Let's turn in our Bibles to the book of Revelation and to chapter four. It's lovely to be here with you this evening and thank you for the invitation to join you and thank you for your prayers for the student work. I would genuinely say that there isn't a month goes by when we don't hear somewhere in the UK of students coming to faith in Christ. It is a very fruitful time. for young people to hear the gospel. My boss describes it as people's last best chance to hear the gospel, and I think there's truth in that. So do pray for non-Christian students as they hear the gospel through the witness of their friends. We are very grateful for that. Let's read Revelation chapter 4 then together. After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, come up here and I will show you what must take place after this. At once I was in the spirit and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of Jasper and Carnelian, a rainbow resembling an emerald encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were 24 other thrones and seated on them were 24 elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the sevenfold spirit of God. Also before the throne, there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal. In the center around the throne were four living creatures and they were covered with eyes in front and behind. The first living creature was like a lion. The second was like an ox. The third had a face like a man. The fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night, they never stopped saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come. Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor, and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives forever and ever, the 24 elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say, you are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being. Amen. May God enable us to hear and to respond to his word of truth. Let's pray for a moment. Our dear Heavenly Father, you give us through the eyes and the heart of the Apostle John long ago this glimpse in this chapter into eternal reality. into the future, into all that will take place, into the security and the steadfastness of your eternal purposes. How grateful we are, Heavenly Father, that all of this world's long history, as it seems to us, will find its end one day in your eternal presence, before your judgment throne. how we thank you that all wickedness and sin will be banished forever, and all your people set free and made perfect at last. So, Lord, help us to live our short lives, however far into them we are, our few years in this world. To the glory of your name, and with this heavenly perspective in mind, for Jesus' name's sake, amen. Well, if you turn to Revelation chapter 4, we're going to look at what is really just the backdrop. that is the setting for Revelation chapter 5. Revelation chapter 4 and 5 really go together. If you imagine arriving in a theatre 20 minutes early, and it's one of these shows where there is no curtain on the stage, you might be able to sit there for 20 minutes and look at the stage set, at the backdrop, at the artwork. before ever an actor sets foot on the stage. And in a sense, that's what chapter 4 is. It is an indescribable, a remarkable setting for the action that takes place in chapter 5. If you look at the end of verse 1 of chapter 4, John is told, come up here and I will show you what must take place after this. And what must take place after this doesn't take place until chapter 5. It's the question, who can open the scroll? And the answer, here is a lamb looking as if it had been slain and he becomes the one who is able to open the scroll. That's what must take place. Chapter 4 is just the scene. the backdrop. But it's given to John and it's given to us in Scripture, and so I want us just to spend time, as it were, looking at that scene and seeing what is there and what it speaks to us of. And the first thing to say is that what is there is a remarkable picture, and of course whenever you think of the Book of Revelation, that's probably what you think of. Extraordinary visions, lavish pictorial scenes that are painted in words and are almost beyond description. Pictures which cause language to be stretched almost to breaking point as the Apostle John writes down what he sees. One person described Revelation as being like God's pop-up picture book. And you know when you buy for little children these wonderful books that you open them up and this dramatic three-dimensional picture appears. And the whole idea is that the child and the adult both just look at the picture and take in the scene. And those pop-up picture books fail to work if people begin to pull them to bits and begin to kind of take one moving part out of the page and so on. That is what destroys the impact of the picture. And that's always a danger with the book of Revelation, that we become so fixated with some of the details of the vision and try to understand them and pull them out their context and make them mean something that they were never intended to mean or do. and then the whole thing collapses and doesn't work as God intended it to. So we have to both read the detail but also stand back and look at the picture as a whole. And that's where John's language becomes interesting because he describes things using words that we almost can't quite envisage. God is helping us through these verses to imagine the unimaginable. He is helping John to describe the indescribable. And there's a sense as the use of similes and pictures pile up one on top of another that if you did actually start to try and paint what is described, it would almost become impossible to do it. For example, if you look at verse 3, the one who sat there had the appearance of Jasper and Carnelian. Well, what does one who has the appearance of Jasper and Carnelian look like? I'm not sure I know what Carnelian is, actually, so that would be a start. But even if I did, you can't quite imagine but in its unimaginable quality, something of its beauty comes through. I'd love you to get the children, for example, in Sunday school to try and draw a rainbow resembling an emerald encircling a throne. Would they be able to do that? It's defying our minds to try and imagine the sheer glory and beauty and majesty of what is being seen. Or look at verse 6, before the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass as clear as crystal, simile upon simile upon simile. It's not a sea, it's something that looked like a sea, and it looked like a sea of glass, whatever it is. And you see the whole idea is that we stand back and we allow our minds to roam across the vista of the glory without becoming too obsessed or worried about every finite little bit of detail. That's how the visions of the book of Revelation work. And the Lord in his goodness gives us these