Skill Two taught you to take a symbol apart. It never told you why the book was built out of symbols in the first place. That is this one, and it is the answer the whole guide has been walking toward: Revelation compresses because its subject will not fit in a sentence.
Some of what follows you have already done — the Christ of chapter 1 and the Lamb of chapter 5 were both on your table in Skill Two. Go back and read what you wrote then, or come at them fresh. Either is fine. You are asking a different question this time, and you may find your old answers were better than you remember, or thinner.
In 1738 Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon called The Excellency of Christ. His text was Revelation 5:5–6 — the Lion announced and the Lamb shown — and his doctrine was one sentence: there is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ. It has been a favourite here for years. Read it slowly; it is short.
John was informed about a lion which had managed to open the book, and likely anticipated seeing a lion in his vision. But as he was expecting to see one, there appeared a lamb to open the book — a creature entirely unlike a lion. A lion is a predator, one accustomed to causing dreadful slaughter among other animals, and no creature is more easily caught as prey by it than a lamb.
Jesus Christ possesses a most admirable union of various excellencies. Although the lion and the lamb are very different kinds of animals, each of them has its own particular merits. The lion is superior in strength and in the dignity of his look and voice, while the lamb is outstanding in meekness and patience. Yet we find in the text that Christ is compared with both of them, where the distinct excellencies of each are wonderfully brought together in him.
Edwards then goes through the excellencies that meet in Christ two at a time. Each pair is a genuine collision: hold either one alone and you have a figure you could describe. Hold both and you have someone you have to be shown.
Edwards’s own list runs longer than this. These are the seven we keep coming back to.
Not all seven. One. Choose the pair you find hardest to hold together — the one where you suspect that believing the left half properly would cost you the right half.
Write about that. Where do you quietly keep only one of the two? Most of us have a Christ who is running at half strength in one direction, and we did not choose it on purpose.
Here is the problem Edwards is describing, put in terms of language. A sentence has to choose. You can say he is strong. You can say he is meek. You cannot say both in one predicate, and if you say them one after another they start negotiating with each other — the listener hears a qualification, and quietly downgrades both. Fairly strong. Fairly meek. A reasonable man.
An image does not negotiate. Put the Lion and the Lamb in a single sentence of vision and neither one is reduced by the other. The lion is not slightly less a lion for standing next to a lamb. Both run at full strength at once, and the collision between them is not a problem in the text — the collision is the text.
Which answers a question you were left holding at the end of Skill Two: why does John describe Jesus almost entirely in borrowed words, instead of telling us plainly what he saw? Because plainly was not available. What he was given to say does not go into propositions without losing most of itself, and he had a form that could carry it whole.
Compression is not concealment. It is capacity.
Which changes what decompressing a symbol is for. You are not cracking a code and you are not solving a puzzle. You are opening something up to find out how much was packed into it — and what was packed into it, every time, is him.
These are not for looking up. You have done the lookup work. This is meditation: read the text, see the two things that will not go together, and stay there until it stops being a puzzle and starts being a person. The prompt at the bottom of each is a place to rest, not a question to answer well.
Do not do these in one sitting. There are eleven, and one at a time is the whole point.
… the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood…
The hairs of his head were white, like white wool… and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not… I died, and behold I am alive forevermore.”
The words of the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze… I gave her time to repent.
The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation… Behold, I stand at the door and knock.
“Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah… has conquered.” And I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes.
For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron… And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.
… called Faithful and True… He has a name written that no one knows but himself… On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.
“Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready”… “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end… I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.
Every one of those eleven is a thing which should not be:
A resurrected body. A tender‑hearted king. A courageous servant. None of them should exist, and the one who holds all of them together is the reason this book had to be written in pictures rather than propositions.
So you have five skills now. The first says the book had an address. The second says its images are compressed. The third says its comforts are real and older than the book. The fourth says those comforts were fitted to particular people in particular trouble. And the fifth says what the whole apparatus was ever for.
It was never a puzzle to be solved. It was a person to be seen — and seen at full strength in every direction at once, which is the only way anyone has ever been comforted by him.
Go back through the notebook — all of it, from the first city brief to the last of these eleven. Find the place where you first stopped reading Revelation as a problem. Date it if you can. Then write down what you saw there.