Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the glory of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
Please turn in the Scriptures to Revelation 4. Revelation 4 is to Revelation 5 what a setting is to a drama. In other words, Revelation 4 sets the stage and Revelation 5 unpacks something. We are now going to look at Revelation 4, and in the second hour we will look at Revelation 5. Hear then what Scripture says.
“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 its 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.
Before we plunge into this chapter I should say something about how you interpret the book of Revelation, because it is strange stuff, isn’t it? Let’s be quite frank.
A friend of a friend of mine was doing university evangelism on a British campus not all that long ago and he was passing out free New Testaments, contemporary English, to young people who, in fact, had never read the Bible at all. They were biblically illiterate. He gave them away with the condition they would be read, and he would track them down later and make sure they had been read and so forth.
He gave this particular one away, and some weeks later he tracked the person down and said, “Well, did you read that book I gave you?”
“Well, yes, I did.”
“What did you think of it?”
“Well, it was a strange book, a bit repetitive. At the front end they tell the same story three or four times, but I sure loved that science fiction at the end.”
What was the chap trying to do? You see, he was trying to make sense of a literary genre in terms of some literary genre that he, himself, knew. The fact of the matter is in the first century they didn’t write science fiction. The fact of the matter is today we don’t write apocalyptic. There are enough similarities that somehow this chap read the one as the other. Do you see?
The fact of the matter is the Bible, in God’s great wisdom, is made up of many different literary genres. It’s not just set up like systematic theology, full of propositions and inferences and proof texts and so forth. What’s it made up of? Letters, history, poetry, genealogies, laments, paeans of praise, proverbs, apocalyptic, and all these different forms.
Each of these literary forms has its own way of making its own rhetorical appeal. Until you learn what they are then there is always a danger of misreading these books, of reading them the wrong sort of way, not understanding how they work. I don’t have time to give a long lecture on how this particular kind works, but let me mention a couple of things though because they will be important, even in this chapter.
There are a lot of standard symbols in apocalyptic. If I were teaching an ideal course on the book of Revelation, what I would do the first week is assign 500 pages of reading from Jewish apocalyptic literature from 200 BC to AD 200 AD, books with the name of 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch and The Fourth Apocalypse of Ezra and so on. I would get you to read that.
After you finished reading all of that, not that you would understand it all that well, you would turn to this one and you would say, “Boy, this is a lot simpler than the other ones,” because it belongs to a certain style of reading, and you have to become familiar with that style. God, in his wisdom, has given it to us that way.
One of the things this standard symbolism does, however, is use mixed metaphor. We will see that several times. That is, it will take some metaphors and bang them altogether in one big symbol. If you try and draw a picture of that, you end up with unmitigated nonsense. Rather each symbol smashes together and makes a contribution toward a kind of visionary thing, but there is no way you can draw a picture of it. You will see that is really crucial for understanding this in a minute.
Apocalyptic literature is given by God for some very good reasons. In other words, it is not that God was thinking, “Well, I’ve used this literary genre, and I’ve used that literary genre. Which one shall I give them now? How about some apocalyptic? That will throw them a curve.” No, there are some really good reasons why he uses this. Apocalyptic is very, very good at getting across transcendental visions; that is, visions beyond space and time. Let me give you an illustration.
I have a sister. I have a brother, too, for that matter, but I’m talking about my sister, who many years ago was with her husband, a missionary, in Papua New Guinea. She worked with a tribe that was pre-Stone Age in its technology; that is to say they didn’t even use stones on their arrowheads. They used hardwood, like teak, dipped in curare, or the PNG equivalent of curare, poison, on bamboo shafts for their arrows.
They hunted wild pigs that way. I still have some of those arrows at home. The tribe was extraordinarily primitive from a technological point of view. They were only about half a generation away from being headhunters. Suppose, for argument’s sake, you transplanted one of those tribals to one of the Western universities and put them down in a family where they were studying modern linguistics.
The aim was to get this tribal to teach the tribal language to some Westerner so the Westerner could speak it as fluently as the tribal. You must understand, tribal languages that have never been broken down into writing, as this tribal language had not been.… Papua New Guinea has something like 800 languages, and most of them have still not yet been reduced to reading and writing, although SIL is working on a lot of them, and some are new tribes and so forth.