portions of Scripture because he has made us to think pictorially. That is how the human imagination and the human mind works. If I say the word table to you, What are you all imagining? If I could see the thought bubble above each of your heads, I would see different pictures of different tables. It might be your dining room table or it might be a genetic kind of neutral table. It might be the table with the wobbly leg that you've been trying to repair for a few months or meaning to repair for six years. Few of you, I would imagine, when I say the word table, picture the letters T-A-B-L-E, the word table. I would imagine very few of you picture that. If you do, go to your GP. You're probably on a spectrum of some kind. We don't think like that. We think pictorially. And that's why the Lord gives us these pictorial portrayals of the glory of God. That's why Scripture paints in narrative form what happened amongst his people. Of course not all of Scripture is pictorially written. Some of it is law, some of it is history, some of it is lists, some of it is letter, but much of it, and certainly these visions, are pictorial. And our task is to sit back, look at the picture, and realize the extent and the glory of the majesty of the God who is enthroned. It's right, isn't it, that the picture is almost beyond description? Because were we to be able to define the eternal glory of the living God, in scientific and absolute terms. There would be something wrong about that. God is bigger than that, and he allows us here, it's almost like Isaiah in the temple, you remember, is able just to catch a glimpse of the hem of the garment of the Lord, and that opens his eyes to his glory. Well, here is something given to John the apostle on the island of Patmos, where he was beleaguered and exiled before the church was about to be under the pressure of persecution. Here is something that says to the Apostle John, yeah, this may be happening all around about you, but look at this. God's big picture of his glory. Secondly, though, I think what we can take in here is something of God's single purpose in his gospel story. For here at the end of the Bible and in this book of Revelation, we begin to see all the themes of Scripture being tied up together as things come to a close in the future, as the end of history is portrayed and the future of eternity glimpsed, all these themes that we know, if we know our Bibles well, are hinted at and drawn in to their completion and to their right place. You can just Draw several of them so easily from the passage, can't you? Look at verse 5. From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. Well, who would read that but not think of the Lord's revelation of himself on Mount Sinai to Moses and to that terrific scene of smoke and fire, of burning holiness and fearful awesome judgment being spoken out of this thunderous, noisy mountain. We're meant to read that and think, yes, this is the God who redeemed his people from the land of Egypt, who brought his people from slavery and then spoke to them in the desert through Moses. This God that we're thinking about in eternal terms is that God who rescued his people. We're meant to read in verses 6, second half of verse 6, right through to the end of verse 8, this picture of these four living creatures, and we're meant to think of people coming from all of creation to worship the one true and living God. Here's actually a very good example of what happens when the book of Revelation is pulled to bits in an unhelpful way. These four living creatures, the lion, the ox, the man, and the eagle, are often portrayed as resembling the four gospel writers. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Now who in the world thought that up? I don't know. It must have been in the early church. But you'll often see in stained glass or in carvings around pulpits and so on, these four figures, the lion, the ox, the man, Dr. Luke and the flying eagle. That's why lecterns in churches are often like an eagle. John, the gospel writer, being portrayed. Now, I think if the four gospel writers could speak to us from heaven, they would say, well, how ridiculous. Nothing should have given anybody the vaguest thought that John was speaking about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But that kind of bit of tradition fell into the Christian world and has stayed there ever since. Anyway, if you didn't know anything about that, forget I said it here. You don't need to know. What this does represent is that from all the compass points, north and south and east and west, the four living creatures, and they're not anyway an ox, an eagle, a man, a lion, are they? It's like a lion, like an ox, a face like a man, from all of creation, in ways that you could hardly imagine, from all the nations, from every point of the compass, comes glory given to the Almighty God of heaven and earth. And they sing day and night as they look to him holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. It's the theme that begins way back with Abraham when God says to him, I will make your descendants as many as the stars in the sky or as many as the grains of sand on the seashore. It's the theme of Isaiah who says the nations will come. It's the theme of many of the Psalms that speak of the nations singing praise to God. It's the theme of Jesus when he teaches his apostles that they will go out to tell the nations about the Messiah. And here, in eternity, we're given this picture that is also beyond description of the whole of creation, people coming to bear before the holiness of God. Creation itself is a theme that comes up towards the end of the passage. In the song of praise in verse 11, you are worthy our Lord and God to receive glory and power for you created all things and by your will they were created and have their being. And there is no sense in which the creator of the universe will ever do anything other than put the whole business of creation back in its place, in its rejuvenated, recreated form, perfectly, without error, and it will all point to his glory and honour and power. There are many themes. What a joy to see, even in the backdrop, even before the Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, is mentioned, even before the Lamb who was slain is seated on the throne. What a joy to see that God, in his mysterious way, by his Spirit, inspired this old man on Patmos to see what he saw. to write it all down, that we might trust and know and believe and rest assured that all will be well, it will all come together, there will be no loose end, there will be no nothing missed and nothing missing, no mistakes, but it will all be perfect, brought together at the last to the glory of the living God. God's big picture, God's single story. Thirdly, God's beautiful glory. God's beautiful glory. I think that must be