And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged us. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments. And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory. And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds. And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.—Rev. xvi.
Any ordinarily attentive reader will perceive a great resemblance between the events which were said to follow the blowing of the trumpets and those which are here seen to follow the pouring out of the vials. When the first four trumpets sounded, the earth, the sea, the rivers, the sun were smitten. Here we read of the same calamities in the same succession. The river Euphrates is connected with the sixth trumpet and with the sixth vial; the voice, “It is finished,” accompanied the seventh trumpet as well as the seventh vial. There are several minute differences, to which I may refer presently. There is one leading and startling difference which seems to determine the purport of the respective visions. When the fifth trumpet sounded, a star fell from heaven upon the earth, the bottomless pit was opened, locusts came forth, which did not hurt the grass or the trees, but only those men who had not the seal of God on their foreheads, which did not kill them, but tormented them for five months. The fifth vial “was poured out upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues for pain.” That the trumpet imported the downfall and ruin of a great spiritual dynasty, and the moral and spiritual misery which is consequent upon such a fall, I tried to show you when I was occupied with that subject. That this vial imports the perdition of a dynasty not spiritual at all, but essentially brutal, though once, it may be, upheld by spiritual sanctions, the words themselves would teach us, if no light fell upon them from previous or subsequent passages. Everything so far would appear to favour that method of considering these prophecies which I have adopted. The trumpets would be all announcements of the fall of the spiritual centre of the old world; they would point to Jerusalem. The vials would concern what I may call the material centre of the old world; they would point to Rome. But they would not concern Jerusalem and Rome at different epochs of history; they would denote a crisis through which the two cities were passing within the same three or four years.
I. What those three or four years were, and what we know to have been passing in them, I have partly considered already; the seventeenth chapter will bring the question distinctly before us. The subject for today leads us to reflect upon the different aspects in which the same events may be presented to the mind of a prophet. “And the first went and poured forth his vial upon the earth, and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and upon them that worshipped his image.” There was no allusion in the eighth chapter to any calamity that befel human beings from the hail and fire mingled with blood which were cast upon the earth; only the third part of the trees and of the green grass were said to be burnt up. There we were hearing a trumpet; here we are seeing a vial poured out. There earth was smitten; those who had been called out to declare who is the Lord of the earth, and had not declared Him to men, or believed in Him themselves, were to read His Mene Mene written on their walls. To the others it could not have that significance. They only feel the effects of the visitation. It comes upon them as a noisome and grievous sore. They smart under the plague. The lesson reaches them through their bodies. Let it not, however, be supposed that the message may not have come in this form to the inhabitants of Judæa. They, too, were worshippers of the beast. They were becoming incapable of rising to a conception of anything but material losses and sufferings. And there may have been many of the heathens who saw a Divine hand in the infliction, who glorified God in the fires. The distinction between the two purposes of the judgment is not affected by the mode in which it was received by this person or that.
II. “And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man, and every living soul died in the sea.” This it will be said is the language of poetry or prophecy, not of fact. I have asked you before whether you are sure that the language of poetry or prophecy does not represent facts more faithfully than the language of statistics. Do you think a statement of the number of persons who die in a wreck—let it be of the most petty fishing smack—conveys the history of that wreck? Is not the picture of a great artist truer? Many of you, I am sure, will be familiar with that memorable passage of Jeremy Taylor, in which he supposes a man “from one of the battlements of heaven to espy how many men and women at that time lie fainting and dying for want of bread; how many young men are hewn down by the sword of war; how many orphans are weeping over the graves of their fathers, by whose help they are enabled to eat; to hear how many mariners and passengers are at this moment in a storm, and shriek out because the keel dashes against a rock or bulges under them; how many people there are that weep with want and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by too quick a sense of a constant infelicity.” Surely there was no exaggeration in these thoughts. Such a spectacle must at any instant, in Taylor’s age or ours, have been presented to one who stood on that point of observation.
It is not so horrible as the vision of a single den of tyranny which is sometimes laid bare to our eyes when it is about to pass away. St. John is beholding the withering of the earth, and the destruction at sea, from one of the battlements of heaven. We might describe it by some dry abstraction such as the overthrow of commercial prosperity, the interruption of the intercourse between nations. To him it is as if the sea became the blood of a dead man.