This language has never been broken down. You must understand that such languages are extremely complicated. Languages tend to smooth out and become somewhat easier with time. Their vocabulary increases, but they tend to lose all kinds of fine refinements and complications that are there in a language that is primitive. Primitive languages are, in fact, extraordinarily complicated.
Nevertheless, you have some Westerner, you perhaps, trained in linguistics, and now you spend five years learning the tribal language. You now speak it like a native; you really speak it well, all the right accents and colloquialisms and so on. You’re dropped into this tribal group without any objects to explain what you mean. You just have your language, and now you’re going to explain to them in their language what electricity is. How will you proceed?
You say fluently in their language, “I have come to tell you about.… You don’t have a word for it, so we will make one up. We’ll call it, in your language, electricity. Electricity is like a very powerful spirit that runs through hard things like vines. These vines don’t grow. We make them. We make them in very, very, very big mud huts we call factories. We make them, and we string them along from tree to tree. Actually, we cut down the tree, take all the branches off, put it in a hole.… No, forget that. We just string them along from tree to tree.
In our villages, it comes in through the thatch of our mud huts. It’s connected to a little round thing we put up in the ceiling of the thatch of our mud hut. At the other end, we pump in this thing called electricity that is something like a very powerful spirit, and it gets inside of the thatch of our mud hut and goes around and around and around so fast it glows like a little sun so you can stay up late at night. Why you would want to stay up late at night, I’m not sure; but you could, because you would have some light.
It goes into other square things we make in our big mud huts we call factories with some round things on top, and it goes around there lickety-split …” Only you say lickety-split in their language, of course. “It goes around there lickety-split so fast it can make water boil. You can put your clay pots on it, and you can boil your water without any smoke. No fire. You don’t need the hole in your ceilings anymore.” All the Papua New Guinea thatch roofs have holes in the middle for the smoke to get out. “You can cover up those holes now, because there is no smoke.”
How am I doing in explaining electricity to them? So far I haven’t mentioned anything about the atomic nature of matter and what electrons are. I haven’t mentioned any of the units of measurement, volts and amps and ohms. I haven’t mentioned conductors and semiconductors. I haven’t mentioned systems of generation, distinguishing between alternating current and direct current. I haven’t talked about storage facilities. I certainly haven’t talked about Boolean algebra, the basis on which the entire digital world works.
What’s the matter with these people? Are they stupid or something? No, of course not. If they moved to the West, their kids have a jolly good chance of beating your kids at school. Children of immigrants often do; they try harder. It takes us two or three generations to dumb them down to our level.
No, the problem is they have no physical understanding of how these things work. They’ve never seen them. These things are entirely beyond their ken. All of the arguments are by analogy. Electricity is like a spirit. It runs through hard things like vines, and so on. I’m operating by analogy all the time.
How would you describe the throne room of God? Now do you see the problem? The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 said he was caught up into the third heaven and he saw things that are not lawful to be uttered. He meant two things by this. He meant that he wasn’t allowed to, and he meant that he really couldn’t, in any case, because the people to whom he was speaking didn’t have the categories. They hadn’t been there.
We are so blind as to what God is like, so cut off in our sin and rebellion that when God discloses something of what heaven is like he uses the symbols of apocalyptic, of analogy, so we begin to see through a glass darkly, because we can’t see yet face to face. That is one of the strengths of apocalyptic.
It opens our eyes to enable us to see things we wouldn’t otherwise see. What you have in chapter 4, really, is a vision of the throne room of God, and once you’ve seen that, then you’re ready for the drama that takes place in the throne room in chapter 5. This is a vision of the transcendent God.
John says, after these visions, the content of the letters to the seven churches in chapters 2 and 3, he looked again and a door was standing open in heaven, not so he could go up initially, but so he could see. Then he is invited up. “The voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet …” That’s a reference back to chapter 1 where the voice of the exalted resurrected Jesus speaks to him and addresses him now comes to him and says, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.”
