Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion from The World Made Right by Michael Rowntree.
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Revelation 5
In July 2007, my brother Matt came within seconds of dying.
His best friend, Brian, was getting married, so the wedding party gathered at a lake house for pre-wedding festivities. The guys had been leaping off the dock and hoisting themselves back up via a platform that could be raised and lowered by a cable.
Unfortunately, someone had failed to ground the motor powering it. When Matt grasped the cable, 110 volts blasted him. Muscles seized. Grip tightened. Death currents surged through the live wire. Minutes felt like hours. Half in the water. Half out. He jerked like a fish on a hook. He tried to shout for help, but only a thin sound leaked out.
Then for a moment, hope revived. Brian saw the commotion. Eyes widened, he rushed over. A Division-1 athlete, he leaped on Matt’s back to pry him off, but the voltage pounded Brian too. At the speed of electricity, he turned from rescuer to victim. The baseball star pressed, growled, and tore himself loose. My brother still hung from the platform, barely conscious. A final thought pulsed: This is it. I’m done.
Friends scrambled. He prayed. Eyelids flickered and closed.
Still, this was not the end. Another friend named Matt Terry heard the commotion. He snagged a wooden oar. He jabbed. He dug. He pried each knuckle. Unconscious now, my brother splashed down. They rushed him to the hospital. Just a few days later, doctors sent him home, calling it a miracle.
This is it. I’m done.
Have you thought that before? Have you ever sensed the end closing in only to discover that it suddenly wasn’t?
“My life flashed before my eyes” is how we name that rare but clarifying moment. In the opening verses of Revelation 5, John faces something even more intense. Not just life but eternity flashes before him. Paralyzed, he weeps. He wails. But John’s helplessness is not just physical, mental, emotional, or relational.
It is cosmic.
Revelation 5
By Revelation 5, John hasn’t retreated through that door standing open in Heaven (4:1). While he’s still in the throne room, the prophet’s eyes now fall upon what God the Father holds: a scroll. Inscribed front and back with divine calligraphy, the script contains holy intel about redemption. Redemption is the theme of Revelation 5. It flows from the previous chapter’s theme of creation. Redemption is a kind of creation. It is new creation. Whoever is worthy has the privilege of not only opening the scroll but bringing its contents to pass.
John knows this. It explains the sobs—nobody bawls like that just to know a secret. John aches for redemption. He’s tired of being stuck on Patmos. Tired of watching friends get executed. Tired of Rome winning. When John sees the scroll, he knows the stakes. The fate of every person, every creature, and indeed the whole world hangs helplessly by a live wire.
Then an angel inquires,
Who is worthy to open the scroll? — 5:2
For redemption to be realized, a redeemer must be found. So John waits.
A celestial search committee scours Heaven, earth, and under the earth (did they really expect to find a redeemer there?), but to no avail (5:3). Finally, an announcement blares over Heaven’s intercom:
Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that He can open the scroll and its seven seals. — 5:5
A redeemer is found! That’s the first surprise. The second one is that this lion looks so un-liony:
I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain. — 5:6
As in Revelation 4, the cascade of praise ensues. The divine council buckles, each one “holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (5:8). They sing “a new song” about Jesus’ worthiness to open the scroll (5:9), for He “ransomed people... from every tribe” and “made them a kingdom and priests” (5:9–10). Angels contribute their harmonies next (5:11–12), followed by every creature in Heaven and on earth and under the earth (5:13).
Contents of the Scroll
The scroll is unraveled in future chapters, but characterized by prior ones—much prior ones. Two Old Testament hyperlinks clarify the nature of this scroll:
And when I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was in it. And he spread it before me. And it had writing on the front and on the back, and there were written on it words of lamentation and mourning and woe.
‘But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end.’... I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, ‘O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?’ He said, ‘Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.’
Like John, Ezekiel views a hand, a scroll, and front-and-back inscriptions—not because Heaven lacks paper but because God’s plan lacks no forethought. His scroll contains words of judgment (“words of lamentation and mourning and woe”). When God sets the world right, the associated display of wrath will reflect not the caprice of Zeus nor the happenstance of a fallen world but the precision of God’s fatherly hand.1
The scroll of Revelation 5 implicitly comprises similar prophetic warnings, but the audience and outcome differ. God sends Ezekiel “not to many peoples of foreign speech” (Ezek. 3:6a) but to Israel. Israel got first dibs on truth. So emphatic was God about reaching Israel first that He barred Ezekiel from preaching to the other nations and peoples, even while admitting, “Surely, if I sent you to such, they would listen to you” (3:6b). Now, in Jesus, that time has arrived. Israel rejected the scroll’s message; the nations will now listen. The elders’ song reinforces this conclusion:
And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth’. — Rev. 5:9–10
- The opening of the scroll yields redemption for the world.
