BS2825 
 
 
DEC SO 1920 
 
 
 Division BSl ou5 
 ion .CI 55 
 
THE SOCIAL MESSAGE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 my 
 RAYMOND CALKINS 
 
 THE WOMANS PRESS 
 
 600 LEXINGTON AVENUE 
 NEW YORK CITY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 
 The National Board of the Young Womens Christian Associations 
 
 op the United States of America 
 
 New York 
 
TO HER 
 
 whose Life has been to me a 
 
 Revelation 
 of Faith and Hope and Love 
 
l Surely I come quickly. Amen. 
 Even so come, Lord Jesus." 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction ix 
 
 CHAPTEB 
 
 I Purpose and Message 1 
 
 II Language and Style 10 
 
 III The Ethical Value of Apocalyptical Prophecy . 29 
 
 IV Outline and Contents 42 
 
 V The Introduction and the Messages to the 
 
 Churches 49 
 
 VI The Eternal Background 69 
 
 VII Judgment and Salvation 79 
 
 VIII The Sound of the Trumpets 92 
 
 IX The Second Interlude 101 
 
 X The Dragon and the Beast 115 
 
 XI The Beginning of the End 131 
 
 XII The Doom of Evil 146 
 
 XIII The Blessed Consummation 174 
 
 Bibliography 191 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE Book of Revelation is one of the least used and least 
 understood books in all the Bible. Every Bible reader re- 
 calls with gratitude a few chapters at the beginning of the 
 book with their beautiful promises "to him that overcometh" ; 
 and every one reads a few chapters at the end of the book 
 which tell of the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, where there 
 shall be no more curse or pain or death. 
 
 But the book as a whole is a closed book to all but a small 
 minority of Bible readers. To most people, this book, with the 
 exception of the chapters to which I have referred, is a jargon 
 of strange figures of speech — a fantastic conglomeration of 
 beasts with men's heads, of dragons cast into fathomless pits, 
 of serpents casting floods out of their mouths, of locusts with 
 the hair of women and tails like scorpions. It is a vast arena 
 that resounds to noise of battle as trumpets sound, and 
 seals are broken and vials are emptied. "To most people its 
 bizarre imagery, its complicated structure, its general unin- 
 telligibility make it a gigantic riddle. It seems to them, per- 
 haps, to form a strange anti-climax to that splendid literature 
 of the soul which preceded it. They are at home in the 
 Gospels and in the Epistles; but in this strange world of 
 earthquake and eclipse, of fury and agony, of tramping armies 
 and thundering angel-music, they are perplexed and repelled." * 
 Why is this book in the New Testament at all? What does 
 it mean? Does it mean anything? 
 
 If anything were needed to complete the dismay with which 
 the average Bible reader views this book, it is supplied by 
 the use which is made of it by those Bible students who 
 
 1 Cairns, Christianity in the Modern World, pp. 216-217. 
 
 ix 
 
x Introduction 
 
 claim that its purpose is to tell us about the end of the 
 world, the physical second coming of Christ, the millennium, 
 the second death and the general resurrection. On the basis 
 of its prophecies, we are told, we can figure out when all 
 these events will happen, for the book contains the key to all 
 these mysteries. But because the doctrine of a material mil- 
 lennium and a physical second coming bewilders and repels 
 more people than it illumines or attracts, many have closed 
 their minds more firmly than ever against a book which seems 
 to contain such teaching. They determine that they will let 
 the book severely and altogether alone. Thus it has come to 
 pass that one of the most inspired and inspiring and useful 
 books in the Bible has been neglected by Bible readers and 
 Bible students. It has no place in their everyday Bible, the 
 Bible which they use for the support of their own souls, or 
 for light upon the pressing problems of the hour. They never 
 turn to it except in time of personal bereavement. They think 
 of it, if at all, only as containing beautiful and imaginative 
 descriptions of Heaven, and promises of crowns of victory 
 to those who overcome. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the Book of Revelation is one of 
 the most practical books in the Bible. No book in the New 
 Testament, with the exception of the Gospels, contains so 
 much inspiration for one who is actively engaged in a daily 
 struggle against evil in himself and in the world. It is full 
 of help for all who are wrestling with the problem of evil in 
 any form. It is a book to be used not only for the light which 
 it throws upon the future life, but for the streams of light 
 which it throws upon the life which now is. It is not pri- 
 marily the vision of another world; it is rather a trumpet-call 
 for courageous living in the present world. Especially in a 
 time of rebuilding such as the present, when the problems of 
 life are so many, its burdens so great, its calls to service so 
 insistent, the real message of this book is needed by all who 
 hunger and labor for righteousness. 
 
Introduction xi 
 
 The purpose of these pages is to set forth this message 
 of the Book of Revelation clearly and briefly. They are 
 written with the general reader in mind as well as Bible stu- 
 dents and Bible class leaders. They offer an interpretation of 
 the book which the author believes to be its underlying mes- 
 sage, and one which is perhaps more suited to the present 
 than to any other age since the book was first written. It is 
 now that the Book of Revelation needs to be read and under- 
 stood. The effort has been made to suggest, rather than to 
 elaborate, the spiritual lessons of its chapters and to indicate 
 briefly the meaning of the text. There has been no attempt 
 to discuss at all completely the many Biblical and historical 
 problems involved. For these, the reader is referred to more 
 competent authorities. The idea is to exhibit the one simple 
 and wonderful truth which, like a golden thread, runs through 
 all the chapters, and to suggest the permanent social value of 
 that truth for all militant souls who are enlisted for life as 
 soldiers of the cross and "followers of the Lamb." The au- 
 thor hopes that this great Bible book will indeed be a revela- 
 tion of heretofore unrealized and unutilized sources of faith 
 and inspiration and courage. 
 
 The indebtedness of the writer to other authors has been 
 indicated in the footnotes. Special acknowledgments are 
 due to Dr. Beckwith whose admirable recent commentary 
 has furnished many of the Bible references, and to Dr. 
 Porter whose volume has suggested many suggestions in 
 interpretation and in the paraphrases of the text. 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 March, 1920. 
 
SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE 
 BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PURPOSE AND MESSAGE 
 
 THE best and quickest way to understand any book is to 
 ask why and when it was written. The answer to these 
 questions makes clear to us the purpose and the message of 
 the Book of Revelation. This book was first written to meet 
 an extraordinary emergency in the life of the early church. 
 It was written to inspire a church beneath the Cross and 
 threatened with extermination at the hands of the Roman 
 Empire. The church, when this book made its appearance, 
 was on the eve of a life and death struggle with Rome. The 
 signs of the times were all focused on a fierce contest between 
 rl C hrist and Caesar. The Book of Revelation therefore has a 
 great historic interest for the student of the New Testament, 
 in that it marks the transition from the earlier tolerant attitude 
 of Rome toward the new faith to its later implacable hostility. 
 Readers of the epistles of St. Paul will all remember that he 
 kept appealing, and not in vain, from the attacks of his 
 Jewish antagonists, to the protection of the Roman governors 
 and magistrates. More than once these officials delivered the 
 Apostle from the hands of the Jews; they rescued him in 
 Jerusalem from the hands of an angry mob intent on murder- 
 ing him ; from his prison in Palestine he appealed unto Caesar, 
 and he urged upon his converts submission to Roman rule 
 and authority. (Rom. 13:1-5.) 
 
 1 
 
 • 
 
2 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Thirty years after his death, however, all this was changed. 
 The Roman Empire realized at last that the Christian faith 
 was challenging its authority and had become its irreconcilable 
 rival. In the Book of Revelation we have the first expression 
 of the Christian faith as it asserted itself and took its stand 
 over against the great world power which had now become its 
 outspoken enemy. It was inevitable that Rome and Christian- 
 ity should come to grips. When the Book of Revelation was 
 written, that time had arrived. "The historical background 
 of the book is the Roman Empire, and especially the worship 
 of the emperors and its enforcement in Asia Minor." * 
 
 During the reign of Domitian, who died in the year 96 A.D., 
 an edict had gone forth that his subjects, especially in Asia 
 Minor, should worship him as God. All students of Roman 
 history are familiar with this strange and almost unbelievable 
 cult which developed in the later days of the Roman Empire. 
 Augustus had declined to be thus worshiped in Rome, but he 
 had encouraged it in the provinces, probably as a means of 
 knitting them more firmly to the Empire and to the Emperor. 
 "It was not meant to displace the nature religions but to have 
 recognition by their side, in a more or less close relation to 
 them. It was valued by the emperors as an effective means of 
 Romanizing the empire and hence was furthered especially 
 where Roman culture did not prevail, and in the Orient where 
 it would cause least offense. It was, in fact, offensive only to 
 monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Christianity, which could not 
 worship God and Csesar. In general the Jews fared better 
 than the Christians during this period." a Both Caesar and 
 Augustus had granted exemption to the Jews because of their 
 numbers and because of their well-known aversion to idolatrous 
 practices. Rome was not inclined to grant these privileges to 
 Christians. During the reign of Nero, this policy of enforcing 
 emperor-worship in the provinces had steadily grown. It was 
 developed by Caligula; but it came to its climax in Domitian's 
 
 1 See Porter, Messages of the Apocalyptical Writers, p. 185. 
 'Porter, ibid., pp. 185-186. 
 
PURPOSE AND MESSAGE 3 
 
 time, in Asia Minor where the earliest Christian churches had 
 been planted. There for the first time it was proposed that 
 this cult should be enforced by law and backed by all the 
 power of the Roman government. 
 
 We have no details. We do not even possess the wording 
 of the edict. But we have the facts. Sometime about 90 A.D., 
 under the Emperor Domitian and presumably with his ap- 
 proval, this worship of the Emperor was enforced in Asia 
 Minor by the priests of the cult and the governors of the prov- 
 inces. Only the Jews were to be exempt. The Orientals 
 accepted the new worship with enthusiasm. There was left to 
 resist only the little and apparently helpless band of Chris- 
 tians. When the Book of Revelation was written, that was 
 the situation. Rome and Christianity were at last face to 
 face. 
 
 We do not know how far compulsion had already gone 
 when the book was written. Presumably there had already 
 been a few martyrdoms (Rev. 2:13), but there was every 
 reason to expect a general persecution of the church, as 
 Rome set itself to the task of exterminating Christianity. To 
 the church in such an hour of peril the Book of Revelation 
 is addressed. It calls on all who have named the Name of 
 Christ to be faithful to the end. It unfolds vast and in- 
 spiring visions of the power of God and of the omnipotence 
 of Christ. It tells of the deathlessness of his saints and of 
 the certainty of victory. It predicts the downfall of Rome and 
 the destruction of evil. It calls on Christ's followers to 
 mobilize to meet the enemy; to fight, to endure, to suffer, to 
 die for the sake of the Name; and it promises to all who 
 overcome a crown of life. 
 
 If we understand the emergency which caused the book to 
 be written, the interpretation of it for its time, for our time, 
 and for all time, becomes as clear as daylight! In the light 
 of this explanation, how far from the truth becomes that use 
 of it which finds the chief meaning of the book in the hints 
 it gives us about the wind-up of creation, the end of the world, 
 
4 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 and the nature of the Last Judgment! As a matter of fact, 
 there is only one chapter that even appears to refer to these 
 distant and mysterious events. To use Revelation in this way 
 is to abuse it, for the book itself makes no claim to be a key 
 to the future. "The predictions in the book relate to the im- 
 mediate and not to the remote future, as the writer most ex- 
 plicitly afl&rms" (1:1,3; 22:10-12), and its value lies "not 
 in disclosures of history in the nineteen following centuries, 
 nor of forecasts of still future events . . . , but rather in its 
 fitness to brace the Christian faith to meet one of the great 
 crises of its history, and permanently in the faith that in- 
 spires it in the rule of God and the certain victory of his 
 cause." We must put out of our mind the ideas which centuries 
 of misuse have caused to prevail about the book. The beast 
 is not the Sultan or the Pope of Rome or Napoleon or the 
 Kaiser, but rather Nero and the Emperor Domitian whom the 
 Christians had been commanded to worship. The harlot is 
 not the church of Rome, as certain Protestant writers have 
 declared, but rather the Roman Empire which had decreed the 
 death of all who failed to worship its head as God. All the 
 conglomerate figures that fill the book are the hosts of those 
 who fight either on the side of the beast or on the side of 
 the lamb. Here we have the "cry of the Christian heart tor- 
 tured by the pressure of the Pagan Empire." Here we have 
 Christian prophecy directed against contemporary evil, and 
 designed to rescue contemporary Christianity from overthrow, 
 to inspire it to resistance, and to predict its victory in the time 
 in which its author lived. 
 
 It requires no great gift of imagination to realize what such 
 a flaming message must have meant to that church beneath the 
 cross; what inspiration it brought to those threatened with 
 death; what consolation it gave to those whose friends may 
 already have suffered death "for the sake of the Name"; 
 what joy it yielded to those who read these horrific descrip- 
 tions of how their persecutors were to be destroyed, of how 
 wicked and cruel Rome, the mother of abominations, drunk 
 
PURPOSE AND MESSAGE 5 
 
 with the blood of saints, was to go down in the crash and 
 wreck of ruin as she is made desolate by famine and plague, 
 and is cast into the lake of fire. With what exaltation of 
 spirit do you imagine they would respond to that vision of the 
 Holy City, the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven 
 prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; or read of that 
 coming day when God shall wipe away all tears from their 
 eyes and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor 
 crying, when the former things are passed away? 
 
 Such, then, was the particular spiritual emergency which 
 caused this book to be written. It was a flaming Tract of 
 Faith for Bad Times. It was intended to encourage God's 
 people under oppression and suffering. Its object was to steel 
 them to patience and endurance by the presentation in vivid 
 form of the fact that overrides all other facts, that the Lord 
 God omnipotent reigneth and will come with a recompense. 
 Understand the crisis which called this book forth, and its 
 spiritual value becomes clear as crystal. In the flaming up 
 of faith in the hour of darkness lies the wonder of Revelation. 
 In its extraordinary exaltation of spirit, when apparently 
 there is no rift in the clouds, nor sign of hope anywhere, lies 
 its permanent religious value. In the sheer strength of its 
 proclamation of victory, when nothing but defeat and death 
 are apparently visible, lies its claim to the gratitude and love 
 of Christians for all time. 
 
 Such a book could not possibly end its mission with the par- 
 ticular circumstances that called it forth. It is an immortal 
 appeal to fortitude and to faith whenever and wherever evil 
 threatens the good, wrong apparently triumphs over right, 
 and the children of God are overborne by the forces of sin. 
 All through the centuries of Christian struggle this has been 
 the book of comfort and of hope for the witnessing servants 
 of Jesus Christ. Centuries later when the growing church was 
 in its final death-grapple with the Roman Empire — a struggle 
 which issued in a far greater victory than even the seer of 
 Patmos was able to discern, the Christianization of Rome itself 
 
6 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 — this book above all others sustained the courage and ani- 
 mated the faith of those who bore witness to their faith with 
 their lives. In the days of the Reformation when thousands 
 were called upon to die for the liberty of conscience, the free- 
 dom of the soul, and the purity of faith, no part in the Bible 
 was read with greater fervor than this inspired book which 
 still spoke of the certainty of victory and the triumph of the 
 faithful. More than one Christian martyr had died with the 
 last words of this book upon his lips : "Surely I come quickly : 
 even so, come, Lord Jesus." And to-day, for the lonely mis- 
 sionary confronting single-handed and alone the great solid 
 and apparently immovable evils entrenched in non-Christian 
 civilizations, for the social worker with his back to the wall 
 fighting against the hosts of wickedness in high places, to 
 the individual Christian who feels the hot breath of evil in 
 his face and does not know how he is to overcome it, there 
 is no inspiration in the Bible to be compared with that of 
 this Book of Revelation. 
 
 Days like those in which we live are the very days for 
 which this book was written. A time such as the present, is 
 the time for Christians everywhere to take up this book and 
 read it, and to lay its true message next to their hearts. It 
 is sheer tragedy to go through experiences such as this genera- 
 tion has known without the spiritual support and inspiration 
 which Revelation can furnish us. We are living in an epoch 
 that corresponds to that for which the book was written. Evil 
 seems to be on the throne. The destinies of the world are at 
 stake. Cruelty has done its worst. If ever people needed 
 bracing, we need it now. If ever mankind needed the mes- 
 sage of this book, it needs that message now. "Fear none of 
 these things that thou shalt suffer; behold the devil shall cast 
 some of you into prison that ye may be tried and ye shall 
 have tribulation ten days; be thou faithful unto death and 
 I will give thee a crown of life." Read about the beast, your 
 beast that threatens you with destruction, and read how the 
 Lamb on the throne shall overcome him, for he is Lord of 
 
PURPOSE AND MESSAGE 7 
 
 Lords and King of Kings. Listen to the song of the redeemed 
 who chant their psalms of deliverance and victory, who reign 
 forever and forever, and remember that the same victory is 
 yours if you, like them, will be faithful to the end. 
 
 The book contains five distinct and imperishable spiritual 
 messages for its time and for all time. 
 
 1. It is an irresistible summons to heroic living. To read 
 Revelation aright makes one ashamed if he has not thrown 
 himself body and soul into the struggle for righteousness. It 
 is the most militant book in the Bible. It tells us that there 
 is no place for a neutral in the everlasting fight between God 
 and Satan, the Dragon and the Lamb. The laissez-faire Chris- 
 tian will feel lost in this book; he will not answer to its mes- 
 sage because he does not feel himself involved in its issues. 
 But the truly militant Christian who feels that his own life 
 is bound up with these issues, simply cannot do without its 
 appeal to fortitude and its assurance of victory. 
 
 2. This book contains matchless appeals to endurance. "Hold 
 fast that which thou hast that no man take thy crown." "Be 
 ye faithful unto death and I will give you a crown of life." 
 We all know the almost hypnotic effect of certain phrases, 
 the strange impression they produce upon the psychology of 
 a soul. The words, "They shall not pass !" made the defenders 
 of Verdun a rampart of steel. Precisely this is the influence 
 produced by the message of the Book of Revelation upon those 
 who lay it to heart. Yielding becomes a psychological im- 
 possibility. One lays it down and says, "To doubt would be 
 disloyalty, to falter would be sin." That is why in any period 
 of discouragement, such as the world is now experiencing, 
 this book should be read and re-read. It can contribute im- 
 mensely to the morale of mankind. Moral endurance will tell 
 the story in fateful years such as these. The reading of 
 no literature in the world will do more to heighten cour- 
 age, hearten faith, steel men's souls to patience and to the 
 uttermost limits of endurance as the reading of this old, 
 neglected Book of Revelation. 
 
8 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 3. This book tells us that evil is marked for overthrow in 
 the end. Here is to be no inconclusive struggle, no stale- 
 mate, no peace without victory. It is not to be an easy or 
 a speedy triumph. Nothing in all this book is more wonder- 
 ful than the full justice that is done to the powers of evil. 
 Behind their manifestations and their effects, the prophet 
 goes to the real source of their strength — to Satan and his 
 angels who have for a season all power to make war upon the 
 servants of the Lamb. We do not know just when the end 
 may be. Satan may be bound for a while and then break loose 
 again. The end may not even be in sight. Victory may mean 
 the death and martyrdom of many of the saints of Christ. 
 But, in the end, the powers of darkness are marked for de- 
 struction. Whatever else evil is here for, it is here to be 
 conquered. It is not Christ who is going to be defeated: 
 
 And the beast was taken and with him the false prophet 
 . . . and they twain shall be cast alive into the lake of fire 
 burning with brimstone and the remnant were slain with 
 the sword of him who sat upon the horse whose sword 
 proceeded opt of his mcuth, and death and Hell were 
 cast into the lake of fire, and whosoever was not found 
 in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. And 
 I saw a new heaven and a new earth and the holy city 
 of the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. And 
 I heard a great voice saying, behold the tabernacle of 
 God is with men, and he will dwell with men, and they 
 shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them 
 and be their God. (Rev. 19: 20, 21; 20: 14, 15; 21: 1, 2, 3.) 
 
 4. It gives us a new and wonderful picture of Christ. Too 
 long has the picture of Christ been that of the meek and lov- 
 ing Jesus. But that picture cannot stand alone, not in a 
 world like this. If many men have lost faith in Christ, it 
 is because the Christ of Galilee has seemed to them to be too 
 idyllic, radiating too much of charm, but too little of strength; 
 a gracious, kindly teacher; a guest whose garments have not 
 known the stain of warfare or the blood of struggle; a lover 
 of little children; a compassionate helper of the sick and 
 the sinful; "a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of 
 the utmost tolerance and subtlest sympathy; a saint of non- 
 
PURPOSE AND MESSAGE 9 
 
 resistance" 1 — but not the heroic leader, not the masterful 
 champion, not the all-conquering Captain of our salvation. 
 Out from this last book of the Bible wherein is fought the 
 final fight of faith, there emerges the picture of Christ that 
 is adequate to the uttermost needs of his suffering and strug- 
 gling people: 
 
 And I saw the heavens opened, and behold a white horse, 
 and he that sat upon it was called faithful and true, and 
 in righteousness he doth judge and make war. And his eyes 
 were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns, 
 and he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood, and 
 the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white 
 horses clothed in fine linen, white and clean, and out of 
 his mouth a sharp sword goeth that with it he should 
 smite the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of 
 iron, and he treadeth the wine-press of the fierceness and 
 wrath of the Almighty, and he hath on his vesture and on 
 his thigh a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 
 (Kev. 19:11-16). 
 
 5. Finally, this Apocalypse reveals to us the fact that his- 
 tory is in the mind of God and in the hand of Christ as the 
 author and the reviewer of the moral destinies of men. Here 
 is no mere evolutionary theory of history; here is no mere 
 idea that the "thoughts of men grow broader/' etc.; it is no 
 impersonal, automatic and scientific process which is going 
 to toss us into our promised land; it is not even a power not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness. The Apocalypse 
 rather shows us God at work behind the framework which we 
 call the universe. It shows us Christ as the maker of his- 
 tory; it looks upon Him as marching on in the glory of 
 his strength, putting all things under his feet. It looks upon 
 moral victory as his victory, and sees Him standing on the 
 field of history, conquering and to conquer, only not yet hath 
 He put all things under his feet. There come moments in 
 the moral life of men — and who shall say that the present 
 age is not one? — in which no other interpretation of his- 
 tory will suffice; in which the incarnation itself, and nothing 
 short of it, will serve as the sure basis of the Social Hope. 
 
 1 H. G. Wells, God, the Invisible King, pp. 101, 102, 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LANGUAGE AND STYLE 
 
 ONE of the chief reasons why the modern reader feels 
 lost in the Book of Revelation and finds himself be- 
 wildered and dismayed as he seeks to understand it, is because 
 of the language in which it is written. Its style is not only 
 peculiar but it seems often to be almost repellent. One can 
 make nothing intelligible out of certain passages, as for ex- 
 ample, the twelfth chapter in which is set forth a woman clad 
 in the sun, with the moon under her feet, giving birth to a 
 son whom a great red dragon is ready to destroy — which is 
 cast down from heaven to earth where it continues to per- 
 secute the woman and her seed. What, one asks, does all this 
 mean? Does it mean anything? Whence this imagery? What 
 religious use can it have for us to-day? 
 
 The reader of the Book of Revelation, however, would not 
 be so much perplexed by its language if he were more familiar 
 with certain other portions of the Bible in which similar lan- 
 guage is used. What we need to remember is that this mode 
 of speech which seems so strange to us was not strange at all 
 to the first readers of this book, and would not be strange to 
 us if we knew our Old Testament better than we do. Nearly 
 every figure of speech used in this book was taken bodily out 
 of some portion of the Old Testament. The locusts and the 
 dragon, the beast and the scarlet woman, the tree of life, the 
 sea of glass mingled with fire, the horsemen, the harvesters 
 — these are not used for the first time in the Book of Reve- 
 lation. They constitute a religious dialect that was familiar 
 to Jews and to Jewish Christians, the meaning and purpose 
 
 10 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 11 
 
 of which were well understood. This was not the first book 
 of its kind; it would be much truer to call it the last. The 
 Book of Revelation is simply what may be called the Christian 
 climax to a kind of writing which had had a history extending 
 over five hundred years. The idea of a beast did not con- 
 fuse the first readers of this book because they knew that 
 the Book of Daniel was full of beasts and they knew what 
 those beasts meant. The idea of locusts with the hair of 
 women and the tails of serpents did not bother them, because 
 they knew all about them from the Book of Joel. All of 
 the imagery and strange symbols were perfectly intelligible to 
 them, and they would be to us if we knew our Bibles better. 
 In order, therefore, to understand this language and to feel 
 familiar with it, it is necessary to inquire into its origin and 
 to understand why it was used and what meaning it was in- 
 tended to convey. 
 
 Now all readers of the Old Testament are aware that 
 prophecy after the Exile takes on a new form and a new 
 color. Indeed, the Book of Zephaniah, written before the 
 exile, may be said to mark the beginnings of apocalyptic 
 prophecy. 1 But the Book of Ezekiel really marks the transi- 
 tion from the old form of prophecy to the new. The very 
 opening chapter of Ezekiel reads like certain passages in the 
 Book of Revelation. Here we have cloud, wind and fire, four 
 living creatures with four faces and four wings, a chariot with 
 wheels like beryl, a throne like a sapphire stone and a man 
 on it with the likeness of the glory of Jehovah. Ezekiel, in 
 a word, reads differently, except in a few chapters of the book, 
 from Amos and Hosea and Isaiah. The language is different, 
 the ideas are different, the tone and color are different. If 
 this is true of Ezekiel, it is even more true of Zechariah, and 
 of Joel, and above all, of Daniel. The pages of the prophets 
 from the time of Ezekiel on are increasingly crowded with 
 
 1 See Zeph. 1 : 14-18, and cf. G. A. Smith. "His book is the first 
 tinging of prophecy with apocalypse." Minor Prophets, Zephaniah, 
 Chap. III. 
 
12 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 figures of angels and archangels and all the heavenly host, 
 with visions and fantastic imagery. 
 
 The question is, What caused this change to overtake the 
 language and ideas of the Old Testament prophets? The an- 
 swer, once more, must be found in the historical background 
 of these post-exilic prophets. In a word, it was the Exile, 
 that prodigious disaster that ruined all the national hopes of 
 the Jews, which transformed the message of the prophets, and 
 changed the character and purpose of their writings. Down 
 to that time prophecy was largely ethical. It dealt with man's 
 duties to God. Its refrain was, "What doth the Lord require 
 of thee'?" It consisted of exhortations to righteousness, rebuke 
 of evil, denunciation of national sins, and promises of na- 
 tional prosperity based on moral obedience to the law and will 
 of God. This is the form of prophecy with which we are 
 most familiar. 
 
 But when the overthrow of Jerusalem had taken place, and 
 the people were confronted with apparently fatal and irredeem- 
 able disaster, then prophecy changes its tone and form to 
 meet the emergency and to satisfy the spiritual needs of the 
 people. Now it was not a question of what man should do 
 for God, but of what God could do for man. Now was not 
 the time to talk of man's duty to God, but of God's duty to 
 man. What moves the heart of the prophet now is not the 
 conversion of the people, but deliverance from trouble. It 
 was not the reformation of the people but salvation by the 
 Most High that inspired prophecy in its new form. During 
 the five hundred years that marked the humiliation and degra- 
 dation of the Jewish people under the successive tyranny of 
 Babylonian and Assyrian, of Persian, Greek and Roman con- 
 querors, prophecy lifted its voice in an agony of appeal to the 
 Ancient of Days, to the omnipotent God, to bare his arm 
 in the sight of all nations. The scene of prophecy was shifted 
 from earth to heaven. Its pages were filled with the de- 
 scription of the power of the God who is King of Kings 
 and Lord of Lords, his resources, his hosts, his anger, 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 13 
 
 his deliverance. In a word, we have the revelation of omnipo- 
 tent might as a pledge and promise of victory, given to the 
 people of God when their own strength was exhausted, their 
 own hope had vanished, and their future was filled with the 
 darkness of despair. 
 
