What are the “living creatures” in Ezekiel and Revelation?

Question 8019.

Ezekiel opens his book with a vision so strange that readers have been arguing about it for two and a half thousand years, and at the centre of it are four living creatures. John sees something very like them around the throne in Revelation 4. Between them these two passages have generated more speculation than almost anything else in Scripture, including a good deal that involves flying saucers.

I want to take the text at its word. My conviction is that these are real beings rather than pictures of something else, that Scripture itself tells us what they are, and that their function is a good deal more interesting than the guesswork that surrounds them.

What Ezekiel actually saw

The vision opens by the river Chebar with a stormy wind out of the north, a great cloud with fire flashing inside it, and out of the middle of the fire come four living creatures. Ezekiel 1 describes each as having a human likeness, four faces, four wings, straight legs with feet like a calf’s hoof, and human hands beneath the wings. They gleam like burnished bronze and they move like flashes of lightning.

The four faces are the detail everybody remembers. Each of the living creatures has the face of a man in front, a lion on the right, an ox on the left, and an eagle behind. They do not turn as they move, because whichever way the Spirit goes, they go, and a face is already pointing that way.

Beside them are the wheels, and the wheels are stranger than the creatures. A wheel within a wheel, rims full of eyes, moving in concert with the living creatures because the spirit of the creatures is in the wheels. Above them is an expanse like awful crystal, and above that a throne like sapphire, and on the throne a figure with the appearance of a man surrounded by fire and brightness. Ezekiel is careful with his words here. He does not say he saw God. He says he saw the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord, and then he fell on his face.

Ezekiel names them himself

We are not left to guess at the identification, which is where a great deal of the speculation could have been avoided. In chapter 10 Ezekiel sees the same vision again, this time in the temple, and he tells us plainly that these are cherubim. He even says so twice, adding that he knew them to be cherubim because he had seen them by the Chebar canal.

That single sentence settles the question of what the living creatures are. They belong to the order of angelic being called kerub in Hebrew, the beings stationed at the gate of Eden and depicted over the mercy seat of the ark. I have written on that order more generally in what cherubim and seraphim are.

There is a small variation between the two chapters. In chapter 10 the ox face has become the face of a cherub. Commentators have offered various explanations, the simplest being that the ox face was the characteristic cherub face and Ezekiel, having now seen them in the temple where the carved cherubim stood, describes it by its proper name. I would not build anything heavy on the difference.

What John saw in Revelation

The four living creatures of Revelation 4 are recognisably the same family of being, though the description is not identical. John sees four creatures around the throne, full of eyes in front and behind, the first like a lion, the second like an ox, the third with the face of a man, the fourth like an eagle in flight. Each has six wings rather than four, and they are full of eyes all round and within.

The six wings and the ceaseless cry of holy, holy, holy connect them to Isaiah’s seraphim rather than to Ezekiel’s cherubim, which is why some readers conclude that John is seeing a different order altogether. I would not press the categories that hard. Scripture gives us glimpses of the throne room rather than an angelic taxonomy, and the differences may reflect what each prophet was shown rather than a difference in the beings themselves.

What is clear is the function. These living creatures never stop giving glory and honour and thanks to the one seated on the throne, and whenever they do so the twenty-four elders fall down and cast their crowns before him. They are not decoration around the throne. They are the ones who start the worship.

The four faces, and what they are not

The four faces have attracted a great deal of imaginative interpretation. The most familiar suggestion, going back to the early church, is that they correspond to the four Gospels, with Matthew as the lion, Mark as the man, Luke as the ox and John as the eagle, or some rearrangement of that. It is an old and attractive scheme with no basis whatever in the text.

Another common reading takes them as the highest of four created orders, the man as the crown of creation, the lion of wild beasts, the ox of domestic animals and the eagle of birds, so that the living creatures represent the whole created order worshipping God. That is at least plausible, and it fits the way Revelation later has every creature in heaven and on earth joining the song.

I would hold such readings loosely. Ezekiel does not explain the faces, and where Scripture is quiet I would rather be quiet with it than build a doctrine on a symmetry that pleases me. What the faces certainly convey is a fullness of created capability gathered in the service of God, and a strangeness that is meant to unsettle.

Real beings, not literary devices

A good deal of modern scholarship treats the living creatures as borrowed imagery, pointing to the winged bulls with human faces that guarded Assyrian and Babylonian palaces. The parallel is real, and Ezekiel’s first hearers, exiles in Babylon, would have seen such figures. That does not make the vision a piece of borrowed decoration.

The Bible presents angelic beings as genuinely existing creatures with function and will. Cherubim guard Eden, and their likeness is commanded for the ark, which would be a strange instruction if they were only a figure of speech. I take the living creatures to be actual beings that Ezekiel and John actually saw, described in the only language available to men who had seen something outside ordinary experience.

That matters for how we read everything else. If the throne room is furnished with metaphors, then the throne is a metaphor too, and before long the one seated on it is a metaphor. I would rather begin by believing that the prophets saw what they said they saw. My wider approach to angelic beings is set out in who Michael the archangel is.

What the eyes are for

The detail that unsettles readers most is the eyes. The rims of the wheels are full of them in Ezekiel, and in Revelation the living creatures themselves are covered with them, in front, behind and within. It is a genuinely disturbing image and it is not meant to be comfortable.

