We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

lamb

The Key to Understanding Revelation

The most important key to interpreting John’s violent imagery is found in the heavenly throne room scene in chapters 4-5. (For the first entry in this series on the violence in Revelation, click here.) This throne room represents heaven’s perspective on events that are occurring on earth, which is contrasted throughout Revelation with the false perspective of the “inhabitants of the earth” (8:13; 11:10; 13:8, 12, 14; 17:2). The only real battle that is waged throughout Revelation is a battle between truth and deception. It is, more specifically, a battle between the truth that the Lamb’s slaughtering was victorious and the lie that it was the Lamb’s defeat.

John invites us to see the truth by allowing us to witness the drama that is unfolding in the heavenly throne room. Here we find a mysterious sealed scroll, which contains the secret that Revelation unveils. The drama of this scene reaches a pinnacle when someone raises the question: “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?” (5:2). John weeps when no one is found worthy (5:4). How long before we learn the secret of the role that Jesus’ martyrdom plays in God’s victory over evil?

The answer is finally brought forth when John hears “one of the elders” in the throne room declare that “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed,” and he is therefore worthy “to open the scroll and its seven seals” (5:3-5). This image represents the kind of enemy-slaying Messiah most first century Jews had been hoping for. But, surprisingly enough, when John looks to see this mighty messianic Lion, he instead beholds a little lamb that had already been slaughtered (5:6)!

Yes, John is saying, the Lion of the tribe of Judah has “triumphed,” but he triumphed not by violently slaying his enemies: he triumphed by becoming a slain little Lamb who offered up his life on behalf of his enemies. And yes, Jesus wages war with the aggression of a Lion, but the power that he aggressively wields is the Lamb-like power of self-sacrificial love that was perfectly manifested on the cross. In this way, John has transformed an image of power and domination into an image of vulnerability and nonviolence.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this remarkable symbolic transformation for our interpretation of Revelation. John’s transformation of the Lion of Judah into the sacrificial Lamb constitutes the climactic turn that anchors most of John’s other symbolic reversals. Once the Lion has been revealed to be the Lamb, we never again find Christ referred to as a Lion, though he’s referred to as the Lamb twenty-seven more times. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that the rest of the book of Revelation is simply an unfolding of the Lamb-like victory revealed in Revelation 5 and depicted (from a different angle) in Revelation 12. The remainder of Revelation, in other words, is an apocalyptic-like expression of the heavenly truth — spoken against all lies to the contrary — that by means of Jesus’ sacrificial death and the faithfulness of his followers, the “kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah” (11:15).

Photo credit: Waiting For The Word via Visualhunt / CC BY

Related Reading

From Good Friday to Easter

This weekend as you contemplate the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, we pray that God will reveal his unfathomable love for you in new ways. Blessings to all of you from all of us at ReKnew. Photo credit: Claudio  via Visualhunt / CC BY

Tags: , ,

Reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer

Jesus begins the instruction on prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) by telling his disciples to pray for the Father’s name to be “hallowed,” for his kingdom to come, and for his will to be established on earth as it is in heaven. He is, in effect, telling them to pray for the fulfillment of everything his ministry,…

Gospel “Contradictions” and Orality Studies

* This essay has been adopted from G. Boyd and Paul Eddy, Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). One of the standard tests historians put to ancient documents to assess their veracity is self-consistency. Generally speaking, fabricated accounts tend to include more inconsistencies than truthful accounts. Hence, the absence of inner contradictions contributes to a positive…

Imaging God Rightly: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 3

In the previous two blogs I noted that the vision of God in our minds is the single most important vision in our lives, for it completely determines whether we’ll have a relationship with God and what kind of relationship this will be. A. W. Tozer once wrote, “What comes into our minds when we…

Why Are We So Mired in Violence?

In his marvelous little book entitled The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis envisioned hell as a realm in which people are forever moving farther away from one another. Hell is the ultimate, cosmic, suburban sprawl! It seems to me that Western civilization is diving headlong into Lewis’ hell, and we’re being pulled there by the…

Why Did Jesus Curse a Barren Fig Tree?

While no one argues that the NT advocates violence explicitly, many allege that some passages reflect violent attitudes toward outsiders, and especially toward non-believing Jews, while others detect an element of violence in some of Jesus’ teachings and behavior. Some scholars argue that this violent aspect of the NT laid the groundwork for later Christian…