 We understand now what the word "revelation" means. It 
 does not mean a revelation of the future mysteries of the end 
 of the world, the millennium or the Day of Judgment. Neither 
 does it mean primarily a revelation of the glories of Heaven 
 or the blessedness of the redeemed. Rather it means a revela- 
 tion of the infinite God, mighty to save; an uncovering for 
 the consolation and inspiration of God's people of the all- 
 conquering powers of an omnipotent Saviour. Thus under- 
 stood, the word Revelation or Apocalypse is used of all this 
 type of prophetic literature. 
 
 It is not difficult, when the underlying idea of apocalyptic 
 prophecy is grasped, to understand its style and vocabulary. 
 The writer is endeavoring in each case to convey to the reader 
 the impression of the irresistible resources of God marshalled 
 to defend and to deliver his people. Evidently this impres- 
 sion can be best conveyed by the use of highly colored and pic- 
 torial language. Symbolism is thus of the very essence of 
 apocalyptic thought. All of the seemingly fantastic imagery 
 in this type of literature is simply the effort of the human 
 mind to portray the resources of God on the one hand and 
 of evil on the other. It is the description, so to speak, of 
 celestial munition factories and of the mobilization of ethereal 
 troops. While in part grotesque, it is in the main a grandiose 
 effort of the human mind to portray in pictorial fashion the 
 contending hosts of God and of Satan, of the beast and of the 
 Lamb. Such was the meaning of the apocalypses in the Bible 
 and out of it, which for five hundred years brought unbroken 
 inspiration to the beleagured, defeated, discouraged and all 
 but despairing children of God. 
 
 It should be remembered also that such symbolism is com- 
 mon in all literature outside of the Bible which aims at the 
 
14 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 same result as these apocalyptical Bible books. Milton, for 
 example, in his Paradise Lost, uses language that is closely 
 akin to that of Daniel and Revelation. And we have a fine 
 bit of apocalyptical writing in the Battle Hymn of the Re- 
 public : 
 
 "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, 
 He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath 
 
 are stored, 
 He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift 
 
 sword, 
 His truth is marching on." 
 
 Whenever the human mind endeavors to portray the divine 
 power and wrath in its onslaught upon sin and evil, this pic- 
 torial language will be used. It is the language of the second 
 Psalm and of the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah. 
 
 It requires no argument to prove the inspiration of this 
 kind of prophecy when its meaning is once understood. Often 
 it is treated, even by serious Bible scholars, as prophecy in 
 decline; as an inferior or second-rate kind of literature, not 
 to be compared with the fine ethical chapters of Amos or 
 Isaiah. It is often thought of as fantastic, grotesque, or even 
 absurd. The tendency is to skip such chapters as represent- 
 ing a kind of Jewish thought which is wholly foreign to mod- 
 ern thinking and modern culture. More will be said about 
 this in the next chapter. But here the essential and wonderful 
 inspiration of apocalyptical prophecy must be insisted upon. 
 
 Its inspiration is seen first of all in its accommodation to 
 the real needs of the people. There is something truly won- 
 derful to the thoughtful Bible reader in the swift way in 
 which prophecy makes itself over in the interest of the human 
 soul. It cares nothing for itself; its sole concern is the spirit- 
 ual needs of men. And, as we have seen, no kind of message 
 was more calculated to meet such needs at the time these books 
 were written than the very kind of message which they em- 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 15 
 
 body. Ethical exhortation was not then needed; therefore it 
 was no longer used. 
 
 "I believe in the inspiration of the Bible/' Coleridge once 
 remarked, "because it inspires me." If we judge the inspira- 
 tion of these apocalyptical books by this test, they become 
 among the most inspired books in the Bible. It is not too 
 much to say that at certain crisis hours in history, the books 
 of Daniel and Revelation have saved for the world the faith 
 of the Bible. These messages evoked such a response of 
 heroic fortitude and endurance from the hearts of readers, 
 that their resistance to evil became like adamant, and the faith 
 of which they were the sole and apparently helpless defenders 
 triumphed over what seemed insuperable odds. What, the 
 historical student may well ask, would have become of the 
 Bible faith had it not been for the naming appeals of the 
 apocalypses ? 
 
 Finally the inspiration of these books is seen in the faith 
 which they themselves enshrine. Whence came the assurance 
 to these unknown writers that God was ready to act and ready 
 to strike? How were they enabled to promise sure and speedy 
 victory against every outward appearance and probability? 
 How came they to know that deliverance had been provided 
 and that salvation was near? Who caused them to see the 
 counsels of the Eternal, and to reveal the infinite passion 
 and power of an omnipotent Saviour? What made their 
 hearts to be lifted up to a height far above even the most 
 courageous and daring of their comrades? The answer to 
 these questions rests in the spiritual region of what, for want 
 of a better word, we call the inspiration of the human soul. 
 It means, indeed, the very entering of the Spirit of God into 
 the hearts of these men, enabling them to see what the eye 
 of man could not see, to hear what ear had not heard, and to 
 understand what otherwise would be impossible for the mind 
 of man to conceive. From this point of view the apocalypti- 
 cal writers become the most inspired of the prophets, and one 
 finds one's heart warm with ft new feeling of gratitude and 
 
16 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 love for these men from whose souls, in the darkest hours 
 of Bible history, there leaped forth the faith, the knowledge, 
 the assurance which turned defeat into victory and brought 
 life out of death: 
 
 "Thrice blest is he to whom is given 
 The instinct that can tell 
 That God is on the field when He 
 Is most invisible." 
 
 What has here been set down concerning apocalyptical 
 literature as a whole may best be illustrated by a brief survey 
 of the Book of Daniel. The Book of Revelation cannot be 
 understood apart from the Book of Daniel. They are two 
 parallel books. In each case the historical background is the 
 same; the purpose is the same; the method is the same; and 
 the result is the same. In order to understand the Book of 
 Revelation it is necessary that we first understand the Book 
 of Daniel. 
 
 The Book of Daniel is one of the most interesting and im- 
 portant books in the Bible. It pulses with human interest; 
 it throbs with spiritual passion; it is full of dramatic spiritual 
 appeal; it is wonderful in the faith it exhibits; and the les- 
 sons it teaches are of permanent and extraordinary value. 
 Yet, like the Book of Revelation, it is a book that is all but 
 neglected by the rank and file of Bible readers. For many 
 people the first six chapters are all that they know of the 
 book. These chapters contain the stories of the heroism of 
 Daniel and his friends at Babylon. They are good hero- 
 stories to be read to children, but Shadrach in the fiery fur- 
 nace or Daniel in the lions' den do not convey an immortal 
 truth to grown-up readers of the Bible. Another set of Bible 
 students fastens on the last six chapters of the book. In these 
 visions they seem to find a key to the mysteries of the future. 
 Upon the basis of these chapters they figure out when the 
 world will end, the Anti-Christ be destroyed, and the millen- 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 17 
 
 nium be ushered in. Yet neither of these is a worthy way of 
 using one of the grandest books in the Old Testament. 
 
 The Book of Daniel brings us down to the very end of 
 the Old Testament era. It brings us to the very threshold of 
 New Testament times. It was probably the very latest of our 
 Old Testament books. Its scene is not laid in Babylon in the 
 time of the Exile at all, but in Palestine, only about two 
 centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. The period 
 of Jewish history which called it into being was one of the 
 most critical in all the chequered history of the Jewish people. 
 Once more, and just before the Prince of Peace was to be born, 
 the Hebrew faith was confronted with a trial so severe that 
 its very existence was threatened. In the year 332 B.C. Persia 
 was conquered by Alexander the Great, and the succeeding 
 two centuries of Jewish history are known as the Greek period. 
 Now the Greek invasion was unlike the Assyrian and the Baby- 
 lonian invasion in this respect, that it was not an invasion 
 of armies only, but of ideas as well. A force of intellect, 
 an insidious culture, a permeating spirit foreign to the ideals 
 of the Hebrew people, was brought to bear upon them with 
 a pressure surpassing any that the Jews had hitherto known. 
 The ancient empires had transplanted the nation to Assyria 
 and Babylon; the Greeks brought Greece to Palestine. Israel 
 was compassed and penetrated by an influence as subtle as 
 the atmosphere, and found itself infected and altered beyond 
 all powers of resistance. The policy of Alexander and his 
 successors was to introduce the Greek language, Greek cus- 
 toms, Greek culture, in all conquered territories. Hellenism 
 was in its very nature a permeating and transforming force. 
 Little by little it made its way into the very heart and citadel 
 of Hebrew life. The Hellenist Jews, comprising the priests 
 and the aristocracy, began to speak the Greek language, adopt 
 the Greek customs, frequent the Greek theatres, take over, 
 in a word, the Greek culture. The very integrity of Hebrew 
 faith and morals was threatened by this subtle and apparently 
 irresistible invasion of Greek civilization and ideals. 
 
18 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Of course, it did not proceed without opposition. Over 
 against the Hellenists who favored the new culture were the 
 Chasidim, the conservatives, those faithful to the ancestral re- 
 ligion and to the faith of their fathers. Thus the issue was 
 joined. How it would have ended had the policy of the peace- 
 ful penetration of Greek ideas proceeded it is impossible to 
 state. Instead of this, the issue was suddenly forced in a 
 most dramatic and unexpected manner. 
 
 About 198 B.C., a Syrian monarch known as Antiochus 
 the Great finally succeeded in wresting Judaea from the con- 
 trol of Egypt. His son, Antiochus Epiphanes, the bright and 
 shining one, came to the throne about twenty years later. 
 He had long lived in Greece and was a devotee of everything 
 Greek. One of his ambitions was to make the Greek lan- 
 guage, the Greek literature and the Greek culture prevail all 
 over the East. When Judaea became a part of his dominions, 
 he determined to do away with the Jewish religion, and to 
 substitute for the Sabbath and the Law and the God of the 
 Jews, the altars and the sacrifices and the gods of Greece. 
 
 About the year 170 B.C., we come to the climax of one 
 of the grandest epochs in the whole history of the Jews and 
 to one of the turning points in the history of religion. An- 
 tiochus determined, in a word, not to wait for the gradual 
 fulfilment of his plans, but to accomplish them at once by 
 the use of force. A pagan altar was erected in Jerusalem, 
 on the site of the Temple. Sacrifices were made to Zeus, 
 the Temple was polluted, the people were compelled to take 
 part in the pagan rites. They were ordered to disregard the 
 Sabbath, to cease from reading the Law and the prophets, 
 and death was the penalty for refusing to obey. Religious 
 persecution had become a fact for the first time in Jewish 
 history. 
 
 At first, Antiochus carried all before him. Many of the 
 priests and most influential people went over to the Greeks. 
 By fire and sword Jerusalem had been converted into a heathen 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 19 
 
 city. Then came resistance and the upleap of the Jewish 
 spirit. 
 
 Twenty miles northwest of Jerusalem is the little town of 
 Modin (or Modina). Here lived a pious Jew, Mattathias, 
 and his five sons. When the soldiers came to enforce the rule 
 regarding heathen sacrifices, Mattathias refused, killed the 
 King's officer and a Jew who stepped forward to offer the 
 sacrifices, fled with his sons to the mountains and called the 
 people to war. Hundreds followed him and then, only about 
 a century and a half before the birth of Christ, the last great 
 war was fought to save the Jewish faith from destruction. 
 
 This war is known to history as the Maccabean war. It 
 has been so called from the name given to the most famous 
 of the sons of Mattathias, Judas, who became the military 
 leader of the Jews, and one of the great generals of history. 
 He was called Maccabeus, which means the Hammerer. With 
 mere handfuls of soldiers compared with the hosts that An- 
 tiochus sent against him, he conducted a guerilla warfare with 
 such skill and pertinacity that the Syrians were beaten off 
 again and again, until, by a miracle as it seemed, Antiochus 
 suddenly died. Judaea and all its precious heritage of faith 
 was preserved unto the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 by Him fulfilled into that faith which has been and is for all 
 time the hope of mankind. Any one who wishes to read 
 about this episode and about these wars may do so by open- 
 ing his Old Testament Apocrypha and reading the first book 
 of Maccabees. In spite of occasional errors, this book is au- 
 thentic history, contains the main facts of this extraordinary 
 epoch, and is of sustained and thrilling interest. 
 
 Now the Book of Daniel had for its purpose to enflame the 
 patriotism and faith of the Jews in this life-and-death strug- 
 gle, to nerve them to resistance, and to create in them the 
 will to conquer. "If we would realize the greatness of the 
 Book of Daniel, we should ask ourselves the question, What 
 would have been the history of religion in the world, and 
 what would have been our own religious condition if the effort 
 
20 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 of Antiochus to extirpate Judaism had been successful, and 
 then realize that the faith and hope which this book expresses 
 . . . was the only thing that stood in the way of his success." * 
 
 We do not know the author of the book. Like the Book 
 of Jonah, it is one of the great anonymous books of the Old 
 Testament. The author assumes the name of Daniel, which 
 means "God is my Judge." There may indeed have been a 
 man named Daniel. In Ezekiel (14:14, 20; 28:3) a Daniel 
 is mentioned with Noah and Job as a very righteous man and 
 as an example of the highest wisdom. But we have no exact 
 knowledge of him, and the author simply makes use of him 
 and of the stories connected with him, to point his own moral 
 lesson, and to create the moral enthusiasm demanded by the 
 crisis which he had set himself to meet. He tells these stories 
 as if they had taken place in the far away days of the Baby- 
 lonian captivity. But his readers knew how to take them. 
 They were naming tracts for the times. "This book fell like 
 a glowing spark from a clear Heaven upon a surface which 
 was already intensely heated far and wide and waiting to 
 burst into flames." For a century or more prophecy had 
 been dormant. Once more before the close of the Old Testa- 
 ment it leaps like flame from the lips of this inspired prophet. 
 
 We are now in a position to understand the message of 
 this book. It falls into two parts : the first six chapters, which 
 have to do with the stories of the heroism of Daniel; and the 
 last six chapters which contain visions and predictions of 
 the outcome of the struggle, the destruction of evil, and the 
 triumph of the faithful. 
 
 Look for a moment at these stories in Daniel in the light of 
 what has been said, and see what new and wonderful signifi- 
 cance they assume for their time and for all time. Here is 
 the story of how Daniel and his companions refused to defile 
 themselves with the King's meat. Its immediate object was 
 to brace the Jews to refuse to eat the meat which Antiochus 
 had commanded they should eat in order to break down Jew- 
 
 1 Porter, op. cit., p. 94. 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 21 
 
 ish religious customs. Eating of such meat since the Exile 
 had been regarded as a deadly sin. This story illustrates the 
 blessing of faithfulness. In it young men in the midst of 
 the solicitations and temptations of modern life can find the 
 same inspiration which the Jews found, beset as they were by 
 the royal decree. 
 
 Akin to this is the story in the third chapter of the burning 
 and fiery furnace. "Regarded as an instance of the use of 
 historic fiction to inculcate the noblest truths, the third chap- 
 ter of Daniel is not only superb in its imaginative grandeur 
 but still more in the manner in which it sets forth the in- 
 spired fidelity which is the essence of the most heroic and in- 
 spiring forms of martyrdom. So far from slighting it because 
 it is not literal history, I have regarded it as one of the most 
 precious among the narratives of the Bible, and of priceless 
 value as illustrating the deliverance of undaunted faithful- 
 ness, and that God is the Saviour and Deliverer of those who 
 trust in Him." * The Jews were in the furnace of affliction, 
 but they were not to be afraid of it. Let them but answer 
 as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered — one of the 
 most magnificent passages in the Bible. President Hadley of 
 Yale has said that he could never read these words without 
 emotion : 
 
 If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver 
 us from the burning fiery furnace; but if it be not ac- 
 cording to his plan, be it still known unto thee, O king, 
 that we will not worship thy gods nor the golden image. 
 (Dan. 3:17, 18.) 
 
 In this setting, the phrase "But if it be not" is one of the 
 noblest in all literature. 
 
 And the fire had no power upon their bodies, nor was 
 the hair of their head singed, nor had the smell of fire 
 passed upon them, for there was with them in the fur- 
 nace a fourth whose aspect was like unto the Son of God. 
 (Dan. 3:27.) 
 
 1 Dean Farrar, quoted in Daniel, Expositor's Bible. 
 
22 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 What depth of inspiration for the day for which it was writ- 
 ten! What a chapter for the martyrs of the day in which 
 we live! 
 
 With these two must be linked the story of Daniel cast into 
 the den of lions. The wicked are often called lions in the Old 
 Testament. "My soul is among lions. Break the jaw-bones of 
 the lions, Lord." "They have cut off my life in the dungeon 
 and cast a stone upon me." In the story, the Jews for whom 
 it was written saw a true picture of themselves cast helpless 
 in the midst of their ravenous foes, and in the deliverance 
 which was Daniel's they saw the promise of their salvation 
 from their enemies and from them that hated them. The truth 
 of this chapter for its time and for all time is adapted to 
 those who face persecution for righteousness' sake. 
 
 Besides these three stories of personal heroism are the three 
 dreams, pictures of the destruction of the kingdom of evil. In 
 the first dream the prophet sees a kingdom with head of gold, 
 arms of silver, thighs of brass, and feet of iron, standing 
 athwart the land and threatening to crush it. And there was 
 a "stone not made with hands" that smote it. 
 
 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the 
 gold broken to pieces together and became like the chaff of 
 the summer threshing-floors. (Dan. 2:35). 
 
 There was not a Jew who would not know that the kingdom 
 of Antiochus was meant, and that the downfall of that colossus 
 was prophesied by the impact of the rock of righteousness. 
 Think of the inspiration which the story contained for these 
 threatened Jews! Think back to the colossus of Germany 
 which within our own memory stood apparently impregnable, 
 "girt about with might," but was made like the chaff of 
 summer threshing-floors by the impact of a stone not made 
 with hands, by the force of righteous ideas. 
 
 In the second dream picture, the prosperity of the heathen 
 kingdom is likened to a tree which grew and was strong, and 
 the height thereof reached unto Heaven and the sight thereof 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 23 
 
 to the end of the earth. But a holy one came down from 
 Heaven and hewed the tree to the ground. Naught but a 
 stump was left : 
 
 Thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee after that thou 
 shalt have known that the heavens do rule. Wherefore — break 
 off thy sins by righteousness and thine iniquities by shewing 
 mercy to the poor. (Dan. 4:26, 27.) 
 
 The meaning of this prophecy for its own day needs no com- 
 ment, nor does its wonderful applicability to our day: no 
 kingdom is sure until "they have known that the heavens do 
 rule." 
 
 The story of Belshazzar, with its oriental magnificence, has 
 been made familiar to us in art. It is a true night-piece with 
 all the colors of dissolute, extravagant riot, luxurious passion, 
 gTowing madness, ruinous bewilderment, mysterious horror 
 and terror of such a night of revelry and death. The descrip- 
 tion begins with a crashing overture, and it ends with the 
 doom of judgment. The eloquence of it must have fired to 
 white heat the religious enthusiasm of the Jews for whose 
 inspiration it was written; to-day there are few passages in 
 all literature to compare with it for its effect on the emotions. 
 Considered as a judgment on the only oriental empire known 
 to our times, the Turkish rule, it is fitting in nearly every 
 detail. The words Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, fall like the 
 sound of doom, the tolling of the bell of fate, upon the mod- 
 ern nations that have been weighed and found wanting. 
 
 If this, then, is the historical meaning and the everlasting 
 inspiration of these stories contained in the first six chapters 
 of Daniel, a word must be said about the visions and predic- 
 tions contained in the last six chapters. Here we have the 
 emergence of that new type of prophecy of which I have 
 spoken. It tells men that, irresistible as their human foes 
 may seem to be, the hosts of the Lord are mightier still, and 
 nothing can withstand his might. Traces of this kind of 
 prophecy are to be found, as we have seen, in all the litera- 
 ture after the Exile, but Daniel is the first book to make 
 
24 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 exclusive use of it. Its entire message deals with what God 
 will do for men; it speaks only of salvation and deliver- 
 ance, and with its strange figures of speech and bi- 
 zarre imagery, borrowed largely from Eastern mythology, 
 it brings a powerful message of hope and victory. The 
 point to be borne in mind, however, is that this prophecy 
 in the book of Daniel is all focused on immediate historical 
 events. The afflicted Jews in the time of the Maccabees were 
 demanding an end of their troubles and deliverance from their 
 persecution. That was what the book promised them. First 
 of all, it described their enemies in the terms of beasts: one 
 like a lion, one like an eagle, one like a bear, one like a 
 leopard, with horns and heads, and teeth and hoofs — these 
 are the heathen kingdoms. Over against them there is the 
 host of the Lord, there is the Ancient of Days, there is the 
 Son of Man, and there are the saints of the Most High. In 
 chapter after chapter there is the promise: 
 
 Judgment shall be set; and the kingdom shall be given to 
 the people of the saints of the Most High. His kingdom is an 
 everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey 
 Him. Here is an end of the matter. (Dan. 7:27.) 
 
 The inspiration of these chapters is two-fold: first, it lies 
 in the fact that when the fortunes of the Hebrews were at 
 their lowest, when it seemed as if nothing could save them, at 
 such an hour the faith of this prophet rose supreme and he 
 promised the Jews, battling for their faith against overwhelm- 
 ing odds, that judgment was to be visited upon the beast An- 
 tiochus and "they shall take away his kingdom to destroy and 
 to consume it to the end." Even a time limit is set to his 
 triumph. After three and a half years (a time, times and half 
 a time) the people are to be delivered from their persecution. 
 And indeed they were! How, in those dark days, came the 
 prophet to have so confident a faith in the triumph of right- 
 eousness that was on the scaffold, and in the downfall of evil 
 that was on the throne*? In the answer to that question we 
 touch a real inspiration in the Book of Daniel. 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 25 
 
 This matchless assurance that evil shall be conquered in 
 the end, that the right shall ultimately prevail, remains the 
 eternal inspiration of all righteous souls. The Book of Daniel 
 was one of the favorite books of Jesus. There are more ref- 
 erences to it in the records of his life than to almost any 
 other Old Testament book. In the dark hours of his passion 
 and struggle, when He came face to face with incarnate evil, 
 when He sweat drops of blood in his agony to do away with 
 the sin of the world, his soul hung upon this everlasting as- 
 surance that "upon the wing of abominations shall come one 
 that maketh desolate and even unto the full end, and that de- 
 termined, shall wrath be poured out upon the desolate." (Dan. 
 9:27, R. V.) 
 
 If Jesus needed the inspiration of these chapters, we need 
 them too. They bid us, even in the darkest day, to trust the 
 omnipotence of righteousness; they tell us that evil is marked 
 for overthrow; that God's word is not to be mistrusted; that 
 we must labor and endure in the faith which is so adequately 
 expressed for us at the end of this wonderful book: 
 
 But go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt 
 rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days. (Dan. 12:13.) 
 
 Any one who is at all familiar with the history of the Jew- 
 ish people between the time of the Maccabees and the Book 
 of Revelation — roughly speaking, between 100 B.C. and 100 
 A.D. — will not be surprised that this kind of apocalyptical 
 literature flourished during this period. As we have seen, 
 here is prophecy for dark and dismal hours, for people 
 with their backs to the wall, desperate, defeated and all but 
 despairing. Such was the outward condition of the Jewish 
 people for these two hundred years. Delivered from the 
 Syrians, the Jews fell into the clutches of Rome and, as every 
 New Testament reader knows, they were ground under the iron 
 heel of Roman oppression. The embers of revolt were con- 
 stantly breaking out into the open flame of rebellion, until 
 Rome determined to make an end of this seditious people. 
 
26 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 That end came in the unparalleled and appalling disaster of 
 the capture of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus in the 
 year A.D. 70. The horrors of the siege and destruction of 
 Jerusalem may be read in the history of Josephus. All 
 through this dismal period the faith of the Jews was sus- 
 tained by apocalyptical writings which are not a part of our 
 canonical Scriptures. These offer a broad and a fascinating 
 field for study. 1 It is unfortunate that they have not been 
 gathered into a convenient volume for the general reader. 
 Two of them (Ezra and Baruch) appear in the Old Testa- 
 ment Apocrypha. Others have been published in separate 
 volumes (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Lon- 
 don). A knowledge of these books is necessary for one who 
 desires to understand the sources of the Book of Revelation, 
 and the position which it occupies in the history of apocalyp- 
 tical literature. 
 
 The most important of these non-canonical apocalypses is 
 the Book of Enoch. It was written a little later than the 
 Book of Daniel, and like Daniel is pseudonymous. It is com- 
 posite, and contains several apocalypses which made their 
 appearance during the two centuries before Christ. The first 
 part of the book contains a series of visions, in which are 
 described the impending destruction of evil, the triumph of 
 righteousness, and the setting up of the Messianic kingdom. 
 
 The second of these visions consists of a series of parables 
 or similitudes. These all treat of the Messianic age, and 
 offer a basis for understanding the Messianic consciousness of 
 Christ. In them are described the future abodes of the right- 
 eous, the punishment reserved for sinners, the sufferings of 
 God's servants in their resistance to evil, and the final judg- 
 ments to be enacted by the Messiah. A third division of 
 Enoch gives us information about the heavenly bodies, and 
 still another describes the whole course of human history to 
 
 1 The Standard work is R. H. Charles' Apocrypha and Pseudepi- 
 grapha (Oxford 1913). A brief review of the most important of 
 these apocalypses will be found in Case, The Revelation of John, 
 pp. 75-124, and Porter, op. cit., pp. 293-356. See also Hastings* 
 Bible Dictionary, Apocalyptic Literature, and Apocrypha. 
 
LANGUAGE AND STYLE 27 
 
 the end of the world. Doubtless this book was familiar to 
 the author of Revelation (see Jude 14), and it contains all 
 of the familiar ideas of our Apocalypse: the necessity for 
 faithful endurance, the trials of God's servants, the terrors of 
 the last times, the sure triumph of righteousness, the punish- 
 ment of the wicked, and the glories of the Messianic age. 
 
 Early in the Christian era appeared The Assumption of 
 Moses, the purpose of which was to encourage trust in re- 
 ligious ideals rather than in political action while awaiting 
 the salvation that God was sure to send to his people. A 
 little later appeared The Secrets of Enoch. God is described 
 as revealing to Enoch the secrets of Heaven and of Hades. 
 He is also told that at the end of seven thousand years a new 
 and eternal world is to appear, which is now imminent. 
 
 The fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 gave rise to two im- 
 portant Jewish apocalypses, both of which are found in our 
 Old Testament Apocrypha, Baruch and Ezra (II Esdras). 
 The first of these purports to have been written by Jeremiah's 
 scribe. The purpose of the real author, however, is to admon- 
 ish the faithful to endure in the face of all trials, since in 
 his own time God will come to them with a glorious reward, 
 and will give terrible punishment to their enemies. In the 
 book of Ezra, the question is asked why God should permit 
 his people to suffer so severely. The answer to this question 
 is given to Ezra by an angel, and contains the familiar apoca- 
 lyptical assurance of the care of God for his people, the 
 impending end, the punishment of sinners, and the new crea- 
 tion with the glories of the heavenly Jerusalem. A careful 
 reading of this book, which is easily accessible (O. T. 
 Apocrypha II Esdras), will reveal many of the features of 
 the New Testament Apocalypse. 
 
