REVELATION 4

John here offers a dazzling vision of God which pushes the boundaries of human imagination in its metaphorical description. John’s own language reflects this; in contrast with what has gone before, he now repeatedly reaches for ‘as’ and ‘ was like’ and ‘had the appearance of’. As elsewhere in Scripture, literal description of God is not possible; God is unknowable even though he has graciously revealed himself to us. Yet within this kaleidoscopic of language, two threads are clearly woven into the visionary fabric. The first – the warp threads which give structure – is the Old Testament theology of God as the supreme Creator and the source of all there is. We see this in the image of the rainbow and the four living creatures, as well as in the acclamations of worship; Revelation stands in continuity with the Scriptural understandings of God as Creator and the repeated re-emergence of that theme in the life of his people and their encounters with God in the different stages of their pilgrimage. This transforms not only our understanding of God, but also our understanding of the world. It is neither an accident of self-generation to be trivialized, nor a resource to be exploited, but an expression of the creative love of God which continually points to its source. And if God is the Creator of the world, he is alos the Creator of his own people, and so they owe him not only glory and honor but also gratitude and allegiance.

The second thread – the weft, woven in out of the warp threads – is the image of imperial obeisance. Whatever honors and acclaim are given to those with human power – whether it is the wearing of white, the prostration, the casting of crowns, the cry of ‘worthy’ – they really belong to God, since the power that is being recognized is God’s power which he shares. Jesus’ words to Pilate, ‘You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above’ (John 19:11), are, refracted through this visonary lens, spoken to all human power. Power that demands allegiance over against or ahead of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is speaking a lie and based on deceit; if we are tempted to believe it, we need our eyes opened to the true source of all things. God alone is worthy of our unceasing praise, our unswerving loyalty and our profound gratitude.

REVELATION 5

If the previous scene in Revelation 4 was one of dazzling splendor, then its development so far in Revelation 5 is one of astonishing drama. The appearance of the scroll causes John to be overcome with grief and frustration. Here before him, it seems, is the mysterious will of God for his creation, and yet it remains a mystery – firmly and decisively sealed, so that no-one is able to read it and make sense of it. Yet almost immediately another figure appears in the drama, the lion who looks like a lamb. Nowhere in the text of Revelation is the lamb explicitly identified with the figure of Jesus (itself remarkable), but there is no doubting the identification from both the theological and textual parallels. Here is the one who fulfills the hopes of God’s people Israel, as the promised anointed Davidic king who is to come. He is the one who is fierce and powerful enough to conquer their enemies and tear them apart. And yet when John sees him, he is like a weak and vulnerable lamb who has been slaughtered, just like the Passover lamb eaten by the people, the suffering servant who was ‘wounded for our transgressions’ and the lamb offered as an atoning sacrifice. He is the one who was slain, but now stands, shares the throne with God and with him sends the Spirit to enact his will on earth. Here we have the most explicit (perhaps the most complex) trinitarian statement in the whole New Testament. John expresses his theological understanding by the juxtaposition of a series of (sometimes sharply contrasting) images. How we relate and resolves these images – especially the contrast between the lion and the lamb, and the images of power and weakness, of victory and suffering – will be key to our reading of the whole book.

The language of worship here does a remarkable thing in identifying the lamb as equal with the one on the throne in deserving worship and adulation, in a text which implicitly refutes the claims of human figures to be deserving of such obeisance. Because of this, it is reasonable to claim that is offers us the highest possible christological understanding in the whole New Testament: what we can say of God in worship, we can say of Jesus. The two figures of the one seated on the throne and the lamb are thus characterized as God the Creator and God the Redeemer. These figures are never quite merged and remain distinct within the narrative of Revelation, and, unlike the association of the Word within the work of creation in John’s Gospel, their roles also remain distinct. But in the final hymn of praise, the worship is given to the two as if they were one.

The placing of these scenes of heavenly worship following on from the royal proclamations to the assemblies in the seven cities has a powerful rhetorical impact. The followers of Jesus might be facing particular challenges and opportunities, located within their own cultural and physical contexts, yet the context for all their struggles is this cosmic vision of the praise of God and of the lamb. Where they might feel as though they are ‘swimming against the tide’ in terms of dissenting from the cultural norms of their society – in their non-participating in the trade guilds with their associated deities, in their moral stance and in their reluctance to participate in the imperial cult – the juxtaposition of Revelation 4 – 5 offers a startling reconfiguration of their world. All of creation is caught up, not in obeisance to the emperor, but in the God and Father of Jesus, and of the lamb, and any who are not taken up with this are, in fact, in the minority. It is an extraordinary cultural and spiritual counter-claim to the majority perception of reality. And in its emotive extravagance, this vision of worship is not offered as a rational fact, but as a compelling call for all readers to join in themselves.

It is important to note that, while there are elements that look to the future restoration and recreation of the world, this is primarily a vision of how things are now, and a reality in which readers can participate now, as an anticipation of the reality that all will one day see clearly.

(Ian Paul, Revelation, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries)

THE LAMB WHO WAS SLAIN AND WHOSE BLOOD PURCHASED SALVATION

Christ’s suffering witness and sacrificial death are, as we shall see, the key event in God’s conquest of evil and establishment of his kingdom on earth. Only if we can say that God himself was involved in the suffering of Christ on the cross can we do justice to the place of the cross in Christian faith. The cross is the basis and criterion of Christian theology. ‘the test of everything which deserves to be called Christian’. It means that God is decisively revealed in the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross. The cross must be the criterion which distinguishes the Christian understanding of God from all others. The cross reveals God’s love to be suffering love. To say that God is love is to refer to the cross. The only conception of God’s love which can do justice to the cross is that of passionate concern which suffers from, with and for those it loves. The cross is the event in which in which God makes all suffering his own. Here God does not merely enter by empathy into the suffering of all who suffer, but by an act of solidarity in suffering makes their suffering his own. In Jesus God’s identification with people in their sufferings goes beyond empathy to an act of solidarity in which he suffers as one of the godless and the godforsaken, sharing their fate of abandonment. In the Father’s suffering of the death of Jesus God’s grief at the loss of those who are estranged from him reaches a new and absolute depth. In their common love for the world and their suffering they overcome the estrangement to be redemptive for the world.

(Richard Bauckman)