The passage: After the messages, John looked and saw a door standing open in heaven. The trumpet-like voice he had heard before told him to come up, so it could show him what must happen afterward. At once he was in the Spirit, and he saw a throne in heaven with someone seated on it, radiant like jasper and sardine stone, with a rainbow like an emerald around it. Around the throne were twenty-four seats holding twenty-four elders in white robes with gold crowns. From the throne came lightning, thunder, and voices, and before it burned seven lamps of fire, which are the seven Spirits of God, and there was a sea of glass like crystal. In and around the throne were four living creatures covered with eyes front and back—one like a lion, one like a calf, one with a human face, one like a flying eagle—each with six wings and full of eyes, who never rest from crying “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.” Whenever these creatures give glory, honor, and thanks to the One who sits on the throne and lives forever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him, worship him, and throw their crowns before the throne, saying he is worthy to receive glory, honor, and power, because he created all things and they exist and were created for his pleasure.
The messages to the seven Churches are finished. What those Churches needed was the revelation of a Son of Man living among them—the source of their light, the Judge of their inner condition, the one who cleanses and restores them. But the man who wrote down what the Spirit said to them needed something more to prepare him for the crisis that was coming. In the vision of a Prince of the kings of the earth, something was implied that everyone should want to explore, and that those especially had to explore who were to teach their own time and be the prophets of the next generation. If they were satisfied merely to believe in a Friend of Man, they would drag Him down to their own level; or else He would seem too grand and terrible for them to contemplate, and lesser beings, more like themselves in their weakness and mistakes, would become dearer to them than He is. Then, when some great shock disturbed the ordinary course of their lives, they would find they had no firm place to stand. The faith that had for a while raised and purified them would look like nothing but their faith, their imagination. Everything around them would reel and totter, and they would reel and totter along with it.
I. So the Old Testament teaches us that the preparation for any great turning point in Jewish history was a fresh discovery of God Himself as the foundation of the nation’s order and its very existence. I have already spoken in these lectures, and often before in this place, of that revelation to Moses of the “I AM” as the one pillar of Israel’s law and freedom, the thing that fitted him for his work. Today I must speak of two other passages, which are not only important and interesting in themselves but necessary for understanding the chapter before us. “In the year that King Uzziah died,” says the sixth chapter of Isaiah, “I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.” Here a man sitting in Solomon’s temple is shown the meaning and reality of the symbols that stood around him. What he saw with his eyes pointed to a living, spiritual world he could not see but which surrounded him. A king was dying or dead; a king was about to succeed who would bring idol worship into that very temple, and in whose reign there would be an invasion by Syrians and a still more dangerous invasion by Assyrians. The earthquake would be terrible; the nation would be shaken to its core. Its inner life would seem to be gone, and from outside the sentence “Cut it down” would seem to be coming. But the outcome of events did not depend on Ahaz, or Shalmaneser, or Sennacherib. The survival of the nation did not depend on the survival of its outward signs and forms. Beneath everything and above everything there was a Divine King and a Divine order. He was holy, whatever else was unholy. There was right at the foundation of things, however much power seemed to trample right down. God had ministers around Him who displayed His nature and carried out His purposes. If Israel utterly failed to be His minister, these would not fail. And in them was a pledge that Israel too would not fail, whatever its kings or priests did. The nation would live on and do its work until the work was done. Knowing this, Isaiah could be a prophet. He could speak to kings, priests, and people about their unbelief in this Divine King and about the miseries their unbelief had brought and would still bring. He could bear witness that there was a Will higher than their self-will, which would in the end prevail against it.
