You know, you never know what a Sunday will bring forth. And certainly John was there in exile on the island of Patmos; he had no idea when he woke up that Lord’s day morning, he had no idea what was going to happen to him. And what we read as we studied chapters one to three was that he had a vision of the risen, ascended, glorified, divine Son of God. He tells us that he saw a human form. And then later Jesus himself speaks; the One who has that human form speaks and identifies himself.
“I am he who was dead, and now I am alive forevermore.”
Revelation 1:18
And in chapters two and three, we find that the ascended, risen, glorified, divine Lord Jesus is in regular communication with his church on earth. Seven churches were selected, representative of all the churches in all the places all over the world throughout all of time, and the Lord Jesus is active in those churches. He is especially active on the Lord’s day. Remember, it’s still Sunday. And as we read the letters to each of those individual churches, we see a pattern developing. And the pattern that develops is simply this: that Jesus is in charge of the public worship of those churches.
Not only is he in charge of it, he is actually acting as the worship leader, the minister, to those churches. He begins each of those letters with a call to worship that brings our attention towards himself, or towards his Father, but certainly sets in in very clear parameters the fact that we begin worship with God. We begin worship with God. And then in every one of those letters, there is an appeal to repent. In other words, there’s an exposure as we come into the presence of God — we find an exposure of our sin and the need to repent. Following that there is an exhortation, it may be an exhortation in form of a warning, or in form as an encouragement and a blessing; and each letter ends by offering us the hope of glory in one shape or another. This is where we’re going. This is our destiny. This is to that towards which we are moving as God’s people. Jesus conducts the worship of his church. He is the worship leader. As the writer to the Hebrews describes it, Jesus Christ, as it were, from heaven orchestrates all the activities of the worship service.
And Jesus, we learn from the first three chapters, Jesus is involved with us every liturgical assembly of God’s people gathered for worship simultaneously by his Holy Spirit, whom he mentions in each of those letters. He is with his church by his Spirit. Therefore he is intimately present with every gathering of his people, all across the world, through every time zone and through all of space, and all of history.
That’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it? When we gather on the Lord’s day, we don’t get to get a vision like John had. John gets it on our behalf. This is the reality, whether you see it or not, whether you sense it or not: Jesus Christ by his risen power and by his Holy Spirit is present with his people as they gather for worship. Now that, we need to have really hammer that into our minds.
And the second thing we learn from these chapters and which we learn when we come to this chapter in particular, here we find it’s still Sunday. It’s still Sunday. John has this second vision, and so having seen what’s going on in the churches on earth in chapters one to three – Jesus is present and he’s active in the very worship and in the very liturgy of the church; Jesus is active and present as the church goes through the various elements of that liturgical process; as they gather together and they go through those things, Jesus is present with his church on earth.
Now John has this vision in which it’s still Sunday but now he is caught up. The curtain – the dimensional curtain – if you like, is drawn away. He gets to see what you and I right now can’t see, but which is an actual reality in which we are engaged simply because we are God’s people gathered to worship God. And that is that we are gathered here on earth, and we are part of the cosmic spiritual reality of the worship of God that is going on in the heavenly places. In other words, we partake of that great worship service that is occurring right now. Remember, time is not an issue in eternity. Every, every worship service from Adam’s time till Jesus comes is represented by what John sees in his vision as the curtain is torn away. Because every worship service on earth, every assembly of the church on earth, is connected to what is going on in the heavenly realms even as we sit here in this room. And John has shown us, and we saw this last week, that at the center of our worship is God.
We gather together, and let’s be honest with you, if you read Christian books — and I actually avoid Christian books, I read theology books, as you would imagine, but the kind of “how to pray” and stuff like that, that’s, not one of those books has ever helped me to pray by the way — and I don’t know that they’re going to help you either, because they’re far too focused on the mechanics of doing it as human beings here on earth. The Bible doesn’t do that. The Bible does not give us a handbook about how to pray, or how to witness, or how to love your neighbor. It tells you to do those things, but it assumes that God will help you and give you the grace and the wisdom to know how to do it yourself. You don’t need a handbook to do that. What we learned from the book of Revelation is that, as Christian people, we need the vertical dimension to be the primary dimension of what we are doing. When we come together to worship, we need to know God. We need to know God.