“At once,” he says, “I was in the Spirit.” In chapter 1, verse 10, he had already said, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” when the first visions came. Now again, he says, “I was in the Spirit.” Maybe this was a separate vision, or maybe it is some additional degree of intensity, but this is all taking place in a visionary fashion for John. “I was in the Spirit …” Now what does he see? John sees …
1. The centrality and indescribable majesty of the Almighty
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.” John does not let his persecuted readers forget there are thrones above thrones above thrones, and way, way above Caesar’s throne is God’s throne. That’s a huge theme in this book: God, still, is on his throne.
When you try to understand the symbolism, one of the difficulties in trying to see what John saw is the ancients did not employ scientific terminology in their classification of precious stones. Most likely the jasper was an opal or a diamond, probably a diamond, but in those days they didn’t cut them symmetrically the way we do. That was developed only in the last 100–150 years. They didn’t have the same sort of symmetry, the same sort of glint.
What the King James Version calls a sardine is not a fish. It’s a sardius, or we would say today, a carnelian, a scarlet red gem. The emerald, like ours, is green. The word for rainbow, iris, from which we get the girl’s name Iris, can either be a rainbow if it is a vertical color or it can be a horizontal one from which you get all these medieval pictures of halos on peoples’ heads. What are you supposed to learn from this? The closest analogy I can think of is the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Have some of you been there to see that?
If you go to London on a tourist trip sometime and you get to the Tower to see the Crown Jewels, the security is pretty impressive. They may have reconfigured it since I was there last, but you go down these steps, and throughout this huge cavernous area there are these catafalques of jewels with glass covers, all kinds of hidden security everywhere, with lights shining on them. Swords, for example, with jewel after jewel after jewel on the handle with lights shining down on them and crowns and independent jewels from all the years of the British Empire.
Wandering through this display of glory are two paths: one that is really quite close to these jewels and one that is a yard or so back. If you take the back one then you’re allowed to stop and look. If you take the front one the guards are saying, “Keep moving. Keep moving.” You’re not even allowed to stop. You certainly can’t take pictures. “Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving.” Occasionally, you can get out of their line of vision and you can stop anyway. Being of rebellious disposition, I was inclined to do that.
You can get a little closer, and then you get behind one of these things, and you look at one of these boxes of jewels. The light is shining down on them and then refracting; it is absolutely spectacular. Then you move your head a bit, and it all refracts to another position. Then you move it back a centimeter, and then it refracts to another position. Then you go back and forth, and the light is just exploding in front of your eyes. It is not the wealth that is bound up with that. It is the sheer magnificent color of it all. It is glorious to watch. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”
That’s the kind of image John wants you to see. At the end of the day you can’t draw this throne. He doesn’t even say what this person on the throne is like, but rather there was someone sitting on a throne in heaven. The whole thing is glorious to watch. How do you describe a God who is purer than the driven snow? Whose love is warmer than the love of the very best mother?
Who is more entrancing than a million twinkling stars? Who is more nourishing than the best of foods? Who is more awesome than all the unleashed powers of nature? How do you describe a God like that? At the end of the day, you’re reduced to using similes and metaphors, symbols. Indeed, the most important thing about the description here is he is not described.
There is no way you can come away from this and draw a picture. “God looks like this.” Like the 3-year-old who is industriously drawing a picture and his mother asks him, “What are you doing, Johnny?” “I’m drawing a picture of God,” he says. “Johnny, nobody knows what God looks like.” “They will when I’m finished.”
There is no possibility of that sort of thing here, because the whole point is the symbolism is such you can’t draw a picture of it. Every anthropomorphism is cast off. It is like the great symbolic apocalyptic vision of Ezekiel 1, a vision of God. Again, in highly symbolic terms, one of the earliest forms of apocalyptic description of God, six centuries before Christ. After you’ve finished the whole thing Ezekiel writes, “As the appearance of the rainbow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so is the appearance of the brightness round about.”