ultimately the strongest and most dominant theme of the chapter as we stand back and look at it all. It is a scene of beauty, and that is something that speaks to us. very deeply and very personally in the very fabric of our beings as people who are created in the image of God. We are made as those who sense, appreciate and grasp beauty. That is not true of any of the animals or the birds. They are beautiful, many of them. But they do not sense beauty. They do not grasp or understand or perceive what is beautiful. But we do. Even in our fallenness, we do. Because we are both, of course, fallen and sinful, but also God's image bearers. That is true of Christian and non-Christian alike. That's why, as Romans explains, Creation speaks to the whole world in its beauty. That's why the rain falls on the just and the unjust. It is the way that we are wired that enables us to appreciate what is beautiful. That's why we want to shape our gardens or put paintings up on our walls. It's why we want to appreciate what God has made, whether that is in landscape or cityscape or whatever it is. Whether you like to look at the sea or the hills or the amazing engineering feats of men, we appreciate that there is an image of what God is able to do. I drove up And I never stopped tiring of crossing the Forth and seeing the new bridge. And it's a remarkable thing. It's a beautiful thing to see how the whole thing has come together. Boggles my mind to imagine how they can actually get the roads. You can see them now just beginning to link up and how the whole thing will work. And, you know, three years ago that was just fields and mud and so on. What an extraordinary thing that God's image bearers are able to do. And yet here, with language bursting beyond its capabilities, we are gazing at something infinitely more beautiful that is not marred in any way The one who sat there on the throne had the appearance of Jasper and Carnelian. A rainbow resembling an emerald encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were 24 other thrones, and seated on them were 24 elders. They were dressed in white, had crowns of gold on their heads. And then that thought is just left hanging visually, And John comes back to it in verse 10, the 24 elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. And they lay their crowns before the throne. So suddenly we are seeing that the beauty of the scene contains the beauty of people's worship, selflessness. The elders take their crowns off and lay them down before the one who is enthroned. That is beautiful. That the God who made us and gave us life, as the end of verse 11 says, is now receiving the adoration that is his due. It hurts us, doesn't it, when people speak ill of God. It hurts us. It's ugly to our minds and hearts when people abuse the Gospel and decry the Lord Jesus Christ and trample the truths of Christianity into the mud. And the Lord says in chapters like this, well, don't despair. But remember what is of eternal beauty and what will prevail. The Scriptures say that one day we will see Jesus and know Him as we are fully known. Now, the apostle says, we see as if through a glass darkly. Then we shall see face to face. Now we can glimpse it. Then we shall see it and enjoy it and be in it forever. And so God's beautiful glory mysterious yes, beyond description yes, beyond our grasp ultimately in this world, but there's enough of its truth for us to grasp that we might rest and be at peace and know that he reigns. God's big picture, God's single story, God's beautiful glory, finally God's occupied throne. Now a throne obviously speaks of sovereign rule. It speaks of their being, someone in charge. The throne is perhaps the centrepiece of the entire vision, although there are these other thrones round about 24 elders that I guess in some way represents the church or the redeemed of God in some sense, the leaders of God's people, the redeemed dressed in white. But the throne at the center of all thrones is the centerpiece. And we are able to glimpse it because In verse 1, a door was standing open, and this voice invites John, come up, come up and look, come and see this throne. And then in chapter 5, of course, we understand more about who is seated on the throne, but someone is seated on the throne. human beings, all of us, we weep at meaninglessness and pain. There was a poor fellow on the radio this morning describing how he was kind of so-so about Christianity. He was open to the idea of there being a God. He would discuss it. He felt he was not an atheist. But his 11-year-old brother, when he was a teenager, had died in a drowning accident. And as a teenager, growing up in a religious home, he kept using the word religious, which was interesting, he felt, surely this is the point of religion, that if we obey this God, and if we sit through hours of chapel, we've done our bit of the bargain, surely God should now do his bit of the bargain, and surely if ever there was a bit of the bargain he should have done, it should have been to stop my brother drowning. It's pointless. But he hadn't understood the Gospel, had he? The Gospel's not a formula. It's not mechanics. It's not a, you know, we put in ten hours of church attendance, God churns out ten less days of pain. That's religion, but that's not the gospel. And what this vision reminds us of is that in the gospel we have the living Lord who created our bodies and gave us life. who is reaching down to us in mercy and holding us through all the agonies of life in this world. We don't have a mechanical formula to follow. We have a Lord, a Saviour, a Redeemer who loves us. and who says, trust me, trust that I am sovereign over all things. Look at my throne. Come and look, John. I mean, Patmos, can you begin to imagine? Exiled to Patmos to die. The apostle must have had days of deep despair and crying out in helplessness. as the church is persecuted and he's estranged from the believers. And the Lord in his kindness says to old John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, come up and look and see there is a throne and there is someone on it. It's a terrifying place because from that throne came flashes of lightning and rumblings and peals of thunder, but it's secure. God's occupied throne gives us true perspective. Of course we weep at meaninglessness and pain, like all human beings, but our perspective is different. Once, with John, you have glimpsed the throne. Don't despair. That throne is there, and the living Lord reigns from it. What a wonderful thing to see, to know, to believe, and no wonder the chapter ends with praise. Amen. Let's pray for a moment. You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being. How we praise you, Heavenly Father, that in your kindness you gave John this vision that we might have these words and trust you no less than he was enabled to do. Amen.