The passage: John saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, a face like the sun, and feet like pillars of fire. He held a little book, open, in his hand. He set his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and cried out with a loud voice like a roaring lion. When he cried, seven thunders spoke. As John was about to write down what the thunders said, a voice from heaven told him to seal those things up and not write them. Then the angel standing on sea and land lifted his hand to heaven and swore by the God who lives forever, who created heaven, earth, sea, and everything in them, that there should be no more delay: in the days when the seventh angel sounds his trumpet, the mystery of God would be finished, as He had told His servants the prophets. The voice from heaven told John to go and take the open book from the angel’s hand. He went and asked for it, and the angel told him to take it and eat it — it would be sweet as honey in his mouth but would make his stomach bitter. John took it and ate it, and it was sweet in his mouth but bitter afterward. And the angel told him that he must prophesy again before many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.
I. In the fifth chapter we were told how the Prophet saw, in the right hand of Him who sat on the throne, a book written on both sides and sealed with seven seals. Those seals have now been broken, and the book is open. The mighty angel whose face is like the sun holds it in his hand. I said before that we could not name the book until we knew something of its contents. Can we name it now? First, we heard that no one in heaven or earth could open it except the Lamb who was slain — the Lamb who joins the highest power to the highest suffering, in whom is all the glory of Him on the throne and all the sorrow of man. He can read it and let us read it. So this is one hint about the book: it must concern the relations between heaven and earth. It must tell what separates them, and whether they can ever be reconciled. Second, when the first four seals were broken, the four living creatures — the lion, the calf, the man, the eagle — each showed a power going out on earth to destroy rather than bless. Each earthly power seemed to correspond to one of these heavenly powers, being an aspect of God that had been cut off from God and twisted into idolatry. So the book must show us how earthly power has become separated from righteousness, and whether it can ever become righteousness’s servant. Third, we heard of martyrs beneath the altar crying for deliverance from the self-willed powers, confessing the self-sacrificing power. So the book must be a record of the wars of those who have fought for good and truth against triumphant evil and falsehood, who kept their faith that what looks weakest to men is strongest to God. Fourth, we had the vision of a great convulsion that made all the seemingly supreme powers of the earth tremble, because they knew the avenger had come and the sufferer was truly the king. So the book is meant to interpret those puzzling stretches of human history that show periods of revolution and anarchy. It shows them to be the necessary result of earlier tyranny and defiance of law; it shows there is a Divine purpose in them and a Divine blessing to come out of them. In all this I find everything that fits the Scriptural idea of prophecy, and almost nothing that fits the heathen idea of prediction. The book is an unfolding or discovery of the meaning and purpose of the eternal God. It explains the principles of an unchangeable government. It shows a law at work even in the ups and downs and whims of self-will. So it applies to the ages before John was born; it applies to the time in which he lived. If, as St. Paul and the New Testament writers affirm, the ends of the ages were meeting in that age, the book must have a special bearing on it. By interpreting the century after Christ came in the flesh, it throws light back over all the centuries before He came.
The passages that follow clearly show that this is a book of judgment. And they do not leave “judgment” a vague word, as it often is in our minds. We are told what is judged; what cannot perish and what must perish in the judgment; what the signs of judgment are; how far God judges and punishes men; how far men judge and punish themselves. The subject of the judgment is a Nation. The vision of the sealed tribes taught us that there is an order within the nation to be judged, an order that survives any destruction of its outward forms. The vision of the countless company assured us that the nation’s existence does not shut out the existence of a society with no boundaries at all. The book’s plain language led us to suppose that the city or polity doomed, around which the angel’s trumpets were blowing, was Jerusalem. That would be the natural conclusion if there were no stronger reasons against it. I have pointed to two reasons that have mainly led readers to reject this view and adopt a more far-fetched one. First, they have decided that the Apocalypse was written after Jerusalem’s destruction, so the trumpets of coming doom must point to some other city. Second, they have thought the more obvious meaning too poor and thin, one that would strip the Apocalypse of all its instruction for later times.
To the first objection I answer this. Even if the traditional dating of the Apocalypse to the reign of Domitian could be maintained against the judgment of some of the most eminent modern scholars — even if it was not written, as those scholars suppose, in the time of Galba — the argument is still worthless, except to those who confuse prediction with prophecy. The Jews who lived after the temple was destroyed, even after the plough had been driven around the walls and the city’s name changed — things that did not happen until Hadrian’s time — still needed to understand what that great overthrow meant, and what the Divine signs were that announced it. The Jew needed this light so that he would not be utterly confounded by his ancient records, which seemed to promise the city of David permanence. The Gentile needed it just as much. From Jerusalem had come the message that claimed him as one of God’s family. St. Paul, however hated by his own people and even suspected by the Jewish Church, had carried the gifts and offerings of the Gentiles there as a token of their obligation. When the Church lost its Capital, they might easily feel it had lost its Centre. The history of the second century shows us the sea of notions and theories about the visible and invisible world through which the Church had to pass, because belief in such a Centre was so hard to grasp. To know what Jerusalem was to the old world, and what would take its place in the new, might be the most urgent lesson for that time; and if that time and later times did not fully profit from it, perhaps it is all the more necessary for ours.