- Isaiah is often called the evangelical prophet, the prophet of the Christ who was to be born of the Virgin and shown on earth. That makes it all the more important to remember that his prophecy does not begin from that point; its ground is laid in the revelation of a King who lives forever. My other example comes from a later and much darker period. Ezekiel is sitting stunned by the river Chebar. He is a captive among captives. The Babylonian has laid his land waste. The capital drags on a dreary existence under a king whom Nebuchadnezzar has appointed. The temple of his fathers is soon to perish, and he is surrounded by strange sights and strange forms of idolatry. Some of those sculptures whose character we have lately come to know may have been before his eyes; at any rate they were not far off. His people, already used to cruder shapes of Egyptian or Phoenician worship, would be drawn with a strange fascination to the shapes the world’s rulers had made. There were all kinds of animal power, with the lion and the eagle standing out above the rest. There was the god-king, with his sharp eye for conquest and destruction. There was the chariot in which he rode to battle or led home his procession of captives. There were the wings that seemed to say he and these animals belonged to a region above the earth. How astonishing the combination of all these forms was! Was not the Lord God of Israel—of whom no image could be made—overpowered, when the rulers of the earth, the conquerors of the chosen people, paid homage to all these images? “It came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. And I looked, and behold a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.” A vision of God! Yes—these Babylonian images have not driven Him out of His own creation. They are parts of His own creation. Every one of them bears witness to Him. The lion, the ox, the eagle each display some aspect of His power and His work. This chariot in which the tyrant sits, the chariot that goes out to spread ruin and death, is not, after all, the truly conquering chariot. There are wheels higher than its wheels. There are wheels with a spirit moving in the middle of them. There is an order of life, not of death. And these wheels will at last roll over everything that resists them. Bel will bow down and Nebo will stoop, and those who lead others into captivity will themselves go into captivity. On the throne is the likeness of a man—not of a brute or a tyrant. And just as at the start light was unfolding itself out of a cloud and a whirlwind, so this was the vision’s end: “As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”
By such a revelation—the powers of nature and of art rescued from their perversion and restored to their right place in the Divine harmony—by such a vision of a Being at the center of all, terrible not from too much darkness but from too much light—the lonely exile was prepared to endure the troubles of his time, to bear witness to his people about their idolatries and heathenism, and to be the prophet of a rebuilt temple and a renewed society.
And so it is with the greater teacher, the last of the Apostles. He had absorbed those earlier revelations, and now needed a still higher one so that he could bear the weight of his present and coming sorrow. For him on the island of Patmos, as for Ezekiel by the Chebar, a door was opened in heaven. And the trumpet-voice he had heard before, waking him to acknowledge the Son of Man walking among the candlesticks, now tells him to come up higher, so he can learn what is to come. That trumpet now, as before, speaks not to his outward ear but to his spiritual ear. At once he is in the spirit, seeking to know what lasts and abides, what will not change when everything he sees changes. “And behold a throne was set in heaven, and One sat on the throne.” There had been a throne in Isaiah’s vision; it spoke of the King who lives on when Uzziah and one king after another die. There had been a throne in Ezekiel’s vision; it spoke of a King who rules in righteousness, while the kings of Israel and Babylon ruled in unrighteousness, exalting power over righteousness. St. John’s need is greater. The kingdom of Israel is gone. The temple in which Isaiah sat, which in Ezekiel’s day was to perish and rise again, had now been finally doomed. And a god-emperor mightier than the Babylonian was claiming the world and its glory as his own. The old Asiatic thrones, the Greek republics, even the Roman republic itself, had all fallen beneath his feet. Was there any throne besides his? Was his the only one, raised to omnipotence? A Person is here—as real as the man on the throne of the Caesars, not an abstraction, not a phantom of cloud or air. But “He that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone.” This is not a revelation of crushing power, but of perfect, untroubled brightness—of light with no darkness in it at all. What had been emerging in Ezekiel’s vision through whirlwind and cloud is now shown to the New Testament seer as the home and resting-place of his spirit. Yet he has lost nothing that was given to his forerunner: “There was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” The sardine stone does not shut its light up inside itself. The light must spread out in different rays; there must be variety within the unity.