What he means by that is.… Do you know how a child draws a picture of a rainbow and there’s a nice semicircle of orange and a nice semicircle of red and a nice semicircle of blue, and they are all put in there together with nice lines. The little child has been trained to color within the lines, and they are all nice and discrete. Whereas when you look at a real rainbow they are all blurred, aren’t they?
You can sort of distinguish, but not very easily. It is all blurred together. Even the glory of the whole thing was blurred so Ezekiel couldn’t see it clearly. Then Ezekiel comments, “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” I tell you, in much of the Western world our God is too domesticated. We’ve left insufficient place for mystery.
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.” Who are they? I have to tell you, frankly, that Christians have disagreed over the identity of these twenty-four elders for a long time, and I doubt that I’m going to resolve all of the disagreements right now.
There is one group that sees these as representing the church, or perhaps the people of God from both Testaments. Twenty-four. That is, twelve plus twelve. Twelve tribes, twelve apostles, the whole people of God. They point out that white raiments, for example, and crowns on their heads are often presented as rewards to overcomers. Moreover, they are clearly emblematic. The twenty-four might also suggest, for example, the twenty-four courses of priests in the Old Testament. After all, aren’t we royal priests? That’s one the themes of 1 Peter and of the Apocalypse.
Of course, the King James Version fosters that particular rendering, too. I don’t know if anybody here is still reading the King James Version, but in chapter 5, verse 9, these elders say, “Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood.” If that were the correct reading that would settle it, wouldn’t it? They would be the redeemed.
Although almost all contemporary versions from right across the track say today, “… you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God …” People. Not us, but people. I think that is the correct reading, all right. With respect, in fact, I take the other view. I think these elders are a very high order of angels. Let me give you some of my reasons and what difference it makes.
Angels, under various guises of course, are very common in apocalyptic literature, and they often have the function of interpreting the vision to the human seer, to the human prophet. In fact, that is one of the functions of these elders, as we will see in the next chapter. Moreover, we are told in chapter 5, verse 8 they offer the prayers of God’s saints to God as if they wafted them into his presence.
That is clearly an angelic function, for example, in chapter 8, verse 3. There is no evidence anywhere that human beings do that anywhere in Scripture. Moreover, in chapter 7, verses 13 and 14, John addresses one of these elders as “my Lord,” which is simply not the way Christians in the New Testament ever address each other. They are slapped down when they do; but it seems like an appropriate address, perhaps, to angels.
In chapter 14, verse 3, Christians appear to be singing a new song that not even the elders can learn or sing. Of course not, if they’re angels. Has it not ever struck you in the Bible there has arisen a Redeemer for fallen men and women but not for fallen angels? No angel will ever be able to sing, “Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it. Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. Redeemed by his infinite mercy. His child, and forever, I am.”
The most they can sing is, “Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it. Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. Redeemed by his infinite mercy. His child, and forever, they are.” They will never be able to sing the kind of song of redemption I can sing. One hopes their poetry will be a little better than that, but we will let that pass.
Paul also refers to certain ranks of angels as thrones and principalities and rulers. These people are sitting on thrones here. It is also suggested by the great vision of chapter 7, verses 9 to 11, where around the throne there are concentric circles; first the great multitude of the redeemed, the saved, and then in narrower concentric circles angels and then the elders and then the four living creatures. That is the cherubim.
It sounds as if you’re moving into the throne, you’re moving up the ranks of these angelic beings. The same vision recurs in chapter 19, verses 1 to 4. I think the word elder is used to refer to angelic beings as early as Isaiah 24, but that is another whole issue. What’s the point of all of this? The point is their function is to praise God and enhance the throne. The praising of God comes up in a verse or two, as we’ll see, but they also enhance the throne.
Suppose you decide in a couple of weeks to come up to Chicago for a weekend and you say, “Don Carson was down to see me; I can jolly well go and see him.” You find out my address, and you drop by at around 8:00 on a Saturday morning, and knock on the door. I’ll open the door, and I’ll be in my jeans and probably a flannel shirt. I’ll be working at something or another. I’ll either be writing something or going to fix something or whatever.
