in the songs heard around the throne.7 Beginning in chapter 4 and continuing intermittently through chapter 19, these paeans of praise provide a celestial background to history that, amid the dissolution of human institutions, “abides the unchanging reality of an eternal world in which God’s purpose is unfailing and in which His Christ is victorious.”8 More personally, they disclose the proper response of created beings to the glory of God. Worship is the essence: not the giddy, sentimental feelings