And so I come to the second objection, which I have noted in earlier lectures but which keeps rising before us and needs to be looked at from several sides. We have our own notions about which events are big and which are small, and about what information we need or do not need for practical guidance. But God’s measure of events may be quite different from ours; and our Divine Teacher may know better than we do what we need. To have a set of Scripture passages we can tie to what is happening in the world, and by which we can guess what will happen, may seem to us a great help in living our lives. He may regard the search for these as feeding fever and restlessness rather than calm trust and brave action. He may want to present the Scriptures to us as one living whole, to show how they interpret the life of one nation, and through it the life of all nations. He may want us to see the light they throw on the history and traditions of the heathen — people we assume He was indifferent to, but who were part of the world Christ came to redeem. I have said before that getting a right sense of Jerusalem’s place in the old world is needed for a right understanding of the modern world; and I believe St. John will teach us that truth in all his later visions.
I cannot think that any preparation for the opening of a book holding such records and lessons could be too vast or majestic. It seems only fitting that a mighty angel should come down from heaven wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow around his head, to present it as an open scroll. For we have now found the most comforting and satisfying name of all for it — a name St. John himself supplies. It is the book of Unveiling; the Divine mind and purpose are gradually revealed through the working of the ages. And that involves an unveiling of the very name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The symbols describing this angel are already familiar. He is wrapped in a cloud; his outward form is hidden, and he is known by the light he brings. There is a rainbow on his head, a face like the sun, and even his feet are of the same kind — only in them there is heat as well as light, a heat that can consume. No part of the universe is untouched by his message: his right foot rests on the sea, his left on the land. His voice is one of terror — not that musical sound made by many waters, but loud as a roaring lion.
There is something in the echoes answering 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 that scatters darkness and interprets the confused voices always ringing in our ears with their jarring clashes, there is still a background the spirit acknowledges but cannot reach into; there are still sounds we must be content to believe are the utterances of God’s voice, but which we cannot put into our own words. Let this much be granted to those who would represent God’s purposes and will as one great riddle that man can know nothing of. Let us be glad that there never has been and never can be any lifting of the veil that would interfere with trust, awe, and adoration. “What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter” — that is the Divine message every apostle and every man must hear when his Lord stoops to wash his feet; he must hear it again coming from Gethsemane, from Calvary, and from the empty tomb. And so it will be when he passes out of the sight of mortal eyes. Through age upon age there must always be a step of the ladder he has not yet climbed. But through those same ages the voice of God is at the top of the ladder, always calling him to come up higher. And he knows that nothing is kept from him out of grudging jealousy, and that what is hidden must be more good and gracious than what has already been shown. Living under the government of a Being whose delight has been to make Himself known, he can wait in quietness and confidence. If he were living under a Being about whom there was nothing but guesswork and uncertainty, he would only stop being restless when he stopped being a man.
- “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 thought these words meant what sermons and popular religious books so often make them mean. To the ear there is certainly something very grand in the phrase “time shall be no longer.” Such an announcement seems worthy of the Archangel’s oath. It is only when we ask ourselves what these sounds actually convey, what we suppose “the end of time” indicates, that we find we are grasping a cloud and, for the sake of that cloud, parting with the most solid realities. Do we really suppose the prophet is saying that a time will come when time will end and eternity begin? Do we attribute such confused notions to one who tells us in every line of his Gospel and Epistles of an eternal life which was with the Father and has been made known to us — whose Apocalypse means nothing unless it means the unveiling of eternal mysteries to creatures living under the conditions of time? I need hardly point out that if Time had been meant in that abstract, absolute sense, the article would have had to be there. Philology, common sense, and, it seems to me, the highest theology have all been sacrificed here — partly because men could not see why such solemnity should attach to the proclamation that there would be no more delay in bringing about the mystery of God; partly because they dimly supposed that the accomplishing of the mystery of God must mean the breaking up of the framework of the universe, which they thought would be aptly described as the end of time. But if the mystery of God that He declared to His prophets is the mystery of the reconciliation and atonement of God with man, the mystery of the Lamb’s triumph 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 I am not departing from the language of Scripture or of sound theology when I say that this mystery is not waiting to be accomplished in some far-off imaginary time when time ceases, but is being accomplished at the very crisis toward which all the earlier words in this vision of the trumpets have been pointing.
