In Revelation, numbers are important.
7 churches. 7 lamp stands. 7 spirits of God.
7s are important, but so are 3s. 3 angels with three final woes.
3 choruses of “Hallelujah” to offset three songs of woe for the fall of Babylon.
And so it is all the more remarkable that in ch. 4, when the One who Sits on the Throne is praised, there are not three songs. There are only two.
The praise of God is incomplete.
The scene continues, not with a third song of praise, but with the introduction of the Lion who is the Lamb who was slain. The lamb, too, receives his two songs of praise: You are worthy… for you were slaughtered! This followed by “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slaughtered.”
So what about the third?
It seems that the completion of the praise of God was waiting. It was waiting for the praise of the Lamb. They each receive their third song at the end of ch. 5–and they receive it together.
How is praise of God brought to completion? How is praise of the Lamb brought to completion? When they are drawn together in the praises of every creature under heaven:
-
To the One seated on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might
forever and ever!
And.
To the One on the throne and the Lamb.
Now has come the praise of our God in its fullness–when its adoration of the creating God is wrapped up, inseparably, with the praise of the redeeming Lamb.
Hmm, as if all the psalms and praise of the Hebrew Scripture were missing their final note, I like it.
Yes!
Thanks for posting that Daniel. Rev 5 is one of my favorite passages.
The way Revelation lays out the dynamics of numerology is really interesting.. But I never noticed before how the process of the consummation of praise is signaled by a progression of two/three types. It is almost like a symphony which begins a theme and then later develops that theme into something greater and more profound
The dynamics or movement of the Lion/Lamb type is an interesting one. Notice how the duo of Lamb/Lion is at first held in tension in chp. 4 — still short of the third praise of completion, as you point out — and then in chp. 5, at the crescendo and completion of praise, the lion is nowhere to be found, leaving only the paradoxical power of the Lamb as sufficient enough.
Is John purposefully employing the two-step process of this type, effectively beginning with the tension of Lamb/Lion (or metanarratively speaking, Jacob/Israel and Christ/church), wrestling with the complex history of Judah as lion/aggressor in lieu of Christ’s lamb-like sacrifice, and thus in brilliant rhetorical fashion reversing the motif Jacob had in fact wrestled into existence himself in Gen. 49:9? One might say, he out-wrestles Judah’s original mandate (marked by aggression and violence), opening the gates (and keeping them open) for all nations to come and serve a good and just King.
Caveat: I realize the “throne” could serve in place of the Lion type, nevertheless “Lion” is not explicitly there; and further, the imago Dei of Genesis 1 employs royal imagery which is constituted not by Jacob’s summons that Judah’s “hand shall be on the neck their enemies,” but rather the mandate to till the earth and have dominion over the animals — not people!
Thus, the function of a Lamb-King is, in a way, a recapitulation of the original intent prior to the fall.
Of course, inner-critiques of different texts/traditions in the Bible, like the various critiques of Judah’s legitimacy, have traditionally fallen on deaf ears. We love to harmonize traditional takes on texts without being critical of our own analysis — largely a one-way street of pedigree (or, worse, we “reflect” only in name, co-opting the other). This suggests that the terms of infallibility still lingers on from our Western/Enlightenment philosophical traditions.
Far be it from me, though, to pick up the first theological stone..