The passage: John saw four angels at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds so no wind would blow on the land, the sea, or the trees. Another angel rose from the east, carrying the seal of the living God, and called out to those four angels not to harm the earth, sea, or trees until God’s servants were sealed on their foreheads. He heard the number sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel—12,000 each from Judah, Reuben, Gad, Aser, Nepthalim, Manasses, Simeon, Levi, Issachar, Zabulon, Joseph, and Benjamin. After this he saw an uncountable multitude from every nation, people, and tongue, standing before the throne and the Lamb, dressed in white robes with palms in their hands, crying that salvation belongs to God on the throne and to the Lamb. All the angels fell on their faces and worshipped God, praising him with blessing, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honour, power, and might for ever. One of the elders asked John who these people in white robes were and where they came from; John said the elder knew. The elder answered that they had come out of great tribulation and had washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb; that they are before God’s throne serving him day and night, that God will dwell among them, that they will hunger and thirst no more, that the Lamb will feed them and lead them to living fountains, and that God will wipe away all their tears.
Part of this passage is read as the Epistle on All Saints’ Day, and I have spoken of it before in connection with that day. I know of no line-by-line commentary that shows its meaning better. But now I will consider it in relation to the whole subject and purpose of the Apocalypse. The words “after these things” recall the vision we looked at last Sunday. Each of the four seals, as it was broken, revealed some form of power—power splendid and victorious; power feeding on itself; power carefully guarding mere possessions and calculating how to increase them; power destroying both things and men. The fifth seal revealed the victims of power crying out for justice, asking when it would be shown that power is the servant and creature of right. When the next seal was opened, the prophet felt the earth shaking, kingdoms falling into ruin, and the great men of the earth begging the hills and mountains to hide them from the righteous Avenger, from the wrath of the One on the throne and of the Lamb.
Yes, from the wrath of the Lamb. For in the Apocalypse he is not shown as stepping in to stop the decrees of righteousness, but as carrying them out and fulfilling them. There is a feeble and utterly confusing notion—cruel as well as feeble, immoral in practice as well as inconsistent in theory—that has crept into all the mythologies and been carried over from them into Christian teaching: the idea of a human benefactor whose mind differs from the mind of the One on the throne, who tries to shield men from the results of God’s righteous judgments. That idea is completely opposed to the teaching of St. John the theologian. The Lamb helps the creature precisely because he does the Creator’s will—because he fights with his weapons against all the usurpers who show they are rebels against God by trampling on man.
Is this upheaval, then, that is making earth and heaven shake—the thrones of the rulers who reign on earth, and the thrones of the gods they worship as the props of their rule in heaven—is it really, as the great and rich men and captains think, the beginning of universal anarchy? The one who believed the Lamb was opening the seals, who had heard the cry from under the altar, knew it could not be so. There would be universal anarchy if these kings and great men and captains, these gods on earth and in heaven, were the only supporters of order. But if they were themselves the sources of anarchy—if their disobedience to eternal laws had produced this earthquake and made it inevitable—then those very laws would be asserted and brought to light by the events that made the unfaithful rebels grow pale and hide.
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!” cries the shallow pretender who wants to be thought scientific; “four angels holding four winds—what ignorance of the laws of Nature!” But this criticism, far from being scientific, is merely the voice of a common feeling that true science would teach us to distrust. How does it interfere with any law that governs the winds—whether we know that law or not—if that law is administered by spiritual powers, living persons? If we insist on tying the acts of such powers to caprice, if we assume it cannot be their special nature to obey and to uphold obedience, we are simply assuming the very thing in question. That assumption is exactly the opposite of the Bible’s assumption. In Scripture the righteous angel is precisely the one who carries out the commands of the perfectly righteous and orderly will, listening to the voice of his words. Suppose there is no such will; suppose laws exist without a lawgiver—then indeed all subordinate agents become incredible and impossible. And then the man asks, What governs me? And because he finds in himself a will that cannot bend to mere laws and yet must bend to something, he stoops to some tyrannical will. This is the weary circle round which those drive us who despise the old language and have found no new one to replace it. Glorifying laws, they lead us to despise and overthrow law. Aiming at scientific calm, they take away the very thing that protects us from endless restlessness.
What calm it must have given the Apostle’s mind, what 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 so that nothing would be touched until a purpose affecting the destiny of man was fulfilled. The sea, the earth, and the air are not our masters; we are not the playthings of their whims. They are under the government of the One who made man in his image and redeemed man to be his child. This is the Scriptural philosophy. What other philosophy can you find that equally lifts man above the fear of the elements and all the superstitions that go with that fear, that so bravely equips him to investigate the laws and conditions of a world created to be his home—created by his Father?
