Revelation
Things That shall Be
PART IV
THE EARTH-TRIAL.
(CHAP. xiv.)
"FIRST-FRUITS." (vv. i - 5.)
THE manifestation
of evil is complete; we are now to see God's dealings as to it. These acts of
Satan and his ministers are a plain challenge of all His rights in Israel and
the earth; and further patience would be no longer patience, but dishonour.
Hence we find now, as in answer to the challenge, the Lamb upon Mount Zion, -
that is, upon David's seat; and as the beast's followers have his mark upon
them, so the followers of Christ, associated with Him here, have His and His
Father's name upon their foreheads. What this means can scarcely be
mistaken.
Zion is not only identified in Scripture with David and his
sovereignty, but very plainly with the sovereign grace of God, when everything
intrusted to man had failed in Israel, priesthood had broken down, the ark gone
into captivity in the enemy's land, and although restored by the judgment of
God upon the Philistines, was no more sought unto in the days of Saul. He,
though Jehovah's anointed king, had become apostate. All might seem to have
gone, but it was not so; and in this extremity, as the seventy-eighth psalm
says, "Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, . . and He smote His
adversaries backward. Moreover, He refused the tent of Joseph, and chose not
the tribe of Ephraim, but chose the tribe of Judah - the Mount Zion which He
loved. . . . He chose also David His servant." Nor was this a temporary choice:
as a later psalm adds, "For Jehovah hath chosen Zion ; He hath desired it for
His habitation. This is My rest forever : here will I dwell, for I have desired
it." (Ps. cxxxii. 13, 14.)
Thus, though the long interval of so many
centuries may seem to argue repentance upon God's part, it is not really so :
"God is not man, that He should lie ; nor the son of man, that He should
repent." The Lamb on Zion shows us the true David on the covenanted throne, and
Zion by this lifted above the hills indeed. The vision is of course
anticipative, for by and by we find that the beast still exists. The end is put
first, as it is with Him who sees it from the beginning, and then we trace the
steps that lead up to it.
But who are the hundred and forty-four
thousand associated with the Lamb? Naturally one would identify them with the
similar number sealed out of the twelve tribes in the seventh chapter, and the
more so that the Lamb's and His Father's name upon their foreheads seems to be
the effect of this very sealing, which was upon the forehead also. No other
mark is given us as to them in the former vision, of whom we read as exempted
from the power of the locusts afterward. Here, if it is not directly affirmed
that these are sealed, yet it seems evident, a seal having been often a stamp
with a name and the purpose of the sealing in the former case being to mark
them out as God's, this is manifestly accomplished by the name upon them. This
open identification with Christ in the day of His rejection might seem to be
what would expose them to all the power of the enemy, yet it is that which in
fact marks them for security. In reality, what a protection is the open
confession of Christ as the One we serve ! There is, in fact, no safer place
for us than that of necessary conflict under the Lord's banner ; and the end is
glory. Here they stand - these confessors, openly confessed by Him on His side
and their having been through the suffering and the conflict is just that
which brings them here upon the mount of royalty : it is "if we suffer, we
shall also reign with Him."
Another inestimable privilege they have
got, though clearly an earthly, not a heavenly company: they are able to learn
"a song that is sung in heaven." And I heard a voice from heaven, as a voice of
many waters, and as a voice of great thunder; and the voice which I heard was
of harpers harping with their harps; and they sing a new song before the
throne, and before the four living beings and the elders: and no one was able
to learn the song, except the hundred and forty-four thousand that were
purchased from the earth."
It is clear that the company here occupy a
place analogous to that of the Gentile multitude of the seventh chapter, who
stand before the throne and the living ones also. The vision in either case
being anticipative, we can understand that earth and heaven are at this time
brought near together, and that "standing" before the throne and "singing"
before the throne involve no necessary heavenly place for those who sing or
stand there. Here they stand upon Mount Zion while they sing before the throne,
- if, that is, the singers are primarily the hundred and forty-four thousand,
as many think. What seems in opposition to this is that the voice is heard from
heaven, and that the company on Mount Zion are spoken of as learners of the
song. On the other side, the difficulty is in answering the question, Who are
these harpers, plainly human ones, who are distinguished from the elders, yet
in heaven at this time? Remembering what the time is may help us here. May they
not be the martyrs of the period with which the prophecy in general has to do,
- those seen when the fourth seal is opened, and those for whom they are bidden
to wait - the sufferers under the beast afterward two classes which are seen as
completing the ranks of the first resurrection in the twentieth chapter. These
would give us a third class, evidently - neither the heavenly elders nor the
sealed ones of israel ; and yet in closest sympathy with the latter. It could
not be thought strange that these should be able to learn their song. And at
the time when the Lamb is King on Zion, this third class would certainly be
found filling such a place as that of the harpers here.
