(PREACHED ON WHITSUNDAY.)
The passage: John saw a Lamb standing on Mount Sion, and with him one hundred and forty-four thousand who had the Father’s name written on their foreheads. He heard a great voice from heaven like rushing waters and thunder, and the sound of harpers playing, and they sang a new song before the throne, the four living creatures, and the elders; no one could learn that song except those hundred and forty-four thousand who had been redeemed from the earth. They are undefiled, virgins, who follow the Lamb wherever he goes; they were redeemed from among men as firstfruits to God and the Lamb, with no lie in their mouth, faultless before God’s throne. John then saw an angel flying in mid-heaven with the everlasting gospel to preach to everyone on earth, every nation and tongue, saying loudly, Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; worship the Maker of heaven, earth, sea, and springs. Another angel followed, announcing that Babylon the great city has fallen, because she made all nations drink the wine of the wrath of her fornication. A third angel followed, warning loudly that whoever worships the beast and its image and receives its mark will drink the undiluted wine of God’s wrath, and be tormented with fire and brimstone before the holy angels and the Lamb, their torment rising forever, with no rest day or night. Here is the patience of the saints who keep God’s commandments and the faith of Jesus. And a voice from heaven told John to write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on; the Spirit says they rest from their labors, and their works follow them.
I. This vision brings to mind the one in the seventh chapter. There, as the angels went out with their trumpets to prepare for the fall of the accursed city, another angel was sealing twelve thousand from each tribe of Israel with the seal of the living God. The names of the tribes, so carefully listed there, do not appear again here. But the total number sealed is the same. The place, Mount Sion, ties them to the chosen people. Yet there are two new features: these hundred and forty-four thousand are gathered around the Lamb, and they are marked with their Father’s name. I want especially to draw your attention today to the likeness between these visions and the difference between them. Whitsuntide, it seems to me, sheds clear light on the whole subject, and in turn is lit up by the Apocalypse.
(1.) The Feast of Pentecost was strictly a Jewish feast, though it gave thanks for the gifts of the common earth. Those who came to it treated Jerusalem as their center. At this Pentecost the Apostles spoke to them of a Son of David, and of David himself. What amazed everyone was that Galileans could speak with Jews living in all the different heathen cities about the works of the God of Abraham. Those who received the Spirit felt they were no longer a divided people scattered among the heathen, but a family that no distance could break apart. They were truly children of Abraham because they were children of God. Though they might be only a remnant of Israel, though most of their countrymen might go on calling the one they revered as a divine King a criminal and blasphemer, they stood for a united Israel. The nation the sects were tearing apart lived on in them.
(2.) And yet the ascended King was shown to be the King of the Jews precisely because he had conquered the death that held all men captive, because he could not remain in one earthly dwelling-place. He must therefore be the King of all men. However slow the Apostles were to learn that they were to proclaim him in that character, however important it was that there should be a time in which they grasped their position as Jews and showed their countrymen what that position meant, events would inevitably break down the barriers they could not break themselves. Their fellowship was essentially a human fellowship.
(3.) It was human because it was divine. Before Christ left them he had said, “I ascend to my Father and your Father; to my God and your God.” And now he sent them the promise of this Father. He had himself explained that promise as the gift of another Comforter, who would stay with them forever, a Spirit of Truth, who would teach them about him and about his Father. The new name with which they were sealed was a name that Gentiles as much as Jews had been groping after. The solemn words, “The Lord thy God is One Lord,” seemed to set all who had mixed human thoughts and feelings into God at an infinite distance. But now, when the highest showing of God’s glory was in One who had taken flesh and become man; now, when a Spirit had been given who could teach them to glorify God most by magnifying his image most; now the hope of the Greek could be fulfilled as much as the hope of the Israelite: the kingdom of heaven could hold both. God’s unity repelled no one and drew all.
(4.) These sealed members of the different tribes are now gathered on Mount Sion, around the Lamb. The place shows that they stand for the continuity of the Jewish family. But the Lamb who bore the sins of the world shows that they are no longer members of tribes, that their center is no longer in Jerusalem. The insect has passed through its stages of egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis. It has become winged. It can rise to heaven, or settle on any leaf or flower of earth. The chosen nation has expanded into the Church of the whole universe. It is a witness that men are not fatherless, are not slaves of a beast. It declares that they are redeemed and united in a living and glorified Head.
Perhaps you say the next words contradict this claim. Let us look at them.
- “And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps: and they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and before the elders; and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits to God and the Lamb. And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.”
