The passage: John heard a great voice from the temple telling the seven angels to go and pour out the vials of God’s wrath on the earth. The first was poured on the earth, and a foul, painful sore fell on the people who bore the mark of the beast and worshipped his image. The second was poured on the sea, which became like the blood of a dead man, and every living thing in it died. The third was poured on the rivers and springs, and they turned to blood; and the angel of the waters said God was righteous in this judgment, because these people had shed the blood of saints and prophets, so now they were given blood to drink, which they deserved; and another voice from the altar agreed that God’s judgments are true and righteous. The fourth was poured on the sun, and men were scorched with great heat, and they cursed God’s name and did not repent. The fifth was poured on the seat of the beast, and his kingdom went dark, and men gnawed their tongues in pain and cursed God, and did not repent. The sixth was poured on the great river Euphrates, and its water dried up to prepare a way for the kings of the east; and John saw three unclean spirits like frogs come from the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet—spirits of devils working miracles, going out to gather the kings of the earth to the battle of the great day of God. (“Behold, I come as a thief; blessed is he that watches and keeps his garments.”) They were gathered to a place called Armageddon. The seventh was poured into the air, and a great voice from the temple and the throne said, “It is done.” There were voices, thunders, lightnings, and the greatest earthquake ever; the great city split in three, the cities of the nations fell, and great Babylon was remembered before God to be given the cup of his fierce wrath. Every island fled and the mountains vanished, and a great hail fell, each stone about a talent’s weight, and men cursed God because of the plague of the hail.
Any reasonably attentive reader will notice a strong resemblance between the events that followed the trumpets and those that follow the pouring out of the vials. When the first four trumpets sounded, the earth, the sea, the rivers, and the sun were struck. Here we read of the same calamities in the same order. The river Euphrates goes with both the sixth trumpet and the sixth vial; the cry “It is finished” went with both the seventh trumpet and the seventh vial. There are several small differences, which I may come to shortly. But there is one large and striking difference that seems to settle the meaning of each vision. When the fifth trumpet sounded, a star fell from heaven to earth, the bottomless pit opened, and locusts came out that did not hurt grass or trees but only tormented—not killed—the men who lacked God’s seal on their foreheads, for five months. The fifth vial “was poured out upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues for pain.” I tried to show, when I treated that trumpet, that it meant the fall and ruin of a great spiritual dynasty and the moral and spiritual misery that follows such a fall. That this vial means the destruction of a dynasty that is not spiritual at all but essentially brutal—though it may once have leaned on spiritual supports—the words themselves would teach us, even without light from earlier or later passages. Everything so far seems to favor the approach to these prophecies that I have adopted. The trumpets would all be announcements of the fall of the old world’s spiritual center; they would point to Jerusalem. The vials would concern what I may call the old world’s material center; they would point to Rome. But they would not concern Jerusalem and Rome at different points in history; they would mark a crisis both cities were passing through within the same three or four years.
I. What those three or four years were, and what we know was happening in them, I have already partly considered; the seventeenth chapter will bring the question clearly before us. Today’s subject leads us to reflect on the different ways the same events can appear to a prophet’s mind. “And the first went and poured his vial upon the earth, and there fell a foul and painful sore upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and upon them that worshipped his image.” In the eighth chapter there was no mention of any harm to human beings from the hail and fire mingled with blood cast on the earth; only a third of the trees and green grass were burned. There we were hearing a trumpet; here we are seeing a vial poured out. There the earth was struck; those who had been called to declare who is the Lord of the earth, and had not declared him to men or believed in him themselves, were to read his Mene Mene written on their walls. To the others it could not carry that meaning. They only feel the effects of the visitation. It comes to them as a foul and painful sore. They smart under the plague. The lesson reaches them through their bodies. Do not suppose, however, that the message could not have come in this form to the people of Judæa. They too were worshippers of the beast. They were becoming incapable of grasping anything but material losses and sufferings. And there may have been many heathens who saw a divine hand in the affliction and glorified God in the fires. The distinction between the two purposes of the judgment is not changed by how this or that person received it.
