The Lamb Slain in the Midst of the Throne.
I. The sacrificial offering of Jesus Christ is recognised in heaven. Think as men may of the theme of redemption through atoning blood, it is acknowledged in its reality and perceived in its glory by the dwellers in a higher and purer sphere than our own. There is, I imagine, a design in this representation to exhibit to us that glory of the Redeemer which is peculiar to Him only as a Lamb that had been slain. He has a glory independent of any of His achievements for man, a glory to which nothing can be added, and from which nothing can be withdrawn, whose shining can neither be brightened nor dimmed by the obedience or disobedience of His creatures, the glory of His essential Deity. But the peculiar glory of the Redeemer resulted from His work as Mediator. To accomplish this work, He assumed humanity. He obtained His victory by falling; and if the military chieftain, returning a conqueror from the conflict, manifests his energy, and prowess, and bravery by the wounds which he bears away with him from the battle-field, why can we not understand how the appearance of Jesus Christ on high, as a Lamb that had been slain, is the brightest illustration of His grandeur?
II. These considerations minister to our own personal comfort, security, and hope. Christ is now carrying on in heaven the very office and work which He commenced when on earth; and though there is no visible altar and no literal sacrifice, no endurance of anguish, and no shedding of blood, yet still He presents vividly and energetically the marks of His Passion, and the effect is the same as though He died daily and acted over again and again the scene of His tremendous conflict with the powers of darkness.
III. Look at the relations which Christ sustains as possessed of infinite wisdom and unlimited power to govern the world, symbolised by the seven eyes and the seven horns, which are the seven spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth. No doctrine is more plainly taught in the Bible than that Christ by His sufferings has been exalted to a throne of universal dominion, "given to be Head over all things to the Church," so that Providence has brought all its resources and all its instrumentalities and laid them down at the foot of the cross, to be used in subserviency to and in furtherance of its grand design. The Redeemer has a kingdom, and an end for which the kingdom exists, peculiarly His own, and He must reign until His rule is universally acknowledged, and all His enemies are put under His feet.
E. Mason, A Pastor's Legacy,p. 36.
I. Notice the description that is given of Christ: a Lamb. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." That was Jesus of Nazareth. You cannot read the Old Testament without understanding the same thing clearly: "He is led as a lamb to the slaughter." That also is Jesus of Nazareth. There is a fitness in His being presented as a Lamb in His own personal character. Morning sacrifices, passover lambs these and kindred institutions of the Old Testament all point in the same direction.
II. This Lamb slain even yonder in heaven to the vision of the Apostle bears traces of having been slain. God deals with angels one by one. The angels are not a race. Like the trees of the forest, each one stands upon his own root. I feel thankful that we belong to a race. Christ took not on Him the nature of angels. We are a race, and are dealt with as a community. We stood in the first Adam, and he sinned; Christ is the second Adam, and we can stand in Him, and be saved; and there is the philosophy of the Lamb slain. He came that He might undo what the first representative did: He came that He might stand for His people, that He might be in their room. He is slain, for the wages of sin is death; He is slain, for the law was broken, and He magnifies it; He is slain, because there was a penalty, and before angels, and principalities, and powers God is to be seen as forgiving for a cause, and that cause is the atoning death of the Lamb of God: "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him might not perish, but have eternal life." That is a familiar text. Look into the meaning of it, and below the surface. The world is like a great house, with vessels to honour and vessels to dishonour; He loves it as His great house, but let it be our care that we be not the vessels to dishonour.
III. The Lamb slain is on the throne. In one breath the preacher tells us about Christ as a Victim, Christ as a Priest; in the next breath he tells us about this same Crucified One as on the throne. Yes, it is a strange combination. Man never could have made it; human intellect never could have originated it.
IV. The Lamb slain is standing in the midst of the throne. Fourteen or fifteen times in the Scriptures Christ is connected in this way with the throne; but this picture, standing, is peculiar. It is here and in one other place, here very fitly: standing is the attitude of activity. The man on duty, the man who has to do things, the man who has to put his strength into things, stands up. Christ is Mediator, He is High-priest still: He ever liveth to make intercession; He is Prophet still: He is teaching all His people; He is King: He is standing, and nothing escapes His vision.
J. Hall, British Weekly Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 117.
Christ and His Members United by the Holy Spirit.
The union of Christ with His people, and of them with Him, is a thing which may be described, in the light of the New Testament, as not only a great truth of spiritual life, but the truth of truths. It is related to all other kindred doctrines as that which combines, harmonises, and explains them; it appears as the end where they appear as means.
I. The sacred mediation of the heavenly Spirit, the conveyance through Him of every blessing of the vital union, appears everywhere in the subject. The Sevenfold One is sent forth into all the earth, as the eyes, as the presence, of the exalted Lamb of the sacrifice. It is by Him, and by Him alone, that that presence is in the Church and is in the Christian.
II. "Sent forth into all the earth" from the presence of the Blessed, from the heaven of heavens into all the earth, from the heart of God to the heart of man, from amidst the song of the heavenly elders to you and to me to the circumstances of our life today; to the stones and dust, the thorns and mire, of our path; to the snares and the illusions, to the crowds and to the solitude, of earth. Yes, He is sent forth into the present, the visible, the temporal; He is intended, He intends Himself, to be no dreamy abstraction above our heads and hearts, but to be the inmost Friend, the living strength, the infinitely ready and versatile resource and expedient of the hour of your temptation and of mine. He is able to set us at liberty in Christ, and yet by the same act to bind us into the bondage of Him "whom to serve is to reign"; He is able to make all the flying hours of inestimable and never-returning time sacred to us, and yet to take out of them all anxiety, to fill the heart with the things eternal, and yet to open to it as no other touch can do all that is truly rich and beautiful in the things of this life; He is able, in a word, having united us to Christ, to make that union a living, bright reality, a possession that we use as well as have, in the whole of life.
H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All,p. 125.
References: Revelation 5:6. R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xii., p. 284.Revelation 5:6; Revelation 5:7. E. W. Shalders, Ibid.,vol. xiv., p. 362.Revelation 5:7. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 295.Revelation 5:8. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xviii., No. 1051.