And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, and cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets. And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.—Rev. x.
I. We were told in the fifth chapter how the Prophet saw in the right hand of Him that sat on the throne, a book written within and on the back side, sealed with seven seals. The seals have been broken. This book is now open. The mighty angel whose face is as the sun, holds it in his hand. I said we could not give a name to the book till we knew something of the contents of it. Are we able to name it now? First, we have heard that no one in heaven and earth, except the Lamb who was slain, had power to open it. The Lamb who unites the highest power with the highest suffering; the Lamb in whom is all the glory of Him that sits upon the throne, in whom is all the sorrow of man; He can read it, and enable us to read it. Here at least is one indication respecting the book. It must concern the relations between heaven and earth. It must tell what separates them, and whether they can ever be brought into reconciliation. Secondly, when the first four seals were broken, the four living creatures, the lion, the calf, the man, the eagle, each shewed us some power going forth on earth, not to bless but to destroy. Each of the earthly powers corresponded, it seemed, to one of these heavenly powers. Each was an aspect of God, divided from God, perverted into idolatry. The book, then, must shew us how earthly power has become severed from righteousness; whether it is ever to become the servant of righteousness. Thirdly, we heard of martyrs beneath the altar, who were crying for deliverance from the self-willed powers, who were confessing the self-sacrificing power. The book must be a book of the wars of those who have fought for good and truth against triumphant evil and falsehood, who have not lost their faith that what is weakest in the sight of mortals is strongest in the sight of God. Fourthly, we have the vision of a great convulsion, which made all the powers of the earth that seemed to be supreme tremble, because they knew that the avenger was come, that the sufferer was indeed the king. The book then is to interpret those puzzling passages in human history which exhibit periods of revolution and anarchy. It shews them to be the necessary results of previous tyranny and defiance of law; it shews that there is a Divine purpose in them, and a Divine blessing to come out of them. So far I find everything in this book which answers to the Scriptural idea of prophecy, almost nothing which answers to the heathen idea of prediction. It is an unfolding or discovery of the meaning and purpose of the eternal God. It explains the principles of an unchangeable government. It exhibits a law working in the very vicissitudes and caprices of self-will. It applies, then, to the ages that had past before John came into the world; it applies to the time in which he was living. If, as St. Paul and the writers of the New Testament affirm, the ends of the ages were meeting in that age, the book must have a peculiar reference to it. By interpreting the century after the coming of Christ in the flesh, it throws back a light on all the centuries before He came in the flesh.
The passages which follow clearly identify the book as a book of judgment. And they do not leave that word “judgment” a vague one, such as it is apt to be in our minds. We are told what is judged; what cannot perish, what must perish in the judgment; what are the signs of judgment; how far God judges men and punishes men; how far men judge themselves and punish themselves. The subject of the judgment is a Nation. The vision of the sealed tribes taught us that there was an order in the nation to be judged, which must survive any destruction of its outward forms. The vision of the company which no one could number, assured us that the existence of the nation did not interfere with the existence of a society that had no boundaries whatever. That the city or polity which was doomed, and round which the angel’s trumpets were blowing, was that of Jerusalem, the direct language of the book led us to suppose. That would be the natural conclusion, supposing there were no stronger reasons on the other side. I have hinted at two reasons which have mainly influenced readers in rejecting this opinion, and adopting one that is more far-fetched. First, they have decided that the Apocalypse was written after the destruction of Jerusalem, and therefore that the trumpets of coming doom must point to some other city than that; next, they have regarded the more obvious meaning as poor and jejune, one which must rob the Apocalypse of all its instruction for later times.
