6 Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. 7He went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne. 8When he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. 9They sing a new song:
‘You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God
saints from* every tribe and language and people and nation; 10 you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving* our God,
and they will reign on earth.’
11 Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, 12singing with full voice,
‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honour and glory and blessing!’ 13Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing,
‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honour and glory and might
for ever and ever!’ 14And the four living creatures said, ‘Amen!’ And the elders fell down and worshipped.
Stand and sing a new song called “Worthy”
Revelation can be a bit
intoxicating because the symbolic world it describes and the songs it promotes
are so vibrant, so mesmerizing, so rich, that it can turn you into a sort of
psychic paranormal conspiracy theorist looking under every symbol for some
hidden meaning or some secret code and leave you missing the more important thing.
This happened to me this week with the 24 elders of chs. 4-5. Despite my
warnings last week I got caught up in this tea-leaf reading quest of discerning
their deep significance. Who are they? What do they mean? I scoured over
commentaries and journals and discovered that . . .
a. They
could be angelic figures, possibly God’s heavenly court or council
b. They
could be the saints in heaven
c. Or
the twelve apostles and the twelve patriarchs or twelve tribes
d. They
could be angelic representatives of the church in heaven
e. Or
the people of God both Jew and Gentile – the whole church
f. They
could even be the 24 hours in a day, reflecting round-the-clock praise of God
But then I realized that if you want
to really figure it out you take the number 24 and divide it by the number of
vowel points in the name YHWH and multiply it by the chapters of Revelation,
excluding chapter 13, of course . . . Okay, this is a bit confusing so let me
show you my work.
Now, I’m being sarcastic.
Last week we began with
Revelation 1:3 which reminded us simply and directly that this book is a
blessing – “blessed are the people who hear and who keep what is written in it.”
Truth be told, I’m not exactly sure what the 24 elders are about – it’s a
mystery. But! Whatever their identity is
it’s secondary to Revelation’s clear presentation of their function - for no
matter who they are all they do in this book is fall down and worship! They
are worshippers. This is a book about worship. There are 5 new songs in chs.
4-5 alone. Singing is one of the most pronounced activities in the book of
Revelation NOT screaming, running, worrying, fretting, fighting, or hiding.
It’s a curious feature, I think, to realize that a text that frightens us so
much has so many people joyfully singing in it. The book of Revelation is God’s
last word on worship.
Worship is . . .
1.
a
game of thrones
At the center of chs. 4-5 is a
throne. Actually, it’s practically the center of the entire book. The word
throne appears in nearly every chapter of Revelation and often is coupled with
the one who sits there as a designation for God. In chs. 4-5 the word throne
appears 17 times!
The world of John is a world of thrones – the emperor and
his provincial governors who fashioned a symbolic world of civic and religious
architecture, inconography and statues, rituals and festivals, and visual
wonders, that still leave us breathless today. Rome and many cities were
amazing places. I think of the scene from Monty
Python’s Life of Brian in which Jewish revolutionaries are planning to kidnap
Pilate’s wife. One of them asks, “What have the Romans given us?” The different revolutionaries
then respond with a humorous recounting of all that Rome has provided: the
aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health, wine, public
baths, safety, and peace.
But Rome wasn’t interested simply in people’s health or
well-being. Its desires were far more reaching. John understood that Rome
wanted people’s worship; that unifying the empire wasn’t simply about loyalty but
about love. Rome didn’t simply aim to govern but to shape people’s lives, to
twist their desires, to acquire their awe. Not surprisingly, twice the
word throne is used to refer to false centers of authority and worship, Satan’s
throne (Rev. 2:13, a reference to the Pergamum Altar
which depicted
Olympian gods and their helpers fighting evil — the chaotic forces of
nature in the form of the earthbound giants and sea creatures; it was also
depicted on coins), and the beast’s throne. Not surprisingly, in the OT –
Ezekiel and Isaiah connect thrones thematically not simply to good or bad
government but with Israel’s desire to follow false gods. So while the throne is
an obvious political symbol, it connects more directly to worship.