III. “And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.” There is nothing which often puzzles us more than the sense of Divine retribution. The conscience witnesses for it; ever and anon we are sure that we recognise it. Not to confess it, appears like a practical confession that chance is the Lord of All. Not to confess it, makes every calamity which is inflicted upon human beings far more frightful and ghastly, as if an evil spirit was indulging its malice. The belief of retribution was the staff of heathen faith amidst all its corruptions; Jewish prophets lived to proclaim it; surely the Gospel cannot have taken away the right from us. And yet there are those words of our Lord about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, and those citizens of Jerusalem upon whom the tower in Siloam fell. There is the warning to the disciples who thought the blind man or his parents must have sinned. There is the universal sentence overreaching and maintaining all these particular instances, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” There are the manifold transgressions of this command which we ourselves have committed, and which we have seen others commit, in the effort to make specific inflictions accord with specific crimes. There are those cruel recriminations with which every page of ecclesiastical history is blotted; each party discovering the most manifest tokens of Divine vengeance against the other. How can we uphold our faith in the exact suitableness of the wrongs which men do to the corrections which God appoints for them, in the face of these warnings from the highest authority and from our own experience?
There are two methods, I believe, which may help us to do this if we will pursue them faithfully. The first is, to fix our minds stedfastly upon the word Judgment, to give it its full force, not to accept any poor substitutes for it. Judgment means, in its ordinary use, discrimination, the assigning to each thing its real worth, the separation of that which is real from that which is merely apparent or counterfeit. Mean that when you speak of God’s judgments. Mean nothing whatever which is inconsistent with that. And then you must suppose that He does make His purposes manifest, and that He will make them more manifest. You will ask that they may be made manifest to you. And the more you ask that, and the more you expect an answer, the more horror you will feel at the thought of putting your judgments in the place of God’s, your rash and partial guesses between you and His revelation. You will feel more every day how you are tempted to do this; you will feel how you long to pull out the motes from other men’s eyes, and to forget the beams in your own. You will not plead that you must do this to a certain extent, in order that you may not hide from men that God is judging them. You will feel that in any degree in which you do it, you are doing something to prevent the effect of God’s judgments, something to make them less credible to your fellow-creatures. The second rule is a corollary from this. Always try to understand the retribution of God first in your own case. There it will become evident to you if you look for it. You will see that the correction has been graciously adapted to the faults in your character which need it. You will see that where you have sown the wind, you have very often indeed reaped the whirlwind. Very often; but not always. It has not been a mere progress from antecedents to consequents. There has been a Judge, who has been directing the step from one to the other; who has—oh, how continually!—turned the very evil you have done or plotted into an instrument of humiliation—therefore of good. That of which the natural fruit would have been mere remorse, and therefore greater sin, has been the means of leading you to repentance, and so to the deliverance from sin. Such discoveries do not force us to imagine exceptions in the course of God’s dealings. They are the highest examples and illustrations of His dealings. They bring out the principle of retribution in its fullest power. So in great historical crises, like that which we are considering, there comes a flash of light from Heaven, showing how the rivers and fountains of water, those blessed gifts of God which have nourished the life and health of nations, are turned into blood, are made poisonous and destructive; not through some accident, but in obedience to an everlasting law. Those who have borne witness against the perversion of these gifts, the saints and prophets who have testified that the good things which are bestowed upon men, are not to be turned to purposes of pride and covetousness, are not to be diverted from their human channels into selfish channels, these have been made victims of their protest. Their blood has been mingled with these waters; they have been offered up to propitiate the selfish divinities who they declared were no divinities at all. “And now, O Lord,” so sings the Angel of the Waters, “Thou hast claimed these as Thine own. Men who used them for their bloody purposes, must drink blood. They would not receive the waters as given for the nourishment of the earth; the waters shall bring no longer nourishment, but death to them.”