 There are a few Christian apocalypses which made their 
 appearance subsequent to the writing of our Revelation. The 
 most important of these are The Shepherd of Hennas, and 
 The Apocalypse of Peter. It seems reasonably clear that 
 both books were in existence as early as 150 A.D. Hermas 
 
28 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 receives revelations of wisdom in the form of addresses which 
 he is instructed to pass on to his fellow-Christians. These 
 addresses contain information about the church, the impend- 
 ing catastrophe, and the virtues which Christians should pos- 
 sess. The Apocalypse of Peter has great historical signifi- 
 cance since it is the prototype of that kind of literature of 
 which the writings of Dante are the most famous example. 
 This Apocalypse is only a fragment, and its chief purpose is 
 to portray in detail the future blessings of the righteous and 
 the torments of the wicked. The special tortures of mur- 
 derers, blasphemers, the worldly and the persecutors of Chris- 
 tians are successfully described. The Book of Revelation 
 contains only the beginnings of such speculation which, 
 through this later Apocalypse, became one of the familiar 
 themes of later mediaeval church literature. 
 
 Such then, in briefest outline, is the history of apocalypti- 
 cal prophecy to which the Book of Revelation belongs. It is 
 the great Christian Apocalypse. Like all apocalyptic litera- 
 ture, it was written at a time when faith was tested, when 
 evil was regnant, when God's people were threatened by suf- 
 fering and by death. Here we have the cry of the Christian 
 heart tortured by the pressure of the Pagan Empire. Falling 
 back on that form of prophecy that was so familiar, so sat- 
 urated with all kinds of national and religious sentiment, 
 which had already vindicated itself more than once in the his- 
 tory of God's people, John, carried away in the spirit, be- 
 held the Apocalypse, the Omnipotent God, the Lamb that 
 was slain, sitting upon the throne and crowned King of Kings 
 and Lord of Lords. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PROPHECY 
 
 IT is important to remember that the apocalypses of the 
 Old Testament were reflected in the teachings of Jesus. 
 They were not reckoned by Him to be a negligible or sec- 
 ondary element in Old Testament inspiration. Apocalyptical 
 thought is seen to be a fundamental and permanent element 
 in his teaching. If we can discover the reason for this, we 
 shall discover also the place which the apocalyptical ideas 
 should have in the thought of all Christians. 
 
 Every reader of the Gospels is aware that they contain two 
 kinds of language, and two types of thought. On the one 
 hand, there is the simple ethical teaching of Jesus as found 
 in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Parables, and in the chap- 
 ters of the Fourth Gospel. In these familiar portions of the 
 Gospel we are taught about God's love for men, about man's 
 duty to God and to his fellow-men, and about the nature of 
 the kingdom of heaven. But there is another kind of teach- 
 ing, found chiefly at fhe end of each of the four Gospels, in 
 which Jesus discourses about the end of the world, the judg- 
 ment, the resurrection of the just, the condemnation of the 
 wicked, and the coming of the Son of Man in power and great 
 glory. 
 
 To most Bible readers these chapters have seemed strange 
 and unintelligible, quite foreign to the words of the meek and 
 loving Jesus; a rather unwelcome and mysterious addition, as 
 it were, to the familiar sayings of Christ. Many Bible read- 
 ers, if they were to speak their minds, would be rather re- 
 lieved if the teaching of Jesus were free from this apocalypti- 
 
 29 
 
30 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 cal language. Frankly, they are not at home in it, do not 
 read it, and do not know what to do with it. What relation 
 has the parable of the prodigal son to such words as these 
 at the close of the same Gospel (Luke 21:25-27): 
 
 And there shall be signs in the sun and the moon and 
 in the stars; . . . the sea and the waves roaring, for the pow- 
 ers of heaven shall be shaken. And then they shall see the Son 
 of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. 
 
 The average Bible reader is not the only one to be perplexed 
 by this contrast in the teachings of Jesus. Scholars have 
 been baffled by it also. Of late years, an exhaustive study of 
 the subject has been made. No portion of the Gospels has 
 been scrutinized with more care than the apocalyptical ele- 
 ment. Out of this study, four general positions have emerged, 
 which may be briefly summarized as follows: 
 
 1. It has been thought that these teachings are a kind of 
 Jewish excrescence upon the pure, original Gospel of Christ 
 Himself, that they are not a part of that original Gospel 
 at all, that they were carried over from the Old Testament 
 by the early Christian writers whose minds were full of this 
 Jewish teaching, and grafted on the teaching of Christ Him- 
 self which was, in its original form, innocent of any such 
 thought and language. The apocalyptical element in the Gos- 
 pels is thus thought to be a Jewish gloss foisted upon the nar- 
 rative by Jewish influences, the pure Gospel being adulterated 
 by a foreign admixture of Jewish ideas. 
 
 The trouble with this theory is that it runs counter to the 
 judgment of the best scholars of the text of the New Testa- 
 ment. Those scholars now tell us that the apocalyptical say- 
 ings of Christ are as well attested as his simple ethical teach- 
 ings. While there may be some intermingling of Jewish ele- 
 ments in the Gospels, there is nothing to show \hat the 
 apocalyptical ideas are not an original part of the teachings 
 of Jesus. They cannot be stricken out of the Gospels as 
 alien and spurious additions to it. 
 
 2. A second theory is that these teachings in the Gospels 
 
ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PROPHECY 31 
 
 are the exaggeration of a later age. Our Gospels, as we 
 know, are not a verbatim and contemporary record of the 
 sayings of Jesus. They are a recollection of those sayings 
 as they passed through the minds of the evangelists who later 
 set them forth orally and in writing. Thus they are tinged 
 and colored by the thought of the evangelists and by the at- 
 mosphere of a later time. Since the Gospels were written 
 about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, or shortly 
 after, it is natural to suppose that that great catastrophe 
 influenced the thought of those who reported the utterances 
 of Jesus. Those utterances, as we know, remained a fluid tra- 
 dition for nearly a generation before being put into a fixed 
 form. During that time they were susceptible to outside 
 influences and an unconscious infiltration of extraneous ele- 
 ments. These apocalyptical ideas crept into the reported 
 teaching of Jesus during this period of fluidity. Doubtless 
 there were some of his sayings which lent themselves to such 
 an interpretation, and the later Christian consciousness made 
 explicit, in an exaggerated form, what was at the most merely 
 implicit in the teaching of Jesus. 
 
 The answer to this is, that there must have been at least 
 some solid foundation for these portions of the Gospels, since 
 they attained the strength and the dimensions which they ex- 
 hibit in all of our four Gospels and elsewhere in the New 
 Testament. We have in the New Testament no less than seven 
 different presentations of the faith of the primitive Chris- 
 tians, viz.: the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), 
 the Fourth Gospel, Paul, Hebrews, James, Peter and Reve- 
 lation. In all of them the apocalyptical element is promi- 
 nent. It is an accepted principle in New Testament inter- 
 pretation, that what is common to all presentations of the 
 Gospel teaching goes back to the teaching of Christ Himself. 
 The application of this principle proves that the apocalyptical 
 teaching belongs to Christ, if it proves anything at all. The 
 evidence shows that if that teaching were influenced at all by 
 later thought, it was softened rather than sharpened as time 
 
32 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 went on. It goes back to the very first days of the church's 
 history. It leaps as by instinct from the lips of the New 
 Testament preachers. It must, therefore, have behind it the 
 authority of Christ Himself. 
 
 3. A third view accepts these sayings as an undoubted genu- 
 ine part of the teaching of Christ, but insists that they are 
 an unimportant part of that teaching. Jesus was a Jew. 
 He inherited the Jewish ideas, and the Jewish teaching was 
 a part of his human consciousness. He was a child of his 
 age, and He did not escape from the Jewish categories of 
 thought. Thus the survival of the apocalyptical ideas is a 
 proof, according to the exponents of this theory, of the way 
 in which He emptied Himself into the human life of his time. 
 The apocalyptical thought survives as a relic of old Judaism 
 and must be regarded as an anachronism in the teaching's of 
 Jesus to which little attention need be paid and in which 
 little value will be found. 
 
 The difficulty here lies in the fact that this teaching grows 
 in intensity and in fullness and power as the life of Christ 
 progresses. If it were an inheritance truly foreign to Him- 
 self and to his mission, we should expect to find it in abun- 
 dance at the beginning of his teaching, but falling more and 
 more into the background as that teaching developed ac- 
 cording to its own principles and purposes. But precisely 
 the opposite is the case. The apocalyptical ideas are indeed 
 to be found all through the Gospels. "Little Apocalypses" 
 (as for example in Lk. 10:18; Matt. 8:11, 12) keep occur- 
 ring. But it is as his ministry approaches its climax that 
 this teaching increases in extent and in power. It is in the 
 shadow of the Cross itself that it rises to its height. How 
 then can it be considered a negligible or unimportant or 
 valueless part of his teaching? The evidence goes to show 
 that on the contrary it was an outstanding part of the Gospel 
 as Jesus felt it and taught it. 
 
 4. So convincing has this argument seemed to many mod- 
 ern scholars that they have not hesitated to declare that 
 
ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PKOPHECY 33 
 
 the apocalyptical element in the Gospels is the original core 
 of that Gospel, and that in its light the whole teaching and 
 outlook and mission of Christ must be understood and ex- 
 plained. The apocalypse of Jesus, in a word, and not the 
 ethics of Jesus, constitutes the real Gospel. For this strange 
 and unwelcome conclusion, conservative Bible students are in 
 part responsible, in so far as they have insisted upon the im- 
 possibility of reconciling the ethical and apocalyptical teach- 
 ings as parts of one and the same Gospel. Those who have 
 been unwilling to accept the apocalyptical teachings of Christ 
 on a par and level with his familiar ethical teachings, have 
 pointed out that the two are mutually contradictory. And 
 this contradiction, they have argued, goes deeper than lan- 
 guage and form of thought. It involves the very essence of 
 the Gospel itself. On the one hand we have the fact of the 
 incarnation, God in man, Christ uttering the truth of God in 
 his teachings concerning God and man. When this was done, 
 the kingdom of God had in a true sense already come. Out 
 of this inspiration, the kingdom of heaven would gradually 
 develop as the tree from the grain of mustard seed. When 
 the sower had sown the seed, redemption had indeed been 
 wrought. Quite contrary to this, however — so runs this ar- 
 gument — is the apocalyptical idea in the Gospels. According 
 to this, the kingdom of heaven had not come with the earthly 
 career of Jesus. His Messiahship would not be proved and 
 recognized until his return upon the clouds of heaven. Not 
 until the Son of Man should come with power and great 
 glory, not in the weakness of the manger but in the triumph 
 of the apocalypse, would his Messiahship be vindicated and 
 his kingdom be set up on earth. It has been urged that 
 both of these conceptions, the ethical and the apocalyptical, 
 cannot be true. One or the other must represent the mes- 
 sage and mission of Christ. 
 
 Accepting this conclusion, a certain set of influential schol- 
 ars, led by Albert Schweitzer, whose book, "The Quest of the 
 Historical Jesus," 1910, is the most complete statement of this 
 
34 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 view, has argued that the apocalyptical conception is the real 
 and original Gospel; and that the apocalyptical hope was that 
 which, from the first, animated and inspired Christ and was 
 the secret of his inspiration and the source of his Social Hope 
 for the world. It was upon this revelation that his heart was 
 set from the first, the ethical teachings constituting only a 
 preliminary and preparatory and temporary labor, until the 
 consummation should appear. This generation was not to pass 
 away until these things were fulfilled. Some standing there 
 were not to taste death until they should see the Son of Man 
 coming in glory. It was the apocalyptical vision that was 
 the inner inspiration of Jesus all through his ministry, an in- 
 spiration inherited from the most spiritual of the prophets 
 who had most immediately preceded Him and passed on by 
 Him to his followers. The Cross was to Jesus the crucifixion 
 of these hopes, and constituted the bitterness of his cup and 
 the agony of his soul. 1 
 
 Into a criticism of this view it is not our purpose to go. 
 Doubtless it clears up certain difficulties, explains certain well- 
 attested sayings of Christ which otherwise seem very obscure, 
 and presents us with a clear and intelligible story of the 
 progress of his thought and consciousness. But it runs 
 counter to what may be called the normal Christian conscious- 
 ness. It may satisfy intellectually and even spiritually a cer- 
 tain company of admittedly able and devout scholars, but it 
 does not and will not satisfy the instinct of the instructed 
 Christian heart. It not only does not offer men the Christ 
 whom they want, but it does not present them with the whole 
 Christ of the Gospels. An interpretation which puts the 
 whole ethical teaching of Christ in the background, makes a 
 subordinate if not a negligible fact of the Incarnation, and 
 makes the Cross the symbol of a divine disappointment in- 
 stead of a divine consummation, will never win the loyal al- 
 legiance of more than a small group of Christian thinkers. 
 
 1 The reader will refer to London Theological Studies, H. T. An- 
 drews, "The Eschatological Utterances of Jesus," and to D. S. 
 Cairns, op. cit., Chap. IV, "Jesus and the Kingdom of God." 
 
ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PROPHECY 35 
 
 For the majority of Christians, the chief value of all this 
 apocalyptical explication of the Gospels is a vindication of it 
 as a real and permanent and fundamental element in the 
 total thought and message of Christ. 
 
 If, then, no one of these four views can be accepted, what 
 interpretation can be offered which will include both the 
 ethical and apocalyptical ideas and unite them in a compre- 
 hensible and intelligible whole? The answer to this question 
 is not nearly so difficult as it has been made to appear. Care- 
 ful thought will show that not only can they be united, 
 but that they are both necessary to the complete thought and 
 teaching of Christ, and that both are needed in the thinking 
 and experience of a true follower of Christ and a true worker 
 for Christ. 
 
 We have already seen what is the innermost meaning of 
 all the Jewish apocalypses. It was the Jewish way of ex- 
 pressing faith and hope in the ultimate triumph of good over 
 evil. Always that idea lies at the root and center of an 
 apocalypse, wherever found. That idea Jesus had inherited; 
 it had become a part of his spiritual experience. He was 
 familiar with the vocabulary of the apocalypse, that literary 
 vehicle in which this fundamental idea was transmitted to 
 the Hebrew mind and consciousness. This inspiration, then, 
 and the form in which it was expressed and uttered, formed a 
 part of that equipment which Jesus received from his human 
 heritage. With it, He began his ministry. 
 
 At first, however, slight use was made of it. Doubtless 
 the Gospels give us an accurate sequence here. That min- 
 istry begins with the teaching of his disciples and of the 
 people, and with the healing of the bodies and souls of men. 
 Only occasionally do we have a flash of the apocalyptical 
 vision, as when He sees Satan falling like lightning from 
 Heaven, or declares in the parable of the tares that evil at the 
 last will be destroyed by fire. But as Jesus advances in the 
 proclamation of his new kingdom, it becomes increasingly ap- 
 parent that against it are to be arrayed the kingdoms and 
 
36 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 powers of this world. "Now is my soul troubled." (John 
 12:27.) The shadow of the Cross begins to fall across his 
 pathway, and He sets his face steadfastly to go up to Jeru- 
 salem. Sharper and sharper becomes the contrast between 
 good and evil. On the one hand there is his handful of dis- 
 ciples, themselves ignorant and feeble, and Himself, despised 
 and rejected of men, and on the other hand, the more deeply 
 He penetrates into the meaning of his ministry and of the 
 work of the redemption and salvation of the world, the more 
 definite become the two contrasting kingdoms — the kingdom 
 of this world and the kingdom of heaven. The more heavily 
 the kingdom of this world threatens to crush Christ, who not 
 only preached but in his own person typified the kingdom of 
 heaven, the more insistently there falls from his lips the 
 apocalyptical teaching that one day the kingdom of heaven 
 will be set up in this world, and He, the prince of righteous- 
 ness, will sit upon the throne. In part, this teaching was 
 projected into the future, and Christ saw and proclaimed that 
 distant advent, the precise day and hour of which He, Him- 
 self, did not know, but the Father only, when He would re- 
 appear in power and great glory. But again, this teaching 
 was concentrated upon the present hour, and Christ saw and 
 proclaimed that with the completion of his work, with his own 
 death and resurrection, that far-off and ultimate triumph was 
 already potentially achieved- This world was judged, its 
 kingdom was already overthrown, and the Son of Man was 
 already come. Without doubt He pointed to the Temple lind 
 declared that within that generation not one stone should 
 stand upon another. Without doubt He declared that soon 
 Jerusalem would be hedged in with heathen armies, as in the 
 days of Isaiah and Jeremiah. But surely we may say that 
 what really preoccupied the mind of Jesus was not a series of 
 probable or even certain historical and political events, but 
 rather the certainty that He had from his Father that if his 
 days were numbered, so also were those of the nation and 
 of the system that were casting Him forth. Through Jesus 
 
ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PEOPHECY 37 
 
 Christ, God had made Himself felt as a fact upon Jerusa- 
 lem. The moral judgment typified and personified in the 
 Son of Man was speedily to fall upon that city and upon 
 that nation. That was the "time of the visitation" of Jeru- 
 salem. "Out of all the many days, there had been one day 
 on which the challenge of eternity had been concentrated. 
 The pressure of an eternal judgment had been brought to 
 bear upon the Holy City through the immediate presence of 
 the Son of Man. It had been brought under the scrutiny 
 of the Eternal and had delivered the verdict which was its 
 condemnation. And all this had come so suddenly that Jeru- 
 salem was not aware of what it had done." It was not in 
 any sense prepared for the time of its visitation. How real 
 and vital, thus understood, becomes the message of Jesus 
 to his disciples: 
 
 Therefore be ye ready; for in such an hour as ye think not 
 the Son of man cometh. (Matt, 24:44.) 
 
 Far from its being the truth that this teaching of Jesus 
 is a Jewish survival, or an element of weakness in his moral 
 outlook, what we really discover is that it is a necessary sup- 
 plement to his explicit moral and religious teaching. 
 
 "When death drew near and the shadow of the Cross fell 
 upon Him, conscious that as yet He had been unable to give 
 the spiritual riches of the kingdom of God full expression, 
 . . . and that his brief life was about to end, his earthly 
 work forever to be closed, He flung the reserved elements of 
 his teaching into symbolic form, and making use of the cur- 
 rent and familiar imagery of the Jewish Apocalypse, He ut- 
 tered these great and terrible closing words about his second 
 coming." * 
 
 It is as if He had said: "Hitherto I have been among you 
 in obscurity and weakness: I am now about to go away; 
 but I shall come again in glory and power to judge the 
 world and to bring in the kingdom of God." Obscurity there 
 may be — allusions that are not easy to explain or even to 
 
 1 See Cairns, op. cit., p. 200. 
 
38 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 understand — a language with whose very vocabulary and im- 
 agery we are not familiar; but brushing these all aside the 
 main intention is plain : that just as there had been an ad- 
 vent in weakness, so there should be an advent in power; 
 just as He had come into this world sharing the limitations 
 of our humanity, so one day He would come with the infinite 
 prerogatives of ruler and judge: just as one day He had put 
 Himself at the mercy of men, so one day men would be at 
 the mercy of Him who would be judge of both the quick 
 and the dead. He was indeed going away, He said, but only 
 to a higher vantage ground from which He would exert a 
 far more powerful influence upon them and upon the world 
 than when He was with them in the flesh. And He would 
 still be the instrument of God in all the coming convulsions 
 of nature and history through which mankind will be judged 
 and the kingdom will come, just as He had under lowlier 
 conditions been the Father's instrument in succoring them in 
 the storm upon the lake, in feeding them with heavenly food, 
 and in washing their travel-stained feet. 
 
 The real meaning of the apocalyptical teaching of Jesus, 
 then, is his claim to be the rightful Lord of the entire world; 
 is his solemn assurance that though He might seem to be 
 leaving the world in humility and shame, the hour was ad- 
 vancing when that kingdom which He had come to found, 
 which thus far had found its lodgment only in the hearts of 
 a few Galilean peasants, would manifest its true character 
 in the great spheres of the world's life; when He, who was 
 born in a manger and was about to be spat upon, beaten 
 and crucified, would reappear as King of Kings and Lord of 
 Lords. When that reappearance should be, how it should 
 come to pass — these are questions secondary to this magnifi- 
 cent proclamation of the coming of the kingdom and the 
 coming of the King. 
 
 From this point of view, the apocalyptical teaching has a 
 true and permanent place in the message of Jesus. Neither 
 ethics nor apocalypse excludes the other; neither is subordi- 
 
ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PBOPHECY 39 
 
 nate; and each is necessary to complete the whole. The 
 ethical message of Jesus would be incomplete without this 
 vision and solemn announcement of the ultimate overthrow 
 of evil and the triumph of righteousness. Doubtless this 
 truth was conveyed in language which to us may seem unin- 
 telligible and unfamiliar; but underneath it all, and running 
 through it all, and not forgetting the full reach and meaning 
 of it all, runs this sure conviction of the ultimate triumph 
 of the truth which He, a humble rabbi, a lover of men, an 
 itinerant preacher, had put in the hearts of his disciples and 
 of those who had ears to hear. That truth was destined one 
 day to overturn the world and usher in the kingdom of God. 
 
 The same importance is given to the apocalypse in the 
 teaching of St. Paul. Is it possible to imagine Paul without 
 the apocalyptical hope? He travels about the Roman Empire 
 with the light of the Gospel shining in his soul. He plants 
 little Christian colonies and instructs his disciples to be kind, 
 loving, forgiving, pure, earnest and faithful. Then he looks 
 about him and" what does he see? He sees the whole Roman 
 Empire in its vast power and in its impregnable sin. 1 "As 
 he goes forward seeking to subdue the whole world for Christ, 
 he becomes aware that while to a certain extent the world can 
 be impressed by the Gospel, there is a whole social order of 
 untouched wrongs and cruelties that he cannot touch, evils 
 that are wholly against the mind of Christ, but that he can- 
 not touch or alter. Hoary institutions like slavery, state 
 paganism and the murderous gladiatorial games — what could 
 he do to destroy them? But one thing he could do. He could 
 set himself to win converts out of the heathen world; he 
 could plant in the hearts of men and of women the love and 
 fear of Jesus Christ; he could organize them into churches. 
 And for the rest? There was the great hope; there was the 
 great assurance — the Lord would come. Once He had come 
 in weakness; the next time He would come in power and in 
 glory, and Emperor and Sanhedrin would own Him alike." 
 
 1 Cairns, ibid., p. 213. 
 
40 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Then cometh the end when he . . . shall have put down 
 all rule and all authority and all power. For he must reign 
 till he hath put down all enemies under his feet. The last 
 enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (I Cor. 15:24, 
 25, 26.) 
 
 Do you think St. Paul could have lived without the apoca- 
 lyptic hope? Do you think even his courage would have sur- 
 vived despair without the knowledge that the Captain of his 
 salvation would one day reassume command and lead his hosts 
 to victory? Do you imagine that he found this teaching that 
 is "foreign to the serious culture of our time," foreign to 
 his own life or without its message to his own soul? Was it 
 unimportant or unnecessary, or was it the very bread of life 
 on which his soul fed and drew its daily help and strength? 
 
 And now we come to the end of the Bible. The story of 
 creation and redemption has been told. The full truth that 
 one day shall make all men free has been uttered by Christ 
 and interpreted by his inspired disciples. There is nothing 
 more to be said that is essential to the personal and social 
 salvation of all mankind. There stretch out the long and 
 apparently unending centuries of sin and strife, of crime and 
 injustice, of shame and war and inhumanity, of tears and 
 savage bloodshed. What shall be the fate of the Gospel in 
 such a history? How shall the idealism of Jesus fare in such 
 a world? What shall the outcome be in this gigantic strug- 
 gle between God and Satan, Christ and Caesar, the Host of 
 Heaven and the Armies of the Aliens? 
 
 Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in 
 his own blood. And hath made us kings and priests unto 
 God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion forever 
 and ever. Amen. Behold he cometh with clouds; and every 
 eye shall see him and they also which pierced him; and 
 all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even 
 so, Amen. I, John, . . . was in the spirit on the Lord's 
 day and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, 
 saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. 
 (Rev. 1:5-11.) 
 
 The Apocalypse with which the Bible closes is thus the di- 
 vine proclamation of the ultimate victory of God's truth in 
 
ETHICAL VALUE OF APOCALYPTICAL PEOPHECY 41 
 
 spite of all the contradiction and opposition of the ages. In 
 no more inspired way could God's inspired Book have come 
 to its close. 
 
 In the same way every Christian who bears the Gospel truth 
 in his heart needs the apocalyptical hope. The ethics of Jesus 
 will not suffice. We must share in his vision of the final over- 
 throw of Satan and the coming of the Son of Man. Without 
 such a hope, days will come when the powers of darkness 
 will seem so overwhelming, the forces of evil so irresistible 
 and impregnable that we will cease to believe in their ulti- 
 mate destruction. Our hearts will grow weary, our arms will 
 grow weak, our courage will become faint. If in such an hour 
 we can fall back upon and be sustained by this inspiration 
 which has fired the hearts of the apostles and martyrs, we 
 will chant in the very face of the evil that threatens to de- 
 stroy us: 
 
 "But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day; 
 The saints triumphant rise in bright array; 
 The King of Glory passes on his way; 
 
 Alleluia!" 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 OUTLINE AND CONTENTS 
 
 THE Book of Revelation is not a series of disjointed 
 chapters and disconnected visions. It is a carefully 
 constructed drama, arranged to produce the maximum effect. 
 No book in the Bible betrays more literary skill, a surer dra- 
 matic instinct, or possesses greater unity of design and ar- 
 tistic structure. Our study of it proceeds upon the assump- 
 tion that, in the main, it is the work of a single author, and 
 that this author has a plan of composition that runs through 
 it from beginning to end. Both of these statements are ques- 
 tioned by many Bible students who point out that the Jewish 
 apocalypses are, with the exception of the Book of Daniel, 
 compilations from various sources, without unity of author- 
 ship or design. In the same way the art and unity of the 
 Book of Revelation have been denied; and it has been held 
 that no consecutive plan of composition can successfully be 
 worked out. 
 
 This position is a possible one, and the matter of the unity 
 of certain portions of the book is still an open one with 
 Bible students. But to the mind of many, of whom the 
 writer of the present study of the Book of Revelation is one, 
 the unity of both authorship and plan is clear; and it can 
 safely be said that no conclusive argument against it has so 
 far been made. 1 We proceed to our examination of its con- 
 tents, then, upon the assumption that the book is the single 
 work of a single inspired writer. The following outline 
 will indicate, in a general way, its plan and structure : 2 
 
 1 For a discussion of the whole subject, see Beckwith, pp. 216ff. 
 
 3 This outline is not closely followed in the succeeding chapters. 
 It will, however, enable the reader to grasp clearly the main argu- 
 ment of the book and the course of its development. 
 
 42 
 
OUTLINE AND CONTENTS 43 
 
 I. Introduction. Chapter 1:1-3. 
 
 Statement of the subject and author, and exhortation to 
 the readers of the book. 
 
 II. Greeting. Chapter 1:4-8. 
 
 A salutation to the churches, and an ascription to Christ. 
 
 III. The Prophet's Commission. Chapter 1:9-20. 
 
 A vision in which the prophet receives his commission from 
 the risen and glorified Christ. 
 
 IV. Messages to the Churches. Chapters 2-3. 
 
 Introductory exhortations, commendations, and warnings to 
 the seven churches of Asia typical of all churches then and 
 now. 
 
 V. Visions of God and of Christ. Chapters 4-5. 
 
 The infinite God and the omnipotent Christ who form the 
 eternal background of the whole drama of the war between 
 good and evil. 
 
 VI. The Opening of the Seals of the Book. Chapter 6. 
 
 A vision of the destruction which God will bring upon the 
 world. 
 
 VII. The Salvation of the Faithful. Chapter 7. 
 A heavenly interlude of comfort and hope. 
 
 VIII. The Sounding of the Trumpets. Chapters 8-9. 
 
 The second judgments of God on the world, by nature, war, 
 pestilence, famine and death. 
 
44 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 IX. A Pause before the Last Judgments. Chapters 10- 
 
 11 :1-13. 
 
