The passage: A great crowd in heaven shouts “Alleluia,” praising God for salvation, glory, honour, and power, because His judgments are true and just: He has judged the great harlot who corrupted the earth and has avenged His servants’ blood. The elders and living creatures worship God, and a voice from the throne calls all His servants, small and great, to praise Him. Then a multitude like many waters and thunder cries “Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigns; the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His bride has prepared herself,” clothed in fine linen, which is the righteousness of the saints. John is told to write that those called to the marriage supper are blessed—these are the true words of God. John falls to worship the messenger, but is told not to: the messenger is a fellow-servant, for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Then heaven opens and a rider on a white horse appears, called Faithful and True, who judges and makes war in righteousness; His eyes are flaming, He wears many crowns and a name only He knows, His robe is dipped in blood, and His name is The Word of God. Heaven’s armies follow Him. A sharp sword comes from His mouth to strike the nations; He rules with iron and treads the winepress of God’s wrath, and bears the name King of Kings and Lord of Lords. An angel in the sun calls the birds to the supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, captains, and all people. The beast, the kings, and their armies gather to make war against the rider, but the beast and the false prophet are captured and thrown alive into a lake of fire; the rest are killed by the sword from His mouth, and the birds are filled with their flesh.
“We praise God for His mercies, we pray to avert His judgments.” This is the idea that even religious people commonly accept. But it clashes oddly with the language of this book. The shouts of praise in heaven, echoed by saints on earth, are for God’s judgments. We have seen this before; and nowhere is the lesson taught more forcefully than at the opening of this chapter.
I. “And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God: for true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. And again they said, Alleluia. And her smoke rose up for ever and ever. And the four and twenty elders and the four beasts fell down and worshipped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen; Alleluia. And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great.”
Are the thoughts of heaven and earth, then, completely at odds on this subject? Do the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures around the throne rejoice in the very thing that makes mortals weep? Do they give thanks that the prayers of mortals have gone unanswered—that God has carried out His vengeance despite men’s efforts to stop it?
Certain phrases in this passage should make us pause before accepting that sad conclusion. One is in the first verse: salvation is ascribed to the Lord our God. Now salvation, in some sense, is exactly what all people everywhere are praying for. If we ask not to suffer a plague of endless rain that would ruin the harvest, we are asking for salvation from that plague; if we cry out against battle, murder, sudden death, conspiracy, or rebellion, we ask salvation from those dangers; if we pray against pride, malice, hypocrisy, uncharitableness, against fornication, heresy, schism, and contempt of God’s word, we ask salvation from those evils. It does not look, then, as though the heavenly hosts are celebrating the defeat of prayers rising from earth. If they praise God for His judgments, they link those judgments with deliverance.
The second verse explains the first. “He hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.” The salvation is from something that has defiled the earth, made it miserable, and filled it with blood. With full delight they watch the smoke of the fire that has consumed the earth’s tormentors and destroyers rising for ever and ever. Not for one age but for every age has that fire been kindled; the smoke rising from each age is a pledge and promise for the next. That is why the fifth verse breaks down the barrier between those in the visible world and those in the invisible one. All who fear God, small and great, are asked to join in watching the judgment—all are called to praise for it.
Yet although the Apostle does not present heaven and earth as at odds, but as truly at one, we should not forget that a conflict must exist somewhere. And since all our thoughts, wishes, and prayers are bound to be shaped by it, let us not shrink from pressing the question: Where is it? How does it come about that we speak of praying against what the wisest and holiest seem to pray for? How is it that we dread the very result they long for—which, when they see it, makes them exult?
Suppose I believe I am in a system I am to call generally or universally good, though I am aware that much in it I hate—things that torment me, crush me, devour the life in me. Then of course I do not pray, and cannot. The author of that system—if it has one—has, I suppose, made it as he saw fit. I have nothing to do but endure it as best I can; and my endurance will be mixed with curses that break out of my inmost soul, since its misery has no other outlet. Those curses will be aimed at the system, if I regard it merely as a system; or at whoever set it going, if I think there is such a one. And no arguments proving the folly or hopelessness of rebelling against a state of things to which I am chained—no statistics showing that things follow a certain course, or that after ages everything works out for the good of the whole—will produce anything more than a pretence of contentment in me, so long as I keep the feelings and needs of a human being. The only escape is to drown those feelings and needs. In animal indulgence, in the dullness of a merely sensual life, a man may learn to submit; otherwise he will beat his head against the bars of his prison, if he dreams even a little of escaping it.
