Chapter 3
What it means.
Revelation 4:1 After these things I looked and saw a door opened in heaven, and the first voice that I heard, like a trumpet speaking with me, was one saying, "Come up here, and I will show you the things which must happen after this."
It is my thesis that all that follows this statement in Revelation is John's detailed presentation of the knowledge given to him during his vision.
Let me be as clear as possible about this. Chapter one of Revelation is John's description of what he saw in the vision.Chapters two and three, the letters to the seven churches, are the specific messages he was given to deliver. All together, what he saw and what he heard, these were his vision. These were delivered to his physical senses.
Does this devalue all of Revelation which follows? By no means! In some very important ways, what begins in Chapter four is the heart of what Christ revealed to him. It is what revealed not to his eyes or his ears, but to his heart.
The overall scheme of Revelation from this point on flows from this scene of heavenly creation out to the world of time; back and forth three times. Each time the journey is made the experience is different.
Now, it is going to seem as though I am entirely changing the subject. But I'm not. I am going to have us think for a time on the difficulty of speaking about a three dimensional object with two dimensional language.
Starting with a simple example, what would you do if someone from another planet asked you to explain an orange to him/her/it? First thing would be to see if he(yes, we’ll go with male) understood the concept of food. If so, we could begin by saying an orange is a food. But how to describe it, assuming we just can’t show it to him? We could cover shape (spherical), color, size, and perhaps even smell. But where from there? A cross section view would be good, one which cut from north to south(you know what I mean) and one which cut along the “equator.” We could cover such things as juiciness, sweetness and food value. We could at least get to the point where our alien correspondent would recognize an orange if he encountered one. Probably.
Do you see how many different approaches it would take, using language only, to convey what an orange is? How much tougher would it be to communicate the totality of a vision? This is how I invite you to consider the balance of Revelation, from Chapter 4 onward. It is the presentation of a number of different layers of meaning of the “heart” of the vision that John was given by Christ.
We will look at the different elements of his presentation next. The first "element" to look at is the scene which is presented at the beginning of chapter 4. I call it the Creator's perfect universe. Or maybe we can just think of it as heaven.