensitive and self-giving than the ideal mother? How do you describe a God who’s more awesome than all the unleashed forces of nature? “God covers himself with light as with a garment,” Psalm 104 says. That’s one metaphor. First Timothy 6 says, “The Lord dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or ever can see.” How do you describe a God like that?

Indeed, the most important thing about this description is that God is not described. There’s no possibility here of image-making. None. I suspect that’s also part of the reason why the Bible has not seen fit to preserve the date of Christ’s birth. We have no original New Testament manuscripts as they came from the hands of the apostles, no original bronze serpent, no ark of the covenant, despite Indiana Jones. Every trace of anthropomorphism is cast off. Because if we had those things, we’d just make idols of them. That’s what we do.

No, this reminds us again of the passage I cited at the beginning, Ezekiel 1:28, “As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so is the appearance of the brightness roundabout. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” That was Ezekiel’s inaugural vision. In other words, this dazzling beauty is so spectacular, it almost masks God’s glory. It is very important that our God not be too small, a sort of being like us, only a souped-up model.

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.” Now let me acknowledge quite frankly that there are two groups in the history of the church that have argued that these 24 elders represent the church or represent the people of God.

The representation is cast in two or three ways. I’m not absolutely certain they’re wrong, but I’m pretty sure they’re wrong. Let me explain the arguments for it and then what I would put against it and why. They would argue the white raiment and the crowns on their heads suggest rewards, the rewards of overcomers as in chapter 3, verse 4. In one of the seven letters the overcomers wear white … victory, purity. They have crowns on their head because they’re overcomers. That’s what they argue.

Moreover, they are clearly emblematic, so 24 might be 12 plus 12. That is the 12 tribes of the old covenant, the 12 apostles of the new representing the totality of the people of God already in heaven. Or the 24 might represent the 24 courses of priests in the Old Testament, thus these people are royal priests praising God, or the like.

Above all, this interpretation has depended in the past on a mistranslation in older versions of chapter 5, verse 9. In chapter 5, verse 9, the elders say (we’ll look at this in the second half tonight) according to the King James Version, addressing Christ, “Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood.” Now if that’s what the text reads, that settles it. These are the redeemed. Has it ever struck you that according to Scripture there has arisen a Redeemer for fallen men and women, but not for fallen angels?