- “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 task is to seal the foreheads of men and those whose task is to harm the earth and sea is very significant. The latter cannot act without the former; both serve the punishment and education of the free creature. He alone can receive the seal of the living God. Every student of the Bible will recognize here principles that work themselves out in every part of its history. They will also recognize in the name “the living God” the characteristic name of the Old Testament. We read that word living as if it meant almost nothing; in fact it means the very highest and most practical truth that human language can express.
What men are to have this seal set on them? They are called the servants of God. And when we ask what that means, we are told that 144,000 were sealed of all the tribes of the children of Israel. That general statement is not enough: the Apostle goes on to list 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 by this detailed repetition. Why is it needed? Why—and this surely is the first question, on which the answer to the other depends—why should Israel be involved in this vision at all? We might expect that some favored souls would be saved in the coming storm. We might expect the prophet to encourage the Churches of Asia, or elsewhere, with the thought that they or some of their members would be worthy to survive the day of trouble, or be brought through it, or be richly rewarded if taken out of it. But surely Israel had forfeited any claim to special favor. The coming calamity might reach far beyond Jerusalem, but the shock would be most violent there; that city would be swallowed by the earthquake. Our Lord had prepared his Apostles to expect it. Whatever others might suffer, the Jews were surely destined to endure horrors they had never known—horrors no nation had ever known before.
It might be said that, for this very reason, faithful Jews had all the more need to be assured they would be watched over. Perhaps; but if “faithful Jews” means those who had given up their national privileges and merged into the general body of the Church, why are they carefully identified by their national marks? Why are the tribes listed? Why is the same number said to be chosen from each? I take it, my friends, that everything here points to something other than an escape that certain individuals might hope for out of the coming trouble, if they seized the name of Christians and were willing to drop the name 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 to a living God. The surrounding nations had bowed to dead gods—gods, the Psalmist keeps saying, that cannot see, or speak, or govern. To testify of One who sees the acts and thoughts of men, who communes with their hearts and spirits, who is an actual King ordering their steps and guiding their way, was the task of the family of Abraham, of the people brought out of Egypt, of those over whom David reigned and to whom the prophets spoke. Let me say it again: this work was done by them as a nation, as an organic body. Once they lost that organic character, they could no longer do it. As separate individuals they might hold a religion, might keep opinions about God different from other men’s; but they could not bear witness to One who was upholding their unity, who would not let them be lost in the surrounding world. And so, as I have often pointed out, the holy men and prophets of the Jews, even when their own countrymen persecuted them most, even when they had the bitterest grievances against them, never claimed some private virtue of their own as God’s witnesses. They simply asserted the standing of Israelites; they rebuked their fellows for abandoning that standing; their worst dread was that the nation, through its members’ indifference, might be cut off; their belief and hope was that, into whatever apparent decline it might sink, its life was immortal, and the living God would himself sustain it. Through all disasters and captivities, in the darkest hours, that faith went with them and carried them straight forward.
I cannot convince myself that St. John’s mind was any less filled and penetrated by this truth than the minds of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel; or that anything had happened to make him accept more contentedly than they did the prospect that the nation would be a nation no longer. And yet everything seemed to say this dreadful doom was near. It seemed inevitable that the nation would lose not merely its independence—that was already gone—but its very substance, everything that had marked it as a body called by God to a special service for mankind.
V. Perhaps you will grant that this was an enormous problem for a Jew of the first century to face. But I wish you could see what an enormous problem it is for students of history in this century. What do we mean by the records of the Old World? Surely not the scattered notices we can gather of Babylonian kings, or the names and dates of Egyptian dynasties, interesting as those are. We mean the records of two or three distinct nations: Judæa, Greece, Rome. Everything vital in the ancient world is gathered up in the story and destiny of those nations. Our fathers knew this; with all our added learning, we know it too. Now, Greece as a nation had already sunk; Rome as a nation had died into the empire; Jerusalem was the last remnant of national existence left anywhere in the whole world. It was only a remnant, a token of what had been—but it was that, and while it lasted it was a sign that not everything was imperial.
If this is so, we may be no less interested—we may be even more deeply interested—than St. John himself in that heavenly vision, which told him that the nation, though already shorn of most of its locks, though the last lock might be cut off and it might be doomed for ages to labor in the mill, blind and alone, still had an imperishable life; that those of the nation who confessed a living God and believed he had actually revealed himself in his Son represented its continuance; that, coming from the various tribes, they were witnesses to the enduring, organic reality of those tribes. Their brethren who clung to different sects and schools, who called themselves Pharisees or Sadducees, might be the numerical majority. But they refused to acknowledge the King of the nation. For all practical purposes they refused to be a nation. They would become what they had in effect declared themselves to be: a set of units with no principle holding them together—solemn witnesses, in their disorganization, 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. That testimony could be fully borne only by those who held fast to the faith that the Son of David was truly the Son of God, and that David’s kingdom would never end while that Son lived and reigned.