- “And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man, and every living soul died in the sea.” This, someone will say, is the language of poetry or prophecy, not of fact. I have asked you before whether you are sure the language of poetry or prophecy does not represent facts more truly than the language of statistics. Do you think a count of the number of people who die in a wreck—even the smallest fishing boat—gives you the history of that wreck? Is not a great artist’s picture truer? Many of you, I am sure, will know that memorable passage of Jeremy Taylor, where he imagines a man on a battlement of heaven looking down to see how many men and women at that moment lie fainting and dying for lack of bread; how many young men are cut down by war’s sword; how many orphans weep over the graves of the fathers who fed them; to hear how many sailors and passengers are at that instant in a storm and cry out as the keel strikes a rock or breaks beneath them; how many people weep from want, are driven mad by oppression, or are made desperate by too keen a sense of constant misery. Surely there was no exaggeration in these thoughts. Such a sight must, at any moment, in Taylor’s age or ours, have appeared to anyone standing at that point of observation.
It is not so horrible as the sight of a single den of tyranny that is sometimes laid bare to us just as it is about to pass away. St. John is watching the withering of the earth and the destruction at sea from a battlement of heaven. We might describe it in some dry abstraction such as the collapse of commercial prosperity, or the breaking off of trade between nations. To him it is as if the sea became the blood of a dead man.
- “And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters, and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art and wast and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.” Nothing puzzles us more often than the sense of divine retribution. Our conscience testifies to it; again and again we are sure we recognize it. To deny it seems like a practical confession that chance rules everything. To deny it makes every calamity inflicted on human beings far more dreadful and ghastly, as if an evil spirit were indulging its malice. Belief in retribution was the support of heathen faith amid all its corruptions; Jewish prophets lived to proclaim it; surely the Gospel cannot have taken the right to it from us. And yet there are our Lord’s words about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, and about those in Jerusalem on whom the tower in Siloam fell. There is the warning to the disciples who assumed the blind man or his parents must have sinned. There is the universal command that overrides and upholds all these particular cases: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” There are the many times we ourselves have broken this command, and have seen others break it, trying to match particular punishments to particular crimes. There are the cruel counter-accusations that stain every page of church history, each party finding the plainest signs of divine vengeance against the other. How can we keep our faith in the exact fitness of the wrongs men do to the corrections God appoints for them, in the face of these warnings from the highest authority and from our own experience?
There are two methods, I believe, that can help us do this if we pursue them faithfully. The first is to fix our minds steadily on the word Judgment, to give it its full weight, and to accept no poor substitutes for it. Judgment means, in ordinary use, discrimination—assigning each thing its real worth, separating what is real from what is merely apparent or counterfeit. Mean that when you speak of God’s judgments. Mean nothing at all that contradicts it. Then you must suppose that he does make his purposes plain, and will make them plainer. You will ask that they be made plain to you. And the more you ask that, and the more you expect an answer, the more horror you will feel at putting your own judgments in the place of God’s, your rash and one-sided guesses in place of his revelation. You will feel more each day how you are tempted to do this; how you long to pull the specks out of other men’s eyes and forget the beams in your own. You will not plead that you must do this to some degree so as not to hide from men that God is judging them. You will feel that in any degree you do it, you are doing something to hinder the effect of God’s judgments, something to make them less believable to your fellow-creatures. The second rule follows from the first. Always try to understand God’s retribution first in your own case. There it will become plain to you if you look for it. You will see that the correction was graciously fitted to the faults in your character that needed it. You will see that where you have sown the wind, you have very often indeed reaped the whirlwind. Very often—but not always. It has not been a mere movement from cause to effect. There has been a Judge directing the step from one to the other; who has—oh, how continually!—turned the very evil you did or planned into an instrument of humbling you, and therefore of good. What would naturally have borne only remorse, and so greater sin, has been made the means of leading you to repentance, and so to deliverance from sin. Such discoveries do not force us to imagine exceptions in God’s ways. They are the highest examples and illustrations of his ways. They bring out the principle of retribution in its fullest power. So too in great historical crises like the one we are considering, there comes a flash of light from heaven, showing how the rivers and springs of water—those blessed gifts of God that have fed the life and health of nations—are turned into blood, made poisonous and deadly; not by accident, but in obedience to an everlasting law. Those who bore witness against the misuse of these gifts—the saints and prophets who testified that the good things given to men are not to be turned to pride and greed, not to be diverted from human channels into selfish ones—these have been made victims of their protest. Their blood has been mingled with these waters; they have been offered up to appease the selfish gods they said were no gods at all. “And now, O Lord,” so sings the Angel of the Waters, “you have claimed these waters as your own. Men who used them for their bloody ends must drink blood. They would not receive the waters as given to nourish the earth; so the waters shall bring them no more nourishment, but death.”
