What do the four living beings of Revelation mean?
Who are the living beings?
The four living beings of the Apocalypse, or the tetramorph, represent the roles of Divinity in the History of Salvation (munera divinitas in historia salutis). Both in the prophecy of Ezekiel and in the book of Revelation according to John, we can see the description of these four figures, which the hagiographers - the sacred writers - describe as beings with the faces of a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. Beings that are presented in close relationship with God and that have, at some point, generated a certain sense of hiddenness and, at the same time - perhaps -, of the strangest and most unsettling visions in the Bible.
Everything in the Bible has its meaning, its reason for being, and for its explanation it is necessary to analyze the history of Salvation, its development, and how God intervenes in the history of humanity in his desire to rescue it from the hands of the enemy, - Satan -, to bring it to redemption.
These living beings are key, a reflection and metaphor of that task to which God devotes himself, and they express the mechanisms, and perhaps systems used for that purpose by interacting in the development of human life from its beginnings to the end of times. These mechanisms, - we could say -, are what we call the roles of divinity in the history of salvation. Roles, facets, functions that God interprets and assumes through the Word for the transcendental task.