Thoughts on Revelation 5

Today’s reading: Deuteronomy 5; Revelation 4-5

Just in case anybody reading this is looking or hoping for anything profound or interesting on the book of Revelation out of these posts, I feel like I should be upfront and tell you now there probably won’t be anything of the sort as we go through… There are a couple interesting things I want to hit on when we get to them, but there are scholars who have spent their entire careers trying to dissect Revelation and they often can’t agree on how they think a given passage should be understood.

Personally, I think what God has given us in Revelation is a lot like what He gave us with Messianic prophesies. God gave the Jews a lot of revelation about the Messiah and how His ministry would go, but it was not until after Jesus died and rose that the puzzle pieces fell into place and we could see the picture clearly. I think that is what we have with Revelation as well, enough to go on for now, but much of which will not be made clear until the time comes. So I’m just not going to bother speculating about end times stuff as we go through this book because if God had wanted it to be clear, He would have made it clear, and He chose not to.

What I do feel like mentioning this morning is the passage of time that I have never noticed before, but feel like I should pay attention to as we are reading through Revelation.

Specifically, at the beginning of chapter 5, John tells us that “no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or look into it, and [he] began to weep because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it.” The way he describes this, it doesn’t sound like he is just saying someone told him that nobody was worthy, or he simple knew it somehow, but it sounds like a search was made of all three spiritual realms (heaven, earth, and the underworld), seemingly with “applicants” even coming forward to try to open and read the scroll, but no one was able to do it. It could also be a debate about known potential candidates rather than an actual physical search for candidates. Revelation 4 and 5 depict a scene of God having taken His seat in His divine council, so this could have been a scene similar to what we see in the book of Job, where members of the divine council are putting forth potential candidates from among the three realms and in the debate about them, none are found to be worthy. I could really see it going either way, but in either scenario, John was clearly witness to a significant process.

So while I tend to picture the scene of Revelation 4 immediately followed by the appearance of the Lamb, it sounds like John would have had to experience a significant passage of time as he watched the proceedings play out, getting increasingly desperate as no one was found worthy, until eventually he breaks down weeping that, among all creatures, not one was found worthy to open the scroll. And it is not until after this whole process that the Lamb appears in the midst of the living creatures to step forward and take the scroll.

And actually, now that I say that, I think where I’m going to land for now with my headcanon on this is that the divine council members were bringing forth candidates who were shown unworthy by trying and failing to open the scroll. I say this because of the description of the 4 living creatures, the divine throne guardians, and the description of the appearance of Jesus in this scene. The four living creatures are described as being covered with eyes, and when John describes the Lamb’s seven eyes he says they the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. So their being covered with eyes in this context is probably telling us that they are watching all that is going on in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and, as Yahweh’s closest attendants, are reporting back to Him what is happening. That could be why it is in their midst that the Lamb appears. Maybe they have been leading the process of bringing the most qualified candidates from heaven, the earth, and under the earth who would then try and fail to open the scroll. And it is not until this point at the end, when all other likely candidates have failed, that they bring Jesus in who is worthy where nobody else was.

However it might have played out, the language does seem to indicate that John was witness to a drawn out and increasingly desperate process, and that kind of changes how I think about and process the appearance of Jesus on the scene. It just makes me wonder if there are other details like this that I need to pay closer attention to that might impact how I think about a given passage in Revelation.

Extra Thoughts

As I’ve been thinking more about this I realized another important implication of this whole process. I have heard recently scholars who take Revelation as a coronation scene, where Jesus receives the throne over all creation. I don’t know enough about that view to argue for it here, but at the very least He is receiving a prominent role in these events. But if this is Jesus receiving the throne, then the process we’ve been talking about in this morning’s post would eliminate any later claimant trying to say the throne should be theirs. If every best candidate was brought into the divine council and given the chance to open the scroll, only to fail, then none of those beings can come along later and make any claim that the throne should be theirs. By Jesus being the last to try to open the scroll, every other creature knows they were not worthy and so Jesus’ claim to authority is eternally solidified. This would essentially eliminate any future Satan rebelling against His authority and drawing others away, because any such rebel would have already been shown to be inferior and unworthy.