IV. “And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun: and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.” Those persons who seek to discover what plagues in modern days correspond to the Apocalyptic plagues, can never be long at a loss for parallels. That they occurred at a certain time, which has been defined with considerable precision already, and will be defined more accurately still in a later passage of the book, I cannot doubt. But plagues on earth, on the sea, in the fountains of waters, and this from excessive heat, cannot be limited to one country or to one century. Those who suppose the words to have some other more refined, more cabalistical sense, may justify that sense as they can, and apply it to our practical guidance. Those who think that the prophet was shewn how all the different portions and powers of the natural world were becoming instruments of punishment to those who had degraded themselves and their fellows into mere servants of these natural powers—witnesses, therefore, against idolatry, and for the true Ruler of men—will thankfully admit that they have not lost their functions, that the purpose to which they ministered then may be accomplished by them now. Nor will their failure to work any general repentance—the exasperation and blasphemy which they provoked—remove them out of the circle of our experience. Are not these rather very solemn indications to us that we must not expect moral renewal for ourselves or our brethren from the terrors which are inspired by any natural agents? The God of Life speaks through them; speaks to our spirits. If our spirits hear Him, they are bowed; let the Angel of Death flap his wings ever so loudly, they will be scared, not changed.
And now we come to that vial of which I have spoken already, as denoting the object of them all.
V. “And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.” The tribulation which is here announced in a few rapid words, is the subject, I conceive, of the two following chapters. In these chapters we are told where the seat of the beast is, in language so very distinct and unmistakable that there has been little—I believe no—difference of opinion respecting it. Rome, in some period of its existence—Rome, under some kind of ruler, imperial or spiritual—has been accepted by all readers as fulfilling the terms of the description. I do not think the prophet has stopped short at this point. I think he has been just as careful in fixing what ruler he intended as in fixing the capital of his government. At present, our business is not with the person, but with the nature of his dominion. We are to connect it with all that has gone before in this vision. Those who worship the beast, and bear his image, are those who have not the faculty of conceiving of anything as omnipotent and Divine except that which is earthly, sensual, devilish. He whom they worship is the embodiment of the earthly, the sensual, the diabolical. He is the transcendent, concentrated manifestation of that which is partial and scattered in those whom he governs. Suddenly there comes an eclipse of his power, and a confusion over all their plans. Something there is—what they cannot say—which is threatening them and their works. They are in darkness. They cannot feel their way. What is coming? Is it light? Oh not that! let that, at least, be far from us. We are in misery enough already. Let it not approach to torment us more. They gnawed their tongues with pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven.
VI. “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.”
In the passage of the ninth chapter which answers to this, four angels, which had been bound on the great river Euphrates, were set loose. Regarding the Euphrates as the prophetic symbol for the boundary which separated the Babel world from the holy city, I supposed this trumpet to indicate that that boundary would now cease to exist; that the work for which Judæa had been marked out as a separate kingdom in the midst of the earth was done; that whatever witness might be hereafter borne against the Babel principle would not be borne by a separate nation with a local centre. The change was a tremendous one—a great shaking would precede and follow it—but it was a change which all the trumpets had been foretelling. When it was made, the last of them would utter its voice; the final message of the age would go forth. That change and that final message are as important for the Gentile world as the Jewish. Contemplated in reference to the first, the Euphrates is said to be dried up, that the way of the kings of the east may be prepared. The ceasing of the Jewish polity and the Jewish witness might appear to set the world free to obey its idol potentates, to accept the last incarnation of evil as its supreme lord. On the great throne of the West sat that incarnation of evil. To that throne the countries of the West bowed; the East had fallen before it. Was not that royalty which the children of Shem had hoped to exercise over the earth in the name of the one Lord God passing for ever away? No, not passing away! rather for the first time beginning to be manifested and felt. The Child to whom the Magi came, bringing their gold and frankincense, will now commence His march over those kingdoms of the West which the Roman tyrant had claimed for himself. They are not this tyrant’s; they are held by an older title. The West shall do homage to the East. There shall be a Christendom confessing the God of Abraham for its God; the Son of David for its King.
