This note is interpretation, not translation. The Lamb is the book’s own main name for Jesus. The word, arnion, is in Revelation 29 times, and only once anywhere else in the New Testament (John 21:15, “feed my lambs”). This note follows Him through the book and back into the scriptures behind Him.
Slaughtered, and standing. John is told of a lion and turns to see “a Lamb — looking as though its throat had been cut,” standing in the middle of the throne (5:6). The song is about the slaughter: “You were slaughtered, and with your blood you bought people for God” (5:9); “The Lamb who was slaughtered deserves to receive the power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and blessing” (5:12). He bears the marks of His death, and He is standing.
The lamb God provides. Isaac asked his father where the lamb was, and Abraham answered, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son” (Genesis 22:8). At the Passover each house took “a lamb without blemish” (Exodus 12:5), and God said, “the blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (12:13). Isaiah saw the servant “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7), and Philip began from that verse to tell the Ethiopian the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:32–35). John the Baptist: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Paul: “the Anointed, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Peter: “you were bought … with the precious blood of the Anointed, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:18–19). Those verses use other Greek words for lamb (amnos, probaton); Revelation keeps its own, arnion.
What the Lamb does in this book. Salvation belongs “to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (7:10). His people “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14), and the Lamb at the centre of the throne will shepherd them (7:17). They beat the accuser “by the blood of the Lamb and by the message they testified to” (12:11). The scroll of life belongs to “the Lamb who was slaughtered” (13:8; 21:27). The Lamb stands on Mount Zion, and His people “follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (14:1, 14:4). The kings “will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will defeat them, because he is Lord of lords and King of kings” (17:14). The wedding is His: “the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready” (19:7); “happy are those invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb” (19:9); the city is “the bride, the wife of the Lamb” (21:9), and its foundations carry “the twelve names of the twelve emissaries of the Lamb” (21:14).
The anger of the Lamb. At the sixth seal the kings and the great men cry to the mountains and the rocks, “hide us from the face of the one sitting on the throne, and from the anger of the Lamb” (6:16). A lamb’s anger is a paradox, and the book lets it stand. The ones who hide are those who would not come to Him; His own people in the same chapters are standing before the throne in robes washed in His blood (7:9, 7:14).
The temple, the lamp, the throne. At the end there is no temple in the city, “because the Lord God the Ruler over everything is its temple, and the Lamb” (21:22), and no need of sun or moon, “because God’s glory lit it up, and its lamp is the Lamb” (21:23). The river of the water of life comes “out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (22:1), and “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will serve him” (22:3). In the Greek, after God and the Lamb, the words are singular: “his servants” and “serve him” (hoi douloi autou latreusousin autō). One throne, and one served.