And so the first thing that John sees in this vision is the throne, but this time he does not see the human form of Jesus by which we come to know God. Here he sees in his vision, as it were, the very essence of God. He’s invisible, he’s immaterial. John, in the language he uses, grasps for a way of describing what he sees. It had the appearance of jasper, the appearance of an emerald, just the appearance – he couldn’t put into words what he was seeing. And what he was seeing, of course, was God, and all things as they relate to God.
That’s the essence of what theology is. Theology is about God, and about everything else in relation to God. And we talk about creatures, the things that God has made. And God himself, as John sees him, as the Bible describes him, God himself exists eternally and happily, even if there was nothing in relation to him. Even if there were no creatures, even if there was no creation. It wasn’t that at some point in his eternal life God got a bit bored, or God got lonely, or God wanted to test out his powers of creation. Those are three explanations that I was given as a little boy, all of them wrong. God does not need us. Paul spells that out in Acts chapter 17 – he does not need anything. Perfectly happy. Eternally in himself. It is his free choice to create the world, and he does that for our sakes and not for his sake. Creation and creatures, therefore, are an effect. They are an effect of God’s power, wisdom, goodness, and Triune action. Creation is the common work of the undivided Trinity – the Three who create.
Now all this is made clear in John’s vision of the throne. God is central, that’s the first thing he sees. And by God in this chapter, in chapter 4, we mean the Triune, undivided, mystery of God. That’s why no form is described which suggests that this is a picture of the essence of God, which is invisible, indivisible, and immaterial. You only know that God is when he signals his existence. You know, this is what is happening in the Old Testament when God comes to meet with Moses, we remember; and the bush is burning, and Moses notices that the bush is burning but the bush isn’t burning. The fire that he sees is self-fueled. Where is it coming from? There’s no obvious source of the fuel; it is a self-fueled fire. Then God explains that this is a sign of who he is.
“I am that I am.”
Exodus 3:14
He is the self-sufficient, self-efficient God. And then there’s the glory, the shekinah glory, that led the Israelites out of Egypt, that led them through their journeying in the Promised, to the Promised Land, that came and hovered over the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, and then later on the temple, they saw this pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, hovering over the Holy of Holies. What was that? It was a created effect that God gave them to signal that he is present with them. And the greatest created effect that God makes to signal his presence with his people was that that was formed and then born of the Virgin Mary, the mother of God.
In this vision, we have God himself put before us in his omnipotent majesty, in his unfathomable mystery; the one who is the object of cosmic wonder and worship. God is on the throne. But around the throne, the place is bursting with life. It says this in verse 4:
“Around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clad in white garments, with gold crowns on their heads.”
Revelation 4:4
Now remember in Revelation, we were told in chapter 1, verse 1, that this revelation had been given by means of signs or symbols. So we’re not to try and imagine what John sees, we’re to interpret what John sees. So how do we understand then this sign? Let’s break it down. There are 24 — a multiple of 12. We know that later in Revelation, for example, when new Jerusalem is being described, new Jerusalem is built on the foundation of the twelve patriarchs of Israel and the twelve apostles of Jesus. Twelve in the book of Revelation is the ecclesial number, that is, the number for the church, the church of Israel and the church of new Israel. Old Israel and new Israel are brought together here in this description of the twenty-four. The Apostle Paul does something similar when he’s writing to the Ephesians, and he says to the Ephesians that “you’re no longer aliens and strangers, your fellow citizens were the saints, you’re members of the household of God.”
Built upon the foundation of the apostles representing new Israel, the prophets the spokesmen for old Israel, with Jesus Christ the one that binds them both together, the chief cornerstone. Now the elders in Israel, twenty-four elders in Israel, represented the people of God as a whole. These elders here in Revelation chapter 4 are likely heavenly beings, angels of some form that signal or represent their counterparts on earth. They represent the total church in the old Israel and in the new Israel, in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. They represent the undivided church, and these heavenly representatives are an encouragement to us in our Christian pilgrimage here.
I mean, look at them for a moment in the letters that Jesus sent to the seven churches. He promises his people that one day they will have a crown of life. He promises to his people here that they will wear white clothing, and he promises his people, you and I here, that we will have a throne, that we will reign with him.
I said these twenty-four are likely angelic beings, they represent the church throughout the world and throughout the ages. They’re a reminder to us that our earthly worship has a heavenly component. If we could see, if we could see what is actually here in this space between me and you in this room this morning, if we could see with our naked eye, we would see that this space is bristling with life. We would see that there is no roof over our heads, but that we are joining with the angels and the archangels, and so on. The joyful assembly, “an innumerable company of angels,” says the writer to the Hebrews.