Now I will be told that nothing here speaks of a redemption of the world; a great deal speaks of a redemption from the world. These followers of the Lamb stand in sharp contrast to everyone around them. Their great blessing is that the world’s habits are not their habits. No one but they can learn or understand their song. The world lies in wickedness, worshiping a beast and his image; they are faultless.
These observations are plain and true. But what conclusions should we draw from them? Many have been drawn. “Christians are redeemed from the earth. What can that mean but that the earth is a vile, unclean thing they have nothing to do with? Christians’ habits are not to be the world’s habits. What can that mean but that they should keep as much as possible to themselves, and preserve the purity and virginity of their souls by not mixing with the corrupted? They have songs of their own; what can that mean but that God has given them an inheritance shut off from people in general?” In later times these conclusions have seemed so inevitable to many religious people that all over Christendom, Protestant as well as Roman, they have been made the basis of whole systems of action; one sect or order after another has arisen to proclaim them, to denounce earlier sects and orders for neglecting them, and to put them into practice themselves.
To the Christian community shortly after Pentecost, maxims very unlike these seemed inevitable and became the foundation of their conduct. One of the first records of their life is that they ate their food with joy and singleness of heart. This was new to them. Part of the song they had learned was a thanksgiving for the earth and its gifts, which before they had received dully and indifferently. But was separation from other people and suspicion of them a mark of them after their baptism? If it had been, that would have set them apart in no way from the world they had lived in. Each Jewish sect cultivated this separation and cherished this suspicion; the most popular sect earned its religious reputation by how far it kept those who would not accept its rulings. The Christians would at once have been recognized as just another Nazarene sect if they had followed this precedent. They could not follow it, because the very principle of their calling was to follow the Lamb wherever he went. He had not gone that way at all. He had solemnly taken a different road. He had drawn the anger of the Pharisees by rejecting what seemed to them unquestionable rules about how to treat their fellow creatures—by going to sinners and eating with them. If his disciples, after his ascension, were to clean out the old leaven, the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, they had above all to purge the leaven of exclusiveness; no ingredient had spoiled the pure Passover bread as much as that.
But if they got rid of this leaven, how could they become a pure loaf wholly given to God? Only while they confessed that in themselves, as individuals, no good thing dwelt—nothing that lifted them above the lowest tax-collector or prostitute or heathen in the world; only while they confessed that all their purity was in that Lamb who had taken them into fellowship with himself and written his Father’s name on their foreheads; only while they confessed that in him God saw them as faultless, wholly undefiled, and that fault and corruption began when they forgot their relation to him, when they separated from one another and went their own separate ways and interests. What, then, was their redemption from among men? Redemption from their self-interest, from their self-worship; the privilege of confessing the Son of Man who had redeemed them and all mankind; the privilege of truly belonging to a human kind, and not being, like the worshipers of the beast, utterly inhuman. I would not change one word or letter of this passage. I insist that it be taken in the strictest possible way. I insist that the weak dodges and evasions that turn “faultless” into “not very faulty,” and “undefiled” into “as pure as human weakness allows,” be thrown out as irreverent and dishonest. Then, I am sure, this passage will reconcile a host of others where readers imagine a contradiction, using one to water down another until both are emptied of meaning. I am sure it will be seen that the freer Christians are from the corruptions of their age, the less they will dare to limit God’s grace; and the more they regard themselves as firstfruits to God and the Lamb, the more they will believe that the whole universe has been offered and sacrificed to God in its High Priest, and that he will claim his right to it, no matter who disputes that right.
This, then, I believe, is what that song is about—the song that began in heaven and was echoed on earth, sung before the throne, the four living creatures, and the elders; the song that was “as it were new”—not actually new, not without earlier versions, not different in spirit from the songs that rose from the hearts and lips of the old prophets when they glorified God under some brute tyranny, amid the sins and decay of their countrymen; but new, because it fulfilled all those older songs; new, because it celebrated the actual reconciliation of heaven and earth that they had only anticipated; new, because the brute power of this day was more openly and formally antichristian than any that came before the Incarnation.
