Lecture VII. The Sealing of the Tribes

And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree. And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel. Of the tribe of Juda were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Reuben were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Gad were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Aser were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Nepthalim were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Manasses were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Simeon were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Levi were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Issachar were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Zabulon were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Joseph were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Benjamin were sealed twelve thousand. After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God, saying, Amen; Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen. And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.—Rev. vii.

Part of this passage is read as the Epistle on All Saints’ Day. I have spoken to you of it formerly in connection with that day. I know no verbal commentary which illustrates its meaning so well. But I shall now consider it as it bears on the general subject and purpose of the Apocalypse. The words “After these things” remind us of the vision we were considering last Sunday. Each of the four seals, when it was broken, had disclosed some form of power—of power splendid and victorious; of power preying upon itself; of power watching carefully over mere possessions and calculating for their increase; of power destroying both things and men. The breaking of the fifth seal had discovered the victims of power crying out for right; asking when it should be shown that power is the creature and minister of right. When the next seal was opened, the prophet felt the earth shaking, kingdoms falling into ruin, the great men of the earth crying to the hills and mountains to cover them from the righteous Avenger, from the wrath of Him who sat on the throne, and of the Lamb.

Yes! from the wrath of the Lamb. For He is not presented to us in the visions of the Apocalypse as interposing to arrest the decrees of righteousness, but as executing and fulfilling them. The feeble and utterly bewildering notion—cruel as well as feeble, practically immoral as well as theoretically inconsistent, which has mixed itself with all mythologies, and has been transferred from them into Christian teachings—of a human benefactor whose mind is different from the mind of Him that sits on the throne—who seeks to avert from men the consequences of His righteous judgments—is altogether opposed to the doctrine of St. John the theologian. The Lamb is the helper of the creature, because He does the will of the Creator; because He fights with His armour against all the usurpers who prove that they are rebels against God by trampling upon man.

Is this convulsion, then, which is making earth and heaven tremble—the thrones of the dynasts who rule in the one, the thrones of the gods whom they worship as the props of their dominion in the other—is this convulsion really the commencement—as the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains think—of a universal anarchy? He who believed that the Lamb was opening the seals, he who had heard the cry from beneath the altar, knew that it could not be so. There was a universal anarchy if these kings, and great men, and chief captains, these gods on earth and in heaven, were the only supporters of order. But if they were themselves anarchs, if their disobedience to eternal laws had produced this earthquake, had made it inevitable, those laws would be asserted and brought to light by the events that caused the unfaithful rebels to turn pale and hide themselves.

I. The next revelation is of a Divine order in the midst of this disorder: “And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.” “How foolish!” exclaims the sciolist, who wishes to be thought a man of science; “four angels holding four winds; what ignorance of the laws of Nature!” Now this criticism, so far from being scientific, is merely the expression of a vulgar sensation which true science would teach us to distrust. How can it interfere with any law which governs the winds—whether we are acquainted with such a law or ignorant of it—that it should be administered by spiritual powers, living persons? If we resolutely associate the acts of such powers with caprice, if we suppose that it cannot be their special characteristic to obey and to maintain obedience, we beg the whole question. That hypothesis is precisely the opposite of the Bible hypothesis. The righteous angel in the Scriptures is precisely he who does the commandments of the perfectly righteous and orderly will, hearkening to the voice of His words. Suppose there is no such will; suppose laws to exist without a lawgiver; no doubt all subordinate agencies are incredible and impossible. And then the man asks, What rules me? And because he finds a will in himself which cannot bend only to laws, and must bend to something, he stoops to a tyrannical will. This is the weary circle round which those drive us who scorn the old language and have found no new language to supersede it. Glorifying laws, they lead us into the contempt and overthrow of law. Aiming at a scientific calmness, they take away from us the protection against continual restlessness.