Worship in Rome was easy, economical,
unifying, and fun, with magnificent pageantry. They were good at it. More than
simply a feeling they employed an array of technological wonders to inspire
fear and awe – talking statues, enormous fake snakes that writhed and flicked
their tongues, thunder and fire machines – a wizardry of technological liturgy.
We also live in a world of thrones. But rather than thinking of something as
simple as the oval office, for example. We would be more accurate to understand
“throne” in this sense as referring to a different kind of structure, like shopping
malls. Temples were political buildings aimed at shoring up religious identity
through entertainment, rituals, trade, and food. They were devotional sites
that covered the range of human existence. Similiarly, in our own day, malls
and advertisers don’t just want our money they want our devotion. In the
documentary film The Persuaders, ad
executives are interviewed who describe their work in evangelical terms. Brand
managers are asked to create religious meaning for people that offers them an
identity and an understanding of the world. Douglas Atkins, a famous ad
executive in the film, argues that to have a successful marketing campaign you have
to offer storied images that invest products with transcendence – that’s
worship. They aim to shape what we love, what we believe. Two Illus. Powerball Ad –
I was in the car flipping through the radio channels and a breathy announcer’s
voice came on: “Sometimes you’ve just got to believe. Believe in a miracle.
Believe in a leap of faith. Believe that there’s something bigger than
yourself. Believe in a second chance.” I was expecting it to end as an ad for a
new church and felt the need to repent until, “California Lottery Powerball.
You just gotta believe.” Scene from the show Mad Men in which the ad executive
Don Draper condescendingly remarks to a female department store owner about her
supposed naivete about love. He says, “The reason you haven't felt it is
because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to
sell nylons.”
The thrones of this world – seek to aim your devotion.
That’s why Revelation connects
worship to the vision of the throne. We need John’s vision to help us see
through the spin and unveil the often idolatrous character of the world we live
in – the institutions, the corporations, the governments, the personalities,
that desire us to turn away from God’s throne and worship them. Revelation seeks
to unveil the real character of things that present themselves as benign.
The point of Revelation is not so
much about divine governance, though surely it reminds us that God is in
charge. No, the book of Revelation wants to make a more profound claim that we
are at heart worshippers and that what or who we worship rules our life. The
warning of Revelation is that even good government and healthy economics can be
idolatrous. What would it mean to see what we buy, how we spend, as worship?
What would it mean to see worship as how the world is ruled?
2.
Worship
is about remembering a lamb with a scroll.
Chapter 5 verse 2, shows the
heavenly worship service beginning with a dilemma of a sealed scroll. Mysterious
right? I wonder what it could mean? Hmmm? A scroll that is difficult to get at,
decipher, read? (hold the Bible) A scroll that only the lamb can make sense of?
That only the slaughtered lamb can open? What could it be?
Now, I’m having a bit of fun and
going to say something to balance out some of the mystery of Revelation. Some
of it just makes sense. Some of it is playful and as I said last week
references not some bizarre future but other Scriptures in imaginative ways
that heighten their importance not obscure their meaning – a way of building excitement
and expectation about what we have. To a first-century Christian, “scroll”
would mean scripture. It is to be expected in the act of worship a scroll would
appear. Seven hundred years earlier in Isaiah, a book John loves to reference, the
prophet lamented that the vision of God was “was sealed” and that no one could
read it (Is. 29:11-12). One of the great excitements of Christian worship was
that Jesus himself revealed the point of Scripture - his teachings, death and resurrection,
demonstrated the Bible’s original intent, its true meaning, its plain sense.
