On Christmas Eve 1968, three men orbiting the moon looked up from the gray, pocked horizon and saw something no human being had ever seen: the earth, rising. Bill Anders grabbed a camera and caught it, a small blue-and-white marble hanging in black nothing over a dead lunar landscape. The crew had been trained for nearly every contingency. They had not been trained for that. They went to the moon, someone later wrote, and ended up discovering the earth.
It had been a terrible year. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in April, Robert Kennedy in June. The Tet Offensive shook the story America told itself about Vietnam. Cities burned, and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.
Then, from a quarter of a million miles away, that photograph. And that night the astronauts read to a watching world from the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times on Christmas Day that to see the earth as it truly is, "small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats," is to see ourselves as "riders on the earth together."
The picture did not fix a single problem. The war went on and the grief stayed. But from that height the whole mess looked different: small, held, and somehow beautiful. Distance gave perspective, and perspective gave something close to hope.
A Door Standing Open
That is very near what Revelation 4 offers. John has just finished the seven letters, seven honest, searching messages to seven struggling churches. Then comes a single sentence that changes the view: "After this I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice, which I had 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 behold, a throne stood in heaven" (4:1–2).
The door is open, so this is invitation and not intrusion. The voice is the one John heard in chapter 1, the risen Christ, so he does not climb alone. And "in the Spirit" marks a new vision. John is not asked to escape the world, but to see it from the place where its story is actually governed.
Chapters 4 and 5 are one scene: the throne room first, then the Lamb who steps forward to take the scroll. "Come up here" is the invitation to both.
The View from the Throne
First, a throne. The word appears about seventeen times in these two chapters, and everything John describes is arranged around it. Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel each saw a glimpse of it. Now it all comes into focus.
Then glory, in language that nearly breaks: jasper and carnelian and an emerald rainbow, lightning and thunder, living creatures covered in eyes who never stop saying, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come." And twenty-four elders, whom I take to be angelic members of God's heavenly council, casting their crowns before the throne.
The throne is not a distant prospect. Jesus told the church in Laodicea, just a few verses earlier, "I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne" (3:21). And Paul says that God has already "raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:6). For the believer, "come up here" is not only an invitation for the end of the age. It describes where we already belong.
We do not climb to the throne room by effort. We are carried there by the one who went before us.
Heaven-Minded, Earthly Good
There is a whole cottage industry of "heaven tourism," books claiming a trip to the other side and back. One of them, written with a boy named Alex Malarkey, sold over a million copies before he wrote an open letter saying he had made it up. "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention," he wrote. "The Bible is enough."
I tell that story not to pile on a young man who was badly hurt and later told the truth, but because it shows how hungry we are for heaven, so hungry we will swallow almost anything.
But the New Testament does not tell us about a little boy who went up and came back. It tells us about a Man who came down, lived the life we were called to live and did not, bore the penalty we owed, and rose. Until he returns, he calls us to "set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth" (Colossians 3:2).
People warn about being so heavenly-minded that you are no earthly good. I have rarely met that person. The common problem runs the other way. A mind fixed on the throne is steadied in a way a mind fixed on headlines never will be.
Knowing God, Knowing Ourselves
John Calvin opens his Institutes (Book 1) by saying that our wisdom consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves, and that we never reach true self-knowledge until we have first looked on the face of God and then come down to look at ourselves.
That is the order of Revelation 4. We do not understand our lives, our times, or our mixed-up churches by staring at them harder. We go up, see the throne, and come back down with different eyes. From there the world's rulers are not the final word, the church's sorrows are not the end of her story, and we are neither as large as we feel in our pride nor as small as we feel in our despair. We are, to borrow the poet's phrase, riders together on a world that is held.
The Question of the Center
Then the whole scene breaks into a song with a single word at the center. "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things" (4:11). In chapter 5 it becomes "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain" (5:12).
The old English word for worship was "worthship." To worship is to name what is worth everything. And so the throne room asks each of us an uncomfortable question that the Monday calendar brings back into focus: what in my life cries out, "Worthy"? What gets my affections, my money, my waking hours, my study, my dreams, my hope? Whatever it is, that is my center. Heaven's answer is that only one is worthy of that place, the Creator who made all things and the Lamb who redeemed them.
To have the Throne of Heaven and her King as the center of our hopes, dreams, desires, and attention is to be heavenly minded, to love the Lord Jesus with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is, in fact, the only truly sane way to live. As CS Lewis reminds us in his book Mere Christianity, “Aim at Heaven, and you will get earth ‘thrown in’; aim at earth, and you will get neither.”
Carrying This Into the Week
You may wake this morning to a world that looks a good deal like 1968: noisy, grieving, afraid. I do not suggest you ignore it. I suggest you take the invitation that has stood open since John first heard that voice.
Come up here. Before the inbox and the news, read Revelation 4 aloud. Let the throne come into view, and the living creatures who never tire of saying, "Holy." Then ask what you would see differently if this were the place from which you looked at everything else, and carry that view down into the day.
The door is open. The one who is worthy is waiting.