This seems to
meet every difficulty, indeed: for their song would clearly be a new song, such
as neither the Old Testament nor the revelation of the Church-mystery could
account for; while the living victors over the beast would seem rightly here to
enter into the song of others, rather than to originate it themselves.
But they have their own peculiar place, as on Mount Zion, first-fruits of
earth's harvest to God and to the Lamb, purchased from among men, (grace,
through the blood of Christ, the secret of their blessing, as of all other,)
but answering to that claim in a true undefiled condition, in
virgin-faithfulness to Him who is afresh espousing Israel to Himself. In their
mouth thus no lie is found, for they are blameless: and these last words we
shall surely read aright when we remember that to those who have not received
the love of the truth, "God will send strong delusion, that they may believe
the lie" (2 Thess. ii. ii), and the apostle's question, "Who is the liar, but
he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?" and that "he is the antichrist who
denieth the Father and the Son." (I Jno. ii. 21, 22.) The names of the Lamb and
of His Father are on the foreheads of these sealed ones.
THE
EVERLASTING GOSPEL. (vv. 6, 7.)
IT is a foregleam of the day that comes
that the first vision of this chapter shows us: but, although the day is coming
fast, we have first to see the harbingers of judgment, and then the judgment,
before it can arrive. Righteousness, unheeded when it spoke in grace, must now
speak in judgment, that "the work of righteousness" may be "peace; and the
effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever." (Isa. xxxii.
17.)
In this way it is that we come now to what seems to us perhaps a
strange, sad gospel, and yet is the everlasting one, which an "angel flying in
mid-heaven," preaches to the inhabitants of the earth. And this is what his
voice declares: "Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment
is come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth and the sea and the
fountains of waters."
How any one could confound this gospel of
judgment with the gospel of salvation by the cross would seem hard to
understand, except as we realize how utterly the difference of dispensations
has been ignored in common teaching, and how it is taken as a matter of course
that the "gospel "must be always one and the same gospel; which even the
epithet "everlasting" is easily taken to prove. Does it not indeed assert it ?
- that the same gospel was preached, of course, in a clearer or a less clear
fashion, all through the dispensation of law and before it?
No doubt
the everlasting gospel must be that which from the beginning was preached, and
has been preaching ever since, although it should be plain that "the hour of
His judgment is come" is just what with truth no one in Christian times could
say. Plain it is too that the command to worship God the Creator is not what
any one who knew the gospel could take as that. In fact, the gospel element, or
glad tidings, in the angel message is just found in that which seems most
incongruous with it to-day - that the "hour of His judgment is come." What else
in it is "tidings" at all? That certainly is; and if serious, yet to those who
know that just in this way deliverance is to come for the earth, it is simple
enough that the coming of the delivering judgment is in fact the
gospel.
Listen to that same gospel, as a preacher of old declared it.
With what a rapture of exultation does he cry, -
"Oh sing unto the Lord a new song!
Sing unto the
Lord, all the earth.
Sing unto the Lord, bless His name;
Show forth His
salvation from day to day!
Declare His glory among the nations,
His
marvellous works among all the peoples!
* * * * * *
Tremble before
Him, all the earth!
Say among the nations that the Lord reigneth;
The
world also is established, that it cannot be moved:
He shall judge the
peoples with equity.
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth
rejoice!
Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof!
Let the field
exult, and all that is therein!
Then shall all the trees of the wood sing
for joy before the Lord;
For He cometh, for He cometh, to judge the
earth.
He shall judge the world with righteousness,
And the peoples
with His truth !"
(Ps. xcvi.)
Here is a gospel before Christianity; and it has been
sounding out all through Christianity, whether men have heard it or have not.
And it is but the echo of what we hear in Eden, before the gate of the first
paradise shuts upon the fallen and guilty pair, that the seed of the woman
shall crush the serpent's head. That is a gospel which has been ringing through
the ages since, and which may well be called the everlasting one. Its form is
only altered by the fact that now at last its promise is to be fulfilled.
"Judgment" is now to "return to righteousness." The "rod" is "iron," but
henceforth in the Shepherd's hand. Man's day is past, the day of the Lord is
come; and every blow inflicted shall be on the head of evil, the smiting down
of sorrow and of all that brings it. What can he be but rebel-hearted, who
shall refuse to join the anthem when the King-Creator comes into His own again?
The angel-evangel is thus a claim for worship from all people, and to Him that
cometh every knee shall bow.
THE FALL OF BABYLON. (v. 8.)