- In this way I believe the vision of the exile on Patmos confirms the hopes that earnest men—Jews or Christians—have held of the final restoration of the Israelites to more than all the privileges their fathers enjoyed, and refutes the opinion of those who say that Jews are not meant to be different from other people, but, once they confess Christ, must be absorbed into our Christendom. I find it most satisfying to take the language of the prophets even more strictly than those teachers do, and to believe they were not deceived when they said that the hills were less fixed and everlasting than their divine polity. But if we read them thus far literally, we must go further. Last week I hinted that the prophets generally, and those after the return from captivity especially, could not help seeing every nation as having its own function, gifts, and destiny. Whatever was distinct was clearly meant by the living God to be distinct; whatever had done a great work was marked out by God for that work. So, if the Jewish nation has had a permanence in the mind of him who was, and is, and is to come; and if those of the race—wherever and whoever they have been—who have believed in a living God have asserted that permanence; then we may also hold that in his eyes there has been a permanence in the Greek nation through all its ages of humiliation under Christian or Mahometan oppressors; a permanence in the Italian nation amid all its subjection to Papal or Germanic tyrants; a permanence one day to be fully asserted and realized by each. And if we dare to ask, in the case of any of these—or of the Jewish nation—why that full assertion of its life has not come sooner, why what has come in each case has so far been so incomplete, the vision we are speaking of gives the answer, and it is one we ourselves need to take to heart as much as any people anywhere.
Look at the history of great national struggles among peoples utterly unlike one another in habits, race, character, and religious profession. Look at the Swiss in the fourteenth century, the Dutch in the sixteenth, the Tyrolese in our own day; see whether the seal of a living God has not been clearly stamped on them; see whether their awakening to conscious national life has not been bound up with a faith in One who cared that men should be alive and free—not a distant Being to be sought out and appeased, but One who was himself seeking his servants, rekindling the dying embers in them, stirring them to repentance and to hope. Consider seriously whether the belief that men form a nation which lives on from age to age, which is affected by the sins and by the righteous deeds of its fathers, which has an inheritance worth striving and dying for, does not imply belief in a living God, and can ever be long divorced from the open confession of a living God. And on the other side, consider whether a people—however great its religious profession, however loud its talk of the immortal individual soul—can really worship a living God while it regards itself nationally as merely a great machine for producing and exchanging goods, or merely as a collection of sects and parties. To talk of nationalities, as newspaper writers or politicians do, is easy; to be a nation—to feel that the word is a reality and not a fiction—is hard; whoever would cultivate that feeling must win it through endurance and sacrifice, must learn to weigh what is substantial against what is accidental, must discover how impotent many fine philosophical theories are. We hold this glorious privilege by inheritance from those who bled for it; if we lose it, we lose all our power over those we govern and all our honesty toward one another. We may lose it; other lands we have spoken of scornfully may earn it as our fathers earned it. If such a calamity is in store for us, and such a blessing for them, it will be because they have become less atheistic than we are, because they are discovering beneath all their superstitions that there is a living God working for them, in whom they may trust—the God our own superstitions are hiding from us.
Another vision followed the one of the sealing of the tribes.
- “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 God’s own history, and the order in which its truths present themselves to our consciences. The Apostle is thoroughly possessed by the sacredness of the nation; he is sure it endures, that it bears the seal of the living God. And so he can rise to the perception of this society gathered out of all kindreds, nations, and tongues. So he can contemplate a universality and unity that are the exact opposite of imperial universality and unity. So he can see that the family of God is not divided by place or time, nor by the Fall or by death. This Church belongs not to past, present, or future, but is like the One who has gathered it, the same yesterday, today, and forever. It lacks no earthly ties; it is bounded by none. Angels mingle with these citizens of different nations and tribes; their bond is a common worship.
- “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 contentment in the perfectly good will of God; joy that his goodness is joined to perfect wisdom; gratitude that to goodness and wisdom belongs perfect power. This is the thought that gives the angels strength; this is the inspiration of their work. And then follows that memorable passage:
- “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 grown so familiar to us that they have lost much of their power. No, my friends; it is not familiarity that drains them of power. They are not familiar enough; the picture has been too much a mere fancy in our eyes. We have thought of it as belonging to some distant region wholly cut off 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 past days bore that witness, who did not count their lives dear, so that we might know him better and their land might testify of him and be a richer inheritance for their sons. Let us think of those we have seen struggling and suffering among us, fainting yet victorious, caring above all to show forth the name of Him who is love and to bear his likeness. Let us remember the old men who spoke wise counsels and prophecies to us, the young men who accomplished so little of what they dreamed, the children who left behind them memories of what they might have become. Then reflect: 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 more fully carry out his commands. Then their number will keep growing; those of other lands we have read and heard of will be mingled with them. We shall lose all count of their multitude, yet no single Church, or nation, or person will be lost in it. Each will shine, all will shine, in the light of his tender love—of him who gave his only-begotten Son to take our flesh and to die. Above all, beneath all, for all, will rise the Good Friday prayer: “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.”