 1. The prophet's new commission. Chapter 10. 
 
 2. The safety and reward of the faithful. Chapter 11 :1-13. 
 
 X. Preparation for the Final Conflict. Chapters 11:14- 
 
 14:1-20. 
 
 1. An anthem of praise for God's approaching victory. 
 Chapter 11 :14-19. 
 
 2. The powers of evil in array. Chapters 12-13. 
 
 a. Satan. Chapter 12. 
 
 b. Rome. Chapter 13. 
 
 3. The opposing host of Christ and his Saints. Chapter 
 14:1-5. 
 
 4. Warnings to flee from the wrath to come. Chapter 
 14:6-20. 
 
 XL The Last Judgments. Chapters 15-20. 
 
 1. Vision of the wrath of God in seven bowls, Chapters. 
 15, 16. * • 
 
 2. The Fall of Rome. Chapters 17, 18, 19 :l-5. 
 
 3. The Victory of Christ. Chapter 19 :6-21. 
 
 4. The Fall of Satan. Chapter 20 :1-10. 
 
 5. The General Resurrection. Chapters 20:11-25. 
 
 XII. The Heavenly City. Chapters 21, 22 :l-5. 
 XIII. The Epilogue. Chapters 22:6-21. 
 
 A careful examination of this outline will reveal the artistic 
 and dramatic structure of the book and the skill and effec- 
 tiveness with which it develops its theme. There is first the 
 solemn introduction, with its blessing upon all who hear 
 and keep the words of this prophecy. This is followed by 
 the salutation in the form made familiar in the letters of St. 
 
OUTLINE AND CONTENTS 45 
 
 Paul, with its eloquent ascription to Christ. The author 
 then tells how he was commissioned to write the book. In a 
 vision he sees the omnipotent Christ who is described in the 
 language of Ezekiel and Daniel and Zachariah, and who com- 
 mands the prophet to write the things which he has seen to 
 the seven churches of Asia. 
 
 These chapters, which contain the messages to the churches, 
 are among the most familiar in the book. With their re- 
 iterated refrain of promise to him that overcometh, they are 
 constructed with singular literary skill and spiritual elo- 
 quence. In spite of local allusions, their main message is 
 still applicable to the church at any period of trials, worldli- 
 ness or apostasy. Before revealing the powers of evil and the 
 judgments of God upon them, the writer then proceeds in two 
 magnificent chapters to give us the eternal background, as it 
 were, against which all of the coming drama is to be enacted 
 (chapters 4 and 5). A sense of assurance and permanence is 
 at once created in the hearts of his readers. It is as if before 
 portraying scenes of great trial and suffering the words were 
 set down: 
 
 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall 
 not pass away. (Matt. 24:35.) 
 
 Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid: 
 
 Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day and forever. 
 (I Cor. 3:11, Heb. 13:8.) 
 
 A door is opened and the seer passes through it and sees 
 God upon his throne, the Ancient of Days who sitteth throned 
 in glory, surrounded by the elders, and by all the heavenly 
 host who worship Him day and night, saying: 
 
 Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour 
 and power. (Eev. 4: 11.) 
 
 The prophet observes that God holds a book in his right hand, 
 a roll sealed with seven seals. "It is the book of human des- 
 tiny." Christ alone is worthy to break the seals of the roll 
 
46 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 and to reveal the future. He is the Lamb that has been 
 slain. "Amid choruses of praise which accompany the action 
 through the whole work like the lyric choruses of a Greek 
 tragedy," 1 the Lamb takes the book and one by one breaks 
 the seven seals. The visions of the future begin. 
 
 The opening of the seals of the book is a pictorial way of 
 describing the judgments of God upon an evil world, which, 
 for the author, is represented by the Roman Empire. The 
 four horses with their riders typify this punishment in its 
 various forms as conquest, war, famine and pestilence. At 
 the fifth seal, the souls of the martyrs cry for vengeance. 
 When the sixth seal is broken we have great convulsions of 
 nature (chapter 6). 
 
 Before the seventh seal is broken, however, we have an 
 interruption. These chapters, we need to remember, are writ- 
 ten to Christians who may already have suffered martyrdom, 
 and for whom persecution is still in store. With a touch of 
 spiritual genius, a passage of consolation and inspiration 
 is inserted before the final woe is pronounced. In the 
 familiar seventh chapter a promise of immortality is given to 
 all those not only of the household of Israel but of all na- 
 tions and kindreds who have come victoriously througk tribu- 
 lation into the blessedness of the redeemed. 
 
 The seventh seal is then opened. But instead of bringing 
 the end, it introduces a new series of seven, the seven blasts 
 of trumpets (chapters 8 and 9). By this literary device, the 
 author succeeds in his purpose of suggesting a long panorama 
 of events, an indefinite period of trial, and the obstinate re- 
 sistance of evil. It is to be no short struggle. Victory is not 
 to be won by a brief campaign. These two chapters are 
 given to a description, highly colored with apocalyptical 
 imagery, of the judgments following the sounding of six 
 trumpets. Again we await the consummation with the sound- 
 ing of the seventh trumpet; but once more the end is delayed. 
 The climax is to be still more portentous. 
 
 1 See J. H. Ropes, Harvard Theological Review, Oct. 1919, p. 419. 
 
OUTLINE AND CONTENTS 47 
 
 The effect is further increased by what follows before the 
 sounding of the last trumpet. The prophet receives a fresh 
 commission as if he needed to be still further equipped for 
 the task that remains (chapter 10). Once more comes the 
 assurance that the faithful shall be preserved and that their 
 witness cannot be destroyed. Vast celestial preparations are 
 made for the impending and final conflict. A pasan of praise 
 is sung to God (chapter 11) ; the forces of the enemy are set 
 in array, the apparently irresistible forces of Satan and of 
 the Roman Empire (chapters 12 and 13). Over against these 
 are marshalled the Lamb and the hundred and forty and 
 four thousand of his saints; and a warning goes forth from 
 the lips of angels to all upon the earth: "Fear God and give 
 glory to him, for the hour of his judgment is come" (chap- 
 ter 14). 
 
 This final judgment is pictured to us in the emptying of 
 seven bowls, such as were used for pouring libations at an 
 altar. The wrath of God is poured out upon a wicked world 
 (chapters 15, 16); the great and terrible day of the Lord 
 is come. 
 
 And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; 
 and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven 
 . . . saying, It is done . . . and great Babylon came in re- 
 membrance before God to give unto her the cup of the wine 
 of the fierceness of his wrath. (Rev. 16:17, 19.) 
 
 In lurid language and with an unparalleled eloquence of 
 spiritual emotion and triumph the downfall of Rome is por- 
 trayed for us, with all her luxury and glory and pride (chap- 
 ters 17, 18): 
 
 Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and 
 prophets; for God hath avenged you on her . . . And in her 
 was found the blood of prophets and of saints and of all 
 that were slain upon the earth. (Rev. 18: 20, 24.) 
 
 The destruction of Rome is followed by a chorus of praise, 
 as a multitude chants with the voice of many waters: 
 
 Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. (Rev. 
 19:6.) . 
 
48 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF. REVELATION 
 
 The Messiah has come, King of Kings and Lord of Lords 
 (chapter 19). And the victory of the Lamb means not only 
 the fall of Rome but the final defeat of Satan, who may indeed 
 break loose again for a while but shall eventually be 
 
 cast into the lake of fire and brimstone . . . and shall be 
 tormented day and night forever and ever. (Eev. 20:10.) 
 
 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and the first 
 heaven and the first earth were passed away. (Rev. 21:1.) 
 
 So beautifully begins the closing chapters of the book, with 
 a sweet strain of heavenly harmony after the thunders and 
 lightnings, the earthquakes and judgments of the barbaric de- 
 scriptions of the destruction of evil in the preceding chapters. 
 It is like listening to a pastoral symphony after hearing the 
 tumult of brass instruments and cymbals and kettle-drums in 
 the thunder of the orchestra. This is followed by the familiar 
 description of the Heavenly City, the salvation of the saints, 
 and eternal joy of those who have been faithful unto death. 
 
 Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so come Lord Jesus. 
 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. 
 (Rev. 22:20, 21.) 
 
 Such is the Book of Revelation. It is an Apocalypse de- 
 scribing for the Christians of the day in which it was written 
 the sure destruction of Rome by the armies of God and the 
 power of Christ. It is an exhortation to endure, to be patient 
 and steadfast in the sure knowledge that victory has been 
 prepared for them. The book contains untold inspiration for 
 all Christians in that it contains the great Social Hope without 
 which they cannot be faithful unto death and so receive the 
 crown of life. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE INTRODUCTION AND THE MESSAGES TO THE CHURCHES 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 1-3 
 
 WE do not know who is the author of the Book of 
 Revelation. The traditional view is that he was the 
 Apostle John, the supposed author of the Fourth Gospel. 
 Scholars are, however, agreed that the author of the Fourth 
 Gospel and of the Book of Revelation cannot be the same 
 person. The difference in style and in religious conceptions is 
 too great, and the supposed similarities are too slight. Neither 
 is there anything to prove that the author was the Apostle 
 John. There is no claim anywhere in the book of apostolic 
 authorship. There are no personal references in it. The 
 writer nowhere indicates that he had known the historic Jesus, 
 and the pictures of Christ are different from those which would 
 have been drawn by one who had been associated with Him 
 in his earthly ministry. 
 
 All that we know of the author is that he gives his name 
 as John and that he was contemporary to the events which 
 he describes, and a brother and fellow in trial of those to 
 whom he writes. 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 1. The Superscription (1:1-3) with which the first chap- 
 ter opens is a solemn introduction to the whole book. The 
 real author of the book, we are told, is Christ, who receives 
 the revelation which is to follow from God and communicates 
 it through an angel to John. The revelation is the authori- 
 tative word of God. Those to whom it is written are ex- 
 
 49 
 
50 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 horted to give heed to it, to listen attentively to these prophe- 
 cies since they tell of impending events, of things which are 
 to happen without delay. In this section, brief as it is, there 
 are spiritual lessons of much meaning. First, the Bible and 
 the whole Gospel message is an authoritative revelation. Our 
 whole attitude toward Christianity is much weakened if we 
 think of it as a system of thought rather than as a true revela- 
 tion of God. How much our Christian thinking would be 
 strengthened if we would preface it with this superscription! 
 Put these words above your creed and see if it is not ennobled 
 thereby. Second, God makes one man the channel of his 
 communication to other men. This channel is never closed, 
 and there is likely to be given to any of God's children a 
 special message of which he is the chosen mouthpiece. How 
 much our religious lives are enriched by this idea in their 
 relation both to God and to our fellowmen! Third, John 
 "bare record." He faithfully reproduced what had been 
 communicated to him. There was no loss in transmission. 
 What he received, he gave. This fidelity in the stewardship 
 of spiritual gifts is insisted upon both in the Gospels and in 
 the Epistles. To-day a chief cause of the lack of religious 
 interest is the ineffective and unconvincing lives of Christian 
 people. How much it would mean if every disciple of Christ 
 should "witness" in such a way as faithfully to reproduce the 
 Gospel in his life! Fourth, the book is to be read, we are 
 told, because of impending events. "The times are at hand." 
 These words are important as indicating that the book is 
 focused upon immediate historical events and is not concerned 
 with distant millennial happenings. Just so in our own lives, 
 this book should be used not as a guide to mysterious events 
 in the future, but as a practical inspiration for immediate 
 trials of our faith and patience. A blessing awaits the de- 
 vout mind which receives and observes the prophecies of 
 this book. 
 
 Chapter 1:1. This is the Bevelation of Christ Himself, 
 who received it from God that He might disclose to his 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 51 
 
 servants what is about to happen. Through an angel, Jesus 
 communicated this revelation to John, 2. who transmitted 
 faithfully all things that he saw. 3. Blessed the man who 
 reads and hears and lays to heart what is here recorded, 
 for the time is come when it shall be fulfilled. 
 
 Notes v. 1 Revelation used only in the New Testament in 
 the sense of an unfolding of future events. For other uses, 
 see Lk. 12:2; Rom. 8:19, 16:25; Gal. 1:12; II Thess. 2:8. 
 The full name Jesus Christ used only in this chapter (and 
 22:21). Elsewhere Jesus is used. Shortly come to pass i.e., 
 the book deals with contemporary and not with mediaeval or 
 modern history, v. 3 The book is to be read publicly in the 
 churches, together with the Old Testament (I Tim. 4:13) 
 and the writings of the Apostles (Col. 4:16; I Thess. 5:27). 
 
 2. The Introduction (1:4-8). John greets the seven churches 
 in Asia, invoking upon them the grace and peace of God and 
 of Christ. God is here described, as many times in the book, 
 with the attribute of timelessness. By the seven (the perfect 
 number) spirits, is meant the spirit of God Himself, "per- 
 fect and one in its various workings." Christ has been a 
 faithful witness, and was raised from the dead to be the 
 divine ruler of men. There follows this beautiful ascription 
 to Christ, one of the most familiar in the New Testament 
 and one which must have been unspeakably eloquent to the 
 persecuted Christians to whom it first came, since it reminded 
 them that Christ gained his heavenly peace through suffering, 
 that his love will not only cleanse us from sin but will exalt 
 us to be kings and priests with Him. It is this Christ who 
 is coming to judge the world (Dan. 7:13; Zech. 12:10). 
 God attests this by his Name (Ex. 3:14; Isaiah 44:6, 48:12). 
 
 This passage is of great interest in the development of 
 Christian doctrine, since we have here a loosely formulated 
 Trinitarian formula. The unique thing about it is that the 
 Spirit is put second and not third. The ascription to Christ, 
 who is given divine prerogatives, is evidence of the impres- 
 sion produced by the personality of Christ and by the real- 
 
52 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 ities of Christian experience upon the mind of this Jewish 
 Christian writer, "a true son of a race with which monotheism 
 had become a passion." The description of God contains the 
 important idea of God as a living and active participant in 
 the affairs of men. "Him who is and was and is to come" 
 implies his presence. It means God is here. All great relig- 
 ious characters have lived and labored in that persuasion. 
 It is the ground of the Social Hope. The earliest Gospel in- 
 sists upon the close connection between Christ and freedom 
 from slavery to sin; from the first it has been "freedom for 
 service"; for we are to be citizens of a spiritual kingdom, 
 having like priests, access to God in order that we may 
 minister to the spiritual needs of men. Early in the book the 
 idea is conveyed, which runs through it to the end, of an 
 omnipotent Christ overthrowing evil and discomfiting his 
 foes. The idea, familiar to readers of Paul's letters (Rom. 
 8:37; I Cor. 15:24) and the Epistle to the Hebrews, is here 
 given true expression. This spiritual idea will lie at the root 
 of the Christian faith in the second coming of Christ. In 
 the end, that is, it is to be a Christ victorious. In that faith 
 we can labor with serenity and hope. This is the source and 
 unshakable basis of the Christian optimism which is one of 
 the outstanding characteristics of the Book of Revelation. 
 
 Chapter 1:4. John greets the seven churches in Asia 
 with the blessing of God and of the spirits of God perfect 
 in all their manifestations, 5. and of Christ who was a 
 faithful witness and was raised from the dead and made 
 the ruler of the kings of the earth. To Him who by his 
 love not only redeemed us from sin, 6. but made us also 
 to be kings and priests, be glory and power forever. 7. 
 Look, He comes upon the clouds and all shall see Him who 
 crucified Him and shall be filled with terror and dismay. 
 8. I, the Lord God, who am and who was, shall also come, 
 even the Almighty. 
 
 Notes v. 4 John He is evidently so well known to his 
 readers that further identification is unnecessary. Seven 
 churches Many other churches are known to have existed in 
 the province (e.g. Colossae, Col. 1:2, Troas, II Cor. 2:12). 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 53 
 
 These seven represent not only all churches in Asia, but the 
 whole church in the world. It is a book with a universal 
 message to a universal church. Seven spirits (See 3:1, 4:5, 
 5:6.) The Holy Spirit is meant. The figure is taken from 
 Zech. 4:2-10. v. 5 first-begotten See Col. 1:18; prince (or 
 ruler), i.e., the common Messianic conception of Christ. (See 
 17:14, 19:16.) v. 6 (See Dan. 7:18, 27; I Cor. 6:2. See also 
 Ex. 19:6.) v. 7 (See Matt. 24:30; Mark 13:26; Luke 21:27. 
 Also, Zech. 12:10-12.) v. 8 An unannounced change of 
 speaker is common with the writer. (See 16:15, 18:20.) 
 For this thought of God, cf. Isa. 41:4, 44:6, 48:12. In 22:13 
 practically this same language is applied to Christ. 
 
 3. The Prophet's Call and Commission (1:9-20). The au- 
 thor describes in detail how he was commissioned to give 
 this prophecy. In this, he follows the example of many of 
 the Old Testament prophets. (1) With the aid of a good map 
 and reference to W. M. Ramsay's "The Letters to the Seven 
 Churches," the reader will study the geography of Asia 
 Minor, and familiarize himself with the topography of the 
 whole region. Patmos was an island lying about fifteen miles 
 off the coast from Ephesus. It was some thirty miles in cir- 
 cumference, and thither exiles were sent to work in the mines 
 and marble quarries. (2) Read Dan. 10:5-9 and Zech. 4:4-6, 
 and see how closely in his description of Christ the author 
 has followed the "apocalyptical model." This imagery is not 
 original with the writer, but is adopted from the Jewish 
 literature with which he is familiar. (3) Note the tender way 
 in which the author speaks of himself as their brother and 
 fellow in their sufferings. In "the tribulation and kingdom" 
 they were partakers together. Thus in every moment of social 
 stress and struggle the modern Christian may feel himself 
 to be the companion of the apostles and martyr of all the 
 ages. (4) Think of the hope expressed in the faith that the 
 living Christ was in the sphere in which they lived and labored 
 and suffered. This has been ever since the source of the 
 abounding social hope of all Christians. Compare Kingsley's 
 
54 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 words: "I am struggling through infinite darkness and chaos 
 by means of one great bright pathway which I find to be 
 the only escape from infinite confusion, the only explanation 
 of a thousand human mysteries — I mean the Incarnation of 
 our Lord." Compare also Hebrews 2 :8, 9, where, in the 
 midst of a ruined world the writer is full of courage because 
 he can "see Jesus," although "now we see not yet all things put 
 under him." There is no substitute for this vision of Christ 
 as the sure ground of social optimism. Only to those who 
 share this vision can the words be spoken, "Fear not." (5) 
 The question of whether these visions were an objective reality 
 or not is not one upon which one can dogmatize. An objective 
 experience of this kind lay behind the life and work of St. 
 Paul, of St. Augustine, of St. Francis and of Martin Luther, 
 to mention only a few outstanding historical examples. One 
 would need to know more than is known about religious psy 
 chology to assert that the visions in this book were a mere 
 literary device; at the same time the value and moral meaning 
 of the Book of Revelation do not depend on any one theory 
 concerning the nature of visions. (6) Note the suggestive 
 symbolism of the churches, (a) Each church has a person- 
 ality of its own. There are seven distinct and separate lamps, 
 (b) The function of the church is to give light, whether as 
 a lamp within or as a star shining overhead, (c) This light 
 is drawn from Christ Himself, who walks among them that 
 He may replenish them and keep them burning. 
 
 "0 make thy church, dear Saviour, 
 A lamp of burnished gold 
 To bear before the nations 
 Thy true light as of old." 
 
 Chapter 1:9. I, John, your companion in faith and afflic- 
 tion, was in the island of Patmos in banishment because I 
 preached the Gospel. 10. On the Lord's day I was inspired, 
 so that I heard a loud voice 11. commanding me to write 
 what I heard to the seven chief churches in Asia. 12. 
 When I turned to see who spoke, 13. I saw Christ Himself 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 55 
 
 standing in the midst of seven candlesticks. He was clothed 
 like a priest, 14. but his aspect was kingly, with flaming 
 eyes and 15. shining feet and a voice like the roaring sea. 
 16. He had seven stars in his right hand and a sword 
 came out of his mouth. 17. I was overcome at the sight. 
 But he touched me and told me not to be afraid, saying: 
 18. I, too, am first and last, and am alive forever and have 
 gained authority over Death. 19. Write the things that 
 you have seen and shall see. 20. The meaning of the 
 stars and the candlesticks is this: the candlesticks are 
 the churches, and the stars are their angels, their spirit. 
 
 Notes v. 9 The personal reference (cf. Dan. 8:1, 10:2; 
 II Esdras 2:42, 3:1) is to emphasize the fellowship between 
 writer and reader. For the testimony i.e. because of, in ban- 
 ishment for preaching the Gospel, v. 10 A state of ecstasy is 
 meant, (cf. 4:2, 17:3, 21:10. See also Acts 22:17, II Cor. 
 12:3, 4.) Lord's Day i.e. the first day of the week. (I Cor. 
 16:2; Acts 20:7.) The expression is here used for the first 
 time, but it must already have been in common use. V. 12 
 For the lamp-stand as symbol of the church, cf. Matt. 5:14, 
 Phil. 2:15. (See Zech. 4.) v. 13ff. This description of Christ 
 (v. 17) is taken from Dan. 10:5-6, 7:9. We touch thus early 
 on the "exalted Christology" of this book. The sword in 
 the mouth (v. 16) occurs frequently in the book (cf. 2:12, 
 16, 19:15, 21. See also Isa. 11:4; Heb. 4:12). v. 16 Stars 
 (Possibly suggested by Dan. 12:3) These are another symbol 
 of the churches. If lamp-stands suggests the presence of 
 Christ in the church, the stars suggest his power to uphold it. 
 v. 17 (See Ezek. 1:28; Dan. 8:17; Matt. 17:6; Acts 26:14.) 
 v. 18 Keys cf. the expression "gates of death." Hades was 
 popularly looked upon as a prison-house of the dead (cf. 
 Matt. 16:19; Rev. 3:7, 9:1, 20:1). v. 19 The things which the 
 prophet has seen are defined in the two clauses which follow 
 (and not in what has preceded) : viz. (1) the present con- 
 dition of the churches, and the Lord's special message to them, 
 as well as the present and eternal presence of God and of 
 Christ ("the things that are"), and (2) the coming judg- 
 ments and their results ("the things that shall be"), v. 20 
 
56 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Mystery, i.e. something secret, which is disclosed only to 
 special persons, in special ways. (See Dan. 2:18; Rev. 
 17:5, 7.) 
 
 4. The Messages to the Churches (chapters 2, 3). All of 
 these messages must be studied in two ways: first, with re- 
 spect to the immediate historical situation, and, second, in 
 their broader aspect as spiritual messages to the church 
 universal. Even in the writer's day, the number seven was 
 symbolic. There were many more churches in Asia than these 
 seven. The number is used to include them all. In an even 
 more inclusive sense, the number seven can be taken to in- 
 clude all churches of whatever age or clime. "The idea that 
 the individual church is part of the universal church, that it 
 stands for it after the usual symbolic fashion of the Apoca- 
 lypse, is never far from the writer's mind. And he passes 
 rapidly between the two points of view, the direct address to 
 the local church . . . and the general application ... to 
 the entire Church as symbolised by the particular local 
 church." * Our study of the messages will have regard to both 
 of these viewpoints. The reader will have no difficulty in 
 tracing the materials in these chapters to their sources in the 
 Old Testament. The reader will also bear in mind that these 
 messages are not to be considered as a section by themselves 
 as if they had no relation to what precedes and follows. That 
 connection, on the contrary, is very close. If you take the 
 seven descriptions of Christ in the letters and put them to- 
 gether, you will have the full description of Christ as found 
 in chapter I. The author is carrying out in detail his idea 
 of the living Christ present in the actual life of the churches. 
 Furthermore, it is the author's evident dramatic purpose to 
 address solemn words of exhortation and warning to the 
 churches to overcome and to hold fast and let no man take 
 their crown, before proceeding to unfold the terrible panorama 
 of the triumphant struggle of Christ with Satan, of the 
 church with the Roman Empire. 
 
 1 See Ramsay, op. cit, pp. 200, 206. 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 57 
 
 (1) The Message to the Church at Ephesus (2:1-7) 
 
 Ephesus was at this time the foremost city of Asia Minor in 
 rank, historical importance and wealth. It was a great com- 
 mercial center, and also the home of many non-Christian re- 
 ligious cults, and the site of the famous Temple of Diana. At 
 the time that this book was written, adherents of the "Nicolai- 
 tans" who had defended unchastity and idolatry, had preached 
 there. But the church had rejected them and resisted their 
 teaching. Evidently, however, brotherly love had suffered in 
 the struggle, and this the church is exhorted to regain. 
 
 Chapter 2:1. To the guardian-angel of the church at 
 Ephesus write: He who controls and is in the midst of 
 the churches, says, 2, 3. I am aware of your patient endur- 
 ance and your refusal to tolerate evil men and faljse 
 apostles. 4. Yet you have lost something of your brotherly 
 love. 5. This you must recover upon penalty of losing your 
 position as a true church of Christ. 6. Your zeal against 
 the Nicolaitans is praiseworthy. 7. He who is victorious 
 shall eat of the tree of life. 
 
 Notes The reader will familiarize himself with the city of 
 Ephesus, its location, wealth, influence. (See Acts 19 :21ff. 
 Also W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul, the Roman Citizen; and The 
 Letters to the Seven Churches, pp. 210ff. Also Hastings' 
 Bible Dictionary in loco.) v. 1 The message is to the angel 
 of the church: i.e. the church's real spirit, or as we might 
 say "better self"; that "self which is always stimulated to con- 
 sciousness whenever God's voice is truly heard by it." It is 
 always to the angel in the church (or in us) that God speaks. 
 v. 2 I know thy works. "Every act of faith, every ministry 
 of self-denial, every humble acceptance of the Cross . . . 
 has its record in heaven." * Think how insignificant was this 
 handful of Christians in great pagan Ephesus. What an en- 
 couraging example to any little congregation that feels itself 
 to be lost amid its surrounding worldliness! Apostles, i.e. 
 itinerant preachers. (See II Cor. 11:5, 13, 12:11.) Warn- 
 
 1 Scott, p. 56. 
 
58 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 ings against false teachers appear throughout the New Testa- 
 ment. It is a great power which belonged to that church to 
 distinguish between the true and the false. To-day in the 
 midst of many "strange doctrines" and aberrations from the 
 simplicity of Christ, it is a distinction if the church can "di- 
 vine where real right doth lie" and hold to the norm of Chris- 
 tian truth, v. 3 Note that this church already had suffered 
 severe persecutions. These are the background of the whole 
 book of Revelation, v. 4 Love in its outward and social mani- 
 festations, in its objective power and initiative is the true 
 "thermometer" of the life of the church, v. 5 For an ingenious 
 explanation of this as a change in geographical location, see 
 Ramsay, "Seven Churches," p. 245. v. 6 No matter how often 
 we may fail, to hate what God hates is to be in the way of 
 salvation, v. 7 The tree of life in the Paradise of God — thus 
 the last book of the Bible joins hands with the first. What 
 man was forbidden to eat there because of sin, he is bidden 
 to eat here because he has been "washed and made clean." 
 
 (2) The Letter to Smyrna (2:8-11) 
 
 Smyrna, a city of great antiquity, is the only one of the 
 seven cities that to-day is of any importance. Its prosperity 
 is due to its wonderful seaport location. In New Testament 
 times it rivaled Ephesus in importance, was closely bound to 
 Rome, and was the chosen site of the Temple built in honor 
 of the Emperor Tiberius. In such an environment the primi- 
 tive church confronted overwhelming odds. Up to this time 
 Smyrna had been free from Roman, persecutions, which, 
 however, are about to begin. Their trial, like St. Paul's, 
 had been at the hands of the Jews. We see here the transi- 
 tion from the one to the other. The tomb of Polycarp the 
 Martyr (155 A.D.), still shown at Smyrna, is witness both 
 to the reality and also to the end of the persecution of the 
 church at Smyrna. How much it needed, how much we need 
 to-day, the comfort of Him who is the present Christ, and who 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 59 
 
 Himself came out of death into life ! Not a word of blame is 
 attached to this church of Christ's poor; only the unforget- 
 table promise of the crown of life. By the crown is to be 
 understood not a material object, like the laurel wreaths 
 of the victor, but the spiritual reward of a larger and more 
 abundant life. This is the true Christian doctrine of reward. 
 
