Worship and Revelation 4-5 – Part 5 – An Objection

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If we stick with objections arising from the text of Revelation itself, perhaps the most obvious one is that raised in a comment on previous post by my friend James Anderson. Reformulated by me, it goes:

The text itself (Rev 19:10, 22:9) asserts that we should worship only God. And yes, Revelation plainly implies that Jesus should be worshiped. And so it plainly implies that Jesus is God. 

One might look to one of my favorite translations, the New Living Translation, which has these two verses saying, in part: “Worship only God”.

When you look at the Greek, though, you see that it simply says “Worship God.” Not the same thing! And most translations get this right. (Even The Message and the Good News Bible get it right.)

Where does the “only” come from? From the theological agenda of the translators; they want the text to be making the argument above. So in the ESV Study Bible, which translates these phrases correctly (“Worship God.”) they feel the theological need to add this footnote:

Human beings must not worship even the angels… God alone must be worshiped. Since the Lamb is rightly worshiped (5:8-14), he is God. (p. 2497)

Interestingly, these evangelical commenters agree with those in the recent Jewish Annotated New Testament that Revelation asserts that only God should  be worshiped. In their comment on 19:7-10, they assert that

It is God, not the Lamb/Jesus, who is to be worshiped. (p. 493)

And bizarrely, in their notes on chapter 5, they ignore the obvious fact that Jesus is being worshiped together with God, although they correctly note that

The heavenly song makes a clear distinction between the enthroned one and the sacrificial lamb. (p. 474)

I’m reading between the lines here, and the commenters in this book are understandably very circumspect, but I think their assumption is that surely, no first century Jew would worship anyone but God himself. To that, I say that this very book is a counterexample. Their theological agenda is blinding them to the obvious. But the same is so with the conservative evangelical commenters of the ESV Study Bible.

When you look at the texts on their own terms, they are not at all making the argument I started this post with.  The excellent Craig S. Keener nails what is really going on in both of these texts:

19:10 Revelation seems to encourage the view that Christians on earth worship with the angels, in communion with the worship of heaven (a common Jewish view); but the book simultaneously rejects the views of those who prayed to and praised angels (amulets and incantations attest that some Jews invoked angels). … (The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, p. 811, emphasis added)

22:8-9 Ephesians and Colossians suggest that some Jewish Christians in Asia Minor had been assigning too prominent a role to angels; if that error is at all in view here, this passage refutes it (cf. also Rev 19:10). (p. 820)

Right – in both passages, John has started to give into a temptation to worship the angel speaking to him. Worshiping Jesus is not at issue, and is not in view in Rev 19. In Rev 22 the angel (v. 1, 6) is speaking to John, and he speaks first in the prophetic first person for Jesus in v. 7 (“I am coming soon…” – this resumes in v. 12)  But there is a break or transition in v. 8. In any case, it seems that John is just repeating his earlier error. In either case, the angel might just as well have said, “Worship God and his Son.” This would have made his point too.

The angel in both cases tells John why John must not worship him. And it is not because the angel isn’t God himself (although of course, he isn’t). Rather,

I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. (19:10)

I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. (22:9)

In both cases this immediately precedes his command to “Worship God.” He grabs John’s head, as it were, and points it to the one on the throne – who has just been worshiped (19:1-9 – this time, without Jesus also being directly worshiped). This does not imply that John should not also worship Jesus. The angel emphasizes that he’s on a level with human prophets; but not so with Jesus, now that he’s been exalted to bear God’s right hand, as we’ve seen. He no longer has the status of being a “fellow servant” with us; he is God’s agent, yes, but is now “the ruler of kings on earth.” (1:5) So the grounds the angel gives for it being wrong to worship himself pointedly do not rule out worshiping the exalted man Jesus.

I conclude that this objection is a total miss; the objector can get no grip on the texts here. She only has her theory to fall back on, a theory which is at odds with Revelation.

As we’ve seen in this series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), in the book of Revelation, we are implicitly by clearly told to worship Jesus, and it is assumed throughout that Jesus is not God, but rather the human Son of God, now exalted to an everlasting position of honor at God’s right hand. The book stands dead against a theological assumption that many consider obvious, that we should only worship God himself. But theological theory must bow to textual fact, given the authority of the text.