Revelation 4:1-11
March 17, 2019
I.
The name of our church is Hope. Hope is not mere optimism. It is not wishful thinking. Still less is it a fantasy about the way things could, should, or would be. Hope is a deep trust in the vision that John has when the door to heaven is opened to him, and he sees inside. That is what starts happening in chapter 4. This book has to be grounded in a deep hope in order to sustain us through the successive disasters of the coming chapters.
Hope is based on a conviction concerning what is ultimately true and real. And this conviction is that God is “on the throne.” That is, all power and authority rests with the living God, who, as the heavenly congregation sings, is “worthy… to receive glory and honor and power.” Because our Lord and God “created all things,” and holds all things in being. The God on the throne is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is.
It is important to remember that the imagery of Revelation works on many levels. This is a vision John is having while he is “in the Spirit,” which is usually taken to mean in some kind of intense contemplative state of consciousness. What he sees is the whole universe, heaven and earth and everything else. There is a sense in which his vision has both inward and outward dimensions. It is about the universe, the fate of creation, and the destiny of humanity. It is also about what is going on in our individual souls.
So the question of who is on the throne means everywhere, including who is on the throne in your own heart. It’s all one. God’s reign has to start in our hearts for it to be extended into our world. Hearing the book of Revelation — or any of Scripture, really — is not like watching a movie, where the action is up there on a screen, separate from us as we more or less objectively observe, seated in chairs as spectators. No. With Revelation we are necessarily involved in the action. The action is within us.
In other words, the question is who is on your throne, who rules in your heart, who is the Lord of your soul? I am not going to perceive or know God on the heavenly throne unless and until I understand God to be ruling over me.
The One whom John sees on the throne is the Creator, the One who speaks the whole universe into being at the beginning, the One who fashions matter and energy, life and consciousness, out of a supreme offering of self-emptying love, culminating in actually becoming flesh and dwelling among us as one of us in time and space in Jesus Christ.
God is only visible to John as a dazzling knot of multi-colored light that John describes in terms of the gemstones jasper and carnelian — a kind of blueish green and a deep reddish orange — surrounded by a rainbow halo. God is encircled by 7 fiery torches which are the Spirit of God, representing the gifts — wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord — listed by the prophet Isaiah.
The throne itself is alive in the 4 forms of lion, ox, human, and eagle.
It is a magnificent, spectacular, awesome, and overwhelming vision of the Creator God, reigning over all.
II.
Bob Dylan once sang about how we all have to “serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” The alternative to John’s vision of the Creator God on the throne, is different throne with a different occupant: in us that is our own ego. That is the influence and domination within our hearts and extending into our world of the Adversary, which tradition names the devil, which is our sour, petulant rebellion against God’s expansive goodness and love.
This is the tempting voice that demands that we take what we can while we can, collecting as many toys, experiences, lovers, knowledge, and consumer goods as possible, depleting and laying waste to the planet in the process, enslaving and abusing other people as we deem necessary, because in the end all that matters is what we get. We need to feed and gratify our egos as much as we can, since we are individuals whose lives are defined by nothing more than how much we enjoy them.
This is the real religion of almost all the world. It is the religion of fear and anger, enmity and consumption, extraction and exploitation, featuring self-serving schemes to inflate and pleasure the ego at all costs. It is the religion in which every sin is redefined as a virtue. It is the religion of the strong man. It is the religion of death. And it has afflicted humanity since practically forever.
John and the early church know the costs and consequences of this false religion. They know what it is like when the Adversary is on the throne. In their time he was personified in the figure of the Emperor in Rome. Unlike God who is always giving, the Empire was always taking. It always had to be fed. It was always extracting value from the people.
John’s audience was told that this is all for the sake of order, prosperity, civilization, security, and peace. But they knew it meant fighting the Emperor’s wars, paying his taxes, fees, prices, and interest, and basically sacrificing their lives and that of their families for the comfort, power, and convenience of those who ruled the Empire.
Our experience may be similar. It seems like every few days I hear on the radio or from a friend that this or that system is broken. Our legal system? Well, that’s broken. Health care? Broken. Politics? Don’t even start. Immigration? Clearly. Education? Seriously? We face a world with broken families, broken hearts, broken eco-systems, a broken climate, broken promises, broken dreams…. It all seems quite unsustainable, leading many to worry about how this is going to end.
This is basically the ideology of every empire through history until today. And it only lasts until it doesn’t, and the whole edifice collapses.
III.
The early church is made up of people who are looking for a better way than what they were getting. They are tired of everything being broken. They are tired of this dead-end existence which Walter Brueggemann describes as “making bricks for Pharaoh.” They find the answer in the story of Jesus Christ, whom the Romans killed, but who somehow still lives in this community of people who know and share with each other his love. It is easy for us to forget that devoting one’s life to Christ is a profound statement of disloyalty to the dominant system in favor of a different Way, a Way of forgiveness, inclusion, non-violence, healing, acceptance, and joy. A Way of giving, not one of taking.
It is Jesus Christ who, by offering his own life for the life of the world, opens the door in heaven to reveal the throne of God that John sees in his vision. The good news is that God is on the throne of the universe… and God needs to be seated as well on the throne in each of our hearts.
It is like John is giving us a glimpse into the engine room of the cosmos, so we can see the truth and the deeper meaning behind events on the surface of things. The brokenness is part of a larger plan and movement that has a ways to go from our perspective, but will eventually and inevitably resolve into something glorious, wonderful, and joyful. Only what is false fails.
The real world is not the world of Rome. The real world is the world centered on, energized and empowered by the light shining from the throne of God. The living creatures in the vision represent all that God has given the breath of life to, and they are always singing “holy, holy, holy!” The 24 elders represent perhaps the whole of humankind, bowing down in prostration before the Lord. They sing of God’s worthiness for creating all things and holding them together in love. Together they represent the whole creation glorifying the One who gives them birth.
John is saying, “Don’t just depend on my vision for proof that God is real and good. Look to the things that God creates, how they reflect God’s glory, how indeed they inherently bear within them the signature of the One who breathes them into being. The universe is not random; still less is it a pit of heartless violence. Rather, we know in Christ that it is all oriented to and centered on the Lord of life.
Some contemporary biologists are discovering that the biosphere is not a realm of competition where only the fittest survive, which was a 17th century model that mistakenly read human egocentricity into nature. Life is characterized more by cooperation and sharing, balance and exchange, where individuals contribute what they have and are given what they need, where even death is part of the system, and nothing is ever lost.
Revelation is full of hymns, and this hymn of the elders, the humans who cast down their own crowns, their own successes and achievements, before the Author of all things, focuses on God’s creation: “For you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”
IV.
This is the attitude we have to have, if we are to know God on the throne in our own souls. Our God is the Creator of everything and everyone. “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all the dwell therein.” God’s creation is very good, it is all one, and all of surpassing value and goodness. There is no justification for doing violence to any of it, none for exhausting, polluting, abusing, or wasting any of it, for our chief end, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.
Creation is the proof of God’s goodness and of our destiny. Creation is bigger than anything our egos can concoct. God and creation always win in the end. Always. John would have us remember this as we move forward into his wild ride of a book. But more importantly, he would have us remember this as we live through a time of brokenness and confusion.
God is what is real. God will win. The Empires will fall. That conviction is what our hope is based on. And so who is sitting on our throne? Who are we serving? To whom are our lives oriented?
Let’s be people of hope, resting in the knowledge that the One who is on the throne is the One who creates all things in love.
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