 Chapter 2:8. To the guardian-angel of the church of 
 Smyrna write: He who died and lives eternally says: 9. I 
 know your steadfastness amid the persecutions of those who 
 falsely call themselves Jesus. 10. Do not fear the even 
 worse trials which are about to befall you. Be faithful 
 and you will win the martyrs' prize. 11. The conqueror 
 will suffer the death of the body but not of the soul. 
 
 Notes Read about Smyrna. (See Ramsay, "The Letter to 
 the Seven Churches," op. cit. pp. 251ff, and other authorities). 
 v. 9 Throughout the Book of Revelation the Christian is, to 
 the mind of the writer, the true Jew. v. 10 In the expression 
 ten days we have the first of many time indications to be 
 found in the book. The symbolism of numbers in apocalypti- 
 cal writing precludes the possibility of understanding them 
 literally when referring to extension in time or space. When 
 they refer to objects, the writer doubtless has a definite number 
 in mind. But in regard to time and space the numbers de- 
 note generalized ideas: such as completeness, perfection, 
 (three, seven, twelve) ; or unknown duration (as a thousand 
 years) ; or a broken period of time (three and three and a 
 half and its multiples). The effort to construct actual time- 
 tables of events out of this symbolic use of numbers can only 
 be called grotesque. The student will recall how this numeri- 
 cal symbolism is carried over from Jewish writings (See Dan. 
 9:25; 12:11, 12). Ten days The writer here means to convey 
 the idea that the time of persecution will be brief and definite. 
 The fact that a fixed time is set for the triumph of evil is one 
 of the characteristic comforts in all apocalypses. A reviving 
 of this idea would have much to do with the invigoration of 
 our Social Hope. It is the time relation which perplexes and 
 finds its utterance in the cry "How long?" The idea that 
 
60 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 this answer is known to God, if not to us, is a source of social 
 inspiration. 
 
 (3) The Church at Pergamum (2:12-17) 
 
 Pergamum had been the royal city of ancient native king's, 
 and situated on a high hill, it was royal to behold. It re- 
 mained, at least to the end of the century, the seat of the 
 Roman government and the residence of the pro-consul of 
 Asia. The phrase "Where Satan has his throne," is an un- 
 doubted and intensely interesting reference to Pergamum as 
 the seat of emperor-worship in Asia Minor. This included the 
 erection of temples, the first of which was built at Pergamum, 
 since it was the seat of the provincial government. The plain 
 reference to a martyr by name is proof that persecution for 
 failure to worship the Emperor already had begun, and refer- 
 ence to the Nicolaitans shows how general was this perni- 
 cious teaching. Surely for these little churches there were 
 "fears within and foes without." Consider what a witness to 
 the austere morality existing in these little Christian com- 
 munities in the midst of heathen licentiousness is indicated 
 by the sharp rebuke to this persecuted church because of the 
 lapse of a few of its members. 1 But behind and above that 
 church was the two-edged sword of One who is King of Kings 
 and Lord of Lords, mighty to save. There is social comfort 
 there for Pergamum of old and for many a church at Per- 
 gamum to-day. 
 
 Chapter 2: 12. To the guardian-angel of the church at 
 Pergamum write: He whose words can cut like a sword 
 says: 13. I know that you are in the center of Satanic 
 persecution, and that although a martyr has already fallen, 
 you did not deny me. 14. Yet there are some among you 
 who practice and teach immoralities, 15. and the heresies I 
 hate. 16. Eepent, or I will come and destroy you. 17. The 
 victor shall receive mystic food and a secret name written 
 on stone. 
 
 1 See Ernst von Dobschiitz, Christian Life in the Primitive Church, 
 1904, 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 61 
 
 Notes Pergamum (the neuter is the more common form). 
 (See Ramsay, op. eit. pp. 281fT., and consult other authorities 
 as above.) v. 12 The idea is the destroying power of the con- 
 demnation of Christ, so frequently appearing in this book, 
 v. 13 Satan's throne, i. e. the seat of Emperor-worship. Noth- 
 ing more is known of Antipas. v. 14 Balaam. (See Num. 
 31:16ff.) v. 15 Nicolaitans. Our only knowledge of this sect 
 is the information contained in this book. v. 17 For the 
 source of the word hidden manna, see Ex. 16:32-34, Heb. 
 9 :4. It was manna "kept before the ark in the holy place 
 which was hidden by God when the temple was destroyed, 
 and kept for the Messianic age." * To eat of this manna 
 was to be one of the joys of the Messianic Age. (See 
 John 6:48-51.) Christ Himself to the Christian is thus the 
 heavenly manna. For the source of the secret name, it is 
 probable that we must look not to Jewish sources but to the 
 pagan practice of attaching mystical and even magical signifi- 
 cance to secret names, the knowledge of which conferred 
 supernatural powers and unlocked mysteries, since they were 
 regarded as a password or Open Sesame. The white stone, 
 an amulet containing the victor's name as an inscription, 
 giving power against every enemy. But Christ gives a 
 new secret name which opens the gates of everlasting life. 
 If this explanation is the correct one, how it illustrates the 
 way in which even the most superstitious ideas of the age 
 could be turned to divine uses by the Spirit of a Christian 
 inspiration ! 2 
 
 (4) The Church at Thyatira (2:18-29) 
 
 This letter is the longest and the most obscure and difficult. 
 Thyatira was a town of little importance. It had no natural 
 advantages, no famous past history. It was the humblest of 
 all the seven cities. Its chief industry was that of dyeing 
 woolen goods. It was a Gentile church, and the Jews are not 
 
 1 Porter, p. 206. 
 
 2 See Beckwith, pp. 462, 3. 
 
62 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 mentioned. It had had a good record of love and service, 
 but the Nicolaitan teachings, resisted elsewhere, had gained 
 the upper hand here, and for this the church is severely con- 
 demned, in the hope that it may be summoned to repentance. 
 
 Chapter 2: 18. Also write to the guardian-angel of the 
 church at Thyatire: He whose vision searches the heart 
 and who abides in strength says: 19. I know your many 
 virtues. 20. But you permit the presence of a false prophet- 
 ess who teaches you false doctrines and practices. 21. She 
 has refused to repent, 22. and I will destroy her and her 
 devotees, 23. that all the churches may know that I dis- 
 cern the heart. 24. I add no other warning to those of you 
 who have not known, as they say, the deep things of Satan, 
 25. except to hold fast. 26. The conqueror will rule over 
 the Gentiles. 27. and they shall be destroyed as God Him- 
 self said. 28. Also I will give him the brightness of the 
 morning-star. 29. Give heed to this message. 
 
 Notes For Thyatira, See Ramsay and Hastings, v. 18 A 
 picture of the all-seeing and kingly Christ, (cf. II. Chron. 
 16:9, Luke 2:35, 8:17; I Cor. 4:5, 14:25; Heb. 4:13.) 
 How ably this description completes the picture of the "meek 
 and lowly Jesus," as an authoritative reviewer and arbiter 
 in our world of chaotic and unjust social conditions ! The feet 
 of burnished brass are indicative of strength. Note that the 
 attributes of omniscience and omnipotence ascribed to Christ 
 are those which are the most characteristic attributes of God in 
 the Old Testament. Yet here in the New Testament we find 
 a Jewish writer raising Jesus to the plane of God. It is 
 indirect evidence of the impression produced by Christ which 
 could create this revolution of thought, v. 19 "Love, faith, 
 ministry, patience." What a wonderful record for a church 
 in the days in which this book was written, record which can 
 be paralleled to-day on many a mission field at home and 
 abroad ! It suggests the full spiritual program for any 
 church, v. 20 Study the use of the words "prophets" and 
 "prophecy" in the New Testament as related to the life of the 
 church, by the use of Hastings' Bible Dictionary. Prophets 
 were a recognized class in the primitive churches, second only 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHUECHES 63 
 
 to apostles, whose claim rested upon "gifts of the Spirit." 
 Then, as now, the distinction between true and false prophets 
 was possible only by an enlightened conscience (cf. Deut. 
 13:1-3). This false teaching in lax morals has its parallel 
 in our day. The question of partaking of idolatrous sacri- 
 fices evidently continued to be a burning one after St. Paul's 
 day. "No other burden" is an evident echo from Acts 15. A 
 distinction is to be made between eating things strangled with 
 blood and being participators in idolatrous feasts which would 
 be equivalent to idolatrous worship (cf. Acts 15 :28 and I Cor. 
 10:21). It may well be that in this case these feasts were 
 accompanied with licentiousness (cf. Jude 4, 7). As against 
 all this teaching that the freedom of the Christian life implied 
 freedom also from the moral law, cf . Rom. 6 :1, 2, Gal. 5 :13ff. 
 v. 24 The deep things of Satan i.e. plainly unholy things 
 which are "camouflaged" as profound truths which only the 
 learned and initiated can understand. Precisely so in our 
 day, departures from the simple rules of conduct are often 
 spoken of as evidences of a higher worldly wisdom, v. 26 The 
 rule over the nations included the Roman Empire itself. What 
 a wonderful confirmation of this apparently impossible pro- 
 phecy is afforded by the history of Christianity during the 
 two centuries which followed! v. 28 morning-star. An ob- 
 scure symbol, perhaps derived from Dan. 12:3. (See Job. 
 38:7.) In 22:16, Christ Himself is the morning-star. 
 
 (5) The Church at Sardis (3:1-6) 
 
 Sardis had been the capital of a great kingdom, but its 
 glory had waned. Its natural situation gave it the appear- 
 ance of being impregnable, yet it had often been taken. 
 When this letter was written, it had been outstripped by its 
 rivals Ephesus and Smyrna, and was of third-rate importance. 
 The history of the city is thus closely paralleled by the history 
 of the church within. Apparently it had had an untroubled 
 history; nothing is said of hostility or persecution. The very 
 
64 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 lack of it may account for its indifference and apathy. The 
 purpose of the message is to call it back to life. 
 
 Chapter 3: 1. And write this to the guardian-angel of 
 the Church at Sardis: He that has divine omniscience 
 says: I know that you are thought to be alive. In reality 
 you are dead. 2. Wake up and reinforce what little good 
 remains, for nothing that you have done is complete before 
 God. 3. Eecall what you have learned and repent, lest I 
 come upon you with sudden judgment. 4. There are some 
 undefiled persons left among you who will walk with me 
 when I come. 5. These shall be found written in the book 
 of life and shall be known before God as my disciples. 
 6. Give heed to this message. 
 
 Notes For Sardis, see Ramsay, pp. 369ff. Also Hastings' 
 Bible Dictionary, v. 1 By comparing v. 1 with chapter 2, v. 1, 
 a difference is noted. There Christ is represented as walking 
 amid the candlesticks. Here we are told that Christ 
 holds in his hand not only the seven stars but also the seven 
 spirits of God. In this new phrase the author may desire 
 to express the idea that although the earthly influence (candle- 
 sticks) of the church at Sardis has waned, its heavenly coun- 
 terpart (stars) still remains, and that Christ through his 
 Spirit is still able to revive the soul of his church. This idea 
 of the essential immortality of the earthly shrine of the spirit 
 of Christ is beautiful and true. Thou art dead. This is true of 
 many a modern church which has lost its communicating and 
 vitalizing power, and of many people who may seem to be 
 healthy, but are not, in any real spiritual sense, alive. It be- 
 comes a most earnest and practical question with any soul : Am 
 I dead or am I alive? To what extent can it be said that I am 
 truly living? v. 2 Always for purposes of self -recovery, one 
 can establish what remains. This is the secret of the op- 
 timism of all true social workers. Like their Master, they 
 "know what is in man" (John 2:25), and their eyes pierce 
 through the outward corruption to the divine remainder of 
 manhood within, and proceed to build upon that. If there 
 was such a remainder in the church at Sardis, surely there is 
 in its modern counterpart, whether church or individual. 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 65 
 
 Always there is at least the memory of what has been heard 
 at home, at church, of prayer, God, Christ, Bible. To hold 
 fast to this and to repent is the beginning of a new life, 
 w. 4, 5 We have here the suggestion of the "inner shrine" 
 of even this corrupted church, the undefiled souls of the faith- 
 ful remnant. Even in the most decadent church to-day this 
 saving remnant can always be found. The origin of the 
 phrase the book of life goes back to the Old Testament (Ex. 
 32:32; Ps. 69:28; Dan. 7:10; Mai. 3:16). It is there used 
 as the roll of the blessed as it is used here. But in Rev. 20 :12 
 it is also used as the book of judgment in which the deeds of 
 men are recorded. It is in this latter sense that chief use has 
 been made of the figure by Christian theology. I will confess 
 his name, a reminiscence, and almost a quotation of one of 
 the words of Jesus: Matt. 10:32; Mark 8:38; Lk. 12:8. 
 
 (6) The Church at Philadelphia (3:7-13) 
 
 The city was so named because of the loyal conduct of 
 Attalus Philadelphus toward his brother and predecessor 
 Eumenes II. It was founded B.C. 189. It was a place of 
 importance in the imperial organization of Asia, possessing 
 wealth and influence, and serving as a trade center for the dis- 
 trict. The message warns of trials to come, urges fidelity, and 
 promises a sure reward. A singular interest attaching to this 
 epistle is the description it gives in v. 9 of the relation of an- 
 cient Israel to the "true Israel" of God, "one which must have 
 perplexed every Christian Jew." * 
 
 Chapter 3: 7. And to the guardian-angel of the church 
 at Philadelphia write: He that is holy and true and 
 has authority to admit and exclude whom he will, says, 
 8. I know your faithfulness. With but a little strength, 
 you have not denied me. 9. I will cause the false Jews to 
 be subject to you. 10. Because of your fidelity, I will 
 guard you in the day of judgment. 11. Expect my coming, 
 that you do not lose your reward. 12. The victor shall have 
 
 1 See Beckwith, op. cit., pp. 477, 478. 
 
66 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 a permanent place in God's temple, and shall be known as 
 belonging to God, and as a citizen of the Heavenly City. 
 13. Give heed to this message. 
 
 Notes For Philadelphia, see Ramsay, pp. 391ff., and other 
 authorities, v. 7 This epithet is taken from Isa. 22:22. (See. 
 Heb. 3:6; Matt. 16:19), and expresses supreme power, v. 8 
 open door This refers possibly to its position "on the thresh- 
 old of the eastern country and to the rapidity with which 
 the new religion was spreading . . . through the cities con- 
 nected with Philadelphia." The door gives an entrance into 
 missionary activity. How true it is of every church to-day that 
 such a spiritual opportunity is presented to it. (Compare I 
 Cor. 16:9; II Cor. 2:12; Col. 4:3). The reward for this 
 church of faithful work at home was the presenting of larger 
 opportunity beyond. Thus the spiritual history of this church 
 is an illustration in primitive Christianity of our Lord's par- 
 able of the talents. 1 v. 9 The synagogue of Satan (cf. chap. 
 2:9.) Note in this verse, which is quite in accord with the 
 teaching of Christ in Matt. 20:26-28, the reversal of the 
 prophecy in Isa. 61 :4-6. Without doubt the primitive Chris- 
 tians were persecuted by the Jews for the same reason that 
 Christ Himself was. Their teaching, like his, seemed to con- 
 flict with the intense nationalistic and "patriotic" sentiment of 
 the Jews "to which its monotheism served as a buttress." To 
 what extent to-day does Christian teaching take issue with the 
 spirit of nationalism and "patriotism" falsely so-called? v. 10 
 "The reward of keeping is being kept." Even this church 
 to which no word of reproach is directed is not to escape trial, 
 but it is to be kept through trial. The reward of virtue and 
 fidelity is never immunity from pain, nor outward prosperity 
 but the fellowship of Christ in suffering, v. 11 "I come 
 quickly." This is a note frequently heard throughout this 
 book, and repeated in its last verse. In its most literal signi- 
 fication it may well refer to the Advent hope of all early Chris- 
 tians, which was not literally fulfilled. Doubtless for them 
 
 1 The phrase may, however, mean simply an entrance into the glories 
 of Christ's kingdom. See Rev. 3 : 20, 4:1; John 10 : 7, 9. 
 
INTRODUCTION AND MESSAGES TO CHURCHES 67 
 
 also, however, it meant the impending judgment of Christ upon 
 the old world order, which was fulfilled. For all of us it 
 contains the solemn truth of the imminence of a divine judg- 
 ment upon all social iniquity and also the speedy revelation 
 of the worth of every soul when it stands open and manifest 
 in his sight (I Cor. 4, 5). v. 12ff. The promise of stability 
 is given to a city in which the memory of a devastating earth- 
 quake was still fresh. (See Ramsay pp. 408ff. cf. Heb. 12 :27- 
 28.) In place of a statue in an earthly temple with one's name 
 inscribed upon it, the faithful shall be under God's own name 
 and sign (John 10:3; II Tim. 2:19), and be admitted and 
 declared members of the divine society of men (cf. Eph. 
 2:19-22). 
 
 (8) The Church at Laodicea (3:14-22) 
 
 The history of this church is the opposite of that at Phila- 
 delphia. The city lay mid-way in a long valley connecting 
 Ephesus with the East. It was the judicial and financial cen- 
 ter of the district, founded for the purpose of transmitting 
 to the interior Greek civilization and commerce, but failing 
 in the accomplishment of this purpose. It imported, but 
 failed to export; it received but failed to give. It grew to be 
 a luxurious but ineffective center of wealth, and died from self- 
 indulgence and apathy. This church was not suffering from 
 either immorality or heresy, but from self-complacency and 
 satisfaction. The teaching of Revelation accords with that of 
 Christ in condemnation of the self-righteous Pharisee, the 
 unprofitable servant, the harmless, respectable, "moral" church 
 or individual. Selfishness, whether in church or individual, 
 is the cardinal Christian sin. There may be more harm and 
 danger in negative morality than in open hostility. Saul 
 of Tarsus may become St. Paul the Apostle, but there is no 
 future for one who is neither hot nor cold. 
 
 Chapter 3: 14. Also to the guardian-angel of the church 
 at Laodicea write: He whose word is truth, the faithful 
 witness-bearer, who stands at the head of creation, says: 
 
68 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 15. Because you are indifferent, neither good nor bad, 16. 
 I will abhor you; 17. for you are rich outwardly but spirit- 
 ually you are bankrupt. 18. I advise you to get from me 
 true riches, the wedding garment, and salve for blindness. 
 19. If I speak severely, it is only because I love you. 20. 
 I am ready to come in wherever I am welcomed as a guest. 
 21. The conqueror will share in my triumph even as I 
 shared in that of my Father. 22. Give heed, to this mes- 
 sage. 
 
 Notes For Laodicea, see authorities as above, v. 14 Christ 
 is here described as the creative agent of God. (John 1:3; 
 Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2) v. 18 Laodicea was renowned for its 
 fabrics, 1 the materials for which were provided by a famous 
 black wool. It also had a medical school and manufactured 
 an ointment for the eyes which was everywhere sought and 
 used. These features of its material prosperity are used 
 to prescribe for its spiritual needs. V. 20. "I stand at the 
 door." We commonly think of truth as hiding itself behind 
 a door to which we must find the key, 2 when, as a matter 
 of fact, from Genesis (Gen. 3:9) to Revelation, we are shown 
 God and Christ as seeking us. "If any man will but open the 
 door, I will come in." v. 21 The rewards and blessings of 
 life here and hereafter are not for those who seek to escape 
 the hard things of life, but for those who, taking their share 
 of life's hardships, endure and overcome. (See Mark 8:34; 
 II Tim. 2:3.) True men are not looking for the easy thing. 
 In sports, in work, or in adventure it is the call to the heroic 
 that wins a response. This is the martial summons of the 
 Bible, not to a life of indolent acceptance of blessings pre- 
 pared for it, but to the sacrificial life that dares and endures. 
 The recovery of this appeal would mean the winning of men to 
 Christ and his cause. 
 
 1 See Ramsay, pp. 428, 9. 
 
 2 See F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, pp. 107-9. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ETERNAL BACKGROUND 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 4 and 5 
 
 THE literary and spiritual purpose of these two chapters, 
 and their place in the unfolding drama of the Apoca- 
 lypse, are not hard to understand. The exhortation to the 
 churches of Asia and through them to the churches of every 
 place and time having been completed, the author is about 
 to address himself to the revelation which has been given him 
 of the judgment of God upon the world and of the impending 
 trial and persecution of his people, which is to result in the 
 victory of his cause and the reward of the faithful. Before, 
 however, proceeding to a description of this struggle, tre- 
 mendous in its scope and its consequences, the author gives us, 
 in these two chapters, as a background against which this battle 
 will be fought, a description first of the almighty and infinite 
 God, and then of the omnipotent and invincible Christ. The 
 purpose may have been to give the reader confidence in the out- 
 come before he finds himself in the midst of the struggle. 
 Always we must remember those early Christians for whom 
 the book was primarily written. It is easy to understand the 
 spiritual meaning of these chapters for those who were called 
 upon to defend the cause of Christ with their lives. For all 
 martyrs and witnesses and workers for Christ in every age, 
 these chapters contain this imperishable hope that behind the 
 battle, and watching over its issues, there is the eternal God, 
 our refuge; there is the captain of our salvation who has gone 
 forth conquering and to conquer. 
 
 In this appeal the author is true to the central teaching of 
 
 69 
 
70 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION" 
 
 the Bible and to the central fact of Christian experience. The 
 ultimate basis of the Social Hope for the Christian lies in the 
 conviction of a living God and of a living and energizing 
 Christ. These are the two indispensable convictions under- 
 lying a permanent Christian optimism. When these convic- 
 tions exist, one can do full justice, as does the author of the 
 Book of Revelation, to the fact of evil, without losing any of 
 one's social confidence. There lies the ultimate and permanent 
 meaning of these chapters. 
 
 To choose an instance from history to illustrate this point: 
 what was the source of the extraordinary spiritual inspiration 
 which led to the founding of the American Commonwealth, and 
 laid the basis of our modern political and religious liberties? 
 We find that it lay in a complete and overmastering con- 
 viction of the reality of God as the ruler of men and -of their 
 moral destiny. When we ask what manner of men these were 
 and what the guiding truth and impulse was that impelled 
 them to their great acts of faith and fortitude, we find the 
 truth of God lying at the root and center of their lives, as 
 the all-controlling motive, guiding alike their lives and the 
 destiny of the cause of which they were the instruments. That 
 creed is perhaps the most sublime that any man can hold; 
 that creed will take men anywhere and prepare them for any- 
 thing; that creed is essential to human happiness and to human 
 progress. The world has rarely produced greater men than 
 have been found under its influence. It was the creed of the 
 Calvinists and of our Puritan forefathers. Merely to mention 
 the fact that Calvinism gave to the world such men as William 
 the Silent, Admiral Coligny, John Knox of Scotland, Oliver 
 Cromwell of England, Jonathan Edwards of America, ought 
 to make us realize that the world owes to it a debt which can 
 never be repaid. "We may repudiate, and we do, the extreme 
 Calvinistic dogmas; but let us frankly acknowledge what was 
 great and noble in it. It was an iron creed, but it made iron 
 men; so that the world never knew braver or stronger men 
 than Calvinism bred. This humbling creed which laid a man 
 
THE ETEENAL BACKGROUND 71 
 
 prostrate before his Maker made holy men like John 
 Bunyan and Richard Baxter and the men of the May- 
 flower." It takes a great creed to make a great man, and 
 there is no creed that is greater, whatever its minor defects, 
 than that which puts God on his throne and acknowledges 
 his sovereign sway over men. This ennobling creed that made 
 men feel that they were the instruments and messengers of 
 Almighty God made mighty men who would neither bend nor 
 bow; who feared none but God, and who with splendid cour- 
 age crashed against tyranny and wrong. It was of men nour- 
 ished by such a creed that J. A. Froude (not a prejudiced 
 witness) wrote: "They attracted to themselves every man in 
 Europe that hated a lie. They were crushed down, but they 
 rose again. They were splintered and torn, but no power 
 could melt or break them. They abhorred, as no body of 
 men ever more abhorred, all conscious mendacity, all impurity, 
 all moral wrong of every kind so far as they could recognize 
 it." It was men such as these who broke the back of tyranny 
 in the state, and who preserved personal and vital religion 
 so that whatever exists at this moment in the English-speaking 
 race of accountability to God and of conscious fear of wrong, 
 was branded into men's hearts by the Calvinists. The secret 
 of their pertinacity, their courage, their indomitable will, was 
 their belief in a sovereign God and in themselves as the agents 
 of his will. It is of such stuff that heroes are made, and pro- 
 phets; it is such men who "subdue kingdoms, obtain promises, 
 and who turn to flight the armies of the aliens." Precisely 
 this is the place which the fourth chapter of Revelation occu- 
 pies in the religious experience of all men everywhere. It is 
 the central teaching of the Bible that God is in the midst. 
 It was Robert Louis Stevenson who said that a man can do 
 and can hear anything if he really believes that God is on 
 his side. That is just what this chapter says : "If God is for 
 us, who can be against us?" 
 
 A similar purpose is intended and achieved by chapter 5 
 in the picture which it gives us of a present, living Christ. 
 
72 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 No one can read and understand the Book of Revelation 
 without gaining a vivid and permanent conception of Christ 
 not merely as an historical character, as One who lived in the 
 past and accomplished a ministry which ended with his death, 
 but also of a living, energizing Spirit who accompanies the 
 on-going life of the world, oversees its struggles, is in the 
 midst of the eternal battle of righteousness, opposes Himself 
 to the enemies of his cause, protects his people, and wins 
 through them and with them and for them, the final victory. 
 This is one of the chief values of the book, one of its greatest 
 spiritual contributions to the Christian. It is a service which 
 is desperately needed. One of the great lacks in the actual 
 religious experience of many in our day is precisely this 
 persuasion of a living Christ. The chaplains in the army 
 reported an almost total absence of it in the experience of the 
 soldiers in both British and American armies. 1 For many 
 people to-day Christ is "a far-off historical character, the 
 great Ideal . . . but He has nothing to do with the daily 
 round." Precisely the opposite of this, of course, is the teach- 
 ing of the New Testament. For the early disciples, Christ 
 had everything to do with daily life. The living and accom- 
 panying Christ stands out on every page of the Acts and 
 the Epistles. But nowhere is such a vivid exhibition of this 
 truth given as in the Book of Revelation. The teaching of 
 this book must revive and make real this integral and essen- 
 tial element of a true Christian experience. The apprehension 
 of this truth is the ground of the Social Hope; gives the clue 
 and meaning to a true social interpretation of history; and 
 fortifies the individual soul in its struggle for righteousness. 
 There is no substitute for this persuasion of the living Christ 
 as the secret of the perpetual inspiration of the human soul. 
 In personal living, this conception stands central. In the 
 midst of the monotonies of existence, or of great cosmic disas- 
 ters, or of the decay of moral impulses, or the inveterate 
 
 1 See Atlantic Monthly Sept. 1919, "The Church and the Civilian 
 Young Man"; also, The Army and Religion (Macmillan), Chap- 
 ter III. 
 
THE ETEBNAL BACKGKOUND 73 
 
 evils of the world, who does not know his moments of moral 
 vertigo, days when all his spiritual forces are threatened 
 with panic? On such days the voice of the omnipotent and 
 ever-present Jesus, traveling in the glory of his strength, 
 comes to us in our fear and trembling, saying in a voice that 
 penetrates to the inmost recesses of our being and rallies all 
 our waning strength. 
 
 Peace, it is I. . . . In this world ye shall have tribulation; 
 but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. 
 