I do not want to change these words. I feel how poor every attempt to make them simpler is. I only want us all to let them sink into our hearts and drive out the notions and fancies that lurk there—the dreary ideas of grandeur and divinity we make up for ourselves. We little know how much of these come from the commonest associations of earthly pomp—yes, and of mere brute force. Be sure we cannot get rid of them simply by deciding that our heaven shall bear no likeness to earth. It will bear likeness to earth; if you build one heaven wholly cut off from earth, you will end up with another one made from the raw materials of earth, and that is the one you will actually believe in. What you need is not a heaven separate from earth, but one that explains earth’s confusions and difficulties instead of being built out of them; one that shows you how the forms of earth are images of heaven’s forms, rather than heaven being copied from them. You want a door opened in heaven precisely so that you are not left with an earth given over to oppression and cruelty. Keep this thought in mind as you read the next sentences: “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.” You have often noticed, reading the first book of the Iliad, how closely the council of chiefs at the beginning matches the council of gods at the end. There are quarrels in both; the quarrel on Olympus, you say, is a glorified version of the one among the Greek ships. On the whole I think that judgment is right. I would only ask you to consider what would become of everything you admire, and rightly admire, in Homer if there were no such glorified version—if you had only the earthly heroes without the beings they were said to descend from. You would lose the poetry, of course; and I believe you would also lose the poem’s truth. The earth would become utterly bleak and bare; you would feel that the men could not be what they longed to be, could not reach the stature they felt they ought to reach, if the sense of higher presences near them were taken away. But if this is the truth, where does the falsehood come in? I have tried to show where. If the standard of the council above is in any way drawn from the standard of the council below—if the poet, wanting to see the gods as the source of the law and justice he finds among men, starts measuring that law and justice by our own—then confusion is bound to creep in. We are deeply grateful to the great poet for letting us see this; his simplicity and honesty are the very things that help us most to detect what keeps him from being wholly simple and true; and we are sure God must have been teaching men who had such glimpses of Him as this Greek and his countrymen had. All the more, then, do we long for God to tell us what He is—whether there is a heavenly order such as men have dreamed of; whether it is unlike everything most precious to us in the order of earth; and if not, whether it must share earth’s imperfection.
V. People looking for objections to the Apocalypse may think it a great find that the elders sitting on the twenty-four seats recall an institution of the Jewish commonwealth. To me it is an obvious and very welcome announcement. Instead of the hierarchies of angels with which medieval writers filled the heavenly world, I find here the plain and beautiful revelation of a government and justice that is the pattern for government and justice on earth. Forget the Center of all—the One who sits on the throne, who is like jasper and sardine stone—and these twenty-four thrones turn into a polytheistic dream, a new kind of nature-worship or demigod-worship. But join them to that Center, as they are joined in this vision, and a calm sense comes into the mind that these are ministers of the Perfect Ruler, doing His commands and listening to His words, with no caprice or disobedience in them, no fighting against law, but perfect freedom and joy in carrying law out. There is a craving in all of us for such a revelation as this; we grow impatient even with the highest discoveries of science when we think it forces us to worship mere laws of the universe and to deny that those laws may be administered by a Person. That there is really no conflict between these two convictions, I think we shall all one day learn. What we need is the assurance that the robes of these Judges and Rulers are white—that there is on them no stain of indulgence or favoritism; that they wear the golden crowns of wisdom and righteousness, which they win by always looking at Him who is perfectly righteous and wise. Then we can rejoice that they rule the earth, because they have none of earth’s baseness.
In the middle of that council of Greek gods sat the Thunderer. A grand image, certainly, and not meaningless—but with very little that is truly awesome. The Israelite was taught that the thunders and lightnings that came from Sinai proceeded from the Lord his God, who had brought him out of slavery. He trembled; but he was told to trust in this God, and those who trusted Him would not be put to shame. From the throne St. John saw, “proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices.” Perfect goodness and purity will make war on everything evil and dark. But there were also “seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.” The consuming fire that is in the lightning has another purpose than destruction. It gives light and gives life. It comes from the Divine Being, the perfect Love; those Spirits are filled with it, and they go out to quicken and inspire all beings that have a will. “And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal.” The throne is not only the place from which commands are issued. The glory of Him who sits on it is meant to be mirrored in His creatures; what He is absolutely and wholly, they are to show forth in their various measures and relations.