If the weather is warm, I might be out on my motorcycle, but you’d have no trouble finding me. I’m in the phonebook. All you have to do is knock on the door. I’m not hard to find. Instead, you decide this weekend you’re going to Washington. You think you’ll drop in on George Bush. You go to the White House and whatever is the equivalent of a doorbell.… That’s already problematic, isn’t it?
There is no way dear ol’ George is going to open the door and say, “Come on in. You’re one of the citizens over whom I am president. Come on in. Would you like some breakfast? Would you like to go for a ride with me on my motorbike?” There’s no way that is going to happen, is it? Why? Because he’s important, and I’m not. The further up you go in the domain of importance, then the more there are serried ranks of people all around you through which you must pass before you get there.
That’s just the way it is; it’s for your protection. Even the functionaries have functionaries and the flunkies have flunkies. You go through the second secretary to the third something or another of whatever it is before you go through security, before you even begin to get into the vestibule, and then after that there are a few more ranks.… I’ve been to the White House for this or that, but there’s no way I’ve gotten anywhere near the president.
So, how will you approach God? It shouldn’t be too surprising that around the throne are these tens of thousands, these myriads of angels as they’re described, and then closer in these elders, and then next to the throne these four living creatures. We have such a sentimental view of God, don’t we? This transcendent imagery is so important. The access we have to God we will come to in the second hour, but before you get to that access you’d better understand this verse.
In the Middle Ages, they understood this better than we. Here’s a song they sang in Latin. It was translated into English in the seventeenth century. The English I’m about to read to you is old. This was a medieval hymn. Nobody sings it anymore. Nobody. We need to bring it back.
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 see what is being said there? God doesn’t need us, and if he were the sort of being that needed us, he wouldn’t have been the sort of being that could’ve made us. There’s a word for that. The Puritans used it a lot. He is the God of aseity. That is, he is so much of himself that he doesn’t need us.
That’s what Paul tells the Athenians in Acts, chapter 17, if you recall. “It’s not as if God needs us,” he says. He doesn’t even need our praise. It’s not as if he is sitting up in heaven about Thursday and saying, “Boy, I’m just about desperate for Sunday until they get cranking again and give me all the praise so I’m not quite so twitchy. Boy, I hope that choir sounds a little better this week.” God doesn’t need us.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t interact with us, that he is impersonal; but he is not personal because he is psychologically needy, poor chap, or he is lonely up there in eternity. In eternity past he was entirely happy. He doesn’t need us, and if he were the sort of being that needed us, he wouldn’t be the sort of being that could have made us.
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.
Great and good God, it pleased Thee
Thy Godhead to declare;
And what Thy goodness did decree,
Thy greatness did prepare.
Isn’t that wonderful? “And what Thy goodness did decree …” That is, in the decrees of creation. “… 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.
I won’t give you the rest of the verses of the hymn. You see, there is a vision of God that understands something of the Apocalypse. The holy throne is enhanced by these great beings.
3. The holy separateness of the Almighty
Verses 5 and 6a. We read, “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.” What you get is three vignettes, very quickly: one, two, three … bang, bang, bang. All three have the same function.
The first vignette is of thunderstorms. I have never been privileged to live in Arkansas, so I don’t have a clue what your thunderstorms are like in the summer. Are they good.… I mean, really, really good? You probably have the right kind of climate for it here. I lived for nine years or so in England, and I have to tell you, thunderstorms in England are wimps. They have a thunderstorm, and it is so wimpy. They are all so bemused by how wonderful it is. It’s boring. Nothing is as boring as an English thunderstorm.
I was brought up in the Saint Lawrence system of French Canada. A lot of the weather of North America funnels out that way. It gets very, very hot. On a hot Sunday afternoon, way off to the southwest, the sky would start to darken. Our place was surrounded by old poplar trees, and the trees would begin to sway back and forth. Still bright skies overhead, but dark down there. Half an hour later, you couldn’t even see the horizon down there. It was just black. You couldn’t distinguish the horizon; it was gone.
Now you have clouds overhead, nimbocumulus clouds that are looking dark and menacing, and the wind is gusting to 35 or 40 mph. Those old trees are moving back and forth. Way off down there in the southwest you hear a rumble, and you start looking. Then you see there’s a kind of light that sort of flickers up somehow in this dark mass of cloud.