The Apostle Paul, when he’s writing to the church at Corinth, and he’s about to tell them about the Lord’s Supper, gives them some other instructions, and he tells them that they’re to do them this way because of the angels in church. “The church,” says Greg Beale, “is pictured in angelic guise to remind its members that already, already a dimension of their existence is in heaven, and that their real home is not with unbelieving earth dwellers, but in heaven. And that it is from heaven we get the help and the protection we need as we journey throughout this our earthly life and pilgrimage.”
It also draws attention, by the way, to one of the reasons why the church gathers together on the Lord’s day, and that is to be reminded – through our liturgy – to be reminded that we have a heavenly existence and a heavenly identity. Now it’s a reality, that if you’ve ever visited Eastern churches, that the liturgy of the Eastern churches – which is far older than any of ours in the West, and goes as far back as we can go to the early Christians – their liturgy is very much modeled on the book of Revelation, and is very much centered around this idea that the congregants who are gathered for worship are engaging in what is going on in the heavenly places. And they use a lot of, they use a lot of outward and visible symbols to try and create the memory or the realization of that, that we perhaps wouldn’t be totally happy with, but nonetheless, that is the concept they have in mind. It goes right back to the Bible itself. We are to model our worship and liturgy on the worship of the angels and the redeemed that we find in heaven in the book of Revelation.
Throughout this book, we are repeatedly reminded of the connection between the worshipping church on earth, and the worshiping church in glory. And this worship of God, you see, is something we share with the angels. They are our fellow worshipers. Later on in this letter of Revelation, John will meet an angel who was a bit overpowering, and he’ll want to worship him, and the angel says, “No. You don’t worship me. We worship God together.” We read about this, for example, in Isaiah 24, where Isaiah foresaw this:
“Then the moon will be confounded and the sun ashamed. For the Lord of Hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and before his elders he will manifest his glory.”
Isaiah 24:23
And again in Exodus 24, the story of Moses, who took seventy of his elders up the mountain, when they received the law of the, where they actually saw the God of Israel.
“And there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire as clear as the sky itself, and they saw the glory of God, and they worshipped.”
Exodus 24:10-11
They worshipped. Worship is the highest activity of a human being. And do you see these twenty-four represent the church? Notice that they wear white clothing. That is, they are priests. Priests to serve God; and they have crowns on their heads, they are, they are kings, and they represent us before God, and they’re in the very presence of God. Jesus says in chapter 1 of Revelation, are we’re told that Jesus has
“made us kings and priests to our God, that he will dress us in white.”
Revelation 1:6
That is, in the priestly garments. In other words, we have access to God like only the priest had in the temple, and we share with Christ in his heavenly rule over all things. That’s why we don’t capitulate to the world’s ideas and the world’s pressures, as if we were beholden to the world, as if we were doing obeisance to the world, and in doing so deny our Lord. No, our primary focus is on King Jesus. We reign with him, we are already reigning with him in the heavenly places, the Apostle Paul tells us. We already belong there. In eternal terms, we are already there. We’re to lift up our eyes to that, and these elders are aware. They’re around the throne. The poorest, meanest, most insignificant saint is represented there, and will be there in the very presence of God. We’re being reminded of that as we gather with those who are around the throne.
And secondly, we’re reminded of what comes from the throne. From the throne there came flashes of lightning, and voices, and peals of thunder, and an echo of the manifestation of God to Israel at Sinai, where we read in Exodus 19 that
“there were thunderings, and lightnings, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all who were in the camp trembled.”
Exodus 19:16
The thunderstorm is a familiar symbol of divine power and glory. Psalm 29:
“The voice of the Lord is upon the waters, the God of glory thunders. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.”
Psalm 29:3-4
Full of majesty. Sometimes that voice of the Lord presages judgment, but it also speaks words of encouragement and life to his church, as we are faithful, as we persevere under trials, as we endure suffering for Jesus’ sake, the voice of thunder reminds us who’s in charge. His voice roars, he thunders with a majestic voice. We read in Job chapter 37,
“God thunders wondrously with his voice, he does great things which we cannot comprehend.”
Job 37:4-5
Or again Job says, that when God speaks, he creates things out of nothing. To the snow he says, “Fall on the earth.” To the beasts he says, “Go into your lair.” When ice is given, when the waters are frozen fast; whether it’s for our correction, or whether it’s on behalf of his people, or out of love, he causes it to happen. “The voice of the Lord thunders” and it’s for the church’s sake.
