Later text
In a loud voice they were saying: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing!”
Intertextuality Pair
Echo
Later text
In a loud voice they were saying: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing!”
Earlier text
Isaiah 53:7BSB
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth.
Earlier text
53:12BSB
Therefore I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the spoils with the strong, because He has poured out His life unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors. Yet He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.
The heavenly acclamation "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing!" hymns the worthiness of the slain Lamb — the same slaughtered-Lamb Christology John established in 5:6 ("a Lamb who appeared to have been slain"), which the vault already ties to Isaiah 53:7. Where 53:7 portrays the Servant "led like a lamb to the slaughter," Revelation 5 portrays that slaughtered Lamb now standing at the center of the throne and receiving the sevenfold doxology owed to God alone. The verse displays the Servant Song's exaltation-humiliation inclusio (52:13 exalted / 53:7-12 slaughtered) brought to its consummation: the ground of the Lamb's supreme worthiness is precisely that he was slain (5:9, "because You were slain"). The telos is worship: the redeemed do not admire the Lamb's slaughter as a tragic past but adore it as the everlasting reason for his glory, so that the marks of the slaughter become the object of unending praise — Christ crucified seen as Christ most worthy, infinitely desirable to all heaven.