 In our social struggle for a better world, as well as in per- 
 sonal living, this conception of a living Christ is indispensable. 
 In the promise of Christ to his disciples, "Lo, I am with you 
 even to the end of the world," the word "end" means not 
 termination but consummation, perfection, completion. That 
 is the Social Hope of the Book of Revelation. It gives us 
 the picture of Christ working with men until the ultimate 
 perfection and completion of the social order. That also is 
 the Christian interpretation of history. When we survey the 
 centuries that have elapsed since that promise was given, and 
 since the last book of the Bible was written and sealed, what 
 do we see? In the breaking up of the pagan world, the grad- 
 ual disappearance of the old social order, the dawning of a 
 new day, the story of human liberties, the rebirth of nations, 
 the on-march of the Gospel, we see the coming of Christ down 
 through the ages, the advance of the Son of Man traveling 
 in the glory of his strength. 
 
 Behind the moral customs of society He stands, back of its 
 laws, habits and practices, wielding upon them his irresistible 
 power. It is impossible to read the record of social progress 
 without the recognition of his shaping strength, his moral will. 
 in forcing the civilized world out of its injustice and inhu- 
 manity. His sublime spirit is in the record; it is in the his- 
 tory of Christendom; it is in the present struggle; it is the 
 hope of society. When did we need this inspiration more 
 than we need it now? It is one of the glories of the Book 
 
74 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 of Revelation that it produces this indelible impression of a 
 Christ who is even now bending men to the doing of his will 
 and putting all things under his feet. 
 
 That the Social Hope is never complete without the con- 
 ception lying behind these two chapters of the Book of Reve- 
 lation is proved by a careful observation of the social con- 
 science that operates without this inspiration. There is, as 
 we all know, a social conscience in the world that is devoid of 
 the Christian inspiration. It may well be asked if the so- 
 cial movements of our time can afford to dispense with this 
 inspiration, much less to despise it. Chiefly it is the Christian 
 Idea which generates the spiritual sentiment, and above all 
 the spiritual assurance and confident hope which must go 
 hand in hand with culture and humanitarian passion and de- 
 votion, if human life is to be made sane and sweet and strong. 
 Let any one contrast, for example, the abounding social hope 
 of Christian missionaries from the very dawn of the Christian 
 era, with the mood of many noble men and women "who with 
 the insight of prophets and the self-sacrificing devotion of 
 martyrs are battling for righteousness outside of the Christian 
 cultus and bereft of the historic Christian inspiration. When 
 Robert Morison was sailing for China, the captain of the ves- 
 sel asked him if he expected to be able to convert the millions 
 of Chinese to Christianity. To which he replied, "No, I do 
 not, but I believe that God is able to do just that !" In ethical 
 and social workers who lack that persuasion, we sometimes 
 detect an undertone of sadness, a note of wistful longing, a 
 strain of "close-lipped patience, near-daughter to despair," 
 which indicates the spiritual tragedy of many a noble life. 
 What would it not mean if these souls could be thrilled, 
 touched, quickened by the message of this book which would 
 replace their noble melancholy with the persuasion that the 
 living God is in the midst of his people so that their labor 
 can never be in vain in the Lord; and that the omnipotent 
 Christ is putting all things under his feet? 
 
THE ETERNAL BACKGROUND 75 
 
 Chapter 4: 1. After this heaven was opened, as it were, 
 and the same voice which had spoken to me in trumpet- 
 tones before, summoned me to see the things that were 
 about to happen. 2. At once I was inspired and behold, 
 a throne in heaven, 3. and he that sat on it was like a 
 rainbow set in jewels. 4. Surrounding the throne were 
 seated twenty-four dignitaries crowned like princes and 
 clothed like priests. 5. And thunders and voices issued 
 from the throne, and seven torches typified the seven di- 
 vine spirits. 6. And the sky stretched before the throne 
 like the transparent sea; and within and about the throne 
 were four living creatures which could see in every direc- 
 tion. 7. They resembled a lion, an ox, a man, and an 
 eagle, 8. but all had wings and all uttered praise to God 
 without ceasing. 9. And at the sound of praise, 10. the 
 twenty-four kingly persons worshipped God, renouncing their 
 glory, 11. and giving all honour to him. 
 
 Notes v. 1 The voice, i.e. the voice of Christ, as in 1:10. 
 This Revelation is from Christ Himself. Come up hither 
 "The vision of the reality and strength of spiritual things 
 alone" can give us the perspective which will enable us to 
 understand and to endure, v. 2 "The sovereign power of the 
 world was not on the earth but in heaven. This thought is 
 the nerve of the whole chapter, and of the whole book. . . . 
 The center of the universe, the foundation of its order and 
 life, is God." There is always a throne above Domitian's. 
 v. 3 The reader can trace all of this description of the glory of 
 God to its Old Testament sources. It is based on Ezekiel, 
 chapters 1 and 10, and Isaiah, chapter 6. For heaven as the 
 dwelling-place of God, see Ex. 24:10; I Kings 22:19. A 
 special significance is not to be sought in each particular 
 element or color. It is the general symbolism which needs 
 to be borne in mind. The question of the relation of the 
 precious stones mentioned in the Bible to our modern min- 
 erals is obscure. (See Hastings' Bible Dictionary on precious 
 stones.) v. 4 Four and twenty elders, i. e., angelic beings with 
 the attributes of kings. They are doubtless taken from He- 
 brew tradition (Isa. 24:23), but their ultimate origin is prob- 
 ably to be sought in Babylonian mythology where twenty- 
 four star gods were supposed to form a circle around the polar 
 
76 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 star. v. 5 The seven spirits have already been mentioned in 
 1:4 (cf. also 1:12, 16 and 8:2). Old Testament antecedents 
 are to be found in Ezek. 9:2, but especially in Zech. 4:2, 10, 
 where it is evident that the lights which are the eyes of the 
 Lord were originally stars. By the figure is meant the all- 
 discerning spirit of God. v. 6 The pavement of the great 
 throne-room of God is here described, and the likeness in 
 color of sea and sky suggested the comparison. (See Gen. 
 1:7.) v. 7 The four living beings (beasts) go back to Ezek. 
 1:5, 18. Originally they were doubtless wind-clouds (Ezek. 
 1:4, 5) which are the cherubim (Ezek. 9:3, 10:20) which bear 
 the chariot of God. It is possible that this conception goes 
 back still further to the mythological idea that four beings 
 supported the four corners of heaven. It is plain that the 
 author draws freely both from ancient mythology and from 
 the Old Testament in giving poetic and symbolic expression 
 to his faith that God is before all and above all and behind 
 all; and that He who has made the world will redeem it and 
 that nothing can thwart his purpose and his will, which the 
 future will reveal. The reader will note how freely hymn 
 writers have drawn upon this chapter. Bishop Heber's hymn, 
 "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty" is a transcript of 
 this description of God. v. 11 The purpose of creation is to 
 satisfy its Creator (cf. Gen. 1:31). This conception is the 
 ground of an imperishable Social Hope. 
 
 Chapter 5: 1. At God's right hand, I saw a book-roll 
 written on both sides and sealed with seven seals. 2. An 
 angel called with a loud voice for one who was worthy 
 to break the seals and open the book, 3. but none could 
 be found. 4. And I mourned over this, 5. but was reas- 
 sured by one of the kingly priests, who told me that the 
 Messiah-Christ had been able to open the book. 6. And 
 I looked and beheld there was one bearing like a lamb 
 the marks of sacrifice, yet having all power and knowledge 
 to do God's will in all the earth. 7. When He came and 
 took the book, 8, 9. the living creatures and the kingly 
 priests all worshipped Him because He was the Eedeemer 
 of all mankind, 10. and had saved and exalted his people. 
 11. The angels also, an innumerable company, 12. joined 
 
THE ETERNAL BACKGROUND 77 
 
 in the hymn of praise. 13. And the whole earth swelled 
 the chorus, 14. and the living creatures chanted the Amen, 
 and the kingly priests fell down and worshipped Him. 
 
 Notes v. 1 The idea of a book of destiny is taken directly 
 from Ezek. 2 :9, 10, Isa. 29 :11, 12, and Dan. 12 :4. w. 3, 4 
 Without the leadership of Christ and without the teaching 
 of his spirit who alone leads us into all truth, God's scheme 
 and plan for the world could never be translated into history. 
 The events of the on-marching world are thus the Gesta 
 Christi, since Christ alone enables men to make actual what 
 otherwise would remain God's hidden purposes. Men have al- 
 ways been palsied by the doubt of whether they understood 
 those purposes. That doubt is removed and assurance is at- 
 tained through the breaking of the seals by Christ alone. The 
 opening of the book by Christ signifies that present events are 
 his fulfillment of God's purposes, and that thus they lead 
 in the end to the salvation of the people of God and the 
 servants of Christ. Human history is thus interpreted as the 
 gradual unfolding of the will and purpose of God, every 
 event, however contradictory it may seem to be, in the hand 
 and keeping of Christ. Such a view of history alone pro- 
 vides a sure basis for social optimism, v. 6 Note that this 
 picture of Christ is made up of wholly different materials 
 from those in 1 : 12-20. Here the idea is more distinctively 
 Christian. By the seven horns is meant perfect power (12:3, 
 13:1, 17:3, 12), by the seven eyes (Zech. 4:10) perfect knowl- 
 edge. Through his vicarious sacrifice Christ has gained his 
 place at the right hand of God above all angels and other 
 powers (cf. Heb. 2:9, 10; Phil. 2:5-11). The conception of 
 Christ as Lamb is peculiar to Revelation and to the Fourth 
 Gospel. Thence it has become one of the most familiar figures 
 in Christian art and hymnology. "The Lamb is in the midst of 
 the throne. The work of redemption and the means taken 
 to accomplish it are ever before the mind of God." Christ 
 by his "sacrificial death has unlocked the purposes of God 
 for mankind, and the broad issue is that eternal love and 
 
78 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 righteousness will prevail. . . . The final result is never in 
 doubt among the heavenly host. . . . Whatever comes, eternal 
 righteousness and sacrificial love are on the throne." All who 
 share in this conviction can face without quiver of dread what- 
 ever struggles and sufferings they may be called upon to en- 
 dure. The Cross is the final symbol of the Social Hope. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 6 and 7 
 
 THE writer's preparations for ushering in his series of 
 judgments on the world and the existing social order 
 are now complete. The occasion of the prophecy, its trust- 
 worthiness and authority have been set forth in the first 
 chapter. The second and third chapters have fulfilled their 
 purpose in addressing both comfort and admonition to the 
 churches of Asia, which are typical of all Christian churches 
 then and now. In chapters 4 and 5 we have great visions 
 of God and of Christ, of the Creator and the Redeemer who 
 are behind and within the great world-movement which the 
 prophet is about to describe. The drama of judgment can 
 now begin. 
 
 This drama, however, does not unfold of itself. Here is no 
 impersonal theory of history. These events do not happen of 
 themselves. The author has used not only a high degree of 
 literary skill, but has employed a social conscience which 
 is fundamentally religious and Christian in portraying these 
 events as transpiring only under the hand and only by the 
 will and foreknowledge of Christ. He alone has the power 
 to set in motion the series of events that shall judge the 
 world, punish evil, overthrow Satan, vindicate righteousness 
 and save his people. It is in the light of such a revelation 
 that we of to-day should watch and study the events of his- 
 tory. Never, perhaps, since the day when the Book of Reve- 
 lation was written have men had such a grandiose spectacle 
 unfolded before their eyes of world-movements taking place 
 
 79 
 
80 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 under the shaping hand of Christ. Sometimes this world 
 moves so leisurely that it seems as if for centuries it stood 
 still. Sometimes it rolls on at such a giddy pace that in a 
 moment of time it seems to describe the orbit of centuries. 
 Such is the age in which we are living. How much it would 
 mean for us if we could view the great revolutionary events 
 of the present as the expression in history of the shaping 
 mind of Christ, who is overturning age-long evils, visiting 
 judgment on an an ti- Christian world order, and ushering in 
 his kingdom! All over the world great revolutions in society 
 and industry are taking place. By an assertion of social con- 
 science such as no modern people has seen, the organized 
 liquor traffic has been destroyed by one blow in the greatest 
 industrial nation of the world. Verily, it is a time of judg- 
 ment, when the crowns of mediaeval monarchs have been roll- 
 ing in bewildering succession in the dust, and some of the 
 evils that seemed permanently entrenched in society have been 
 cast aside. 
 
 All of the great drama of the past few years, which we 
 have witnessed, is akin to that upon which the writer of the 
 Book of Revelation looks with prophetic eyes. He foresees 
 for his day what we have seen in our own. He describes the 
 judgment which is to be visited upon a cruel, conscienceless 
 tyranny which threatens the life of the church and dares to 
 challenge the spirit of the omnipotent Christ. The sixth chap- 
 ter is the core of the book, in the sense that it is the first 
 of the three descriptions which the author gives of the disas- 
 ters which are to overtake impious, godless, imperial Rome. 
 With the opening of the successive seals of the Book of Des- 
 tiny, the prophet beholds Four Horsemen which typify four 
 different judgments which are to be visited upon Rome. The 
 symbolism of the chapter is plain even to the casual reader. 
 To one who studies its origins, it becomes as clear as day- 
 light. The impressive eloquence of this description of woe 
 and desolation cannot be heightened by any extended com- 
 mentary. It is sufficient to refer to a recent use of the chap- 
 
JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 81 
 
 ter which illustrates its marvelous adaptation to post-war 
 conditions. One of the most popular of the books produced 
 by the war has been that by Vicente Blasco Ibafiez entitled, 
 "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." In this book we 
 have a great effort to portray in human speech the terrible 
 realism of the War. Its chapters convey a never-to-be-for- 
 gotten impression of the horrors of the German invasion. 
 The author can find no imagery more adequate to his purpose 
 than that of the sixth chapter of the Book of Revelation. 
 He, too, sees four mythical horsemen riding over the fields of 
 Flanders and of France, the symbols of Invasion, Civil War, 
 Famine, and Death. He has given us in modern speech an 
 amplification in terms of modern Europe of what the inspired 
 author of the Book of Revelation first saw in the days of 
 ancient Rome. He has pictured the judgment of Christ upon 
 an impious world-order of our day, as the Book of Rovelation 
 set forth the judgment about to be visited upon imperial 
 Rome one hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ. 
 Ibafiez has caught the original inspiration of Revelation and 
 has reproduced it in modern language for the use of this 
 present generation. 
 
 It must once more be pointed out that the inspiration of 
 this chapter, rightly viewed, consists not only in its literary 
 style and lofty eloquence. It is seen when we contrast the 
 apparent strength of Rome and of the Christian Idea when 
 this chapter was written. While the weaknesses which ulti- 
 mately resulted in Rome's overthrow doubtless already existed 
 when this Apocalypse was written, they were not generally rec- 
 ognized, nor immediately visible. Rome still stood like a 
 Colossus, unmoved and apparently immovable. On the other 
 hand, the Christian faith was represented by a few scattered 
 companies of Christians, recruited for the most part from the 
 least educated and influential portions of the population — an 
 apparently negligible element in the great Roman world. Yet 
 it is the Idea enshrined within those Christian communities, 
 according to this chapter, which is to destroy the Roman Em- 
 
82 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF BEVELATION 
 
 pire. More wonderful still, that prophecy was fulfilled within 
 the following three centuries. 
 
 Chapter 6: 1. When Christ opened the first of the seven 
 seals, there was a noise like thunder. This was the voice 
 of one of the living beings who told me to come and see 
 what should happen. 2. First, I saw a white horse and 
 on it a bowman representing a royal nation that went 
 forth to conquer. 3,4. Next I saw the second seal opened 
 and I heard the living creature summon a red horse and 
 his rider who typifies civil war that destroys peace from 
 the earth. 5,6. The third seal was broken and I heard the 
 voice call forth a black horse whose rider held seals in his 
 hand representing famine. 7,8. When the fourth seal was 
 opened and the fourth voice had spoken, there appeared 
 a gray horse and its rider. This was death, which was 
 to consume a fourth of the world. 9,10. When the fifth seal 
 was opened, I saw under the altar the souls of the martyrs 
 clothed in white who cried for vengeance on their enemies. 
 11. They were told to keep quiet a little time longer until 
 the number of martyrs should be complete. 12,14. At the 
 breaking of the sixth seal there followed a terrible earth- 
 quake that shook heaven and earth and 15,16. caused all 
 men, the mightiest as well as the lowliest, to flee in terror 
 from the wrath of the Lamb. 17. This was the Great Day 
 of the Lord. 
 
 Notes w. 2ff For the Old Testament original of the four 
 horsemen, the student will refer to Zech. 6 :l-8. They person- 
 ify the four powers of evil which throughout the Old Testa- 
 ment prophets are the agents of God for punishing the world 
 for its sin (see Jer. 15:2-3, 24:10, 29:17-18, 42:17, 44:13; 
 Ezek. 5:12, 17, 14:21, 33:25). God will use these same in- 
 struments for the destruction of Rome. Precisely as the Old 
 Testament prophets made use of political happenings in fore- 
 telling the destruction of Nineveh and Babylon, the author of 
 the Apocalypse used the signs of the times in prophesying 
 the downfall of Rome, the restlessness of subject peoples, 
 social disorders, lack of food, and contemporary convulsions 
 of nature. This fact, however, does not lessen for either Old 
 Testament writers nor for this author the reach of a faith 
 which could confidently declare that these omens presaged the 
 downfall of an apparently invincible foe. v. 2 The white 
 
JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 83 
 
 horseman does not typify Christ. His entrance is reserved 
 for chapter 19. It is not conceivable that Christ should be 
 presented both as opening the seals and also as appearing in 
 response to the summons of an archangel. As indicated by 
 the bow, this rider symbolizes the Parthians, one of the most 
 feared of Rome's enemies, who fought with the bow, not used 
 as a rule by the Romans. White, also, is the sacred color 
 of the Persians, for whom the Parthians stood in later times. 
 The Red Horseman naturally signifies War, specifically the 
 slaughter of war and perhaps civil war ("they should kill one 
 another"), v. 5 The Black Horseman is Famine, a scourge 
 of the Eastern world then as now. Black fitly represents the 
 ensuing distress. The price named for wheat is enormous, 
 perhaps twelve times the usual rate, which was a denarius 
 (18 cents), for twelve measures (quarts) of wheat; and bar- 
 ley cost half as much. v. 6 The oil and the wine hurt thou 
 not. These words have been interpreted to mean that, by a 
 kind of irony of fate, the luxuries of oil and wine are to be 
 left untouched, while the necessities of corn and wheat are 
 lacking. The words oil and wine, however, are regularly used 
 in the Old Testament for the products of the earth (Deut. 
 7:13; Neh. 5:11; Joel 2:19). It seems more probable to sup- 
 pose that the author means that this first visitation of famine 
 is limited in scope and preparatory to the more dreadful 
 calamities to follow (chapter 8:lff). The Fourth Horseman 
 is Death. Only a portion of the population is to be destroyed 
 at this time by the four instrumentalities mentioned (cf. Lev. 
 26:22-26; Mark 13:7-9). v. 9 The fifth judgment is in a 
 class by itself. It was an ancient apocalyptical idea that the 
 day of judgment could be hastened by the prayers of the 
 saints (Rev. 8:3, 4) and cries of the martyrs (Enoch 47; 
 Luke 18:7, 8). In the Old Testament uncovered blood is 
 supposed to cry for vengeance. In the blood was the soul 
 (Lev. 17:11). Hence when blood flowed, the slain cry for 
 vengeance. While this cry of the martyrs may seem to fall 
 below the prayer of St. Stephen (Acts 7:60), it must be un- 
 
84 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 derstood as a passionate appeal of suffering righteousness 
 for the vindication of Christ's cause for which the martyrs 
 stand. (See Whittier, "The Christian Slave," Ps. 79:5-10; 
 Heb. 12:24; cf. II Esdras 4:35). For the familiar notion 
 that a predestined number of the elect must be fulfilled before 
 the end, compare the phrase in the Book of Common Prayer: 
 "We pray thee shortly to accomplish the number of thine 
 elect and to hasten thy kingdom." v. 12 The sixth judgment 
 is an earthquake, frequent in the East then as now. This de- 
 scription is almost a reproduction of Matt. 24:29, 30. (See 
 Isa. 2:19; Hos. 10:8; Luke 23:20.) v. 17 The Great Day of 
 the Lord is a familiar apocalyptical idea from the time of 
 Zephaniah (1:14, 15) on. It was a fundamental idea in the 
 teaching of our Lord and the hope of the Christian church. 
 It was the standing designation of the judgment day. 
 
 These great forces of judgment are still in Christ's hand. 
 Once more they have been let loose on the earth; but they are 
 all subject to Christ. Although apparently destructive, they 
 are for the accomplishment of his will. Even the wrath of 
 man and of nature has fulfilled the Divine purpose. Physical 
 and social earthquakes over and over again in history have 
 ushered in a new and a better order. We must look upon 
 them as the author of the Apocalypse did as "under the con- 
 trol of Him who has the welfare of mankind at heart." They 
 are summoned forth by the Saviour who opens the seals. Ours 
 is the faith that even the most feared of human events are 
 obedient to his work. This is the ground of our Social Hope. 
 Thus is depicted for us in the most impressive way the eternal 
 truth that through the continuous processes of nature and 
 man, evil shall be destroyed. We see the picture of the pour- 
 ing of the wrath of God upon all iniquity and sin. 
 
 Nowhere does the literary and artistic structure of the 
 Book of Revelation appear more clearly than in the chapter 
 to which we have now arrived. Instead of having the 
 seventh seal broken at once, and bringing the first series 
 
JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 85 
 
 of judgments to a close, the author here interrupts this 
 story of retribution by a passage in which is depicted in 
 immortal language the safety of God's people. The literary 
 effect of this postponement of the final scene in the drama of 
 judgment is to heighten the expectation of the reader. Its 
 moral effect upon those tried and persecuted Christians for 
 whose comfort and assurance this book was first written was 
 to create the conviction that nothing in nature or human 
 events, no "principality or power," could separate them from 
 the love of God. Whatever happened, their salvation was 
 sure. Before even more dreadful scenes of judgment were re- 
 vealed, this beautiful word of comfort is given to them by 
 the prophet. The spiritual meaning of this chapter for all 
 Christians and for all time is that the souls of the righteous 
 are in the hand of God; that He preserveth all that put their 
 trust in Him. This chapter, one of the sweetest and most fa- 
 miliar in the New Testament, acquires fresh meaning and elo- 
 quence from an understanding of its position in the Book 
 of Revelation, and the message which it brought to those for 
 whom it was first written. 
 
 The chapter falls into two parts. The first section com- 
 prises verses 1-8, and the second section the rest of the chap- 
 ter. This second section is by far the more familiar of the 
 two, and upon it the Christian heart dwells with gratitude. 
 The first section, usually overlooked, is seen, however, upon 
 examination, to contain a spiritual truth of great significance 
 and of immense comfort. 
 
 The angels of God stay for a moment the tempest of wrath, 
 and another angel commands them to prevent the destruction 
 of the earth until the servants of God shall have received the 
 sign and pledge of their salvation. There follows what may 
 well be termed a family roll-call. The tribes of Israel are 
 named in turn and in each tribe all are "present or accounted 
 for." The perfect number is returned for each one. So un- 
 derstood, what at first sight appears like a monotonous and 
 wearisome repetition of names, becomes one of the most 
 
86 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 eloquent passages in this eloquent Book. When God comes 
 to "count up his jewels/' to number the redeemed, He begins, 
 that is, with his own family, the family with which the Bible 
 began. The history of that family is Bible history. The name 
 of that family was "the children of Israel." That family was 
 destined to bring into the world the knowledge of the one, 
 true and only God. Out of that family was to spring He who 
 was destined to be the Saviour of men. And now at the end 
 of the Bible, which has told of this great family history, and 
 of what it had done for the world, the names shall be called, 
 the names of the children of Israel. It was long, long ago 
 that we first heard that list of names. It was away back in 
 the book of Genesis. Jacob had come into Egypt, "and all 
 his seed brought he with him into Egypt"; and then for the 
 first time we listened to the names of the members of that 
 family with whom we were to become so familiar and whose 
 fortunes we were to follow for so many hundreds of years: 
 twelve children, twelve sons, and their names follow, — Reu- 
 ben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, so the roll goes on, and the last 
 name of all was Dan. And now we have come to the end of 
 the Bible, and once more that list of names is going to be 
 called. Before the number of the ten thousand times ten thou- 
 sand, before the multitude which no man can number, first 
 of all there will come this family roll-call; and we feel that 
 this is right, that this is the way it should be. Judah's name 
 comes first, since out of that family sprang the Lamb of 
 Judah before whose throne this great multitude is gathered. 
 Each answers to his name as it is called. Each separate fam- 
 ily is complete; each family has grown to number twelve 
 thousand. The full number is twelve times the twelve thou- 
 sand of each. 
 
 And I heard the number of them which were sealed, a 
 hundred and forty and four thousand sealed out of every 
 tribe of the children of Israel. 
 
 Read the passage so; remember that it is the last time that 
 these names are to be called; think of the great history of 
 
JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 87 
 
 that family, the long journey they had traveled, their vicissi- 
 tudes, struggles and labors; remember that it is in heaven, in 
 God's own home, that this roll-call is heard, and how beautiful 
 and tender is the reading! 
 
 Our impression of the eternal worth and comfort of this 
 family roll-call is deepened if we let our minds rest upon 
 certain salient features of the history of the family of God. 
 First, it was a scattered family. "Israel is as a scattered 
 sheep" (Jer. 50:17) for "Thou hast scattered us among the 
 heathen" (Ps. 44:11). That family had never really lived to- 
 gether from the day that Joseph went down into Egypt. Of 
 the twelve tribes, ten were afterwards spoken of as "lost." 
 But before the Bible closes we have this beautiful reunion 
 picture. Second, the history of this family was very eventful. 
 Theirs was a long, troubled and tragic career. Every strange 
 and terrible event that could befall a family happened to the 
 family of God. They were spared no imaginable affliction. 
 It was of that home that the prophet wrote. 
 
 O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted 
 (Isa. 54: 11). 
 
 Its grief was even symbolized by 
 
 Kachael weeping for her children and refusing to be 
 comforted (Jer. 31: 15). 
 
 And yet, before the Bible closes, we find the word of promise 
 kept, 
 
 . . . Thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not 
 fear, and from terror, for it shall not come near thee (Isa. 
 54:14). 
 
 Third, the family of God had known terrible family estrange- 
 ments. These brothers had hated each other with a ferocity 
 which it seemed nothing could heal. From the day that Jo- 
 seph was sold into Egypt, through the period of the Judges 
 when Benjamin was terribly punished by his brothers, to 
 the division of the kingdoms which resulted in permanent fam- 
 
88 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 ily alienation, this family presents a record of uninterrupted 
 discord which has no parallel in history. How wonderful, it 
 appears, therefore, before the Bible ends, to find even these 
 wounds healed, and the members reunited in the heavenly 
 home. And how prophetic of the redemption of other fam- 
 ilies appears this final roll-call, for none can have been more 
 scattered, more afflicted, more divided. How our faith is thus 
 increased in the final reunion of the families of God! 
 
 There is one more significant fact to be noted in this roll- 
 call. There is one name that is missing. We do not find the 
 name of Dan. We know that this cannot be by inadvertence. 
 There must be some deep moral meaning in such an omission 
 as this. And there is. Dan presents the most tragic career 
 of all the sons of Jacob. There seems to have been some- 
 thing wrong with him from the first. When the dying father 
 came to breathe his prophetic prayer over his sons, he spoke 
 a strange word for Dan: 
 
 He shall be a serpent in the way; an adder in the path. 
 (Gen. 49:17.) 
 
