The center can hold: though its imagery can be both vivid and disturbing, the Book of Revelation actually paints a comforting picture of an ever-present God.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS, OH MY! IN THE IMAGINATION of children, at least, these may be the scariest possibilities lurking out in the shadows. But in biblical terms the things that go bump in the nightmare realm of Judgment Day are far stranger. How about diabolical beasts and many-eyed living creatures and color-coded apocalyptic horsemen?

The Book of Revelation is a weird and fantastic journey through a future of moral retribution as seen by a visionary named John. It is in equal parts creepy, awesome, and confusing. Most folks tend to respond to the Book of Revelation in one of two ways: outright dismissal of an incredible and inscrutable literary form, or obsessive certainty about how to unlock its secrets.

There is another way to consider this book, which is to treat it as we do all scripture: something useful for our instruction if we just sit with it for a while and absorb its images. Granted, some stories in the Bible are absorbed more easily than others. That's why we teach them to children: Adam and Eve sin and must leave the garden. The earth is flooded, but good Noah and his family are saved. Moses parts the sea, and the people cross to safety. Bad people put Jesus to death, but God brings him back to life.

AS SIMPLE AS THESE STORIES SOUND WHEN WE HEAR THEM as children, we come to understand them more deeply as adults. The Garden of Eden is not God's back yard but a condition that humanity has lost because we fail to love. The ark of Noah is a symbol of God's promise to rescue the goodness in creation from its tendency toward corruption. The Exodus story is about the liberty God intends for the children of humanity willing to leave their slavery to sin behind. The cross of Jesus is not just the instrument of his death but also a sign of the limitless compassion of the God who loves and saves us at any price.

So when we approach the Book of Revelation with its strange creatures, astonishing events, and mysterious numbers, we should not be so quick to seize on a literal interpretation of this story as its message. It was not written to serve as a blueprint for Armageddon, and it is not an allegory with a direct relationship between a mythical character and its real-world correspondent.

Perhaps the best way to consider Revelation is through the medium of its artistry. Like any good work of art, it takes time to appreciate. Sit with a passage or image as you would with a painting or sculpture in a museum. Let it wash over you and gradually unfold its meaning for you. Wrestle with it, gnaw on it, protest it, or celebrate it as you are naturally moved to do. Like all scripture, find a way to be responsive to it, whether in prayer, with journaling or drawing or poetry, or in embracing a moral challenge and action.

One of the images from Revelation that compels us during the Easter season is the heavenly throne at the center of the action. Too often the Book of Revelation is dismissed as scenes from the end of the world: a cross between an action movie and a Greek tragedy, with crushed cars, annihilated cities, and dead bodies littering the landscape at the end.

More than 50 percent of the book, however, doesn't concern Earth and its activities at all. It's more accurate to describe Revelation as a book about heaven and its activities. Even when plagues and monsters assault humankind, the action is always viewed from the celestial perspective, and everything that happens is in the service of divine ends. Just as God commands every painterly detail of creation in the Book of Genesis, God is absolutely in command of the last days and their outcome. Perhaps it's only human nature to think the story is about us. In Revelation, as in Genesis, it's really about God.

WE COME TO UNDERSTAND THIS AS OUR GAZE IS RETURNED again and again to the throne at the center of the drama. In Chapters 4, 5, and 7, and again in 20 through 22, human activity is suspended or perhaps superseded by this magnificent celestial centerpiece. The throne is brilliantly portrayed: encompassed by an emerald halo, poised upon a crystal sea, accompanied by worthy elders and fearful beasts and hosts of angels, all of whom are caught up in an everlasting ecstasy of worship. Peals of thunder and flashes of lightning add to the powerful One who sits on the throne, described economically as a sparkling presence. If you want to know more about the One on the throne, you have to go there yourself.

What should we learn from fixing our gaze on such a scene? That God's halo is green, or that precisely 24 historical persons get to be heavenly elders? It would be terribly disappointing if we, like the children we once were, could only view the surface of this story and no more. When I contemplate this wonderful image of the majesty of God, a peculiarly theological word comes to mind: monotheism. We Christians share with our Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers the conviction that God is one, singular and unchallenged as the ruler of all that is. God is at the center of reality, "on earth as it is in heaven," and there is no other. No matter what is happening in pockets of human history here and there across this planet--and who knows, perhaps on worlds we know nothing about--God is at the center and nothing happens outside of the divine knowledge, reach, and concern.

What does this throne image have to do with us personally? It means that a child is dying in the arms of his mother right now, and God is there. It means that an elderly woman is going blind or losing control of her legs, and God sees and knows and cares about this struggle. It means that people are being crushed each day by war and poverty and disease and loneliness, and none of this happens outside of God's reign or beyond the divine judgment to come. If God is at the center of all that is, then all reality radiates from that place and is responsive to it.

When we surrender our place in human history for a spot in the new creation, we will also be answerable for how we failed to respond to the authority of the One who sits on the throne at the center. Our perspective in time may change, but the center never wavers or blinks.

WHAT SHOULD OUR RESPONSE TO THIS THRONE IMAGE rightly be? If worship is the celestial response--good enough for all those angels, elders, and creatures--it seems like a fail-safe option for us. This doesn't involve simply going to church on Sundays or saying prayers, which is the ritual form our worship may take. Worship fundamentally means obedience to the first commandment: putting no other gods before the one true God. The throne image compels us to keep God at the center of our lives. That means our careers can't be there, or our worries, or our desires, or any other thing that clutches at our attention and loyalty in every hour and every decision.

The visionary John, imprisoned for his beliefs on the island of Patmos, knew how hard it is to lift your gaze from the incessant cares of daily living and from the anxieties that naturally haunt us hour by hour. Still, he focused his attention on the throne at the center of things, on that sparkling presence who, in every moment of eternity, holds the threads of existence in just and compassionate hands. When history finally pours itself out into eternity, one life at a time or all in a moment, those gracious hands will catch us.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Seven Last Words and Invitation to the New Testament, both from ACTA Publications.