What pressures or dangers are these particular people, in this particular place, facing right now which keep them from being “rooted and built up” in Christ? What is keeping them from “abounding in thanksgiving”?
What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?
We gather and join in this great multitude because the Lamb is at its center, and the Lamb’s Kingdom ushers in the peaceable eternity of life resurrected.
John the Revelator sees us in his vision just as much as he sees fantastical creatures and myriads of angels, all of us giving praise to the Lamb who alone is worthy.