 To the Hebrew a serpent was such a sinister figure that this 
 could mean only a sinister end. When they came to Canaan, 
 Dan did a strange thing: he made for the sea. The Hebrews 
 had such an antipathy for the sea that that could only mean 
 that Dan cut himself off from the real genius of the family 
 life. When the roll is called in the Chronicles, Dan is not 
 there, and tradition tells us that it was from Dan that the 
 Anti-Chrisl sprang, who was to deny and make war against 
 the Lord's Anointed. Dan had permanently left the Lord his 
 God. He had chosen, by himself, to set up his will against 
 that of the Almighty. However melancholy the omission of 
 his name may seem to be, let us remember that it does infinite 
 justice to the tragic nature of moral realities. It suggests the 
 solemn lesson that by one's own moral choice one can exclude 
 oneself from participation in the life of God. While there 
 is nothing in this passage to preclude the possibility of a 
 future re-entrance into that fellowship, it does contain a cor- 
 
JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 89 
 
 rective to the easy-going assumption that just because one is 
 of the family of God, one's future salvation is assured. It 
 does teach that conscious surrender to and acceptance of the 
 will of God is the condition of being among the number of 
 the redeemed. 
 
 The second section (7:9-17) of this chapter is among the 
 most familiar in the book. It is frequently read when we 
 come to lay away our dead. It calls for no extended com- 
 ment. It speaks home to the heart with a music all its own. 
 Let it be noted, however, that the Bible is the only book, 
 and Christianity is the only faith, which has, after taking 
 care of its own, a promise for the great unnumbered multi- 
 tude. From this point of view the words "After this" are 
 among the most inspired in the Bible. They point to the im- 
 mense catholicity of that faith, limited to no chosen people, 
 to no particular race, but including within its reach all the 
 children of men. This passage points to the universality of 
 that company of the redeemed that is coterminous with the 
 reach of the Holy Spirit of God. It rebukes all particular- 
 ism, and provincialism which seeks to limit the number of 
 God's saints by a "strictness which He will not own." It 
 tells us that the "love of God is broader than the measure of 
 man's mind" and that "the heart of the Eternal is most won- 
 derfully kind." And it tells us further that little as the finite 
 mind can recall and remember every last, hidden saint of God, 
 He remembers them all and calls each by his name and num- 
 bers them among the multitude of his elect. 
 
 Chapter 7, 1-2-3. Then I saw divine Beings appear who 
 restrained the forces of destruction, and another arch- 
 angel commanded that the earth should no longer be hurt 
 until all the servants of God and followers of Christ should 
 receive the mark that should assure their safety. 4. Then 
 I heard the roll called of the tribes of Israel, the children 
 of God, to whom the covenant of God was made. 5-8. As 
 each name was called, the full and perfect number of that 
 tribe was found present and received on his forehead the 
 seal of salvation. 9-12. After that I saw a multitude of 
 redeemed before the throne of God so great that no finite 
 
90 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 mind could possibly number it. These came from all na- 
 tions and peoples on the earth, and they stood before God 
 and Christ and worshipped them. 13,14. When I asked one 
 of the angels who they were, he told me that they were 
 faithful souls, who preferred persecution and death to dis- 
 loyalty, 15,16. and therefore are now given the victory 
 over every form of human privation and suffering and are 
 in the protecting care of God. 17. In the fellowship of 
 Christ they forget all sorrow and are in perfect felicity and 
 peace. 
 
 Notes v. 1 For the "four winds," cf. Jer. 49:36; Dan. 7:2; 
 Zech. 6:5. v. 3 By the "seal" is meant a mark of authenti- 
 cation (Rom. 4:11) or of security (Rev. 5:1, 20:3). Both 
 ideas are included here in contrast to the mark of the beast 
 (13:16ff) (cf. also Gal. 6:17). For origins of the idea of 
 a brief staying of the forces of destruction, see Ezek. 9:4ff; 
 Baruch 6:4ff. It is probable that our author had in mind 
 some apocalyptical source in which a calamity threatening 
 Israel is to be stayed until God's chosen ones should be made 
 safe. v. 4 The conception of a "true Israel's" forming the 
 center or nucleus of the elect of God is a familiar Bible con- 
 ception (cf. Ezek. 9, 47:13-48; 35; Rom. 3:1, 2; Rom. 9:1-5). 
 
 For passages relating to the history of Dan, see Gen. 
 49:17; Jer. 8:16. (See also Irenseus V. 30, 2.) Other ex- 
 planations for the omission of the name are (1) that it 
 is due to a copyist's error, and (2) that the tribe had 
 long been extinct. The name is found in I. Chron. 2:2, but 
 is omitted in I. Chron. 7. It occurs again in Ezek. 48:32. 
 The idea already suggested for the omission of the 
 name is accepted by many recent scholars. To fill the va- 
 cancy caused by the omission, the name of Joseph is added. 
 By the 144,000 the author doubtless means the whole body 
 of the Church, Jewish and Gentile alike; and by the multi- 
 tude, every servant of God wherever found. The second 
 section (v. 9ff) is of course a vision of the final consumma- 
 tion, introduced thus early to encourage those who are threat- 
 ened with death. No great number of martyrs had as yet 
 fallen victims to the Roman persecutions. This is the first 
 
JUDGMENT AND SALVATION 91 
 
 picture of the Christian heaven (as distinguished from the 
 Jewish idea of a new earth) to be found in the New Testa- 
 ment. The sources for the description of the blessedness of 
 the redeemed are familiar to Bible readers. (Isa. 49:10; Ps. 
 121:6; Isa. 25:8.) The word throne is used seven times in 
 this short vision, conveying the idea of the power of God, 
 and the perfect obedience to Him of all who find in his service 
 their perfect freedom. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPETS 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 8 and 9 
 
 THE Heavenly Interlude being over, the reader is ready 
 to have the seventh and last seal broken. He wonders 
 what judgment can be reserved for the climax to those which 
 have preceded. As a matter of fact, he discovers that the 
 breaking of this seal results in the beginning of a new series 
 of judgments. Since the book described in chapter 5 con- 
 tained the whole drama of destiny, the seventh seal could 
 not end it, but must itself lead to a new chapter in that 
 total description of the judgment of evil and of the triumph 
 of righteousness. In the same way the blowing of the seventh 
 trumpet opens out into the emptying of the seven bowls of 
 wrath (chapter 16). 
 
 The blowing of the seven trumpets, then, introduces a new 
 series of judgments which are described in the eighth and 
 ninth chapters. In these two chapters we have illustrations 
 of the most bizarre imagery to be found in the Book of Reve- 
 lation. The light of the sun and moon is darkened; there 
 are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; we read of swarms 
 of locusts with men's faces and hair of women and crowns 
 like gold, and of horses with stings in their tails, emitting fire 
 and brimstone. If we can understand these chapters, we 
 shall have no difficulty with any part of the book. 
 
 First of all, it is necessary to understand what the author 
 is trying to describe. His object is to show that God is 
 ruling his world; that He is neither dead nor asleep, and 
 that his suffering servants have nothing to fear at the hands 
 
 92 
 
THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPETS 93 
 
 of the pagan empire, since that empire itself is opposed by 
 these destructive agents in the hand of God. God's people 
 who have his seal in their foreheads shall escape, but all 
 who do not repent shall be destroyed. There is an interesting 
 similarity here to the story of the escape of the Israelites 
 from Egypt, of the sign on the door-posts and of the plagues 
 upon the Egyptians. Much in the description of the plagues 
 is the same: frogs, lice, flies, beasts, hail, boils, locusts, dark- 
 ness and death. The idea is the same. Another and a worse 
 oppression has overtaken the people of God, and He uses the 
 same agencies of destruction as before to compass the down- 
 fall of his enemies. 
 
 Again, it is necessary to remember that this series of judg- 
 ments is an advance upon that of the seals. The first series 
 told of the more ordinary judgments, the beginnings of woes 
 which are preparatory to the final consummation. But with 
 the sounding of the trumpets we have portrayed the awful 
 plagues preceding the final conflict and all other events issuing 
 in the final overthrow of evil and the ushering in of the King- 
 dom of God. We should naturally, therefore, expect a more 
 highly colored apocalyptical imagery in these chapters which 
 describe the vast world-movements leading up to the end. 
 
 Once more, it needs to be borne in mind that any lan- 
 guage seeking to describe such supernatural events, must 
 itself be super-natural. If one is describing the ordinary 
 processes of history, one can use ordinary language. But if 
 one is seeking to express the extraordinary intervention of 
 God in behalf of his cause and his people, through nature and 
 man, then one must use extraordinary language. All apocalyp- 
 tical language is extraordinary. It takes on necessarily pic- 
 turesque and grandiose forms, since it attempts to portray 
 the resources of the infinite God in his struggle against sin. 
 When once we understand the poetic and pictorial nature of 
 this language, we will not look at it with literalistic eyes. 
 We will not press it too closely for exact interpretation and 
 understanding. Of course it has never happened and prob- 
 
94 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 ably will not happen during the lifetime of the race that a 
 third of the earth will be burned up, that locusts with men's 
 faces will appear, that horsemen will run about with poisoned 
 tails. But neither did Julia Ward Howe see Christ trampling 
 out the vintage of the grapes of his wrath. This is poetic 
 imagery, the general meaning of which is that the judgments 
 of God in some form and in some way will fall on evil-doers 
 in general, and in particular the Roman Empire, which is 
 persecuting Christians. 
 
 In the next place, we must remember that in a general way 
 it is true that these judgments, described in language that 
 seems so fantastic, are based upon certain natural and social 
 phenomena which had come under the eye and within the 
 knowledge of the prophet who uses this language. It will 
 not do to look too closely for actual plagues and woes of 
 which these are the symbol. On the other hand, contemporary 
 events doubtless did suggest some of the material. This has 
 already been indicated in our discussion of the judgments in 
 chapter 6. When civil war was referred to (6:4), Rome was 
 on the brink of it; when the Parthian bowmen were alluded 
 to (6:2), those dreaded foes of the Romans were an actual 
 menace to the peace of the Roman Empire. Similarly, when 
 in this chapter earthquakes, eclipses, and volcanic eruptions 
 are referred to, and all kinds of natural horrors, it is quite 
 probable that the prophet has in mind some catastrophe of 
 recent occurrence, such as the eruption of Vesuvius, which in 
 the first century had destroyed Pompeii. Indeed, it is not 
 easy as one reads these chapters to avoid the conviction that 
 John himself saw from the island of Patmos the lurid flames 
 of some volcanic eruption, and had heard from fugitives 
 of how fierce beasts had destroyed the vegetation, how sulphur- 
 ous vapors had killed the fish in the sea, how waters were 
 reddened as by blood, and how islands rose and sank again. 
 Such phenomena are frequently used in poetic and prophetical 
 ways in the Old Testament. What more natural means could 
 be imagined for depicting the judgment upon Rome? The 
 
THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPETS 95 
 
 same facts in natural history lie at the basis of his descrip- 
 tion of the invasion of locusts. Ramsay has described how 
 he was the eye-witness of such a plague. The locusts ad- 
 vanced in thick mass-forcnation, in almost serried ranks with 
 well-defined lines. At their head there went leaders, direct- 
 ing the mass behind them. They would settle on fields that 
 were fair and green, but when, as by signal, they rose again, 
 not one blade of green or living thing would be left behind 
 them. The earth was as barren as if it had been burned 
 off by fire. Such plagues were of common knowledge in those 
 districts of Asia Minor. If one understands these features 
 of Eastern geography, these descriptions do not seem half 
 as mysterious as they may have appeared at first. 
 
 Finally, we must render account, as always, of the sources 
 from which the author drew. As has been said, one reason 
 why we find chapters like these strange, is because we our- 
 selves are strangers to those portions of the Old Testament 
 which furnished the material for them. Nearly every figure 
 thus far used in Revelation is taken directly from some pas- 
 sage in the Old Testament. This chapter is no exception. 
 For the fiery hail of 8 :7, we recall Ex. 9 :23 ; for the volcanic 
 eruption of 8:8, Jer. 51:25; for the poisoned springs (8:10) 
 Ex. 7:20-21; for the darkness of the heavens (8:12) Ex. 
 10:21-23, "a darkness which may be felt"; for the locusts 
 (9:3ff) Ex. 10:12-15, and Joel 2:4-11: "the appearance of 
 them is as the appearance of horses, whose teeth are the 
 teeth of a lion." Finally, the horsemen (9:16ff) are doubtless 
 suggested by the passage in Zech. 6, to which reference has 
 already been made (see chap. 6) and also by a passage in 
 Habakkuk (1:8) in which the prophet speaks of the Chal- 
 deans whose horses are swifter than the leopards and more 
 fierce than the enemy wolves, "and their horsemen shall spread 
 themselves and come from far; and they shall fly as the eagle 
 that hasteth to eat." Is it not clear that if all these passages 
 were familiar to us as we read these two chapters of Reve- 
 lation, those chapters would have seemed familiar reading 
 
96 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 also? If it is true in general that a knowledge of the Old 
 Testament is necessary to an understanding of the New, that 
 statement is particularly and convincingly true of the Book 
 of Revelation. 
 
 The reader will note with respect to this second series of 
 judgments that just as in the first series we had four specific 
 plagues under the figures of the Four Horsemen, but that 
 the fifth and sixth were different in character (the prayers 
 of the saints and a general judgment), so, in chapters 8 and 
 9 the first four trumpets usher in definite catastrophes, but 
 the fifth and sixth precede more elaborate visions. 
 
 Chapter 8: 1. "When Christ broke the seventh seal there 
 followed an ominous silence. 2. Then the seven angelic 
 beings who stand before God were given seven trumpets, 3. 
 and an archangel appeared with a censer of incense which 
 he laid upon the altar with the prayers of the saints. 4. 
 This was a witness that these prayers would become an 
 instrument of God in the execution of his authority and 
 power. 5. For when the angel took the fire from the altar 
 made by the mingling of the incense and prayers and cast 
 it upon the earth, there followed manifestations of power 
 in thunders and earthquakes and lightnings. 
 
 6. Then the seven angels in succession blew their trumpets. 
 7. At the blowing of the first trumpet, there came a fiery 
 hailstorm that consumed a third of the vegetation of the 
 earth. 8, 9. At the second, a fiery mass so large that it 
 seemed like a mountain fell into the sea and destroyed a 
 third of the fish and of commerce. 10, 11. At the sound of 
 the third, a comet blazing like a torch fell from the sky 
 upon the rivers of the earth and poisoned their waters so 
 that a multitude of people perished. 12. When the fourth 
 trumpet sounded, an eclipse so terrible took place that a 
 third of sun, moon and stars were stricken with blackness 
 so that the world was in darkness for a third of the day 
 and night. 13. Before the next trumpet blast, an eagle 
 flying in mid-heaven proclaims doom upon men because of 
 the woes which are to follow. 
 
 9: 1. Then the fifth angel blew, and an angel-star fell 
 on th-3 earth and an abyss was opened to which this angel 
 had the key. 2. Out of this pit came smoke as from a 
 huge cauldron which darkened the atmosphere. 3. And out 
 of the smoke came swarms of locusts which had the stinging 
 power of scorpions; 4. and this power was to be used not 
 upon vegetation but upon men who were not sealed with 
 
THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPETS 97 
 
 the sign of God. 5, 6. And their sting when they struck was 
 not to prove fatal at once but was to cause an agony that 
 would be indefinitely prolonged until the men longed in 
 vain for death. 7. In form these locusts resembled huge 
 war-horses, but they had royal crowns on their heads which 
 were like those of human beings, with a face like a man, 
 8. hair like a woman, and teeth like a lion. 9. They were 
 clad in armor of iron, and when they flew there was the 
 sound of racing chariots and of cavalry rushing to battle. 
 10. Their poisonous striking-power was in their tails, and 
 those whom they struck were tortured for a long time. 11. 
 And these demon-powers had a king over them, even the 
 angel who had opened the abyss to release them, whose name 
 in Hebrew is AbadVlon, but in Greek Apollyon. 12. Here 
 endeth the first woe. But the worst are to follow. 
 
 13. Then the sixth angel sounded his trumpet; 14. and a 
 voice from the very presence of God commanded him to 
 unleash the four angelic beings that were bound at the 
 river Euphrates, 15. who had been kept ready for that 
 very hour of that day and month and year to kill the third 
 of men. 16. And the number of the troops of their cavalry 
 was two hundred millions (I heard the exact number). 
 17, 18. And this is how the horses and their riders looked in 
 my vision. Their armor was not of iron and steel, but of 
 fire and brimstone. And out of the mouths of the horses 
 which had heads like lions there came blasts of fire and 
 smoke as from a volcano, 19. for they had power in their 
 mouths as well as in their tails, which had heads like ser- 
 pents that struck and hurt men. 20, 21. Terrible as these 
 plagues were, however, the men who were not destroyed by 
 them did not repent and did not forsake worshipping de- 
 mons and senseless idols and did not give up murders and 
 superstitious practices and all kinds of immorality. 
 
 Notes 8:1 The profound silence gives striking dramatic ef- 
 fect to what follows. Half an hour would seem to denote 
 a long pause, v. 2 The seven angels are referred to as if well- 
 known; but they do not appear in the earlier visions, unless 
 they are the same as the seven spirits of 1 :4, 4 :5, 5 :6. They 
 are doubtless the seven archangels familiar to Jewish apoca- 
 lypses (cf. Tobit 12:15; Enoch 81:5, 90:21ff; Luke 1:19). 
 w. 3-5 There is in this passage no suggestion of the media- 
 tion of an angel between the prayers of the saints and God. 
 Such an idea is found in Tobit 12:12, 15, etc., but not in the 
 New Testament. The idea is rather that the incense of the 
 
98 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 angel re-enforces the prayers and accompanies them and au- 
 thenticates their efficacy. For the altar of incense, cf. Ex. 
 30:lff; Lev 4:7. The idea of prayers as agents of Divine 
 Power, already occurring in 6:9,10, is a dramatic descrip- 
 tion of the social value of intercessory prayer. We do not 
 often enough think of prayer as a form of social work (cf. 
 Col. 4:12). v. 5 cf. Ezek. 10:2, from which the idea is doubt- 
 less taken. The same idea in other forms of an immediate 
 Divine answer to prayer is found in Matt. 3:16, 17; John 
 12 :28, 29. The prominence given in these visions to the mani- 
 festation of the anger of God is a characteristic of all apoca- 
 lypses, which belong to times of persecution and denote the 
 power of God to overthrow evil when the power of God's 
 servants appears inadequate to the task. We need always 
 this faith as a part of our working religious apparatus. 
 The remarkable spiritual eloquence of the description of these 
 terrors will not escape the reader, v. 7 (cf. Ex. 9:23ff and 
 Ps. 18:3). The addition of blood here may be suggested by 
 Ex. 7:17ff and Joel 2:30. v. 11 The idea of a corruption 
 of water is taken from Ex. 7:20, 21, and the name wormwood 
 from Jer. 9:15 (cf. also Jer. 23:15; Lam. 3:15, 19; Deut. 
 29:18; Prov. 5:4). v. 12 For the plague of darkness, cf. Ex. 
 10:21ff; Isa. 13:10; Joel 2:31; Amos 8:9. v. 13 The better 
 reading of the Revised Version substitutes "eagle" for "angel." 
 The eagle is used as messenger in the Jewish apocalypses. 
 Chapter 9:1-11 The vision of the locusts is taken from Ex* 
 10:12flf and Joel, chapters 1 and 2, but the locusts are here 
 transformed into supernatural creatures, whose characteristics 
 are in part taken from fantastic exaggeration of natural lo- 
 custs and in part from mythological tradition. The author 
 treats freely and with apocalyptical imagination the materials 
 which he uses as a basis for his description. 9:1 The idea 
 that stars had a conscious personality is common in Jewish 
 writings (cf. Judges 5:20; Job 38:7). Cf. also Enoch 21:6, 
 "these are the number of the stars of heaven which have 
 transgressed the commandment of the Lord." (See Jude 
 
THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPETS 99 
 
 v. 13.) The star here is certainly not Satan, who nowhere 
 in Revelation appears as an agent of God. "Bottomless pit" 
 is used in a general sense of the underworld in Rom. 10:7; 
 Ps. 71:20, and also in a specific sense of the prison of evil 
 spirits in Lk. 8:31, and elsewhere in Revelation (11:7; 
 20:1, 3). It is represented as locked, (cf. Rev. 1:18.) V. 2 
 (cf. Ex. 19:18; Joel 2:10). w. 5, 6 Five months (see v. 10). 
 Visitations of locusts in the East occur during the five dry 
 months. (For v. 6, cf. Job 3:21.) v. 7 There is an Arab 
 saying that the locust has a head like a horse, a breast like 
 a lion, feet like a camel, a body like a serpent, and hair like 
 a maiden (probably suggested by the antennae of the locust). 
 v. 11 For an opposite idea see Prov. 30 :27. Abaddon means 
 destruction or the place of destruction. Sheol or Hades is 
 personified in Job 26:6, Prov. 15:11. (cf. Rev. 6:8.) The 
 word Abaddon occurs only here, and the author translates it 
 into Greek (Apollyon meaning Destroyer), v. 14ff (cf. Ezek. 
 38:14n\) From Ezekiel on, an invasion of a fierce host be- 
 comes a standing apocalyptical event, (cf. Isa. 5:26ffi; Jer. 
 l:14ff, 4:13, 6:22f, 47:3, 50:42; Joel 3:9ff; Zech. 14:2.) To 
 this idea the author adds his fabulous and supernatural de- 
 scriptions of this aerial cavalry. The location of this host 
 at the river Euphrates suggests the Parthians. v. 15 It seems 
 probable that the author had taken this idea of four angels 
 from a familiar tradition in which four destructive powers 
 (angels, winds) come forth from the four quarters of the 
 earth, (cf. Zech 6:1-8; Dan. 7:2). To this is added the de- 
 rived notion that these agents of destruction are the leaders 
 of the Parthians, located at the Euphrates. The idea of a 
 fixed time is central in all apocalypses, v. 18 (cf. Job 41 :19ff.) 
 Fire-breathing monsters are figures in all mythology, w. 
 20, 21 It is a familiar and tragic fact, abundantly proved in 
 history, that men are not long sobered by even the most ter- 
 rible calamities. The resistance of men's moral nature to the 
 lessons of great catastrophes constitutes one of the most baf- 
 fling problems in moral and religious psychology. Compare 
 
100 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Eugene Sue's terrible description in "The Wandering Jew" 
 of the levity of Paris during the cholera scourge. We are 
 told that when the plague was at its height in London in 1665, 
 riot and vice were rampart. "Neither repented they of their 
 murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor 
 of their thefts." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE SECOND INTERLUDE 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 10 and 11:1-14 
 
 STUDENTS of the Book of Revelation who hold that it 
 is not a unity, and that interpolated sections are to be 
 found in it which must be removed and the material rear- 
 ranged in order to discover its original form, find food for 
 their argument in these two chapters. Surely here, they say, 
 we find an unaccountable interruption in the argument. Just 
 as we are about to hear the seventh trumpet blow which 
 will usher in the climax of the judgment, the process is halted 
 so that the prophet may receive anew his commission. But 
 how could he have received that commission more solemnly 
 than in the opening chapter? Why should these chapters be 
 inserted here The habit of rearranging the material in Bible 
 books to make it more logical is itself open to grave objections. 
 It will not do to classify inspiration with topical exactitude. 
 The moods of the soul do not obey the categories of the 
 logician. Emotion does not proceed in orderly progression. 
 What are looked upon as interruptions and interpolations 
 are often the breaking through of pent-up feeling, the 
 resurgence of spiritual ideas that wreck the program while 
 they reveal the soul. 
 
 Without doubt the author of the Book of Revelation was 
 overtaken by such a mood when he reached the point to which 
 we have now arrived. From the point of view of dramatic 
 surprise and literary effect, nothing could have served his 
 purpose so well. He is about to advance to the last series 
 of judgments which itself will lead up to the final collision 
 
 101 
 
102 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 between the Empire and the church, Satan and Christ, the 
 evil and the good, which in turn will usher in the day of 
 judgment and the day of salvation. Here the prophet pauses 
 to gather strength for this final effort of the soul to depict 
 these great and culminating events. He recoils, as it were, 
 upon himself. The tides of the spirit which have spent them- 
 selves in the awe-inspiring description of the sounding of 
 the trumpets recede into the depths of the soul before they 
 rise once more to even greater heights. The prophet must 
 receive a fresh commission before he can proceed. And if 
 the prophet needs this fresh assurance, so do his readers. 
 Precisely as chapter 7 was intended to assure them of their 
 safety before the trumpets were sounded, so chapter 11 is 
 written to convince them that nothing can violate the inner 
 shrine of God's Temple, nothing can destroy his witnesses 
 until their testimony is complete. 
 
 "In this use of preludes should be noted the splendid al- 
 ternation of light with shadow. Before every vision of gloom 
 and terror, the writer introduces a glimpse of the radiant 
 glory that lies beyond. . . . The assurance of hope, the prom- 
 ise of victory ... is offered anew with every new approach 
 of trial. . . . Nothing could more clearly show that the su- 
 preme purpose of the book was to cheer and sustain through 
 the awful troubles that were coming on the world." ' Just 
 so, in every time of trial, of delayed hope, of unfulfilled ex- 
 pectation, these chapters will do their work in heightening 
 the Social Hope of all Christians. It is this which gives the 
 Book of Revelation its unique and imperishable place in the 
 literature of the soul. These chapters instead of being an 
 interruption, belong just where they are, according to any 
 true spiritual understanding alike of the book and of the needs 
 of the human heart. Just as in the case of the previous in- 
 terlude, this postponement of the final catharsis heightens 
 the imagination and expectancy of the reader. 
 
 At the opening of chapter 10 the author tells us that he 
 
 iBeckwith, p. 245. 
 
THE SECOND INTERLUDE 103T 
 
 was about to proceed with his revelation of the last things 
 and to interpret the voices of thunder which he heard when 
 he was told to stop. He was not yet competent to utter these 
 thing-s. They would be revealed only when the last angel 
 sounded. In the meantime he must himself "inwardly di- 
 gest" these things before being competent to utter them. 
 It is impossible to say just what were the contents of the lit- 
 tle book, beyond that it contained the prophecies that were 
 to follow. This chapter expresses in symbolic form the con- 
 sciousness of the writer that his work here takes a fresh 
 start which carries it to its consummation. Viewed in this 
 light, the chapter which stands almost at the exact center of 
 the book serves, as it were, as a "powerful clamp" * by means 
 of which its different parts are held together. It looks back 
 to chapter 1 where the prophet receives his first commission, 
 and forward to all the coming mysteries of God. 
 
 After the prophet himself has thus been inwardly prepared 
 to proceed, his hearers receive the assurance which they need. 
 This is expressed in two short, eloquent visions, the spiritual 
 signification of which constitutes an imperishable ground for 
 the Social Hope, making the eleventh chapter one of the 
 most eloquent in the entire book. The first of these visions 
 occupies only the first and second verses. The prophet is told 
 to measure the Temple, the altar, and them that worship there; 
 but not to measure the outer court. There is, then, an outer 
 court, and there is an inner shrine. Now there is no promise 
 made about the outer court: "leave it without, measure it 
 not." But the inner shrine, that he can measure; and the 
 implication is that he will find the measures perfect: it will 
 lie foursquare. The outer court may be destroyed, but the 
 inner shrine is indestructible. 
 
 The original Jewish author of this inspired and comfort- 
 able parable doubtless wrote it with reference to the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70. At that terrible time 
 when under the armies of the Emperor Titus, the city and 
 
 1 See Scott, Revelation, p. 205. 
 
104 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 the Temple were laid low and devastated, he wrote to en- 
 courage the Jews to believe that though the nations, the Gen- 
 tiles, the heathen, might ravage the outer and visible court of 
 the Temple, they could never destroy the inner shrine of holi- 
 ness, the altar and them that worship therein. 
 