To the first objection I answer, that if the traditional chronology of the Apocalypse, which assigns it to the reign of Domitian, can be maintained against the judgment of some of the most eminent of modern scholars—if it was not written, as those scholars suppose, in the time of Galba—the argument is still of no worth, except to those who identify prediction with prophecy. The Jews who lived after the temple had been destroyed, even after the ploughshare had gone round the walls, and the name of the city had been changed—events which did not happen till the time of Hadrian—still needed to understand what that great overthrow meant, what the Divine signs were which announced it. The Jew needed this illumination, that he might not be utterly confounded by the language of his ancient records, which seemed to promise permanence to the city of David. The Gentile needed it no less. From Jerusalem that message had gone forth which had claimed him as one of God’s family. St. Paul, however hated by his countrymen, however suspected even by the Jewish Church, had borne the alms and offerings of the Gentiles thither as a testimony of their obligations. When the Church lost its Capital, they might easily feel as if it had lost its Centre. The history of the second century tells us through what a sea of notions and theories respecting the visible and invisible world the Church had to pass, because the belief of such a Centre was so hard to realise. To know what Jerusalem was to the old world, what was to supply its place in the new, might be the most pressing and necessary learning for that time; if that time and subsequent times did not fully profit by it, perhaps it may be the more necessary for ours.
And so I come to the second objection, which I have noticed in former lectures, but which starts up continually before us, and which requires to be considered on various sides. We have certain notions about the bigness and smallness of events; about the information which we require and do not require for our practical guidance. It may be that the Divine measure of events is altogether different from ours; it may be that our Divine Teacher knows better what we are in need of than we know. To have a number of passages from Scripture which we can connect with what is taking place in the world, and by which we can divine what shall take place, may appear to us a great help in the conduct of our lives. He may regard the search for these as only ministering to fever and restlessness, not to calm trust and brave action. He may wish to present the Scriptures to us as an organic whole, to show us how they interpret the life of one nation, and through that the life of all nations. He may desire that we should perceive the light which they throw upon the history and traditions of heathens, to whom we suppose that He was indifferent, but who were part of the world that Christ came to redeem. That our right estimate of the place of Jerusalem in the old world is needful to our right understanding of the modern world, I have said before; I believe St. John will teach us that truth in all his subsequent visions.
II. I cannot think that any preparations for the opening of a book which contains these records and lessons, are too vast or august. It seems but fitting that a mighty angel should come down from heaven clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow about his head, to present it as an open scroll. For we have now found that which is the most comforting and satisfactory name of all for it. St. John supplies it himself. It is the book of Unveiling; the Divine mind and purpose are gradually revealed in the dispensation of the ages. An unveiling of the very name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, is involved in that. The symbols which describe this angel are already familiar to us. He is clothed with a cloud. The outward form is hidden. He is known by the light which he brings with him. A rainbow on the head; the face like the sun; even the feet are of the same nature, only there is in them an element of heat as well as of light, of heat that may consume. No part of the universe is unaffected by His message. His right foot is on the sea, His left on the earth. The voice is one of terror; not that musical one which is made by the sound of many waters, but loud as when a lion roareth.
III. There is something in the echoes which answer that voice, which cannot yet be proclaimed. “And when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write, and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.”
In a book of discovery, a book which scatters darkness, which interprets the confused voices that are continually ringing in our ears, and perplexing us with their dissonance, there is still a background which the spirit confesses and cannot reach into; there are still sounds which we must be content to believe are the utterances of God’s voice, but which we cannot translate into our speech. Let so much be conceded to those who would represent the purposes and will of God as one great enigma, of which man can know nothing. Let us rejoice to think that there never has been, and never can be, such a lifting up of the veil as shall interfere with trust, and awe, and adoration. “What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter,” is the Divine message which every apostle and every man must hear when his Lord is stooping to wash his feet; must hear coming again from Gethsemane, and Calvary, and the deserted tomb. Yes, and so it will be when he goes out of the sight of mortal eyes. All through the ages upon ages, there must be still a step of the ladder which he has not climbed. But all through those ages upon ages, the voice of God is at the top of the ladder. And that voice is always bidding him come up higher. And he knows that nothing is kept back from him out of grudging jealousy; and he knows that what is hidden must be more good and gracious than that which has been disclosed. Living under the government of a Being whose delight has been to make Himself manifest, he can wait in quietness and confidence. If he were living under a Being about whom there was nothing but guess and uncertainty, he would only cease to be restless when he ceased to be a man.