How do men rise out of the mire into which they keep sinking deeper? All would say: not by acquiescing, but by protesting. They insist that mire is not the element human beings were meant to live in. Though a hundred are willing to stay in it, one or two keep affirming, for themselves and the rest, that this is not their proper state; and if they can see no other, they can at least see there must be another. This protest and affirmation become prayer. They believe that somehow, somewhere, they have a deliverer. If someone has cast them into this misery, someone else must be able to save them out of it. The longing to escape has been put into their minds; the effort to escape has been put into their minds. Whatever the Deliverer’s name, and in whatever region near or far He may live, these promptings have come from Him, and He will back them up. They ask Him to save them from the oppressor—they ask Him, if He is strong enough, to judge between the oppressor and them. Whether the Author of the universe is the Oppressor or the Deliverer, the Enemy men must escape or the Friend on whom they can lay all their doubts, fears, and hopes—this is what all past ages were struggling to know. What we say is that the revelation of Jesus Christ was the answer to that question. We who receive Him as the Son of God, one with the Lord of all, do declare that the Creator of the universe is the Deliverer of the universe. Whatever corrupts the earth and human beings we believe comes not from His order but from a breaking of His order. By our loyalty to Him we are bound not to accept abnormalities as if they were laws, but to fight against them. We are bound to believe He is stirring us to fight against them. We have a right to pray against them, whatever they are, our prayers being simply our response to His promptings—cries for His will to triumph over what opposes it. And if we believe He is infinitely wise as well as infinitely good—that we can see only a very little way—then we shall leave our petitions in His hands with no cowardice or distrust. We believe He has ordained summer and winter, seed-time and harvest. Continued rain at this season, experience tells us, is likely to prevent the fruits from appearing in season and to make many starve; that is, we believe it will interrupt or disturb God’s blessed order. Does the rain, then, not come from Him? We believe it does. Rain is a gift of God, not a curse of the Devil. So we believe it is sent for some good purpose—we do not know the specific purpose, but for the general purpose of correcting something wrong in how we act or think, of making us less stupid and monotonous in our lives, less dependent on chance, better farmers, less deaf to nature’s facts and demands—all this we may safely assume, provided we assume a Fatherly Ruler of the world at all. To ask for the removal of the punishment is therefore, as today’s prayer teaches us, to ask for the removal of the cause, whatever it is; to ask for repentance; to ask to be set right. So from whatever starting point, we come back to the conclusion that the source of evil lies in the will; that our wills have set themselves against God’s will; that He is working to bring us into our true state; and that all natural instruments are His instruments for this end. Therefore, when people tell us we keep forgetting the permanence of God’s nature and character and want to bend the laws to our convenience, we admit the charge is just, and are deeply grateful for any help in making it untrue. So we pray to God at such times as this, appealing to Him as being what He was in ancient generations, in the days of Noah’s flood and before—appealing to Him as the God of law and order—appealing to Him against our own ups and downs, irregularities, and worship of accidents; certain that if we do not appeal to Him, if we do not believe in such a God, we shall become the plaything and slave of all shifting appearances, unable to recognize anything firm or constant in the visible or the unseen world.
So it is God’s judgment we call for in every case where we act in line with what the Bible or the Church teaches. They never teach us to shrink from those judgments. Those texts that seem to justify such shrinking, weighed carefully, point the opposite way; indeed they expose the very frame of mind in us that leads to this distortion and cowardice. Do you think the Psalmist who said, “Judge me, O Lord, and plead my cause,” contradicted himself when he said, “Enter not into judgment with thy servant, for in thy sight shall no man living be justified”? I am convinced that one of these prayers explains and confirms the other. He means: “Do not, O Lord, look on me, think of me, judge me as I am apart from Thee—a poor, wretched, helpless atom, cut off from all other atoms, having lost the principle of life and unity. Judge me as I truly am, related to Thee, taking refuge in Thee, begging Thee to search whether there is any wicked way in me, to test me and find the ground of my heart, which is in Thyself!” Do you think St. Paul, saying, “Judge therefore yourselves, brethren, that ye be not judged by the Lord,” contradicted his other statement in the same letter—“I know nothing against myself, yet am I not hereby justified; for he that judgeth me is the Lord”? I think you will find that the judgment of God he wanted them not to incur was being treated as though they were part and parcel of the evil clinging to them; that he wanted them to judge between that evil and themselves; and that he told them to look boldly up to God, in His Son, to judge them and clear them of that evil. And our failure to do this, brethren—our not believing that God has sent His Son to justify us and free every one of us from our sins, our not believing that we stand in Christ, pure and holy and blameless before Him—is the reason we do not feel about His judgments on the world as the Apostle did, but instead cherish the opposite feeling: a wish that they should not come, or should not reach us. This last is, I think, the worse temper of the two. It is nobler and more righteous to wish that the world should be left in its wickedness and misery—horrible as that wish is—than to wish it to pass through the fires while we get a special exemption. What! has our saintliness come to this? Do we really want to hug our evils and not let them be destroyed? Yet that is what our saintliness will be, if our first, second, or third thought is about ourselves—if our first thought is not the one expressed in this verse:
“And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as of the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.” And the second thought is like it: “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.” And the third grows out of the first and second: “And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of the saints.” Here is the true Divine order. Hallowed be thy Name: the Lord God Omnipotent reigns! The eternally righteous Being holds all power. He in whom is light and no darkness at all is shown to be the ground of all things. Thy kingdom come: the Son has claimed humanity as His bride. She is no longer the servant of the beast; she has found her true Lord and can see her glory in Him. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: the Spirit clothes the bride with the graces and beauties of her Lord. Those who have nothing in themselves are able to look up to Him and become bright with His brightness.