What calmness must it have given to the mind of the Apostle, what a freedom from restlessness, what a sense of law, that, in the very midst of a revolutionary whirl, he could see the angels holding the four winds, that nothing might be touched till a purpose affecting the destinies of man had been fulfilled! The sea and the earth and the air are not our masters; we are not the sport of their fancies. They are under the government of Him who has made man in His image, who has redeemed man to be His child. This is the Scriptural philosophy. What other can you find which sets man equally above the fear of the elements and all the superstitions that accompany this fear, which disposes him so bravely to investigate the laws and conditions of a world created to be his habitation, created by his Father?

II. “And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

The distinction between the angel whose function is to put a seal on the foreheads of men, and those whose function is to hurt the earth and the sea, is very significant. The latter cannot work without the former; they are both ministerial to the punishment and education of the voluntary creature. He alone can receive the seal of the living God. All students of the Bible will recognise here those principles which are working themselves out in every part of its history. They will recognise also in that name, “the living God,” the characteristic name of the Old Testament. We read the epithet living as if it meant almost nothing; it does mean the very highest and most practical truth which human language can express.

III. What men are to have this seal put upon them? They are called the servants of God. And when we ask further what that expression denotes, we are told that 144,000 were sealed of all the tribes of the children of Israel. This general announcement is not sufficient: the Apostle proceeds to enumerate the 12,000 of Judah, of Reuben, of Gad, of Aser, of Nepthalim, of Manasses, of Simeon, of Levi, of Issachar, of Zabulon, of Joseph, of Benjamin. We are naturally puzzled at the minute repetition. Why should it be necessary? Why—for this surely is the first question, that upon the answer to which the answer to the other must depend—why should Israel have any concern in this vision at all? We might expect that some favoured souls would be saved in the hurricane which we are told is to overtake the world. We might expect the prophet to encourage the Churches of Asia, or the Churches elsewhere, with the thought, that they or that some members of their body would be worthy to survive the day of trouble, or would be brought through it, or would have a bright reward if they were taken out of it. But Israel surely had forfeited its claim to any special indulgence. The impending calamity might stretch far beyond Jerusalem. But there would the shock be most violent; that city would be engulfed by the earthquake. Our Lord had prepared His Apostles to expect that it would. Whatever other people might suffer, the Jews were surely destined to endure horrors which they had never known—which no nation had ever known before.

IV. It may be said that, just for this reason, the faithful Jews had more need to be assured that they would be watched over. Perhaps so; but if by faithful Jews are meant those who had renounced their national privileges and thrown themselves into the general community of the Church, why are they carefully defined by their national characteristics? Why are the tribes enumerated? Why is the same number of persons said to be selected from each? I apprehend, my brethren, that everything here points to something different from an escape which certain individuals might hope for out of an approaching tribulation, if they grasped the name of Christians and were content to part with that of Israelites. Israel, not a few picked men out of it, but the whole nation—the twelve tribes—had been called out to bear witness for a living God. The nations round about had stooped to the worship of dead gods—of gods, the Psalmist said continually, that could not see, nor speak, nor govern. To testify of One, who sees the acts and thoughts of men, who holds communion with their hearts and spirits; who is an actual King, ordering their steps, guiding their way, was the office of the family of Abraham, of the people who were brought out of Egypt, of those over whom David reigned, to whom the prophets spoke. This work, let me repeat the words again, was performed by them as a nation; as an organic body. Losing that organic character, they could perform their task no longer. As separate individuals they might hold a religion, they might maintain opinions respecting God which were different from those of other men; but they could not bear witness of One who was upholding their unity, who was not suffering them to be lost in the surrounding world. Accordingly, as I have often observed to you, the holy men and prophets of the Jews, even when they were most persecuted by their countrymen, even when they had the bitterest grounds for complaint against them, never pretended that they had some individual virtue of their own as witnesses for God. They simply asserted the position of Israelites; they rebuked their fellows for renouncing that position; their horror of all horrors was the possibility that the nation, through the indifference of its members, might be cut off; their belief and hope was that into whatever temporary or apparent abeyance it might sink, its life was immortal; that the living God would Himself sustain it. Through all disasters, through all captivities, in the darkest hours, that faith went with them, that faith enabled them to bear right onward.