You start counting the seconds … one, two, three, four, five … because you know that sound travels about a mile every five seconds or thereabouts. You get to 27, 28, 29, 30, 31. There’s more thunder, and gradually, the number of seconds reduces between the flashes. By now it’s dark all over.
The first rain comes down. Not British mist. A raindrop the size of a small bucket. Splat … splat, splat … splat, splat, splat! Then suddenly the heavens open, and it just drenches you. You’re outside and three seconds later you’re drenched right through to the skin. Now the flashing lightening is forking all through the heavens. If you’re really lucky.… I saw it once … one of these flashes comes down, and smack! It splits a tree right in half. Now that’s a storm.
Before the days of nuclear power, the greatest energy known to human beings was nature unleashed. Think Katrina. Think tsunami. Around God’s throne that’s what you see, which means nobody is sauntering into his presence on a Sunday afternoon, “Hi, God. Nice day, isn’t it?” Everybody at that point is hiding under the bed. That’s the first of these vignettes.
The second vignette, we’re told, is of seven lamps identified with the seven spirits of God. They are identified for us in chapter 1. There’s a long, long dispute about the details of this part of the vision that I won’t go into, but at the end of the day it’s another way of saying all of God’s glory is mediated by his Spirit. However it’s interpreted, that is what is being said. It is a mediated disclosure.
The last one is this sea of glass. A lot of people have understood this sea of glass as being a mark of, perhaps, God’s omniscience. He can sort of look down through it. Clear as glass, we’re told. Bad translation. In the first place, glass in the first century wasn’t clear. They didn’t know how to make clear glass. That came later. Glass was made, and it was full of impurities, so it sparkled. The word that is often rendered here clear doesn’t mean clear; it means glittering. It’s sparkling. The idea is that the thunder and flashing lightning is sparkling off this sea.
The sea in a Jewish mind is always a barrier that is bound up with chaos. The ancient Jews were not a seafaring people. They’re not like the Brits that are born with saltwater in their veins. The Brits have all of these sea shanties and these marine metaphors, and they are all about adventure. Do you know John Masefield? I’m a Canadian. I was brought up on this stuff.
I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
Not the Israelites. The Israelites never had a navy. When they did get one they had to hire pagans from off the coast of Tyre, and that didn’t last very long. Then when they could afford one they didn’t have the sailors, for goodness’ sake. Actually, the symbolism for sea is not bound up with adventure and freedom and travel. It’s bound up with muck and mire and danger. Read parts of Isaiah. “The wicked are like the sea, which churns up the mud forever.” That’s Isaiah. That’s not the Brits.
So what are we told at the end of the Bible when there’s a new heaven and a new earth? The very first thing we read in Revelation 21, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth … and there was no more sea.” That’s not talking about the hydrological principles of the new heaven and the new earth. It’s a symbol, but it’s a symbol that’s saying there’s no more chaos. There’s no more disorder. There’s no more fallenness. The whole fallen order has passed away.
At this point, it’s not gone yet. Before you get to God, what is separating you from God is not only the fact that God is mediated by his Spirit and all the storms and lightning and thunder of his terror, but also the whole created order stands as a barrier between you and God. That’s what you’re being told. The holy separateness of the Almighty.
4. The four living creatures
These are the highest angelic beings. What they are doing is orchestrating the praise of the Almighty and reflecting the transcendent administration of the Almighty. The book of Revelation actually only quotes the Old Testament once or twice. That’s it. However, it alludes to the Old Testament in almost every verse, certainly every second or third verse.
There are countless thousands of allusions to the Old Testament in this book, although there are only quotations once in a while. One of them is right here. This picture of these four living creatures, it’s an amalgam. It’s an amalgam from two different places of the Old Testament, namely the four living creatures bound up with the mobile throne chariot of Ezekiel 1 who were eventually identified as the cherubim of God.
