"Every Creature."

Revelation 5:11-14

April 7, 2019

I.

Last week, in our glimpse into the heavenly throne room, we heard about the slaughtered Lamb who is worthy to open the seals of the scroll of destiny, and how he ransomed with his life/blood “saints from every tribe and language and people and nation,” a vast, inclusive, diverse, united swath of all humanity.  

This week we pull back for a still broader vision that includes both uncountable thousands of singing angels filling heaven, and “every creature under heaven and on earth and in the sea, and all that is in them,” also singing.  Only now the song is that the Lamb is worthy “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”  Finally, this builds to a crescendo in which the songs are sung to both the Lamb and at he same time to the One seated on the throne, indicating that they are united aspects of the same One eternal God.

It is easy and convenient for us rationalistic, modern people to dismiss angels as mere mythic decoration.  But angels — in Greek the word is literally “messengers” — serve an important function of mediating God’s will to the world.  Perhaps, if God is the Light, then angels are like photons which convey that Light to our sight.  As creatures of heaven, angels deliver, express, represent, and reveal the universality and inclusive vision of the Most High God.  They communicate God’s love.

It is our egocentricity or sinfulness which prevents us from perceiving them, just like our mortal bodies are not equipped to perceive most forms of physical light.  We only feel their effects, and even that only rarely.  Angels mainly serve to praise God the Creator, and we are most in touch with them when we are doing just that.

In art they usually get depicted as white-robed, winged humanoids, but angels are probably more like luminous bundles of God’s energy that deliver grace to us and send back to God the praise of the creation.  Yet sometimes Scripture does describe them as people who bring good news.  But as we will see the good news of God’s grace can become toxic and corrosive to the resistant and unreceptive.

In John’s vision the innumerable angels swirl around God’s throne and sing to the Lamb that was slaughtered.  Which means that angels convey the truth about God which the Lamb reveals.  The meaning of the Lamb is that God’s strength is revealed in weakness, God’s life is revealed in death, and God’s love in self-offering.  God is the One who gives life for us and to us.  God triumphs by absorbing and neutralizing the violence and hatred of the world.

That is what the angels praise God for.  It is the Lamb that was slaughtered who is worthy “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might

and honor and glory and blessing.”  The good news is always about reversal, which is why it is the losers of the world, the ones who are broken, bereft, victimized, disenfranchised, and rejected, who are most likely to receive it and perceive the angels who deliver such news.  

II.

The content of the angels’ song is that the Truth, the nature and destiny of the whole creation, is only available to us in and through the One who is worthy and therefore able to open the scroll: the Lamb.  The Lamb is the key, the catalyst, the necessary element which provides the meaning of life itself.  The good news of the Lamb is the point of all angelic communication.

Indeed, that’s how we know it is authentic and angelic: does it point us to the Lamb?  Does it direct our attention to the cross?  Is the message one of hope for the hopeless, where the poor, the gentle, and the outcast are blessed?  

That good news is always that life is not about gaining power, fame, and wealth, or any of the things we are led to believe it is about.  Life is not about what you get for yourself.  In the Lamb we see that it is really about what we renounce.  It is about what we give and share and contribute.  It is about what we lose, for as Jesus says, it is only when we lose ourselves that we are able to receive what God is always seeking to give us.

The most basic and also most hidden fact about the Bible is that it is written by and for those who remember how they were “slaves in Egypt,” redeemed and liberated by God.  Those who are nothing God delivers into everything; those who make themselves everything God reduces to nothing.  To know God is to live in praise and gratitude, deeply conscious of what you have received because you are always losing it as it pours through you into the world.

In response to the angels’ song, John then hears “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them” also singing a similar refrain.  Every creature refers to everything: every grain of sand and every mountain, every fungus and plant, every microbe and insect, every animal and bird and fish, every molecule and electron, everything that God breathes into being by the Word, which is to say everything that is, lives to praise the Creator, which is “the One seated on the throne and the Lamb.”  

The Lamb and the One seated on the throne have become melded together in praise, so that the cross, where God — the Lamb — pours out his life in his blood for the life of the world, the final act of God’s self-emptying, is revealed as the modality by which God does everything.  Even creation itself, which happens by God’s speaking, is God’s self-emptying, as the infinite love of the Trinity overflows and pours into the nothingness to make something.

Everything is thus breathed into being by God, bearing God’s imprint, God’s signature, God’s frequency, and God’s identifying mark.  Everything participates in the same eternal outpouring and flow of life and love.  Everything is made out of the precipitation of God’s breath for the purpose of sharing in the goodness, joy, blessing, and praise of God together.

III.

John sees in heaven the raucous, bright, shining, colorful, wild, diverse, explosive, ecstatic rave of joy and praise, which sets the tone for what is to come.  In some ways it reveals what is in the scroll because it is a blissful celebration of God’s love which is permeated in and through everything.  

This truth has to be established; it has to shape our consciousness, filling us with hope and joy, to give us fortitude and courage to face what is to come when the Lamb actually starts opening seals and the awesome goodness of God collides with the corruption, illusion, violence, and hatreds that have calcified through our world.

It is also at the same time a vision that is intended to govern and inform our approach to the world in which we live.  For if everything is created to praise God, if every voice of every creature is specifically shaped by God for the purpose of participating in the glorious dance of goodness and love, if God designs the whole place and every piece of it to function as a great mosaic of blessing and shalom, then that is how we need to treat it.  In that knowledge we can only affirm the whole place, and everyone and even everything in it, as a spectacular and miraculous gift, the pinnacle of which perhaps is our very ability to know this and consciously join in the chorus of praise.

We have to approach “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them” with the respect, compassion, gratitude, and wonder they deserve as instances and expressions of God’s love and wisdom, manifest in time and space.  Everything must be addressed and cherished as an unspeakable miracle, and only engaged with according to the sovereign will of the One who created it.  

That means that no part of creation is an object that we may dispose of as seems best to us.  Not people, not animals, not trees, not rocks, not water, not air.  Yes, we need to use created things; life is a network of interactive, complementary sharing.  But we only use anything for the glory of God, with great humility and thanksgiving.  We take no more than we need, and we ensure that the distribution is fair and equitable.  We replace what we have taken; we repair what we have broken; we make up for imbalances we have created.  We clean up our messes.  We practice what we preach to our children when they are guests in someone’s home: we leave the place as we found it if not better.

For we are guests here.  “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein.”  The planet does not belong to us.  We are to behave here only according to the will of our Host, who makes the whole place for joy and praise, love and communion, compassion and blessing, delight and peace, for all.

By what right do we silence, our of our own selfishness, any voice that God created for praise?  By what right do we deplete and exhaust resources God created for the benefit of all?  By what right do we poison land, water, and air, kicking the chemistry of the atmosphere out of balance?  By what right do we trash the magnificent vineyard that God has generously placed in our care?

IV.

Our Westminster Shorter Catechism begins with the amazing affirmation that “the chief end of human life,” that is, our main purpose and function as humans here on the earth, “is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.”  This is what the angels are doing with their song;  this is what the whole creation does with its song.  And it is the whole reason we exist at all.

May everything we do, everything we say, everything we even think, be an expression of this awesome sentiment; and may that joyful, humble, awestruck, thankful hymn be ever in our hearts, guiding every thing we do: 

“To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb 

be blessing and honor 

and glory and might 

for ever and ever!”

+++++++