I cannot persuade myself that the mind of St. John was less pervaded and penetrated by this truth than the mind of Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or Ezekiel had been; or that anything had happened which could make him acquiesce more contentedly than they had acquiesced in the prospect that the nation was to be a nation no longer. And yet everything seemed to say that this awful doom was approaching. It appeared inevitable that the nation should lose, not merely its independence—that had gone already—but its very substance, all that had marked it out as a body called by God to do a special service for men.

V. Perhaps you will admit that this was a tremendous problem for a Jew to encounter in the first century. But I wish you could see what a tremendous problem it is for the students of history in this century. What do we mean by the records of the Old World? Not, surely, the fragmentary notices we can gather of Babylonian monarchies, the names and dates of Egyptian dynasties, however interesting these may be. We mean the records of two or three distinct nations; of Judæa; of Greece; of Rome. All that is vital in the ancient world is gathered up in the story and the destiny of those nations. Our fathers knew it to be so; with all our added wisdom, we know it also. Well; but Greece as a nation had sunk already; Rome as a nation had perished in the empire; Jerusalem was the last relic of national existence left in the wide universe. It was but a relic; a token of what had been. Still it was that; while it remained, there was a sign that all was not imperial.

If this be so, we may not be really less interested—we may be more deeply interested—than St. John himself was, in that heavenly vision which declared to him that the nation, though already shorn of most of its locks,—though the last might be cut off, and it might be destined even for ages to work in the mill in blindness and solitude—had still an imperishable life; that those of the nation who confessed to a living God, who believed that He had actually manifested Himself in His Son, represented its perpetuity; that coming out of the different tribes they were witnesses of the organic permanence of these tribes. Their brethren who adhered to different sects and schools, who called themselves Pharisees or Sadducees, might form a numerical majority. But they refused to own the King of the nation. To all intents and purposes they refused to be a nation. They would become what they had practically declared themselves to be, a set of units with no principle of cohesion,—solemn witnesses in their disorganisation to other lands that only a living God can bind men into one; but very feeble witnesses that a nation once born is never lost, that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. Such a testimony could be fully borne by those who clung to the faith that the Son of David was indeed the Son of God; that the kingdom of David never would cease while that Son lived and reigned.

VI. In this way I believe the vision of the exile in Patmos endorses the hopes which earnest men, either Jews or Christians, have entertained of the ultimate restoration of Israelites to more than all the privileges their fathers enjoyed, and confutes the opinion of those who say that they are not to be different from other people, but, if they confess Christ, must be lost in our Christendom. I find it most satisfactory to take the language of the prophets, even in a more strict sense than these teachers do, and to believe that they were not deceived when they said that the hills were less fixed and everlasting than their Divine polity. But if we read them so far literally, we must go further. I hinted last week that the prophets generally, and those after the return from captivity especially, could not help regarding every nation as having a function and gifts and a destiny of its own. That which was distinct was evidently intended by the living God to be distinct; that which had done a great work was marked out by God for that work. Therefore if the Jewish nation has had a permanence in the mind of Him who was, and is, and is to come; if those of the race wheresoever and whosoever they have been—who have believed in a living God, have asserted this permanence: we may also hold that in His eye there has been a permanence in the nation of Greece through all ages of its humiliation under Christian or Mahometan oppressors; a permanence in the Italian nation amid all its subjection to Papal or Germanic tyrants; a permanence to be one day fully asserted and realised by each. And if we venture to ask, in the case of either of these, or of the Jewish nation, why that full assertion of its vitality has not come sooner, why what has come in each case has been as yet so imperfect; the vision of which we are speaking gives the reply,—it is one which we have as much need to lay to heart as any people anywhere.