And out of the throne there comes something else,
“seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven spirits of the Lord.”
Revelation 4:5
As in Ezekiel chapter 1,
“the appearance of coals of fire burning, the brightness of flame.”
Ezekiel 1:13
Or Zechariah chapter 4, where he sees these flames of fire, seven of them, and the word of interpretation is given:
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.”
Zechariah 4:6
Why the seven? In the book of Revelation, seven is the number, as we know, of completeness, perfection, fullness, plenitude. It’s the Holy Spirit in all of his gifts, that he, just think, that he distributes, both the natural gifts that he gives to people, and the spiritual gifts that he gives to us. And then there are the graces that he begins to form in us: love, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering, self-control. These graces that he begins to create within us, as he renews us day by day, moment by moment.
Why is he called fire? Not because he is a literal fire, but because he purges. He purges us. He takes us like metal that needs to be put into the furnace in order to be purified. That’s what he’s doing with us. He is the instrument of our sanctification, as we’re made more and more like Jesus.
From the throne, and then lastly before the throne.
“Before the throne there’s a sea of glass like crystal.”
Revelation 4:6
That is, entirely flat as it were. It’s a figure of speech, of course. In the Bible, the sea is often the boisterous, violent sea, as a sign of humanity, the wicked are tossed to and fro like the sea.
“‘There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked.'”
Isaiah 57:21
Later on in Revelation, from the troubled sea of humanity will emerge a beast, the Antichrist. When Jesus was on earth, you remember, Satan tried to destroy the disciples, as they’re tossed about like a toy in their little boat by the mighty waves. They’re terrified. They’re fishermen, they’re seamen, and they’ve never seen anything like this before. And Jesus comes and he says two things. He says to the wind, as if it’s a person he’s speaking to, “Satan, be muzzled.” he says, and the wind instantly dropped. He said to the waves, “Be still,” and immediately, immediately the waves stopped. That was a miracle. You try it at home with some water in a basin, and a little like that, and then put it down and see how long it takes for it to settle down. Instantly stops. What we’re being told in is this, in this huge sea of glass, we’re reminded of the distance between God and John, between God and us – the infinite distance. We’re reminded that the thing that makes and creates that distance is our sin. The stuff that churns us up, churns up our feelings, and our emotions, and our anger, and our hatred, and our self-love.
But here before the throne of God above, all is calm, because we have been through the waters. We have been cleansed; our baptism is a pointer to that cleansing that he has done in our souls. We have been washed thoroughly, we can
“draw near to God with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.”
Hebrews 10:22
You have been washed therefore we worship. The sea symbolizes the ineffable, unapproachable, absolute holiness of God, in his most basic sense of the word, his separateness. But in Christ we are drawn near to God. So before the throne, there’s a sea of glass. And before the throne,
“there are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind.”
Revelation 4:6
These creatures represent, appear rather, in the presence of God, just as the seraphim in Isaiah 6 do. There are four of them. “The four forms,” someone has written, “the four forms suggest whatever is noblest: the lion; strongest: the ox; wisest: the human; swiftest: the eagle; in inanimate nature.” Nature, including humans, is represented before the throne. They take their part in the fulfillment of the divine will, and the worship of the divine majesty. So if the elders represent the church, these creatures represent everything in the animate, inanimate nature that God has made. God cares for everything that he has made. Everything that he has made.
In the new heavens and the new earth, these creatures will be restored. Think of the species, by now millions of species of bird that have become extinct, that will be recreated by God. Think of the varieties of plants and organisms on the face of our planet and beyond that will be recreated in the new heavens and the new earth. God cares for everything that he has made. He loves everything that he has made. Everything that he made at the beginning he said was good. And we’ll be part of the new creation.
And these very creatures are “full of eyes, behind and before. These creatures, the things that God has made, are part of God’s way of governing the world. They’re his policemen. They’re everywhere. They see everything. They take in everything. They are one of the instruments God uses. God uses created instruments to do his bidding. I never thought of it till this very moment, but I now think of those cows that came to hear me preach before I could get people to hear me preach. I don’t know what their report card said about the sermons.
But this is the reality of brothers and sisters when we gather for worship. Let me just tell you, if we didn’t sing his praise, God would get his praise from some other source, because here they are before the throne of God. And in a moment, not today, we’re going to find them leading the praise of God above. We sang earlier “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. All thy works shall praise thy name in earth, and sky, and sea.”