- “And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun, and power was given to him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues, and they repented not to give him glory.” Those who try to find which modern plagues correspond to the Apocalyptic ones will never be long without parallels. That these occurred at a certain time, already defined fairly precisely and to be defined more exactly in a later passage, I cannot doubt. But plagues on land, on sea, in the springs, and from excessive heat cannot be confined to one country or one century. Those who think the words carry some more refined, cabalistic sense may justify that sense as best they can and apply it to our practical guidance. Those who think the prophet was shown how all the different parts and powers of the natural world were becoming instruments of punishment against those who had degraded themselves and their fellows into mere servants of these natural powers—so becoming witnesses against idolatry and for the true Ruler of men—will gladly admit that they have not lost that function, and that the purpose they served then may be served by them now. Nor does their failure to bring about any general repentance—the rage and blasphemy they provoked—place them outside our own experience. Are these not rather very solemn signs to us that we must not expect moral renewal, for ourselves or our fellow men, from the terrors inspired by any natural forces? The God of Life speaks through them; he speaks to our spirits. If our spirits hear him, they are bowed; but let the Angel of Death beat his wings ever so loudly, and they will be scared, not changed.
And now we come to that vial I have already spoken of as the object of them all.
V. “And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.” The tribulation announced here in a few quick words is, I believe, the subject of the next two chapters. In those chapters we are told where the seat of the beast is, in language so plain and unmistakable that there has been little—I believe no—difference of opinion about it. Rome, at some period of its existence—Rome under some kind of ruler, imperial or spiritual—has been taken by all readers as fitting the description. I do not think the prophet stopped there. I think he was just as careful in fixing which ruler he meant as in fixing the capital of that ruler’s government. For now, though, our business is not with the person but with the nature of his rule. We are to connect it with all that has gone before in this vision. Those who worship the beast and bear his image are those who cannot conceive of anything as almighty and divine except what is earthly, sensual, devilish. The one they worship is the embodiment of the earthly, the sensual, the diabolical. He is the towering, concentrated version of what is scattered and partial in those he governs. Suddenly an eclipse falls on his power, and confusion covers all their plans. There is something—they cannot say what—threatening them and their works. They are in darkness. They cannot feel their way. What is coming? Is it light? Oh, not that! Let that at least stay far from us. We are miserable enough already. Let it not come to torment us more. They gnawed their tongues in pain and cursed the God of heaven.
- “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.”
In the passage of the ninth chapter that answers to this, four angels that had been bound at the great river Euphrates were set loose. Taking the Euphrates as the prophetic symbol for the boundary that separated the Babel world from the holy city, I supposed that trumpet meant that boundary would now cease to exist; that the work for which Judæa had been marked out as a separate kingdom in the midst of the earth was done; and that whatever witness might in future be borne against the Babel principle would not be borne by a separate nation with a local center. The change was tremendous—a great shaking would come before and after it—but it was a change all the trumpets had been foretelling. Once it was made, the last trumpet would sound; the age’s final message would go out. That change and that final message matter as much for the Gentile world as for the Jewish. Seen with regard to the Gentiles, the Euphrates is said to be dried up, that the way of the kings of the east may be prepared. The ending of the Jewish state and the Jewish witness might seem to leave the world free to obey its idol rulers, to accept the latest incarnation of evil as its supreme lord. On the great throne of the West sat that incarnation of evil. To that throne the countries of the West bowed; the East had already fallen before it. Was not that kingship the children of Shem had hoped to hold over the earth, in the name of the one Lord God, now passing away forever? No—not passing away! Rather, for the first time beginning to be shown and felt. The Child to whom the Magi came, bringing gold and frankincense, will now begin his march over those western kingdoms the Roman tyrant had claimed for himself. They are not his; they are held by an older title. The West shall pay homage to the East. There shall be a Christendom confessing the God of Abraham as its God, the Son of David as its King.
