How this awkward adolescent learned of the amazing Four-and-Twenty Elders from his dad
Growing up I must have heard my father preach a thousand sermons – Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and midweek, year in and year out. He was much more a pastor than an orator and, with the sheer volume of sermons, hardly any stick in my memory. He had a point of never repeating a sermon; he considered sermon-recycling lazy, though he wasn’t above using someone else’s outline.
What I do remember are a couple of series – one, for example, when he preached through the book of Acts, and another from the mysterious book of Revelation. In the late 60s and early 70s, there was much talk of the end times quickly coming upon us. The rapture of the church and the second coming of Christ were all the buzz, and we were privileged to have numerous “authorities” on the subject in our town ever prompt to share their expertise.
When Dad announced he was going to teach a series on the book of Revelation in the midweek Bible study, the eyebrows of a couple of these experts raised high enough to disfigure the faces of mere mortals. But Dad, with a hint of orneriness, said he was going to be teaching something different out of Revelation: this series was to be on the hymns John recorded. The hymns of Revelation did not figure very prominently in these experts’ End Times canon.
If there was a theme to Dad’s life, it was the hymns and choruses of the church. He loved church music. And so, he planned to walk us through the glorious hymns written down by John in his revelation.
In those days, we were gathering in a first-phase “educational unit.” The sanctuary at the time seemed full if a hundred and fifty souls showed up, but with our modest church budget, even that was too large to heat in the winter for the more humble midweek service. So, in the dark evenings of winter, we met in a cozy classroom across the narrow hallway. I doubt we had more than a dozen people in that little room the night dad preached on the Four-and-Twenty Elders.
John doesn’t have much to say about these elders, other than how many there were. Are they angelic? Human? A specific gender? All we know is that they sat on thrones surrounding THE Throne – except when they bowed down. They hung out with four weirdly-described living creatures. Above all, they loved to sing. Well, singing is about all they did.
That singing is what Dad preached about.
In that tiny Sunday school room at the back of the church, I grew enchanted by the story of these four-and-twenty elders and their anthems. I was only a middle school lad facing challenges with which my young age had no tools to handle and burdens I could share with no person I had ever met.
But something triggered in my imagination – my spirit – when I listened to the story of the Four-and-Twenty. Like John the Revelator, I was caught up in a world far from those midcentury wood-paneled walls, blinking fluorescent lights, hard metal folding chairs, and speckled floors.
“The Elders Worship God,” Panel 11j of the 600-year-old Great East Window of York Minster (the Cathedral of York, England), https://stainedglass-navigator.yorkglazierstrust.org/window/great-east-window/explore; the photo file used here is in public domain at Wikimedia Commons.
There in that beyond world, the Four-and-Twenty were seated on little thrones around THE Throne. They dressed only in white with crowns made of real gold on their heads. They had harps – these, not angels or deceased humans are the real harp players in heaven – and each of them held incense bowls made of gold, incense that was actually the prayers of the saints.
And they sang.
Boy, did they sing!
“You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals,
“Because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.
“You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.”
And…
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was,
“Because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign…”
And…
“Amen, Hallelujah!”
I have no idea what style of music the sound was. No doubt it sounded a lot like contemporary American praise music of the 60s and 70s, or even some classical Bach organ thunder. Or so I probably thought.
I just know the impact that music had on heaven and earth.
When these Four-and-Twenty Elders got to singing, they triggered a crescendo of music. The four wild creatures got into the act. Then angels by the hundreds – hundreds of millions, that is. And then every living being in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the ocean got to singing, all centered on the One sitting on the throne and on the Lamb.
And when the singing subsided, the four wild creatures said, “Amen,” and the Four-and-Twenty Elders fell down and worshipped.
The mystique of these Four-and-Twenty was that every time they sang, all living beings in heaven and on earth focused their attention on that Throne in the center of that circle of elders. In the end it wasn’t about their singing or that universal choir, as amazing as that had to have been. It was all about the One who sits on the Throne.
And, in the mind’s eye of this awkward, traumatized adolescent sitting in that sixties-paneled classroom on a dark winter night, the One on that throne grew greater and greater until He filled the entire universe. All else was concealed by the presence of the One.
What comes to mind fifty years later is something cartoonish out of the story of Aladdin where the sorcerer wishes for greatness and gets his wish for power, growing larger and larger until he towers over all the earth. But that sorcerer asks for too much and suddenly is swallowed up in the itty-bitty genie lamp to be trapped for ten thousand years.
What I sensed in that little classroom at the end of the hall at the ebb tide end of South Jersey was that when the One on the throne is worshipped, His presence fills all the known universe and even all the universes of Creation. There is no genie bottle that can contain that greatness, nothing that can capture that awesomeness even for one nanosecond, let alone a few measly ten thousand years.
Half a century on, I still find myself caught up into that view of heaven. And when I do, I become aware that the One I worship, the One in whose hand I am held, fills all of reality with His presence. And when I worship Him, I am aware only of His greatness.
Whatever else my father lived for – and his life had many subpoints – he lived so that others, everyone he ever knew or met, could share in the glory of being around that throne of grace. Ten thousand years from now, the triumphs and tribulations of our present hour will be as insignificant as grains of sand along the Jersey shore. What will matter is who sits on the throne and will you and I be there, alongside Dad, echoing the song of the Four-and-Twenty Elders with a mighty chorus of untold numbers of worshippers.
You and me being there around that throne – in the end, that is what mattered most to Dad.
Taken from the message I shared at Dad’s funeral in Millville, NJ, this past November. Dad passed on to glory on November 7, 2023.