“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God. And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not, I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God; for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”
We have already heard of the voice of a great multitude. Now he speaks to me. Who? The prophet knows no more than we do. He is sure only that the message is a Divine one. And he is sure it is distinct from that general chorus—it is addressed to him. It must be Divine, for it tells him of what has been the subject of all songs and prophecies since the world began: the union of Humanity with her true Husband—the overthrow of the idolatry that had separated them and degraded her. To this all the creation’s hopes, to this all God’s revelations, have pointed. And now some are called to celebrate this marriage. They are invited to the wedding supper. The voice pronounces them blessed. To share in such a celebration is to enter fellowship with all blessed and redeemed spirits—with everything gracious, pure, and noble in earth’s generations and in the worlds that have never known sin. May not humanity so exalted be an object of worship? Does not the one who brings these tidings represent it? Has not hero-worship now found its justification? Has not the Son of Man destroyed the sin into which earlier ages fell? No—see thou do it not! The wedding of Humanity vindicates, rather than reverses, the second commandment as well as the first. Each person is raised by that wedding. Each person content to be a fellow-servant with his brothers, to take his place among those whose nature Jesus bore and whose death Jesus died, shares His glory. But that glory is to look above humanity, as He did. The spirit of prophecy has all along been a testimony to Him—a testimony to a Man who is one with God, who fully asserts God’s name, in whom men may draw near to God.
And now He Himself appears—that Son of Man who stood before the Prophet dressed in the robes of the High Priest, walking among the candlesticks; essentially the same, but bearing a different name, carrying out another office.
- “And I saw heaven open, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called the Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So St. John opens his Gospel. Those who comment on this sentence tell us how what they call the Logos doctrine was spread by a Jew of Alexandria; how it was taken up by the Christian fathers there in the second century; how they, like its first teacher, connected it with ideas drawn from pagan philosophy. Then they ask whether such a deep speculation is likely to have reached a fisherman of Galilee—whether it is not far more probable that what we call his Gospel was a compilation by learned men in a later time. All the learning that can be applied to the history of human thought is valuable, and no speculations about it need cause the slightest anxiety. But, as I have pressed on you before, it may be well worth knowing whether the discovery of the doctrine of gravitation can be traced to Newton, Kepler, or some earlier thinker; but it is rather more important to know whether the doctrine of gravitation is true or false—whether it explains the facts of the universe—rather than merely whether it is contained in a book called The Principia. We must apply the same test to the statements at the start of St. John’s Gospel. They themselves invite that test. Learned scholar, you know everything Philo or Origen said about the Word of God; but if He has nothing to do with you—if you can interpret yourself without Him—you may as well leave Philo, Origen, and the wicked man who forged St. John’s name entirely alone. Their doctrine can mean nothing to you, because in that case it is mere fiction. The Gospel assumes that all the light in you, or in any person, comes from His light; that neither you, nor Philo, nor Origen, could have used or understood any words but for this Word; that your darkness, and mine, and everyone’s, comes from refusing to acknowledge this light and dwell in it. If this is so, then it seems in no way strange that all prophets should speak of a Word of God coming to them, or that heathens should confess they needed such an enlightener of their hearts and reasons. Nor should it surprise us, at least, that a Jew of the first century, meditating on what he believed had been revealed to the prophets of his land—and on the aspirations and perceptions of men outside their covenant—should have reached a clearer, more definite grasp than his predecessors of some Being related to the Mind of God and to the mind of man, in whom God and man might meet. The question of all questions is whether this Being is really the Enlightener of man, or only of wise and select men; whether He was made flesh and lived among men to give them power to become sons of God, or whether He was only a spiritual emanation or idea men might dream about, but who could not speak to them, rule them, or judge them. Supposing He really was what St. John says He was, then, I say, the poor Galilean fisherman was exactly the person to whom—for mankind’s sake—we should expect Him to reveal Himself, so that He might be shown to be genuinely the Enlightener not of those who bring their own light with them, but of those who confess that, left to themselves, they are blind.