THAT the message of judgment is indeed a "gospel" we find plainly in the next
announcement, which is marked as that of a "second" angel, a "third" following,
similar in character, as we shall see directly. Here it is announced that
Babylon the Great has fallen: before, indeed, her picture has been presented to
us, which we find only in the seventeenth chapter. The name itself is, however,
significant, as that of Israel's great enemy, under whose power she lay
prostrate seventy years, and itself derived from God's judgment upon an old
confederation, the seat of which became afterward the centre of Nimrod's
empire. But that was not Babylon the Great, although human historians would
have given her, no doubt, the palm; with God, she was only the type of a power
more arrogant and evil and defiant of Him than the old Chaldean despot, and
into whose hands the Church of Christ has fallen, - the heavenly, not the
earthly people. It is an old history rehearsed in a new sphere and with other
names, - a new witness of the unity of man morally in every
generation.
The sin on account of which it falls reminds us still of
Babylon, while it has also its peculiar aggravation. Of her of old it was said,
"Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord's hand that made all the earth
drunken: the nations have drunk of her wine; therefore the nations are mad."
(Jer. Ii. 7.) But it is not said, "the wine of the fury of her fornication."
This latter expression shows that Babylon is not here a mere political but a
spiritual power. One who belongs professedly to Christ has prostituted herself
to the world for the sake of power. She has inflamed the nations with unholy
principles, which act upon men's passions, (easily stirred,) as we see, in
fact, in Rome. By such means she has gained and retained power; by such, after
centuries of change, she holds it still. But the time is at hand when they will
at last fall, and this is what the angel declares now to have come. Babylon is
fallen, and that fall is final: it is the judgment of God upon her; it is
retributive justice for centuries of corruption; it is a note of the
everlasting gospel, which claims the earth for God, and announces its
deliverance from its oppressors. But we have yet only the announcement: the
details will be given in due place.
THE WARNING TO THE
BEAST-WORSHIPPERS.
(vv. 9 - 13.)
A THIRD angel follows, noted as
that, and belonging, therefore, to the company of those that bring the gospel
of blessing for the earth. That it comes in the shape of a woe, we have seen to
be in no wise against this. Babylon is not the only evil which must perish that
Christ may reign; and Babylon's removal only makes way at first for the full
development of another form of it more openly blasphemous than this. The woman
makes way for the man, - what professes at least subjection to Christ, for that
which is open revolt against Him. Here, therefore, the woe threatened is far
more sweeping and terrible than in the former case; there are people of God who
come out of Babylon, and who therefore were in her to come out (chap. xviii.
4). But the beast in its final form insures the perdition of all who follow it:
"If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his
forehead or in his hand, the same shall drink " - or "he also shall drink" -
"of the wine of the wrath of God which is poured out without mixture into the
cup of His indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in
the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke
of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever; and they have no rest, day nor
night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of
his name."
It is the beast who destroys Babylon, after having for a
time supported her: his own pretension tolerates no divided allegiance, and in
him the unbelief of a world culminates in self-worship. Here God's mercy can
only take the form of loud and emphatic threatening of extreme penalty for
those who worship the beast. In proportion to the fearful character of the evil
does the Lord give open assurance of the doom upon it, so that none may
unknowingly incur it. Here "the patience of the saints" is sustained in a
"reign of terror" such as has never yet been.
Faith too is sustained in
another way, namely, by the special consolation as to those who die as martyrs
at this time: "And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, ‘Blessed
are the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth.'" That is clearly
encouragement under peculiar circumstances. All who die in the Lord must be
blessed at any time; but that only makes it plainer that the circumstances must
be exceptional now which require such comfort to be so expressly provided for
them. Something must have produced a question as to the blessedness of those
that die at this time; and in this we have an incidental confirmation -
stronger because incidental - that the resurrection of the saints has already
taken place. Were they still waiting to be raised, the blessedness of those who
as martyrs join their company could scarcely be in doubt. The resurrection
having taken place, and the hope of believers being now to enter alive into the
kingdom of the Son of Man at His appearing, - as the Lord says of that time,
"He that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved" (Matt. xxiv. 13), -
the question is necessarily raised. What shall be the portion of these martyrs,
then, must not remain a question; and in the tenderness of divine love the
answer is here explicitly given. Specially blessed are those who die from
henceforth: they rest from their labours; they go to their reward. The Spirit
seals this with a sweet confirming "yea" - so it is. Earth has only cast them
out that heaven may receive them; they have suffered, therefore they shall
reign with Christ. Thus accordingly we find in the twentieth chapter, that
when the thrones are set and filled, those that have suffered under the beast
are shown as rising from the dead to reign with the rest of those who reign
with Him. Not the martyrs in general, but these of this special time are marked
distinctly as finding acknowledgment and blessing in that "first resurrection,"
from which it might have seemed that they were shut out altogether.