Then there’s the vision of Isaiah that he has of the throne room of God in Isaiah chapter 6, where the angelic beings are called seraphim. If you go and read those two chapters carefully you’ll discover that this picture draws some from one and some from the other. They’re “seracherubim,” if you like. It’s apocalyptic. You can take your symbolism from different corners and put it together this way. Take a look at it.
The first living creature was like a lion. The second was like an ox. The third had a face of a man. The fourth was like a flying eagle. In the ancient world the lion was the head of the beasts. He was the king of the beasts. In other words, this is saying that God’s throne is royal. Then a face like a man.… It’s saying (believe it or not) God’s throne is intelligent, because our faces are supposed to reflect more intelligence than a dachshund, you see?
The ox was for strength. God’s throne is strong and powerful. A face like a flying eagle … swiftness to do God’s commands. God’s throne.… God’s administration is royal. It is intelligent. It is powerful. It is swift to execute God’s commands. That’s the kind of vision. Then there are more things piled on top.
Each of the four living creatures had six wings. That is two with which to fly, speed to execute God’s commands; two to cover their lower parts, which was a sign of modesty in the ancient world; and two, we’re told, to cover their eyes so they wouldn’t look on God and die. That comes right from Isaiah, chapter 6. That’s where the symbolism is drawn from.
Then, to compound it all, this creature was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. You see the mixed metaphor. There’s no way you can draw that. Imagine this creature with these funny heads going in different directions or different creatures with different heads (we’re not quite sure which it is) but now with wings, and there are eyeballs all over the wings. Eyeballs everywhere.
That’s drawn from Ezekiel 1. There’s no way you’re going to draw a picture of this thing with eyeballs everywhere. That just looks too stupid for words; but the symbolism is important. It’s standard apocalyptic symbolism for saying that God’s throne sees everything. He is omniscient. God’s throne is wise. He never misses a trick. God’s throne is royal. It’s intelligent. It’s powerful. It’s transforming. God’s administration is swift to do what he wants, and he sees everything.
All night and day, we’re told, they never stop saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” That comes from Isaiah chapter 6. It’s sometimes called the Trisagion, the thrice holy. I wish I had time just to unpack what it means to say that God is holy.
It means more than moral, after all. It’s not as if they are sitting around saying, “Moral, moral, moral is the Lord God Almighty.” It loses something, doesn’t it? Some have argued that it means something like separate, but they’re saying more than, “Separate, separate, separate is the Lord God Almighty.” There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?
What you discover is that holy is almost an adjective for God. God alone, in that sense, is God. God alone is holy. He is separate from us in that sense because he is God. Separation now, not in terms of distance, but just because God is God. Then those who are belonging to him and doing what he wants then are separated unto him, and they, too, are said then to be holy.
“Whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne …” We’ve just been told they never stop doing it day and night. “… the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne.”
That’s a way of saying they acknowledge they are derivative beings. They are not junior gods, competing authorities. Whatever authority they have is derived. They are obedient creatures. They cast their crowns before the throne, and they 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.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the first responsibility of creatures is to recognize their creatureliness. Before you’re a Christian you’re a creature. The first idolatry is failure to recognize our creatureliness and all that springs from it. The ground of all human responsibility before God in the Scriptures is the doctrine of creation. He made us. We’re not autonomous. We didn’t make ourselves.
We didn’t give ourselves our own attributes. He made us. Every breath we draw is by his sanction. Every beat of my heart is by his decree. Not only did he make us, but he providentially rules over us, and that is why we owe him. That is why failure to recognize our creatureliness and thus our dependence upon the Creator is the first idolatry. Do you see?
That’s the set up then for the drama. So these unfallen angels around the throne, they recognize the splendid, sovereign God in all of his terrifying majesty. His throne is perfect in the execution of his will. There is no failure here at all. All of God’s creatures bow before him and recognize his Goodness.
Implicitly there is one more detail you cannot escape, especially in a missions conference. This is a set up for something very important: God is the God of all. One of the entailments of monotheism is mission, because if he is the God of all then the only way people will be saved is by this God, and what it means to be saved is to be reconciled to this God. There is no other meaning to salvation than that. Thus, monotheism brings with it the entailment of mission, but that brings us then really to the next chapter. Amen.