And now we get the fuller unfolding of that vision which comforted Ezekiel in captivity. Here, in this heavenly world, are the patterns of those different kinds of power to which men have paid homage on earth, which they have taken as varied pictures of the Divine nature. “And in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts”—or four living creatures—“full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.” Here are types of powers you have met with in the worship and art of every great nation on earth. The first Asiatic conqueror revered the strength of the lion; it expressed the qualities he most wanted in a king and supposed most typical of a god. The useful animals, for which the calf was both literally and ideally the representative, commanded the awe of the Egyptian, and no less of the Hindu. The Greek, still wrestling with these animal images, nonetheless rose to the idea of a human figure and face that surpasses them. The flying eagle stood to the Roman for his ambition of universal rule. In each case the idea of what was greatest in nature corresponded exactly to the idea of what was greatest in the unseen world. There was indeed, as we saw in Assyrian worship, a confused mingling of these different instincts; none was missing in any people of the earth, and only gradually do we see which was mostly governed by one and which by another. But the great revelation to the last of the seers—the one that was to prepare him for the collapse of his own country’s worship and of the witness it had borne against all these idolatries—is that each of these had a meaning; that it was the perversion of a truth; that each animal form had its Divine significance, its heavenly counterpart; that each had its eyes behind, turned to Him who sat on the throne, catching the reflection of His light and purity, and its eyes in front, looking out to the works of His hands. “And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.” Here are the wings that lifted up the living creatures in the old prophet’s vision, showing him what the Assyrian sculptor had only dimly sensed—that everything in creation must have a pull upward as well as downward. There is a spirit carrying things toward God, just as there is a nature dragging them toward earth. But here the downward pull is overcome. They keep rising in higher and higher circles; they get nearer glimpses of eternal holiness and truth. The closer they come, the greater the awe, and the greater the sense of distance. There is no ambition to climb, only to behold. Ever more discovery, ever more adoration. To know truth in its many forms; to know it in its essential unity; to enter a love that surpasses knowledge, so that it may flow out through them to the farthest ends of the universe—this is the work, this is the longing, of these heavenly Natures. But this beholding of truth, this entering into the joy of the Lord, does not shut out that other work of judging and governing which our Lord promised His disciples when He said that the one who used his five talents faithfully would rule over five cities. And the work is part of the worship. “And when these beasts give glory, and honour, and thanks to him that sitteth upon the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, the four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”
It has often been said in Christian pulpits that heaven is just the continuation of worship on earth. Those who have found earthly worship very dreary and unsatisfying have said they would rather have any Greek Elysium or Gothic Valhalla than a heaven like that. I think if we take St. John as our guide—if we accept his revelation as the true one—we can see a truth in what the clergyman says and also a truth in the layman’s protest. Everything there is worship, because all are pursuing the highest good in both thought and action; because all are referring their thoughts and deeds to one center, instead of scattering them among a thousand different centers; because each thinker and each doer forgets himself in the object before him and the work given to him. But if the preacher supposes there is any monotony of employment there—that any serious, earnest task that occupied the student here will be dropped or cut off there, that any real work men are engaged in has nothing corresponding to it and fulfilling it there—I would ask him to look hard at this opening of heaven to the Apostle, and correct his own fancies and speculations by it. The four living creatures, we shall find, are busy with all the movements and changes in the moral world; the very word “elders” shows they are exercising the functions and faculties of judgment and direction over spiritual beings and over natural forces. Our worship must always be dreary if it stands apart from our daily life, if it does not interpret and transfigure that life. The heavenly worship is unbroken only because growth in knowledge is unbroken, and because all free action is unbroken. In the many mansions there is room for every form of life; only the shapes of death can be shut out.
So I say we have here the Christian Elysium, or Valhalla, or Paradise—the thing you are all looking for in your calmest and truest moments; when you are most tormented by the discords of the world around you and of your own hearts; when you are most certain there must be a harmony without discords; when you long for room to finish tasks that death will leave undone; when you wish to recover affections that have been broken, to know what you could not know, to work bravely, to rest without stopping work. “I go,” said Hooker on his deathbed—and these words move me more than all the ecstatic phrases reported from such moments—“I go to a world of order.” It was such a world—as I have said, and as we shall see more fully later—that St. John was driven to seek by the upheavals tearing the world around him to pieces. Is Nero, is Vitellius, the King of kings, the Lord of lords? That was the question he had to face. And this was the answer. He found that the kingdom of heaven, which his Master had spoken of to him as they sat in the boat, and to crowds besides him, was indeed a real kingdom—not far off in some distant star, but bound by the closest ties, by shared pursuits and interests, to everything happening here. It was much to know this; but whoever knows this much will long to know more. What ties this calm life to our restless life? How can one act on the other and reform it? Will He who sits on that heavenly throne restore the children of earth who are trampled under the tyrant on the earthly throne? These questions link today’s vision with the one I hope to look at next Sunday—the vision of the book sealed with seven seals, and of the Lamb who prevailed to open it.