It
may help some to see how similar was the difficulty that had to be met for the
Thessalonian saints, and which the apostle meets also with a special "word of
the Lord" in his first epistle. They too were looking for the Lord, so that the
language of their hearts was (with that of the apostle), "We who are alive and
remain unto the coming of the Lord." They had been "turned to God from idols,
to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven;" and
with a lively and expectant faith they waited.
But then what about
those who were fallen asleep in Christ? It is evident that here is all their
difficulty. He would not have them ignorant concerning those that were asleep,
so as to be sorrowing for them, hopeless as to their share in the blessing of
that day. Nay, those who remained would not go before these sleeping ones: they
would rise first, and those who were alive would then be "caught up with them,
to meet the Lord in the air." This for Christians now is thus the authoritative
word of comfort. But the sufferers under the beast would not find this suffice
for them; for them the old difficulty appears once more, and must be met with a
new revelation.
How perfect and congruous in all its parts is this
precious Word of God! And how plainly we have in what might seem even an
obscure or strange expression -"blessed from henceforth"- a confirmation of the
general interpretation of all this part of Revelation! The historical
interpretation, however true, as a partial anticipatory fulfillment, fails here
in finding any just solution.
THE HARVEST AND THE VINTAGE.
(vv. 14 - 20.)
IN the next vision the judgment falls. The Son of
Man upon the cloud, the harvest, the treading of the wine-press, are all
familiar to us from other Scriptures, and in connection with the appearing of
the Lord. We need have no doubt, therefore, as to what is before us
here.
The "harvest" naturally turns us back to our Lord's parable,
where wheat and tares represent the mingled aspect of the kingdom, the field of
Christendom. "Tares" are not the fruit of the gospel, but the enemy's work, who
sows not the truth of God, but an imitation of it. The tares are thus the
'children of the wicked one,' deniers of Christ, though professing Christians.
The harvest brings the time of separation, and first the tares are gathered and
bound in bundles for the burning, and along with this the wheat is gathered
into the barn. In the interpretation afterward we have a fuller thing: the
tares are cast into the fire, and the righteous shine forth as the sun in their
Father's kingdom.
Here the general idea of harvest would be the same,
though it does not follow that it will be a harvest of the same nature. In the
harvest-time there are crops reaped of various character: the thought is of
discriminative judgment, such as with the sheep and goats of Matt. xxv. There
is what is gathered in, as well as what is cast away, and hence the Son of Man
is here as that. The vintage-judgment is pure wrath: the grapes are cast into
the great wine-press of the wrath of God, and thus it is the angel out of the
altar, who has power over the fire, at whose word it comes. The vine of the
earth is a figure suitable to Israel as God's vine (Is. v.), but apostate, yet
cannot be confined to Israel, as is plain from the connection in which we find
it elsewhere. But it represents still apostasy, and thus what we have seen to
have its centre at Jerusalem, though involving Gentiles also far and near. Thus
the city also outside of which the wine-press is trodden is Jerusalem, as the
sixteen hundred furlongs is well known to be the length of Palestine. Blood
flows up to the bits of the horses for that distance - of course, a figure, but
a terrible one.
Both figures - the harvest and the vintage - are used in
Joel, with reference to this tune: "Proclaim ye this among the nations; prepare
war: stir up the mighty men; let all the men of war draw near; let them come
up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears: let
the weak say, I am strong. Haste ye, and come, all ye nations round about, and
gather yourselves together: thither cause Thy mighty ones to come down, 0 Lord!
Let the nations bestir themselves, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat:
for there will I sit to judge all the nations round about. Put ye in the
sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, tread ye, for the wine-press is full,
the vats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the
valley of decision! for the day of the Lord is near in the valhy of decision.
The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining. And
the Lord shall roar from Zion, and utter His voice from, Jerusalem; and the
heaven and the earth shall shake: but the Lord will be a refuge unto His
people, and a stronghold to the children of Israel."
Thus comes the
final blessing, and the picture upon which the eye rests at last is a very
different one. "So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God, dwelling in Zion
My holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers
pass through her any more. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the
mountains shall drop down sweet wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and
all the brooks of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth
of the house of the Lord and water the valley of Shittim. , . . And I will
cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the Lord dwelleth in
Zion."
PART V
THE VIALS OF WRATH.
(CHAP. XV., XVI.)
THE CHARACTER OF THE JUDGMENT COMING
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