Does it seem strange that I speak of what is called a vial of wrath as carrying such a meaning as this? You will stumble at every passage in the Apocalypse if you find a contradiction in the idea that the highest blessings are revealed through punishments that look like nothing but curses. This drying of the Euphrates, if it was to make a road along which the divine kingdom would pass into new regions and settle there, could not happen until the Roman state had been shown to be built of brittle clay—until the Jewish state had disappeared. Nor could it happen without another kind of evil affecting the world—especially, I believe, the Christian part of the world. This is shown in the next verses.
- “And I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs, come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”
The message of a divine Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, was what the Apostles delivered to Gentiles as well as Jews. It broke down the middle wall of partition between them; it was, in the language of the Apocalypse, a drying up of the Euphrates.
But that same message stirred up all the ideas about spiritual influences and powers that had been sleeping in men’s minds, hidden under their various mythologies and traditions. So, as I noted when speaking of the locusts said in an earlier chapter to overspread the earth, there was a greater outbreak of enchanters and magicians—some heathen, many of them Jewish, and not a few, like Simon, baptized in the name of Jesus Christ—than the world had ever seen before. The craving for glimpses into the invisible world was strong in men’s minds; it grew stronger because of their loss of faith in the official augurs and priests who had once fed it; it attached itself both to the old Roman religion and to the modern unbelief. Those adepts who fed and tried to satisfy this craving might turn it to political or merely personal ends; they were almost sure to combine it with foul morals; imperfect spiritual perceptions and intuitions did not raise up, but rather undermined, that plain sense of honesty and justice that had come down, with however many stains and corruptions, from republican times. These, I take it, are the frogs that came out of the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet—mixing the coarsest animal wickedness with the subtlest spiritual wickedness. It is no exaggeration and no metaphor to say they went out to the kings of the earth and of the whole world. They were the Roman generals and proconsuls to whom these enchanters applied, into whose ears they whispered their divinations, whose decisions they swayed with their Babylonian calculations. Christian men, even if they did not give in to the fascination themselves, must often have been greatly troubled by reports of predictions fulfilled and wonders performed. If they trusted to their own cleverness in detecting frauds, to their tests for telling true miracles from false, they must have been constantly deceived. They could not help noticing many likenesses between these tricks and what was most precious in their own traditions. The old fences had been swept away; the outward protection that the difference between circumcised and uncircumcised had given was no longer any use. But this defense remained—“Behold, I come as a thief.” The Judge stands at the door. The Son of Man, who exposes all tricks and lies, will be revealed. Will this spiritual conceit of mine bear his scrutiny? The prediction may come true; this juggling may succeed. But am I not a child of the light? Do not these works shrink from the light?
And now comes this further assurance. A battle between the powers of light and darkness is close at hand. All these teachers of the kings of the earth are gathering them for that battle. They may be worshipping a beast; but they are spirits, and spiritual powers must rouse them even to satisfy the lowest instincts—a fearful lesson that every age confirms, but that in all the great crises of history stands out and writes itself in letters of blood.
- “And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air, and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell, and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent, and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, for the plague thereof was exceeding great.”
When the last trumpet sounded, there were voices in heaven saying, “The kingdoms of the world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever.” The voice, “It is done,” which goes with the pouring out of the vial, I have taken to point to the same end and to mean the same thing. An age of the world was ending. The question of that age had been: Whose are the kingdoms of the world? The hour of decision had come. Christ and Antichrist were to meet each other. The place that stands for the conflict is curiously chosen. The name Megiddo is linked with two great triumphs of the Israelites and with two memorable defeats. It is symbolic for both reasons. The battle of Armageddon is one in which the Lord God fights the beast. He is to win the victory. So far it is like Barak’s victory over Sisera, or Gideon’s over the Amalekites. But it is a victory in which Israel is not to rise, but to perish. So far it corresponds to the overthrow of Saul and of Josiah. The prophet is a patriot to the last. But it is the God of Israel who lives forever and ever; let the seed of Abraham, let his own Church, become nothing, so that he may be exalted. Let the blind and captive Samson pull the pillars of the house down on himself, if only Dagon and his worshippers may fall with him. Of this fall the next chapters will tell us. I receive them as records of a triumph that has been won, and therefore as an unquestionable pledge and assurance of a triumph that shall be won, for God and for