“And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people; saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come; and worship him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters.” This message, and the ones that follow, are strictly messages from heaven to earth. The first implicitly contains the rest. It is called an everlasting Gospel; good news about an everlasting God; good news to all his creatures everywhere. It is the Gospel that Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew of the Hebrews, carried to the idolaters of Greece and Asia, feeling as he carried it that he was strictly fulfilling his role as a child of Abraham. The Jew lifted up his voice and said to the world, “You who have worshiped things in heaven, on earth, in the sea, and in the springs of water; you who have bowed to gods in nature and of nature; you who have made gods in your own image, in the likeness of your good and evil desires, your just and unjust ideas, your pure and lustful impulses—fear the God who has made everything in heaven, earth, and sea; fear him who made man in his own image; for he has revealed his true image to men; he has revealed the standard of righteousness; the Judge who condemns all unrighteousness; the Redeemer from all unrighteousness.” Do you think it is not a Gospel because it begins with “Fear,” or because it speaks of judgment? I believe no Gospel but this can satisfy men. They want to know whom they should fear. They must fear an evil being if they do not fear a good one. They cannot trust one they do not reverence. Take away awe, and the one you worship shrinks back to your own size. The misery of men had been that they made a God in their own likeness. To have him revealed as infinitely above them, yet stooping to them, was the overthrow of the superstition that had made them cowards and slaves. And the deliverance would be entirely incomplete if they could not believe that this righteous God was their Judge, the Judge of all the earth, and that they could take refuge in him from the false judgments of all men, and above all from their own judgment, and from themselves.
“And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornications.”
The Babel, or Babylonian, order was the opposite of the Israelite order. The ruler had no real relation to his people; he was simply a ruler. The gods he honored were powers—different, clashing powers; they were to be worshiped and appeased as props of his government, and they cared nothing for those who worshiped and appeased them. The God of Israel, by contrast, was declared to be the King and Husband of his people. The kings who reigned in his name were to care for the people as a husband cares for his wife. When the nation fell, as it kept falling, into idolatry, this was called an act of fornication or adultery, the wife turning away from her real Lord. That language fit the chosen people. Now it could be applied to the world at large. The angel proclaims that the world no longer belongs to Babel. The Husband of the human race has appeared; all idolatry is fornication or adultery. Men can be told that they are spiritual beings, joined to a spiritual Lord, and that in giving themselves to fleshly and visible things they are abandoning their rightful state and yielding to seducers. All this was contained in the revelation of the Son of Man. And so it also contained the downfall of the whole system of idolatry—the whole Babel order. Widely as it had spread, mighty and subtle as its influence was over every tribe and nation, the day the Man-child was born, when the true Head of man, the true bond between heaven and earth was disclosed—that was the day of its doom. Already, in the Roman empire, there were signs of the system cracking and falling to pieces. It could not sustain the tyranny that depended on it, and the tyranny could not sustain it. The cry, “It is fallen! it is fallen!” would be shown in that very age by the upheaval shaking earth and heaven, the seat of the empire and the seats of the gods. And the proclamation was not weaker but stronger because, in that upheaval, the very city that had witnessed against Babel idolatry was itself to perish. For it had let the Babel principle into its own heart. Jerusalem had become emphatically the city of confusion. It had aimed to make a name for itself and had forgotten the name of its God. It had thought its towers were high and reached to heaven; but they were built of brick instead of stone, cemented with slime instead of mortar. The babble of its sects showed that God had come down to confound its pride. It had no language it could understand itself; how could it make itself understood to the world? The Church, which the Spirit had empowered to speak to men of different tribes, in their own tongues, of the wonderful works of God, could not help seeing that the fall of Jerusalem was one sign among many that the thrones of all false gods were to be thrown down:
“They feel from Juda’s land The dreaded Infant’s hand, The rays of Bethlehem blind their dusky eyen.”
And this because that Infant came not to destroy but to fulfill; to gather into one all the scattered beliefs and hopes of the world; to overthrow its lies by making good its truths. We must not confuse this voice with the one that follows, closely as they are linked. The Babel society, taken by itself, rests on the worship of a number of persons. But these are always aiming at a mock unity. The beast, described in the last chapter, is the concentration of everything brutal in the others, the exclusion of everything human.
