The vision in chs. 4–5 portrays a heavenly world in which God and the Lamb’s throne is the center, with everything else surrounding it, first a rainbow aura, then the “living creatures” who guard the throne, then the twenty-four elders sitting on thrones in a second outer circle, and finally all other creatures in the universe. The seventeen references to God’s “throne” in these chapters (of thirty-four in the book) underscore the centrality of God’s sovereignty, for which he is climactically given glory in 4:9–11 and 5:12–13. God and Christ are glorified because Christ’s resurrection demonstrates that they are sovereign over creation to judge and to redeem. The clear deduction from chs. 4 and 5 is that the Lamb is in the same divine position as God, a point reiterated throughout the remainder of the book and intimated earlier