This is a major theme of the writer Luke. In Luke 4:16-21, Jesus takes up the
scroll and, reading from Isaiah of all places – wink, wink, says he is
fulfilling it. We heard today the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch,
Acts 8 in which Isaiah’s lamb is “the good news of Jesus.” We need our worship
to be Christ-centered because he is worthy to reveal what the Scriptures say –
the resurrected Christ is our Bible teacher, Luke 24:27, “Then beginning with
Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in
all the scriptures.” Jesus both informs us, John says, and inspires our praise.
He is why we read scripture, he is how we read scripture, he is the one who
reveals the point of the book of Revelation and the whole Bible – it’s about
him – “worthy is the lamb.” When worship begins in ch. 5 with the sealed scroll,
John weeps. It’s interesting to note that when the lamb takes the scroll, John
stops weeping.
You’ll notice that I said that
worship was also “remembering.” We are so use to being told that Revelation is
a future oriented thing that we can easily forget its orientation toward the
past. Worship, Revelation reminds us, is about the past that creates our future
– the crucial issue in these songs found in chs. 4-5 is not what will happen but
what has happened. The people sing, “you
were slaughtered”; “you ransomed for God”; “you have made them to be a
kingdom.” Our worship, is oriented toward the historical event of Jesus’ death
on our behalf. So when you don’t understand your future, when your present
looks bleak – Revelation says, remember and worship. Because of what the lamb
has accomplished – your future is won.
3.
Worship
is a heavenly experience on earth
Last week I suggested that the book of Revelation served as
a poetic theology for the first three petitions of the Lord’s prayer – Hallowed
by your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth at it is in heaven.
Our passage links all three petitions to worship. Beginning in ch. 4 John tells
us he looked up and saw a door standing open in heaven with worship spilling
out of it.
Worship is more than what we do here in church on Sunday. It
is an open air concert amidst all of creation – heavenly and earthly. It’s a
full-bodied, creaturely, emotional, physical response of all of creation to its
Creator. “Open” is a good word for it for Revelation reveals that worship
incorporates everything. It’s about every tribe and every language, every
people and nation, every creature in heaven and on earth, and under the earth
and in the sea. Revelation reveals that worship and heaven aren’t bodiless,
immaterial things but about the stuff of this earth. And heaven – heaven isn’t
some cloud-like place but refers to God’s-will-in-waiting, God’s reign in its
fullness waiting to come down to earth. Worship is the doorway, John tells.
Worship is the mobius strip of the kingdom of God
But worship is more than the most diverse choir ever but
we’re also told that it is an unfettered activity – John uses phrases like . . .
“All that is in them . . .”
“Singing with a full voice . . .”
Weeping and falling down. To be honest, I don’t what that this
might mean for our worship? It certainly doesn’t mean acting crazy or overly
emotional – I’ve done that in my younger days and found it unhelpful – but it
also certainly critiques some of our reservedness, orderliness, composure.
Could John’s phrases be true descriptors of your worship, my worship, our worship?
I’m not so sure. But it’s a good warning just the same.
4.
The
last word on worship is “yes.”
“Amen” is such a good word. It’s
hard to find an equivalent. It’s “yes, truly, listen, absolutely, and will be,”
all rolled up into one. Isaiah gave God the title “amen” (Isaiah 65:16) and
John will do the same for Jesus (Rev. 3:14). It’s what the four creatures shout
around the throne and while Jesus was on the earth it was a word found often on
his lips – the phrase “Amen, Amen, I say to you” occurs no less than
sixty-three times in the gospels.
In the ‘Amen’ of Jesus we have Christology
in a nutshell. When we say, sing, or shout amen, God hears our unwavering assent
to his irrevocable yes – yes to the one who sits on the throne, yes to the lamb,
yes to God’s good creation, yes to God’s Word. The Apostle Paul in 2
Corinthians writes, “For in Christ, every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’ For
this reason it is through him that we say the ‘Amen,’ to the glory of God.”
Revelation reminds us that “Yes”
is God’s last word to us – let amen be your eternal last word to Him.
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