IV. “And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets.”
I cannot tell whether our translators really supposed these words to have the signification which is so frequently given them in sermons and popular religious treatises. There is no doubt to the ear something very grand in the phrase time shall be no longer. Such an announcement seems worthy of the oath of the Archangel. It is only when we come to ask ourselves what sense those sounds convey to us, what we suppose to be indicated by the end of time, that we discover we are embracing a cloud, and for the sake of that cloud are parting with most substantial realities. Do we actually suppose the prophet to say that a time shall come when time shall end, and when eternity shall begin? Do we attribute such bewildered notions to one who has been telling us in every line of his Gospel and his Epistles, of an eternal life which was with the Father, and has been made known unto us—whose Apocalypse means nothing unless it means the unveiling of eternal mysteries to creatures who are living under the conditions of time? I need hardly tell you that if this abstract and absolute sense had been given to Time, the article must have been present. Philology, common-sense, and it seems to me the highest theology, have been sacrificed; partly because men have been unable to understand why such solemnity should have been given to the proclamation, that there should be no longer any delay in accomplishing the mystery of God; partly because they have had a dim notion that this accomplishment of the mystery of God must import a dissolution of the framework of the universe; which dissolution they supposed would be aptly represented as the end of time. But if the mystery of God which He hath declared to His prophets, be the mystery of the reconciliation and atonement of God with man, the mystery of the triumph of the Lamb over the Spirit of disobedience and self-will, the mystery of the conquest of the kingdoms of earth by the kingdom of heaven, then I believe that I am not departing from the language of Scripture or of sound theology, when I speak of this mystery as not awaiting its accomplishment in some far-off and imaginary time in which time shall cease, but as being accomplished at that crisis to which all the previous words in this vision of the trumpets have been pointing.
The perplexities which beset this subject arise in no slight degree from some forms of speech, which are useful in themselves and which have become habitual to us, but which we repeat till they bewilder and mislead us. No distinction is more important for some purposes than that between the Old and the New Testament. There is a clear outward boundary between them, the boundary of language. Nearly 400 years separate the last of the Hebrew writers from the earliest of the Hellenistic. The inward differences appear to be even more deeply marked. Jews of course have the strongest interest in dwelling upon them. The New Testament is for them the contradiction of the old. Romanists are eager to show how the national life of the Jew is extinguished in the universal life of the Church. Protestants are anxious to show that we are not under the law but under grace. A large and increasing school of liberal writers are even more eager than all of these to assert that the new dispensation has swallowed up or subverted the old. And yet none of these deny or wish to deny the Jewish character of the Gospels, Epistles, or Apocalypse. As little can they deny that the Apostles and Evangelists did belong to the last forty or fifty years of the Jewish Commonwealth. If any are disposed to refer some of the books which pass under their names to a later period, all the events which they profess to record undoubtedly fall within this. Supposing, then, that we connected these writers, as they appear to connect themselves, with the earlier prophets and teachers of their land; supposing they did believe, as they say they believed, that the events of which they speak are the fulfilment of the Law and Prophets; supposing they did look, as they seem to have looked, for a kingdom of heaven to rise out of the kingdom of David, and to embrace the Gentiles within it; would this language then sound fantastic or impossible? Would not the destruction of Jerusalem be the winding-up of that series of events—the incarnation, death, resurrection, glorification, of Christ—which were themselves that finishing of the mystery of God, which He had promised to His servants the prophets? I can only ask those who think scornfully of the writers of the New Testament, who regard them as ignorant and narrow Jews, to consider whether this is not actually what they do say; whether I am not giving the force and upshot of their words, be those words Divine or human, wise or unwise? But I may surely ask those who set great—though not in my judgment too great—store by the letter of Scripture, who receive its words as oracles, to consider what those words are; to consider whether taken simply they do not contain the Gospel of a finished salvation to men; whether, if that is so, it was not a fitting occasion for an angel to swear by Him that liveth for ever and ever, who created the heaven and the earth, and the sea and all things therein; because the glorious purpose for which the Jewish nation had existed was brought to pass; because the gods of heaven, sea, earth, were now to bow before the one living God, the Lord God of Israel; because a dispensation was to begin which was grounded upon the regeneration of humanity in the Son of Man; because a Divine Spirit could abide with men and make His temple in their hearts and bodies.