Does it seem strange to you that I should speak of that which is called a vial of wrath as containing such a signification as this? You must stumble at every passage in the Apocalypse if you discover any contradiction in the idea of the highest blessings being revealed through punishments, which look only like curses. This drying of the Euphrates, if it was to make a road by which the Divine kingdom should pass into new regions, and should establish itself in them, could not take place till the Roman polity had been shown to be built of brittle clay—till the Jewish polity had disappeared. Nor could it take place without another kind of evil affecting the world—affecting, I believe, especially the Christian portion of the world. It is indicated in the next verses.
VII. “And I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs, come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”
The message of a Divine Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, was that which the Apostles delivered to Gentiles as well as Jews. It broke down the middle wall of partition between them; it was, in Apocalyptic phrase, a drying of the Euphrates.
But that same message evoked all the notions about spiritual influences and powers which had been slumbering in men’s minds, which had been hidden under their different mythological conceptions and traditions. Hence, as I observed when speaking of the locusts, that were said, in a former chapter, to overspread the earth, a greater outburst of enchanters and magicians—some Heathen, many of them Jewish, not a few like Simon, baptized in the name of Jesus Christ—than had ever been seen in the world before. The craving for glimpses into the invisible world was strong in men’s minds; it grew stronger from the unbelief in their official augurs and priests who had ministered to it in former days: it connected itself with the old Roman religion and the modern infidelity. Those adepts who fed and tried to satisfy this craving might turn it to political or to merely personal ends; they were nearly sure to combine it with a foul morality; imperfect spiritual apprehensions and intuitions did not elevate, but undermined that homely sense of honesty and justice, which had descended, with however many stains and corruptions, from the republican times. These, I apprehend, are the frogs that proceeded out of the mouth of the dragon, and the beast, and the false prophet; mixing the coarsest animal with the most subtle spiritual wickedness. It is no exaggeration and no metaphor to say that they went forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world. They were the Roman generals and proconsuls to whom these enchanters addressed themselves, into whose ears they whispered their divinations, whose counsels they influenced by their Babylonian numbers. Christian men, if they did not yield to the fascination themselves, must have been often exceedingly perplexed by the reports which they heard of predictions accomplished and wonders performed. If they trusted to their sagacity in detecting impostures, to their tests for ascertaining what are true and what false miracles, they must have been continually imposed upon. They could not but discern a number of resemblances in these tricks to that which was most precious in their own traditions. Old fences had been swept away; the outward protection which the difference of the circumcised from the uncircumcised had afforded was no longer of avail. This defence, however, remained—“Behold I come as a thief.” The Judge stands at the door. The Son of Man, the Detector of all tricks and falsehoods, will be revealed. Will this spiritual conceit of mine bear His scrutiny? The prediction may come to pass; this juggling may be successful. But am I not a child of the light? Do not these works shrink from the light?
And now comes in this further assurance. A battle of the powers of light and darkness is close at hand. All these teachers of the kings of the earth are collecting them to that battle. They may be worshipping a beast; but they are spirits, and spiritual powers must rouse them even to the gratification of the lowest instincts; a fearful lesson which every age confirms, but which in all great crises of history stands out and writes itself in characters of blood.
VIII. “And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.”
When the last trumpet sounded, there were voices in heaven—saying, “The kingdoms of the world are become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever.” The voice, “It is done,” which accompanies the pouring out of the vial, I have taken to point to the same end and to mean the same thing. An age of the world was ending. The question of that age had been, Whose are the kingdoms of the world? The hour of decision was come. Christ and Antichrist were to encounter each other. The place which denotes the conflict is curiously chosen. The name Megiddo is associated with two grand triumphs of the Israelites, with two memorable defeats. It is symbolical for both reasons. The battle of Armageddon is one in which the Lord God is fighting with the beast. He is to win the victory. So far, it is like the victory of Barak over Sisera, of Gideon over the Amalekites. But it is a victory in which Israel is not to rise, but to perish. So far, it corresponds to the overthrow of Saul and of Josiah. The prophet is a patriot to the last. But it is the God of Israel who lives for ever and ever; let the seed of Abraham, let his own Church become nothing, that He may be exalted. Let the blind and captive Samson pull down the pillars of the house upon himself if so be Dagon and his worshippers may fall with him. Of this fall, the next chapters are to tell us. I receive them as records of a triumph that has been won, and, therefore, as an undoubted pledge and assurance of a triumph that shall be won, for God and for