I had never before encountered such animosity to a belief that I had found to be beautiful, compelling, and life giving, and it took me aback. They looked up all the usual references in the Bible that are often marshalled in defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, and presented exegetical arguments—faulty exegetical arguments, I later learned—in an attempt to convince me that God is not, in fact, Three-in-One.
Looking back, it’s curious to me that my non-Trinitarian neighbours that day didn’t ever look up Revelation 5:6 for our little game of proof-text ping pong. It’s Curious, but not surprising. Because, although it’s not often discussed in traditional defenses of the Trinity, I think Revelation 5:6 gives us one of the most profound, mysterious, and compelling visions of God as Three-in-One as I’ve ever come across in the New Testament.
St. John the Divine has just received an awe-inspiring glimpse into the Throne Room of God, where he’s seen 24 Elders (presumably representative of the whole People of God, both the 12 Tribes of Israel and the 12 Apostles of the Church), and he’s seen 4 living creatures (apparently 4 angelic beings, though they also seem representative in some way of the Creation itself, since the number 4 is usually associated with the Creation, and they take the shape of creatures associated with the creation—lions, oxen, eagles, men). There are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, crowns being laid down and rainbows scintillating with glory.
Before discussing Revelation 5:6, we should note that in the heavenly vision of Chapter 4, John sees the Throne of the Almighty, and before the throne are 7 lamps (significantly, the word here is different than the word used in chapters 2-3 to describe the 7 lampstands of the 7 churches). Here, John clearly identifies the seven lamps as the “Sevenold Spirit of God” (4:5).
Although he glimpses someone sitting on the throne, the appearance of whoever it is on the Throne is describes in vague terms: “He had the appearance of jasper and ruby.” The image speaks of God’s beauty, his radiance, his glory, his infinite worth, but notably, it does not tell us much about God’s literal appearance; that is to say, we’re not supposed to imagine a huge piece of red crystal sitting on the throne—a literal ruby. Though John sees the Throne, and glimpses someone sitting there, he cannot truly tell what he saw. It reminds me a bit of Moses, being permitted only to see the back of God’s glory as it passed, in Exodus 33.
But then we come to Revelation 5. Here, after no one has been found worthy to open the scroll of God’s plan for bringing Justice to the earth and bringing human history to its final conclusion, John sees a lamb, looking as though it has been slain from the creation of the world.
Here is where things get interesting, and profoundly Trinitarian. As will become clear by the end of the book, the Lamb is the Lord Jesus Christ, slain for the world through his death on the cross. Notably, though, John tells us that this lamb is “standing in the midst of the throne” that is to say, at its very centre. He does not say the lamb is “sitting on the Throne,” of course, because there is already someone sitting there, but if the Lamb is standing “at the centre of the throne,” then it is impossible to extract his identity from the identity of the one sitting there. One commentor puts it like this: “Jesus Christ, the crucified, stands at the centre of the throne because he stands at the centre of the Almighty. Jesus Christ comes from and lives in the very centre of the living God! The heart of the Almighty is the heart of the Lamb” (Darrell Johnson, Discipleship on the Edge, p. 157).
It gets even more interesting, and more Trinitarian, though. Because in his description of this Lamb, John tells us that he has 7 eyes. The strangeness of a seven-eyed lamb is itself enough to tell us that this must be a symbolic description, but just to be sure, John explains: “the eyes are the Sevenfold Spirit of God.” Most commentors suggest that this reference to the “Seven Spirits of God” is picking up on Isaiah 11:2-3, where we’re told that the Spirit of the Lord will rest on the Messiah in his coming, and then the Lord’s Spirit is described with seven epithets: the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel, the Spirit of Might, the Spirit of Knowledge, and the Fear of the Lord. Earlier in Revelation 1, John greets his readers in the name of Jesus (the one who was and is and is to come), and the “Seven Spirits which are before his throne” (1:1); later, in Chapter 3, its stated even more explicitly, that Jesus is the one who “has the Seven Spirits of God.”
The Sevenfold Spirit of God in Revelation 5, then, seems to be a symbolic way of speaking about the Holy Spirit specifically, the “Spirit of the Lord” that rests on the Messiah, the Spirit that is actively at work in the world (the very eyes of the Lamb himself).
Once you connect all these dots, you can’t help but do the math here: if the Sevenfold Spirit of God—the Holy Spirit—is the “eyes” of the Lamb, and the Lamb is standing at the centre of the throne, one which the Almighty himself is seated, then the Holy Spirit, too, is standing there, at the centre of the Lamb, at the centre of God’s throne.
Revelation 5 has come to be, for me, one of the most goose-bump-inducing passages of the whole Bible. It’s all veiled in the mysterious symbolism of apocalyptic imagery, of course, but here we are offered a glimpse into the life of God himself—as much a glimpse, anyways, as anyone could bear, and what we see when we dare to turn our eyes to his One Single Throne, are three.
But these Three are placed in such a way, in such a place, as there could only ever, truly be One there.
So it is true, in one sense, what my non-Trinitarian neighbours were trying to tell me that day. You cannot find the word “Trinity” anywhere in the Bible. But if there is some better way to explain what John saw that day in the Throne Room of God, some doctrine or conceptualization of the divine that can account for a Throne that has the Almighty seated on it and the Lamb standing at its centre, I’ve not yet come across it.
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