And now this Word of God, declared to be the light of men—the source of good to all and to each—comes out judging and making war. Who else can judge but He who has been conversing with every heart, who knows all its passages, who has been carrying on His secret judgments, bringing every man to His bar every day since man began to sin? Who can make war but He who has been striving with each man, each family, each nation—He against whom every idolatrous, malicious, foul thought, desire, word, and deed that has corrupted societies or individuals has fought? We know how dark and bloody men’s wars have been; history tells us. What we want to know is whether all has been bloody and dark—whether it is all to end in darkness and blood. Heaven opens, and One is seen on a white horse, who is Faithful and True, who judges and makes war in righteousness. He sees into the heart of things. Nothing good, nothing of His own creation, can escape those flaming eyes or be lost; nothing evil and corrupting can hide from them and be saved. On His head are many crowns; we cannot measure the extent or variety of His victories. We only know that all His enemies are to be put under His feet. It is not we who gave Him His name; no one knows it but Himself. He knows all our names. Thanks be to God, we cannot fathom the depth of His! His robe is dipped in blood—not only the blood of others, but His own. He has poured out His own blood for men. He will not spare any blood needed for the redemption of the earth, for the destruction of its destroyers. He does not come alone; the armies of heaven are with Him. The Son of God is the Firstborn among many brothers. All the sons of God have received His Spirit and are allowed to share in His work. And that work must be a work of justice and vengeance. A sharp sword goes out of His mouth. The nations have felt the rod of wickedness; they must feel the rod of righteousness. The oppressor must learn there is a power more terrible than his. He has used God’s name to strengthen his purposes of fierceness and wrath; he has thought the earth brought forth its fruits only to make him drunk; now he must learn what the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God is.
V. All through this book I have been tracing the record of a mighty catastrophe that was to end that age of the world. The thought of that catastrophe would be utterly unbearable if we could not call it a judgment, if we were not told who the Judge is. It is when I have heard that the Son of Man, the Lamb who was slain, is King of kings and Lord of lords, that I can bear to read the next verses. “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great. And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army. And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth: and all the fowls were filled with their flesh.”
There is no attempt in this passage, or anywhere in Scripture, to disguise the horror and loathsomeness of a battle. We should never shrink from steadily looking at facts, or cover them with pretty sentimental phrases. Such phrases will never change the nature of things. To endure the visible, we must learn to look into the invisible. To bear the darkness over the earth, the veil of the temple must be torn open. We can bear to hear of the flesh of men and animals given to the birds of the air, if the result is that the beast and the false prophet—the military tyranny grinding the nations, the spiritual tyranny preying on their inner life—are cast into the lake of fire. And this the prophet understands as the meaning of the agony and travail through which the world of his day was passing. It was the judgment on the prince of this world; it interpreted all the judgments before it. Every one had been a battle between these same powers, and every one held the pledge of this outcome. Until the Word of God had been fully revealed in the incarnation of the Son of Man, in His Passion, in His return to glory, a heavy cloud still hung over all the doings and destinies of God’s creatures. The years since Adam came forth seemed only years of mutual destruction for his race, just as the ages before seemed periods of mutual destruction for the lower creatures. Now, when the Head of the universe had gone through its conflict and misery, a light was thrown back over all the past. His life was seen to be stronger than all the powers of death that had been at work in God’s universe.
And so, again, the battle of that age throws light forward into all the battles of later generations. It is hard and sickening to read of Christian men, sons of God, giving their brothers as food to the birds of the air; it is dreadful to think for what ends the kings of the earth and the great captains have slaughtered one another. But do not doubt it: in every one of these fights, some beastly power, some lie that has deceived the world, has been thrown down and cast into the lake of fire. Amid all our reasons for mourning, the spirits of heaven, and those of our brothers who have fought the fight and joined them, have seen reasons for thanksgiving and triumph. Something has been done for the purifying of the earth, for the fuller revealing of the sons of God; new conquerors come from earth’s anguish to share in its righteous government; new guests come from the horrible supper of death to sit at the marriage supper of the Lamb; one more step is gained in the triumph of the Perfect Will over rebellious wills; one step more toward that restoration of all things which God, who cannot lie, has promised through the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.