V. “And the third angel followed, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.”
The angel’s voice sings utter ruin, torment, and endless restlessness to those who carry the beast’s image in their hearts. Why? Because the eternal God has shown his image to men, has claimed them as made in that image, and has promised his Spirit to write his name on their hearts. To worship the beast is to degrade spiritual beings into beasts—a degradation carrying an anguish only spirits can feel: a sense of something lost; endless discontent with what has been taken in exchange; the undying worm of conscience; the envy and hatred that possess and rule creatures made for fellowship and love. Something of this misery can be traced in the laments of the companions of Ulysses when they had drunk Circe’s cup and been transformed by her wand. The exile’s grief is always deepest in proportion to the beauty of the home he has left. The intellectual Greek could perceive the meanness of a swinish existence in a way the savage could not. So it is inevitable that the vision the Gospel gives of a God of eternal goodness and loving-kindness should make the hell of loneliness and selfishness deep and unimaginably dark. Phrases like “the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without measure,” “tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb,” “the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever,” “they have no rest day nor night,” can easily turn into mere figures of speech the orator toys with at will—that alarm the nerves for half an hour, that fret but do not rouse the conscience, that lazy hearers expect and demand as sounds to break the monotony of an ordinary sermon. For the Gospel of such an orator is not a Gospel of God, but a Gospel about how men may be delivered from God. He has no message about a kingdom of light opened to mankind by the incarnation and death of the Son of God; and so his message about the kingdom of darkness reaches nothing in the hearts and spirits of men and only jangles in their ears. This angel’s voice carries real thunder precisely because it is essentially sweet and divine. If God’s love were narrowed even a little, the horror of being cut off from that love, of being given over to lust and hatred, would be narrowed by the same amount. If the power of divine love to lift men out of that abyss of horror were reduced by any time limits, then the sense of what spiritual and eternal death means, the dread of it, and the force of those divinely chosen images that describe it, would be reduced by the same measure. In easy times the contrast may not be very obvious; the divine words and their counterfeits may often be swapped for each other and taken to have the same worth. But in such times as St. John describes, when the power of the beast and the power of the Lamb meet face to face; when everyone must choose between them; when all apparent strength is on the side of evil—then the angel’s words, which declare that this evil power is not all-powerful but utterly accursed, come out in their clearness and force. The beast with the lamblike face, whose work is to stamp the beast’s image with the dragon’s horns on men’s hearts, may mix eternal and temporal terrors in wild confusion, crushing men’s spirits under his shameful yoke more effectively than by any other means. The messenger of God knows in that day that he must set forth, in plain and broad words, the spiritual and eternal ruin bound up in serving a false and cruel power—so that he may turn men to the Conqueror of that power; so that he may convince them that the Redeemer is stronger than the destroyer, and that there are no chains the one can forge that the other cannot break.
- The words that follow are familiar to us out of their setting. It matters that we know them in their setting.
“Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.”
What has the patience of the saints to do with that announcement about the worshipers of the beast we just heard? My brothers! To believe that the devil is not the lord of the world, that he cannot give its kingdoms to whomever he pleases, is hard at all times, and intensely hard in times when brute and evil power has established its dominance and the world is running after it. Then admitting the enemy’s dominion seems only to admit an obvious fact. Indeed, some will insist that holding this belief is a pious duty. “Christ is to reign hereafter; but for now the earth is handed over to the dragon.” I think it impossible, while we believe this, not to pay some homage—yes, continual homage—to the power we suppose is on top. And so this book teaches the deep and vital lesson that the patience of the saints consists in steadily believing the angel’s message about the beast, and in not believing any whispers and suggestions of his about his own authority. In doing this they keep the commandment that says, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” In doing this they walk the path of Jesus, who used this very commandment to resist the adversary when he said, “All these will I give thee, and the glory of them, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” Jesus knew that to admit that lie—to confess that these kingdoms were in the hands of the evil one—was to fall down and worship him. That was all the homage the tempter wanted. Christ might have the kingdoms later, if only he would grant that they were Satan’s at that moment. He said, “Get thee behind me.” In his strength every one of his followers, in the darkest hour, when good seems utterly defeated, is to say the same. And to strengthen them for this effort, another heavenly voice comes, saying, “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth.” Why from henceforth? Were not the dead who die in the Lord always blessed? If the words had a special bearing on that time, may we dare to use them in our funeral service for any brother or sister whose remains we now bury? I think the words did belong to that time; I think “from henceforth” carried a special comfort for those who, judging by their eyes, would have concluded that the earth was not the Lord’s. It reminded them that the earth is only part of the universe; that seventy years do not settle the great questions debated here; that the Lord, who has gone into the grave and hell, has risen on high, to open eternity to men. The voice says to those sinking under the sight the world offers them, “Yes—but at this very moment men are passing into a region where the mists that block our vision here do not exist; where they will know that not the beast, but the Lord God Omnipotent reigns.” And so the words became both backward- and forward-looking. “Know from now on that those who fell asleep before Christ came in the flesh are around his throne. Know from now on that you are surrounded by a countless company of every kindred and nation, watching your struggle and helping you in it. Know from now on that this company will gather fresh members from all the ages to come—in lands unknown to you, men trembling at the thought of death will learn to lose their own deaths in his, who died for the world. Remember from now on that the hard labors you or they undergo in fighting the beast, in yourselves or in the world, lead surely to a rest in God. Know from now on that if you or they leave works God set you to do on this earth poor and unfinished, those works will follow you when you have passed through the veil. Know from now on that whatever is begun will be brought to perfection; that new fields of blessed work will open to God’s servants; that as they followed the Lamb under the weight of mortality, they will follow him now to fresh victories, until every enemy that has opposed him and tormented his creatures is put under his feet.”