Getting through the letters last night, the dramatic action in the Book of Revelation gets underway in chapters 4 & 5 with a scene change to the perpetual worship in heaven. In some Christian churches, great importance is placed on earthly worship being biblical, so I wondered how significant would be the absence of some of these liturgical elements to contemporary Christian worship: incense, prostrations, repetitive praise - "Holy, holy, holy".

In studying with proponents of rapture eschatology, the rapture is placed at Revelation 4:1, to quote Scoffield's Bible note: As the word "church" does not appear again in Revelation until 22:16, the catching up of John from earth to heaven has been taken to be a symbolic representation of the translation of the Church as occurring before the events of the tribulation described in chs. 6 - 19.

By discerning which biblical passages apply to Christians - this exercise is called "rightly dividing the word of God" - rapture proponents detach themselves personally from most of the book.

These Christians are not moved to see a model of worship in the Book of Revelation, they certainly see nothing to imitate, despite the fact that Revelation offers a picture of heavenly worship.

And, well, this detachment is a good thing, from their perspective, because, gosh, isn't the worship depicted too liturgical, isn't it too like Jewish ritualism, isn't it too Catholic? Being Western Christians, they don't know enough to say "Isn't it too Orthodox?" They breathe a collective sigh of relief. Yes, it is all of those things, and they would have none of it.