V. “And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go, and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.”
Nearly every passage of the Apocalypse, as I have observed already, recalls some passage of an elder prophet. When the prophet Ezekiel, sitting by the river Chebar, had seen that “appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord,” which corresponds to the vision in the fourth chapter of this book, he heard a voice, saying unto him, “Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me unto this very day…. And thou, Son of man, be not afraid of them, neither be thou afraid of their words, though briers and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions; be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house…. But thou, Son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee. And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; and he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe. Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll. And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.”
The work of Ezekiel, as it is set forth here, had reference to the Israelites in Babylon. His message to them concerned the desolation and restoration of their city, and above all, of the Temple. It would not be listened to; the prophet would be scorned and hated by his countrymen. But the words were to be spoken, whether heeded or rejected. They were to remain for the generation to come. St. John, falling on a different age, hears the like tidings of lamentation, and mourning, and woe, which his predecessor had heard. He is speaking to the same rebellious house. He finds that house subject to a tyranny like in essentials to the Babylonian tyranny. It is awaiting a more tremendous overthrow. The roll of St. John, like the roll of Ezekiel, speaks of a temple that is to fall, and of a temple that is to rise out of its ruins. And St. John, like Ezekiel, must eat the roll. Its words must not be merely read, they must be taken with all their bitterness and all their sweetness into his inmost being. In this respect the ages which have elapsed between the seer at Chebar and the seer at Patmos make no difference. Living words, words that are things, words that are written down only because they have been acted, or are to be acted, must be received into the man before they can be uttered by him. He must know them by heart, not by rote. So it was in those old times; so it has been in the times since; so it shall be in our times. In easy days the words of all books, and of the Bible especially, furnish famous topics for criticism and debate! Such eloquent comments are written upon them; they can be tortured to such different senses; they can be proved to mean everything, anything, nothing. In times of stress and anguish they are devoured. They are taken not to soothe the reader, nor to condemn those whom he dislikes. He receives them as they are. They nourish him by their bitter qualities as much as by their pleasant; he needs both and accepts both. He begs for no exposition of them; they come charged with a tremendous exposition of what he was and what he is; he demands no evidence about them; they bring it with them.
But why should the book be sweet like honey in the mouth, if it is so full of woe? Why should it be bitter afterwards, if it is God’s book? Ezekiel and St. John had the same experience in this respect. Nor would our case, I conceive, be different if we did indeed eat the words, if they really entered into us. There must be a sweetness unspeakable in the actual living taste of a Divine communication; in the assurance—felt in the blood, felt along the heart—that a portion of that law by which we are governed has been disclosed to us; that the love which lies beneath all law and is working at every moment for the welfare and renovation of the creatures which it has called into existence is showing itself forth in our very selves. Sweet as honey! But then the sense of this law defied in the world, defied in ourselves? of that love trampled upon and resisted in the kingdoms of men and in the kingdom within us? Is there no revulsion in that? Does not the book become the bitterer afterwards, in proportion as it was delicious at first? There may be a return to that early joy; there may be a deeper joy that springs out of conflict and suffering; but whenever the messages and revelations of history and prophecy are digested thoroughly, there must be sorrow. For is not the Man of sorrow He of whom they speak, and He who interprets them?
There was a special cause for the sorrow in the case of the Apostle John. He might have hoped that the open book would have told him the judgment on the great Babel empire of the world. It had made known to him the judgment of the chosen witness against that empire. The seventh trumpet might have announced the fall of Rome. No! when it sounds Jerusalem will fall. And is this, then, the end of all? Is the mystery of God spoken of by the prophets really satisfied in this ruin? For a moment it appears so. The book is open, the dispensation is closing. But the voices of the seven thunders which were not to be written down may still sound when the trumpets have ceased. There may be glimpses into the dispensation which is coming. The oppressor may not be intended to reign for ever. Only one-half of the seer’s task is performed. “And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again unto many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.”