Look at the history of all great national struggles among people the most opposite to each other in habits, in race, in character, in religious profession. Look at the Swiss in the fourteenth century, at the Dutch in the sixteenth, at the Tyrolese in our own; see whether the seal of a living God has not been legibly marked upon them; see whether the awakening to conscious national life has not been connected with a faith in One who cared that men should be alive and should be free; who was not a distant Being to be sought after and propitiated; who was Himself seeking after His servants; kindling the dying embers in them; stirring them to repentance, stirring them to hope. Consider earnestly whether the belief in men that they form a nation which lives on from age to age, which is affected by the sins of its fathers and by the righteous acts of its fathers, which has an inheritance that is worth striving for and dying for, does not imply the belief in a living God, and can ever be long separated from the direct confession of a living God. On the other hand, consider whether a people, be their religious profession ever so great, be their talk about the permanence of the individual soul ever so loud, really does or can worship a living God, while it looks upon itself nationally as only a great machine for producing goods and a mart for exchanging them, or only as a collection of sects and parties. To talk of nationalities, as newspaper-writers or politicians talk of them, is easy; to be a nation—to feel that the name is a reality and not a fiction, this is hard; he who would cultivate that feeling must win it through endurance and sacrifice, must learn to measure what is substantial against what is accidental; must discover the impotence of many fine philosophical theories. We take this glorious privilege by tradition from those who bled for it; if we lose it, we lose all our power over those we govern, our honesty towards each other. We may lose it; other lands, of which we have spoken scornfully, may earn it as our fathers earned it. If such a calamity should be in store for us, such a blessing for them, it will be because they have become less of atheists than we are, because they are discovering beneath all their superstitions that there is a living God who is working for them, in whom they may trust; whom our superstitions are hiding from us.

Another vision followed that of the sealing of the tribes.

VII. “After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.”

The order of these revelations is, I believe, the order of the Divine history, and the order in which its truths present themselves to our consciences. The Apostle is thoroughly imbued with the sacredness of the nation; he is assured that it is enduring, that it has the seal of the living God. So he can ascend to the perception of this society, which is gathered from all kindreds, nations, and tongues. So he can contemplate an universality and an unity which are exactly the opposites of the imperial universality and unity. So he can perceive that the family of God is not divided by place and time, or by the Fall or by death. This Church is not of the past or of the present or of the future, but is like Him who has gathered it, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. No earthly associations are wanting to it; it is circumscribed by none. Angels mix with these citizens of different nations and tribes; their bond is a common worship.

VIII. “And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God, saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen.”

These words express satisfaction in the perfectly good will of God; rejoicing that that goodness is united with perfect wisdom; gratitude that to goodness and wisdom appertains perfect power. This is the thought that gives the angels strength; this is the inspiration to their work. And then follows that memorable passage:

IX. “And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, serving him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

We complain that even these words have become so familiar to us that they have lost much of their power. No! my friends; it is not familiarity which deprives them of their power. They are not familiar enough; the picture has been too much a mere fancy one in our eyes. We have thought of it as belonging to some distant region, altogether separated from this earth. Let us rise to it as St. John rose to it. Let us think first of our own nation, sealed and set apart by the living God as a witness for Him. Let us think of the brave and true men who in other days have borne that witness, who have not counted their lives dear to them, that we might know Him better, and that their land might be a witness of Him, and might be a better inheritance for their sons. Let us think of those whom we have seen battling and suffering in the midst of us, fainting, yet victorious: caring, above all things, that they might shew forth the name of Him who is love, and might bear His likeness. Let us remember the old men who have uttered to us wise counsels and prophesyings, the young men who have accomplished so little of what they dreamed, the children who have left memories behind them of what they might have become. Then think, as the nation is immortal, so must those who have lived in it be immortal. These old men, these young men, these children, must know us better than they did on earth because they know God better; must help us better, because they are more fulfilling His commands. Then their number will expand continually; those of other lands whom we have read of and heard of will be mingled with them. We shall lose all reckoning of their multitude, yet no one Church, or nation, or person will be lost in it. Each will shine forth, all will shine forth in the light of His tender love, who gave His only-begotten Son to take our flesh upon Him, and to die. Above all, beneath all, for all, will rise the Good Friday prayer:¹ “We beseech thee, Almighty God, graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end.”