This fulfillment began two thousand years ago and is evidenced today by every faith-filled gentile reading these words.
Some teach that Jesus still hasn’t opened the scroll because such an unraveling awaits the final seven years of this age. But the allusion to Daniel suggests otherwise. After the angel prophesies a cruel end-times tyrant (Dan. 11:30–45; cf. 2 Thess. 2:1–12), a tribulation (Dan. 12:1), and a resurrection (12:2–3), Daniel presses for more detail, but the angel rebuffs him: “The words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end” (12:9).
That phrase “time of the end” is biblical language not for the last seven years of the age but for all the days between Christ’s first and second advent (Acts 2:16–21). What Heaven sealed for Daniel (Dan. 12:4, 9), Jesus unsealed for us (Rev. 5:5; 6:1). Prophets like Daniel “desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Luke 10:24). We live in the days of fulfillment, as the good news of Jesus is proclaimed beyond Israel to the entire world. For two millennia God has rolled out His redemptive plan like a scroll.
But what makes Jesus worthy to open it?
The Champion’s Pedigree
If unsealing the scroll required holiness alone, God the Father could have saved us the drama and broken the seals. On this matter of redemption, however, even God Almighty has limits.
He is limited by His promises.
In Genesis 1 and 2, God commits Himself to ruling the world through those made in His image. When humanity rebels, He does not abandon the enterprise; He doubles down. In Genesis 3:15, God promises that one made in His image will defeat Satan and rule the world. Jesus opens the scroll because He is holy and human. Apart from Jesus, holy human is an oxymoron.
Jesus could not have come as just a righteous person, though. He needed the right pedigree. The redeemer must hail from the tribe of Judah and of David (Rev. 5:5). Jesus checked these boxes too. He was holy, human, Judean, and Davidic. Despite this prophetic pedigree, however, our champion needed something else to qualify as our champion.
You can’t be a champion without winning.
Thousands of Jews descended from Judah and David, but only Jesus conquered. We see this in Revelation 5:5:
And one of the elders said to me, ‘Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that He can open the scroll and its seven seals.’
Throughout Revelation, conquer is a military word. It is how the beast kills two prophets (11:7) and destroys the saints (13:7). The prophecies about a Lion of Judah and a Davidic king also convey military victory. Jacob labeled his son Judah a “lion’s cub” who would lay his hand on the neck of his enemies (Gen. 49:8–9). The “root of David” in Revelation 5 alludes to Isaiah 11, which also portrays Christ as a military conqueror (Isa. 11:4, 14). Other apocalyptic literature—unfamiliar to many modern Christians but widely read by ancient Jews—promised a lion messiah to kick the empire’s butt in battle (4 Ezra 11:37–12:33). This literature would have colored ancient expectations for an end-times hero: Surely he wins by destroying Rome, right?
Right?
Given this background, you can imagine John’s shock as this scene unfolds. Rumors of a champion spread across Heaven. John pictures a Mufasa- or Aslan-like lion pouncing on bad guys, tossing them like beanbags, shaking the earth with his roar.
But that’s not God’s picture.
John hears of a Lion but then sees a Lamb. It’s hard to imagine a greater opposite, but there is: It’s a slain Lamb (5:6). Many scholars translate this as “slaughtered.”2 Jesus is the omnipotent, slaughtered Lamb, a tornado with a tender side, a nuclear blast that invites our embrace.
- Jesus’ lamblike qualities do not detract from His hero status. They define it.
Jesus conquered not by tossing human beanbags but by becoming one Himself, tossed about by lionlike foes. He conquered by winning hearts, not battles. He shed His own blood, not others’.
How else could He cure our insatiable bloodlust?
He buried it in the grave He walked away from.
Jesus is not just a Lion and a Lamb, He is a Lion because He is a Lamb.
His lamblike sacrifice secures the lionlike victory. John sees the slain Lamb standing for this reason (5:6). He assumes the posture of victor, not victim. Jesus suffered willingly to conquer our mortal enemy: mortality itself. Not only the pedigree of promise but also the track record of a conqueror authorized Jesus to open the scroll.
To dry John’s tears.
To make the world right.
1. Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 27 (1563).
2. See the NASB, CSB, and NLT Bible translations.
Excerpted with permission from The World Made Right by Michael Rowntree, copyright Michael Rowntree.
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Your Turn
This is it. I’m done. Have you thought that before? Have you ever sensed the end closing in only to discover that it suddenly wasn’t? Revelation 5 take us straight to the Throne Room of Heaven and reveal that Jesus is a Lion because He is a Lamb. He is the One who will make things right! ~ Devotionals Daily