The most natural reading connects the eyes to the vision’s setting. Ezekiel is being shown the glory of God at a moment when Jerusalem is about to fall and the exiles are convinced that God has either lost interest or lost the fight. A throne surrounded by beings covered in eyes, moving on wheels that go in every direction, says something rather pointed to a people who thought God could not see them in Babylon.

The wheels make the same point. God’s throne is not fixed in the temple in Jerusalem. It moves, and in the chapters that follow it moves out of the temple, which is the tragedy at the heart of Ezekiel’s prophecy. The living creatures carry the glory away from a house that has forfeited it.

Where they appear in the rest of Scripture

Cherubim are stationed at the east of Eden with a flaming sword after the fall, guarding the way to the tree of life. Two are made of hammered gold on the mercy seat, facing each other with wings overshadowing it, and God says he will meet with Moses from between them. Solomon’s temple contained two enormous carved cherubim overshadowing the ark, and cherubim were worked into the curtains and the walls.

The Psalms speak of God as enthroned upon the cherubim and, in one striking image, of the Lord riding on a cherub and flying. The consistent association is with the immediate presence of God and with the guarding of what is holy. Wherever they appear, a boundary is being kept.

In Revelation the living creatures reappear at the opening of the first four seals, each summoning a rider with a voice like thunder. They are present at the giving of the bowls of wrath. They are not passive spectators of judgement but participants in it, which fits everything else Scripture says about them.

The speculation worth refusing

I should say something about the readings that circulate online. Ezekiel’s wheels have been claimed as a spacecraft, most famously in the 1970s, and the idea has never entirely gone away. It requires ignoring the fact that the prophet identifies the beings himself and that the vision culminates in a throne and a commission to preach.

Another line of speculation assigns the living creatures elaborate roles drawn from sources well outside Scripture, complete with names, ranks and territories. I have no objection to noting what other ancient writings say, provided everyone understands they carry no authority. The trouble begins when a scheme built from such material starts driving how people read the Bible.

The sober approach is to say what the text says, to identify what the text identifies, and to leave the rest alone. That is less exciting than a spacecraft, and it has the advantage of being defensible.

Why any of this matters

It would be easy to file the living creatures under curiosities and move on. I would resist that, because both visions have the same effect on the men who saw them. Ezekiel falls on his face. John, who had leaned on Jesus at supper, falls at his feet as though dead when he sees him in glory. The throne room is not a comfortable place.

We have grown casual about the presence of God, and a good deal of contemporary worship is designed to be reassuring rather than awesome. The living creatures cry holy without ceasing, and Isaiah 6 shows what that does to a man who overhears it. He does not feel affirmed. He says he is undone.

The same vision that levels Isaiah then cleanses him and sends him. That is the pattern, and it is worth noticing that it runs in that order. Awe first, then mercy, then a commission.

Are the living creatures the same as the seraphim?

This is the question that most often follows, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug. Isaiah sees seraphim, six-winged, crying holy, holy, holy, one of whom takes a burning coal from the altar and touches the prophet’s lips. John’s living creatures have six wings and the same cry. Ezekiel’s have four wings and are named as cherubim.

Three positions are possible. The first says the orders are distinct and John is seeing seraphim, with Ezekiel’s cherubim a separate group. The second says the orders overlap or that the terms describe function rather than species. The third says John is shown beings of the same order as Ezekiel’s, appearing differently because the setting is different.

I lean to the second, with the reserve that the question may be badly framed. Hebrew saraph means burning one, and kerub has no agreed etymology at all. We may be dealing with descriptions of what these beings are doing rather than with the celestial equivalent of a species list. Scripture nowhere sets out an angelic taxonomy, and the elaborate hierarchies of later tradition were assembled long after the last apostle died.

The wheels, and the God who is not stuck

I want to come back to the wheels, because they are the part of the vision that speaks most directly to Ezekiel’s original hearers. The exiles believed that God was tied to a place. His house was in Jerusalem, his throne was between the cherubim over the ark, and Babylon was a very long way from both.

Then a prophet by a canal in Babylon sees the throne arrive on wheels. The living creatures carry it, the wheels go in any direction without turning, and the whole apparatus moves wherever the Spirit goes. Ezekiel 1:19-21 labours the point that the wheels rise with the creatures because the spirit of the living creatures is in the wheels.

A displaced people are being told that the God they thought they had left behind has followed them into exile. It is the same comfort Jacob received at Bethel and the same one the disciples received on a hillside in Galilee. If you have ever felt that God belongs to a building or a season of life you have moved away from, this vision is aimed at you.

So, now what?

So what do you do with the living creatures? Start by letting them do to you what they did to Ezekiel and John. If your picture of God has become manageable, a few slow readings of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 will do it more good than most devotional books.

Then be content with what is revealed. Scripture identifies these beings, describes them, and tells us what they do. It does not satisfy our curiosity about the rest, and the appetite for more than is written has led a great many people somewhere unhelpful.

And notice where the vision ends. Not with the creatures, who are only ever pointing away from themselves, but with the one on the throne. If a study of angels leaves you more interested in angels than in God, something has gone wrong with the study.

And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, were full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!

Revelation 4:8 (ESV)

For Further Study

Those wanting to go further will find the fullest dispensational treatments in Charles Ryrie and Lewis Sperry Chafer, whose systematic sections on angelology set out the biblical categories without straying into speculation. J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord are the standard guides to the Revelation throne-room material within a premillennial framework, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is particularly useful on the Hebrew background of Ezekiel’s vision and on the temple chapters that follow it. Millard Erickson gives a careful evangelical survey of the doctrine of angels for those who want the wider discussion.