Many of the difficulties here arise, in no small part, from certain forms of speech which are useful in themselves and have become habitual, but which we repeat until they confuse and mislead us. For some purposes no distinction is more important than the one between the Old and New Testaments. 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 ones. The inward differences seem even more deeply marked. Jews of course have the strongest interest in dwelling on them; for them the New Testament contradicts the Old. Roman Catholics are eager to show how the national life of the Jew is swallowed up 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 growing school of liberal writers is even more eager than any of these to insist that the new dispensation has swallowed up or overturned the old. And yet none of them denies, or wishes to deny, the Jewish character of the Gospels, Epistles, or Apocalypse. As little can they deny that the Apostles and Evangelists belonged to the last forty or fifty years of the Jewish Commonwealth. Even if some would assign certain books that go under their names to a later period, all the events those books claim to record certainly fall within that span. Suppose, then, we connect these writers, as they seem to connect themselves, with the earlier prophets and teachers of their land; suppose they did believe, as they say they did, that the events they speak of are the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets; suppose they did look, as they seem to have looked, for a kingdom of heaven to rise out of the kingdom of David and take the Gentiles into it — would this language then sound fantastic or impossible? Would not the destruction of Jerusalem be the winding up of that whole series of events — the incarnation, death, resurrection, and glorification of Christ — which were themselves the finishing of the mystery of God that He had promised to His servants the prophets? I can only ask those who look down on the New Testament writers as ignorant, narrow Jews to consider whether this is not exactly what they do say; whether I am not giving the real force and outcome of their words, whether those words are Divine or human, wise or unwise. And I may surely ask those who set great store by the letter of Scripture — though not, in my judgment, too great — who receive its words as oracles, to consider what those words actually are; to consider whether, taken plainly, they do not contain the Gospel of a finished salvation for men; and whether, if so, this was not a fitting occasion for an angel to swear by Him who lives forever, who created heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them — because the glorious purpose for which the Jewish nation had existed was now brought to pass; because the gods of heaven, sea, and earth were now to bow before the one living God, the Lord God of Israel; because a dispensation was about to begin grounded on the regeneration of humanity in the Son of Man; because a Divine Spirit could now stay 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 already noticed, recalls some passage of an earlier prophet. When 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 to 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.”
Ezekiel’s work, as set out there, had to do with the Israelites in Babylon. His message 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 own countrymen. But the words had to be spoken, whether heeded or rejected, and were to remain for the generation to come. St. John, living in a different age, hears the same tidings of lamentation, mourning, and woe that his predecessor had heard. He is speaking to the same rebellious house. He finds that house under a tyranny essentially like the Babylonian one, and awaiting a still more terrible overthrow. St. John’s roll, like Ezekiel’s, tells of a temple that is to fall and a temple that is to rise from its ruins. And St. John, like Ezekiel, must eat the roll. Its words are not merely to be read but taken, with all their bitterness and all their sweetness, into his innermost being. In this respect the ages between the seer at Chebar and the seer at Patmos make no difference. Living words — words that are things, words written down only because they have been acted or are to be acted — must be received into the man before he can utter them. He must know them by heart, not by rote. So it was in those old days; so it has been since; so it will be in our times. In easy days the words of all books, and of the Bible especially, become fine subjects for criticism and debate. Eloquent comments are written on them; they can be twisted into all sorts of senses; they can be proved to mean everything, anything, nothing. But in times of stress and anguish they are devoured. They are taken not to soothe the reader nor to condemn people he dislikes; he receives them as they are. They nourish him by their bitter qualities as much as by their pleasant ones; he needs both and accepts both. He asks for no explanation of them; they come already carrying a tremendous explanation of what he was and what he now is; he asks for no evidence about them; they bring it with them.
But why should the book be sweet as honey in the mouth if it is so full of woe? And why should it turn bitter afterward, if it is God’s book? Ezekiel and St. John had the same experience in this. Nor, I think, would our own case be different, if we truly ate the words and they really entered into us. There must be an unspeakable sweetness in the actual living taste of a Divine communication — in the assurance, felt in the blood, felt along the heart, that a part of the law by which we are governed has been disclosed to us; that the love beneath all law, working at every moment for the welfare and renewal of the creatures it has called into being, is showing itself in our very selves. Sweet as honey! But then comes the sense of this law defied in the world and defied in ourselves, of that love trampled 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 more bitter afterward, in proportion to how delicious it was 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 fully digested, there must be sorrow. For is not the Man of sorrow the one they speak of, and the one who interprets them?
There was a special cause of sorrow in the case of the Apostle John. He might have hoped the open book would tell him of the judgment on the great Babel-empire of the world. Instead it made known to him the judgment of the chosen witness against that empire. The seventh trumpet might have announced the fall of Rome. But no — when it sounds, Jerusalem will fall. And is this, then, the end of everything? Is the mystery of God spoken of by the prophets really satisfied in this ruin? For a moment it seems 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 after the trumpets have ceased. There may be glimpses into the dispensation still to come. The oppressor may not be meant to reign forever. Only half of the seer’s task is done. “And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again unto many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.”