 Those scenes were long past when the Christian author 
 wrote this book of Revelation. Yet he preserves this little 
 Jewish bit of inspiration for his own ends. It is not the 
 Jewish city that is now threatened, but the early Christian 
 community: the little handful of Christians who compose the 
 seven churches of Asia, the groups of witnessing Christians 
 at Ephesus, and Pergamum, and Thyatira. So when he uses 
 the word temple, he is not thinking of the temple at Jerusa- 
 lem, but he is thinking of these little churches, and the edi- 
 fice of the Christian faith, and the separate lives of the Chris- 
 tian disciples. We remember how in the early chapters of 
 the book the author has spoken of them as pillars in the Tem- 
 ple. It is in that sense that he uses the word. In those days 
 of persecution and of martyrdom and of death, what he says 
 is this: The outer court may be ravaged by our oppressors; 
 it may be cast out ; our assemblies may be broken up ; our lead- 
 ers may be put to death; our services may be suppressed; 
 our bodies may be destroyed. These have been given over 
 unto the nations and for forty-two months — definite time, that 
 is — they will tread these holy things under foot. But measure 
 the inner shrine, measure the altar, and you will find that 
 it has been preserved inviolable and intact. The body of 
 the Christian confessor may be destroyed, but not his soul. 
 The church building may be ruined, but not its faith. The 
 church community may be destroyed, but not its hope. These 
 are the inner shrine. These are inviolable and indestructible. 
 Fathom if you can the bottomless comfort which such an 
 assurance brought to the persecuted Christians for whom 
 this book was written. 
 
 Those days of the Book of Revelation lie far behind us. 
 Nero is no longer on his throne; the hand that was raised 
 
THE SECOND INTERLUDE 105 
 
 to destroy the Christian church lies mouldering in the dust. 
 The church of Christ goes marching on down through the 
 ages. Consider how immortal is this message of the indestruct- 
 ible inner shrine which remains in the midst of the devasta- 
 tion by the nations of the outer court of the temple of God! 
 What wonderful confirmations of the truth of this parable 
 have been given us through the ages of history even down 
 to our own time! 
 
 1. Let the temple stand for the soul of a nation. What 
 does the parable in these two verses tell us? It tells us that 
 the outer court may be ravaged by the oppressors; they can 
 turn it into a charnel-house and a shambles; they can pro- 
 fane it and trample it under foot for a set time. There re- 
 mains the inner shrine; there remains the soul of the people. 
 Measure it and you will find it preserved. Nothing has de- 
 stroyed it. Nothing can destroy it. It remains untouched 
 and inviolable. The soul of Belgium, France, Armenia — that 
 is the inner shrine. The soil of Belgium, that is the outer 
 court. For forty-two months and a little over that outer 
 court was profaned by every injury and insult that could be 
 heaped upon it. It was trodden under swine's feet and 
 made a heap of mud and indescribable refuse. Its cities 
 were given over to the nations and they visited them with 
 every manner of injury that the cunning hate and ingenious 
 deviltry of man could devise. Woods and orchards were 
 turned into charred acres of land. Meadows and gardens 
 look as if they had been devastated by a blast of Sahara. 
 But the soul of Belgium! Did anything touch it? Measure 
 it. It lies foursquare. The soul of France! was it destroyed? 
 Measure it. Does it fail to meet the test? "And there was 
 given to me a reed like a rod." 
 
 2. Apply this to the Christian faith, to the Christian teach- 
 ing, to the Christian church. Here also there is the inner 
 shrine and the outer court. Remember this, and you will be 
 given comfort and hope in many a dark and dreary day. 
 That outer court began to be invaded long ago. The heathen 
 
106 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 had begun to desecrate the outer precincts. They were pull- 
 ing down the walls and bulwarks of faith. Wise men had 
 begun to substitute evolution for God; they substituted sci- 
 ence for faith; they put up progress in the place of provi- 
 dence. They attacked the supernatural and called it a myth; 
 they attacked the Scriptures and called it all a pious tradi- 
 tion; they attacked the authenticity of the Gospels and re- 
 duced them, as they thought, to ruins. There did not seem 
 to be much left of the outer courts. The nations were tram- 
 pling under feet what the saints had thought to be the most 
 indestructible creeds and unassailable propositions. Many 
 had taken alarm and felt as if the edifice of faith were doomed 
 to destruction. Then came the World War in 1914; then 
 came the spectacle of 300,000,000 Christians trying to ex- 
 terminate each other. The hounds of hell were let loose by 
 those who had confessed themselves to be followers of the 
 meek and lowly Jesus. And the scorners laughed aloud at 
 the bitter mockery and the hideous grinning skull of what 
 looked like colossal Christian hypocrisy, and they poured con- 
 tempt upon the Christian teachings and the Christian churches 
 that had failed to prevent so infernal a tragedy. Yet all the 
 while there was the inner shrine; there was the inviolable 
 essence of the Christian faith; there was the soul of Jesus. 
 Has anything touched the soul of Jesus? We have read of a 
 church building in France which was made a charnel-house 
 by German shells. Walls were battered in; ruins of plaster 
 and glass lay all over the floor; a huge beam rested over the 
 altar. But in the midst of it there was the crucifix, unharmed, 
 untouched. And the cross of Christ has remained untouched 
 alike by the debates of the wise men, by the wisdom of the 
 scientists, and by the hand of Hun and of vandals. "And 
 there was a reed given me like a rod." The worshipping soul 
 of man, and the eternal soul of Christ — these are the inner 
 shrine. 
 
 3. Or here is the church. How men have criticized it! 
 Baiting the church is the easiest and commonest sport of the 
 
THE SECOND INTEELUDE 107 
 
 day. Every one has to have a fling at it. Every one has to 
 throw some insulting word at it. Every one must find fault 
 with it. How worn-out are its creeds ; how barren its services ; 
 how wooden its ministers; how impotent its witnesses; how 
 insignificant and negligible its influence! Its outer court has 
 been trampled all over and criss-crossed by profane and in- 
 sulting mockery. Many have told us that the World War 
 has completed its ruin. Never again can it pretend to be 
 what it was. Its pretensions have been unveiled; its hypocri- 
 sies have been exposed. Other organizations have taken its 
 place. The Red Cross has usurped its function. But do not 
 forget that there is still the inner shrine where the wor- 
 shipper meets his Lord: 
 
 "There is a spot where spirits blend, 
 
 - Where friend holds fellowship with friend ; 
 
 Though sundered far, by faith they meet 
 
 About the common mercy-seat." 
 
 Nothing has touched that; nothing can touch that. Think 
 of the soldier who wrote his mother to remember him at Com- 
 munion on Easter Day, and then went out to die. "And 
 there was given to me a rod." The inner shrine has remained 
 inviolable. 
 
 4. Inviolable also are the souls of men. The outer court 
 is the body. Disease and violence have destroyed it. What 
 unspeakable things have been done to men's bodies! They 
 have been torn, mangled, starved, shot, blown to atoms, 
 strangled. But the soul! Bring out the measuring-rod. "He 
 that dwelleth in the secret place, ... no harm can come 
 nigh that dwelling." The soul is inviolable. 
 
 "Souls of the Righteous in the hand of God, 
 Nor hurt, nor torment cometh them anigh; 
 happy, happy immortality, 
 Souls of the Righteous in the hand of God. 
 
108 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 "Souls of the Righteous in the hand of God, 
 To eyes of men unwise, they seem to die; 
 They are at peace, fairest liberty, 
 Souls of the Righteous in the hand of God. 
 
 "On earth as children, chastened by Love's rod, 
 As gold in furnace tried, so now on high, 
 They shine like stars, a golden galaxy, 
 Souls of the righteous in the hand of God." 
 
 Such is the immortal Social Hope of the vision of the 
 inner shrine. 
 
 A similar truth is contained in the second vision of the 
 indestructible witnesses. Three great characters in the Old 
 Testament were believed never to have died, Enoch (Gen. 
 5:24), Moses (Deut. 34:5), and Elijah (II Kings 2:11). 
 Hence arose the idea that they could return at any time 
 (Deut. 18:18; Zech. 4:12; Mai. 4:5, 6; Matt. 17:3). Accord- 
 ing to early Christian apocalypses, they were to reappear 
 for the purpose of opposing and conquering the Anti-Christ, 
 and to deliver Christians from his wiles. So in this pas- 
 sage, the persecuted Christians are encouraged by the example 
 of these typical witnesses of the Jewish tradition (the num- 
 ber is reduced from three to two) who in miraculous manner 
 are preserved from destruction during the time of their 
 ministry. After their witness has been given, they are to 
 be destroyed and lie unburied while the "men of the nations" 
 rub their hands and congratulate themselves that they are 
 dead. Then God will bring them to life to the terror of their 
 enemies, before whose eyes they will ascend to heaven. 
 
 The plain lesson to be conveyed to the persecuted Chris- 
 tians to whom the Book of Revelation was written, is this: 
 Rome may threaten you with destruction, but you can never 
 die until your testimony is in. Then you may indeed be 
 killed. But, while your enemies may have power over your 
 bodies, they can never destroy your souls. You, yourselves, 
 
THE SECOND INTEKLUDE 109 
 
 are in reality indestructible, and at the resurrection day your 
 enemies will be confounded at seeing you rise to life im- 
 mortal. For a beautiful elaboration of this idea the reader 
 is referred to the apocryphal book, the Wisdom of Solomon, 
 chapter 5 :l-5. 
 
 This teaching of the indestructibility of the witnesses of 
 God has also immense social value for our own time and for 
 all time. Let a man witness for God, and his witness cannot 
 be destroyed. You may destroy his arguments, but you can- 
 not destroy him. You may flout his reasoning, but you can- 
 not do away with the man himself. That life is an un- 
 answerable argument. The prophets and the apostles were 
 killed; the truth which they enshrined and illustrated has lived 
 victoriously. John Brown's body may lie mouldering in the 
 dust, but not the idea for which he stood. On John Wesley's 
 tomb in the Abbey stand the words: "God buries his work- 
 men, but carries on his work." The words of Arthur J. 
 Clough are eternally true: "Though we perish, truth is so." 
 George Eliot may not have spoken the whole truth about 
 immortality in her "Choir Invisible," but she gave unforget- 
 able expression to a part of it. It is possible to "make un- 
 dying music in the world." 
 
 Akin to the social value of this idea is the thought that 
 each man is immortal till his work is done. Until they have 
 finished their testimony, God's witnesses shall live. When- 
 ever, that is, a true servant of God dies, we may have the 
 assurance that the peculiar contribution which it was his 
 moral destiny to make, has been made. Jesus gave con- 
 firmation to this idea in his oft-repeated assertion that his 
 enemies could not take Him because his "hour was not yet 
 come." When at last they did crucify Him, He could say, 
 "It is finished." There is no promise here for any except his 
 witnesses. But for them and for those who love them, it is 
 an assurance of immense worth. It may not always be easy 
 or even possible to see in the case of many who die when they 
 are young, what that contribution is, or why, had they lived, 
 
110 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 it would not have been completed or perfected. But it is 
 our faith to hold that no life can be touched until its witness 
 is complete. Such consolation belongs to all those whose dear 
 dead lie by the thousands on the battlefields of Flanders and 
 of France. 
 
 Contrast also the ultimate salvation and glory of those who 
 have borne their witness with the dismay of those who have 
 tried to put them to death. "And their enemies beheld them." 
 Think of what that means. Think of the multitudes all 
 through Christian history who have died insignificant, lonely 
 deaths, unnoticed, forgotten, neglected. Even their names 
 have not come down to us. Think of the soldiers who died 
 overseas by the thousands, whose identification tags were 
 lost, their bodies thrown indiscriminately together in a con- 
 fused, indistinguishable mass; not even a grave for each, to 
 say nothing of anything to mark such a grave. And then 
 I read: 
 
 I heard a great voice from Heaven, saying, Come up 
 hither; and they went up to Heaven on a cloud and their 
 enemies beheld them, and gave glory to the God of Heaven. 
 
 This is the spiritual hope of each faithful life. No matter 
 how lonely or neglected it may seem to be, it will have its 
 resurrection day, it will be gathered up into glory, and the 
 foes it so bravely faced, who may seem to have overcome it, 
 will know its triumph and give glory to the God of Heaven. 
 
 Chapter 10:1. Then I was on the earth again and saw 
 an angel come down from heaven. His garment was a cloud, 
 on his head was a rainbow, his face shone as the sun, and 
 his feet as columns of fire. 2. In his hand was a small open 
 scroll. In size he was so immense that he stood over land 
 and sea, 3. and his voice was like the roar of a lion. When 
 he spoke, it thundered seven times. 4. I was about to 
 write what these thunder-voices said when I was forbidden 
 to do so. 5. And the great angel solemnly lifted his hand 
 to heaven and took oath that there should be no more 
 delay, 7. but that when the seventh angel sounded his 
 trumpet, the secret purposes of God would be fulfilled. 8. 
 And the voice from heaven commanded me to eat the scroll 
 
THE SECOND INTEELUDE 111 
 
 which the great angel held in his hand. 9, 11. I did so, 
 and found, as I had been told, that it was at first sweet to 
 receive the very words of God, but that the more they 
 were pondered, the more bitter was the mission to pro- 
 nounce the woes and denunciations which they contained 
 in the ears of many peoples. 
 
 Chapter 11:1, 2. And in a vision I was told to measure 
 the sanctuary and to count the worshippers that were in 
 it, and to see how safe and complete they were whatever 
 might happen to the outer confines of the Temple. 3-6. 
 And I was told that power of life would be given to God's 
 witnesses who in sombre raiment would prophesy for a time 
 and walk unharmed through all perils and perform all mira- 
 cles until their ministry was fulfilled. 7, 8. Then they will 
 be killed by the satanic power that will make war against 
 them, 9. and for a time they will lie unburied 10. while their 
 enemies mock them and congratulate one another. 11, 12. 
 Then God will give them a glorious resurrection to the con- 
 sternation of their enemies, 13. and an earthquake will 
 cause widespread destruction. In terror, the rest will give 
 glory to God. 14. The second series of judgments is now 
 over. The third is about to begin. 
 
 Notes v. 1 For the description of the strong angel, compare 
 that of Christ (1:15-16) and see also Ps. 104:3; Ezek. 1:28; 
 Matt. 17:2. No special significance is to be sought in these 
 attributes. The general idea of heavenly glory is conveyed 
 by them. v. 2 The scroll. The words little and open (Ezek. 
 2 :10) to distinguish it from the great roll of chapter 5, which 
 was closed, v. 3 For the figure of the lion, cf. Amos 3:8; 
 Hos. 11 :10. For the seven thunders, see Ps. 29 :3-9. Some 
 popular conception of thunder unknown to us underlies this 
 obscure reference. 1 The number seven is doubtless used to 
 express completion. Their utterance contains the final judg- 
 ments which the author cannot describe (Dan. 12:4-9) until he 
 has been recommissioned. It is useless to press too closely the 
 relation to each other of the message of the angel, the thunders 
 and the little book. One melts into the other and the general 
 purpose is plain, w. 5-6 For this form of oath, see Dan. 
 12:7; Gen. 14:22; Deut. 32:40. The word time signifies delay. 
 (See Matt. 24:48; Heb. 10:37.) v. 7 The word mystery is 
 
 1 Beckwith, pp. 574, 577-8. 
 
112 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 commonly used in the New Testament to describe the purpose 
 of God, hidden for a time but eventually to be made manifest, 
 of salvation in Christ, (cf. Rom. 16:25; I Cor. 2:7.) In 
 Eph. 3 :4ff it is used of the incorporation of the Gentiles into 
 the people of God. Here it is used inclusively of the con- 
 summation of the kingdom, v. 8ff For the Old Testament 
 original of the idea of eating a message, cf. Ezek. 2:8-3:3. (cf. 
 Jer. 15:16, 20:9; Job. 23:12.) The symbolism of eating is 
 the entire appropriation and personal assimilation of the 
 word of God. The idea that the taste of the book was bitter 
 as well as sweet is a characteristic addition of the author 
 of Revelation, and gives warning of the woes which are to 
 come. Also it is spiritually very suggestive. 1 "The actual 
 living taste of a Divine communication is sweet," but when 
 we come to realize how the refusal of that invitation to men 
 means their misery, the utterance of it is indeed bitter; it is 
 sweet to receive the message of God's love, but to translate it 
 in terms of every-day living involves bitter struggle. 
 
 Chapter 11:1-13. w. 1, 2 The original tradition upon 
 which this prophecy is based is unknown to us. The idea of 
 measuring is, of course, familiar from Ezek. chapters 40-43. 
 Doubtless there was a Jewish apocalypse, written in view of 
 some threatened conquest of Jerusalem (perhaps before 70 
 A.D.), and predicting, in accordance with the teaching of 
 the prophets, that a remnant would be saved. This is used by 
 our author not (as some commentators hold) to predict the 
 ultimate repentance of Israel (Rom. chapters 9-11), but to 
 assert by analogy the preservation of the Christian community. 
 The word altar here stands for the altar of burnt-offering. 
 (See Ezek. 43:13ff.) The idea of measuring the worshippers 
 presents no difficulty since the measurement implies preserva- 
 tion, (cf. II Kings 18:22; Isa. 36:7; II Chron. 32:12.) For 
 the outer court, cf. Ezek. 10:5. Forty-two months, or 1260 
 days, three and a half years, is the conventional apocalyptic 
 period of the domination of evil before the end (cf. Dan. 7:25, 
 
 1 See Deane, p. 114. 
 
THE SECOND INTEELUDE 113 
 
 12:7 where "time" and "year" are synonymous). In all pas- 
 sages both in the Old Testament and in the New where these 
 figures are used, this symbolic meaning is to be given them. 
 Other symbolic numbers are four, seven, twelve, forty, seventy, 
 familiar to all Bible readers, w. 3-13 The original tradition 
 underlying this prophecy has already been suggested. (The 
 reader will refer to Gen. 5:24; Deut. 18:15, 18, 34:6; II 
 Kings 2:11; Zech. 4:2ff; Mai. 4:5-6; Mark 6:15, 8:28, 
 9:11-13; Matt. 11:14; John 1:21, 25, 7:40.) No names are 
 here given to the witnesses. Our author is therefore not 
 thinking of Moses or Elijah specifically, but of all who per- 
 form the functions of martyr-witnesses to the truth (cf. Matt. 
 17:10-13; Luke 1:17), and thus of the Christian martyrs to 
 whom the book is addressed, and so of all Christian witness- 
 bearers. Doubtless, as in the case of vv. 1, 2, an earlier 
 apocalypse underlies this passage in which the Old Testament 
 witnesses are to expose the errors of Anti-Christ and to 
 deliver men from his power. Why Enoch seems to be omitted 
 here we do not know unless by limiting the witnesses to Moses 
 and Elijah as Law and Prophet, the complete testimony of 
 the true faith is depicted, v. 3 For the time indication here, 
 see above, v. 4 Standing before the Lord, the true position 
 of every prophet of God. w. 5, 6 (cf. II Kings 1 :10; I Kings 
 17:1, 18:1; Luke 4:25; Jas. 5:17; Ex. 7:20). v 7 The Beast. 
 The use of the word "beast" in the Book of Revelation may 
 be summarized as follows: (1) In chapters 4 and 5, the cor- 
 rect reading is "living creatures" as in the Revised Version, 
 and the word there has no connection with its meaning here 
 and in later portions of the book. (2) All through ancient 
 mythologies and Hebrew folklore, there ran the tradition of a 
 monster, opposing himself to the ruler of the universe, and 
 symbolizing in this opposition the eternal conflict between 
 good and evil. (3) The word is used in this sense in Dan. 7, 
 and is the prototype of our author's use of the word, (4) Our 
 author uses the word in three distinct senses (a) of Satan as 
 the personification of evil, as in chapter 13; (b) of Anti- 
 
114 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Christ as the embodiment of Satanic opposition in human 
 form to Christianity. This figure of Anti-Christ is contempo- 
 rary with the earliest years of the Christian era, owes its 
 origin to Jewish demonology, and appears often in New Testa- 
 ment writings (cf. I John 2:18, II John 7; II Thess. 2:3). It 
 is in the sense of Anti-Christ that the word is used in this 
 chapter of Revelation, (c) Of the Roman emperor as the 
 agent of Satan, as in chapters 13 and 17. v. 8 The denial 
 of burial was felt by the ancients to be the final insult (cf. I 
 Kings 21:24; Jer. 8:lff, 14:16). The term "great city" which 
 here certainly means Jerusalem, elsewhere in Revelation means 
 Rome. Jerusalem is frequently referred to as Sodom, but 
 nowhere else as Egypt, vv. 11, 12 (Cf. Ezek. 37:10; II Kings 
 13:21,2:11.) 
 
w 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE DRAGON AND THE BEAST 
 
 Bevelation, Chapters 11:15-19; 12, 13 
 
 I. The Dragon 
 
 E have now arrived at one of the passages in the Book 
 of Revelation most difficult to understand, whether in 
 its relation to the rest of the book or with respect to its own 
 contents. Only a very careful mastering of the main outlines 
 of the message, and a close examination of the way the mind 
 of the author works, will enable the reader to understand either 
 its place or its meaning. In the main, we find that the con- 
 tents of the Book of Revelation fall into three sections. Of 
 these the first, the study of which we have now completed, 
 contains the introduction, and the chief judgments of God 
 upon a wicked world (chapters 1-11) ; the second, to which 
 we have now come, contains a description of the sufferings of 
 the church, in the grip of the powers of evil (chapters 12-19) ; 
 and the third which lies beyond describes the final victory of 
 Christ and his followers (chapters 20-22). 
 
 We might have been led to expect that with the sounding 
 of the seventh trumpet, after the second interlude, the final 
 judgment would fall upon the world, and the trial of Chris- 
 tians would end and their victory would be assured. But 
 evil is not so soon to be vanquished, and victory is not so 
 easily to be won. Perhaps nothing in the whole book is so 
 wonderful as the full justice which is done to the inveterate 
 and apparently impregnable and invincible power of evil. It 
 is true that Revelation is a book of magnificent optimism, and 
 
 115 
 
13 6 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 that it ends in no stalemate, in no peace without victory, in 
 no truce. The victory which it ultimately describes is absolute, 
 not negotiated as between equals, but dictated by the Supreme 
 power of righteousness whose undisputed and unique suprem- 
 acy is acknowledged by all. But that victory is all the more 
 impressive because it goes to the roots; because the struggle 
 is carried to the very last strongholds of evil; because it does 
 not end until the very principle and source of evil has been 
 discovered and vanquished. It is this thoroughgoing treat- 
 ment of the problem of evil in its relation to the Christian 
 Idea which makes this book the final word of Social Hope. 
 We love the book all the more because of its delayed promise 
 and postponed day of victory. If it offered us anything less 
 than the promise of the final overthrow of evil itself, it would 
 not be what it is. Temporary victories are always possible 
 in the sphere of history. Preliminary battles are being won 
 every day on the field of time. But the Book of Revelation 
 does not describe these. The Social Hope which it offers is 
 not based on them. Rather it takes us by the hand and leads 
 us through seas of blood and ages of soul-struggle up to 
 the very capital of evil and has us witness its capitulation. 
 What we see before this book ends, is not the surrender of the 
 sword of some temporary power. We behold the surrender of 
 Satan himself, who hands his sword over for all time to the all- 
 conquering Christ. This is the ultimate truth which forms 
 the foundation of a Social Hope which is eternal. 
 
 Let the reader once grasp the intention of the author of 
 Revelation to pass beyond the particular and temporary op- 
 position of the Roman Empire to the Christian cultus of the 
 first century and to carry the war, as it were, into the very 
 heart of the enemy's country, and the position and meaning 
 of the following chapters, which every student of the book 
 has found difficult and many have accounted hopeless, begins 
 to be clear. 
 
 Introducing these chapters, we have first the hymn of praise 
 with which the eleventh chapter closes. Like the Greek chorus 
 
THE DEAGON AND THE BEAST 117 
 
 in a tragedy of Sophocles or Euripides, these anthems break 
 forth more than once in the Book of Revelations (chapters 
 5:13, 14, 19:1-7). As the seventh angel sounds, there breaks 
 forth first of all this great hymn of thanksgiving, and the 
 doors of the Heavenly Temple swing open for a moment, and 
 the ark of safety is revealed, and there are manifestations in 
 heaven of the power of God. 
 
 The sounding of the trumpet, however, does not result in 
 immediate, final judgment. Instead there follows chapter 12, 
 admittedly one of the most obscure passages. We note the 
 strange beginning. The author does not even say that he 
 saw this vision. Alone of all the visions in the book it begins 
 impersonally: "And there was seen." Again we have nothing 
 in the Old Testament that will help us, nor anywhere in 
 Scripture, nor even in history. Efforts to find analogies in 
 Israel's escape from Egypt or in contemporary historical 
 events have proved futile. But there are two points that may 
 be held firm. First, the author is here describing the original 
 and ultimate struggle between good and evil; and second, he 
 is using for his source materials which are foreign to the 
 Bible, and a tradition which is wholly unfamiliar to us. We 
 do not know where he found these strange stories of the 
 dragon and the woman and the child, nor do we know just 
 how he meant them to be interpreted. It is very probable 
 that this was not wholly clear to his own mind. Imagination, 
 and particularly apocalyptical imagination, moves in the realm 
 of general ideas which gather in confused mass in the mind of 
 the writer, and are portrayed with a vague and perhaps 
 despairing effort at verbal description, and are left to be their 
 own interpreters of the germinal truth which agitates the soul 
 of the writer. 
 
 The most plausible explanation of chapter 12 is this. 1 (1) 
 
 Ancient mythology has much to say of the aggressive power of 
 
 the Dragon (Chaos) against the older and aboriginal gods; 
 
 it tells us of the birth of the sun-god (so in Greek mythology, 
 
 1 Porter, pp. 236-240. 
 
118 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF BEVELATION 
 
 of the birth of Apollos whose mother was persecuted by the 
 dragon Pythos) ; and of how this infant sun-god is rescued 
 by his mother's flight from the assaults of the dragon which 
 he slays when he is grown. (2) This bit of mythology was 
 made use of by a Jewish tradition not found in Scripture. 
 The woman now becomes the true Israel; the dragon is Satan; 
 the child is the Messiah. The supernatural description of the 
 woman is retained; Michael and his angels are introduced as 
 conquering the dragon in heaven at the birth of the Messiah, 
 and the Messiah himself is represented as slaying the dragon 
 on earth. (3) Finally, this Christian author adapts these 
 materials to his purpose which is (to repeat) to represent 
 Christ as the ultimate symbol of good, vanquishing Satan, the 
 ultimate symbol of evil. Apparently he makes little change 
 in the general order of ideas. In the beginning of the chapter, 
 the woman evidently stands for the true Israel which produced 
 Christ. At the end of the chapter (v. 17) she has become the 
 church, whose children keep the commandments of Jesus. The 
 offspring of the woman are thus Christ and the servants of 
 Christ, and the clue to the author's whole meaning is found 
 in verses 10 and 11, where the victory of the Christian faith 
 is hymned over its arch-enemy. This is the ultimate fact 
 which Michael's conquest of the dragon and the escape of the 
 child are supposed to symbolize. 
 
 It is a mistake to try to find a separate meaning in all the 
 details of the chapter. The literalistic mind will make nothing 
 of it whatsoever. The effort to find in other periods of history 
 than that in which the prophet himself lived the events to 
 which the figures refer, leads to nothing but confusion and 
 total misunderstanding of the underlying and spiritual mean- 
 ing of the chapter. 
 
 The chapter is obscure in its details because, as has already 
 been stated, we do not know the original source from which 
 the materials are taken. The author has been content to 
 leave the traditional material as he found it; not because its 
 meaning was always clear, perhaps even because its meaning 
 
THE DRAGON AND THE BEAST 119 
 
 was not always clear. It served his purpose and pictorially 
 it was very effective. 
 
 It is not difficult, however, to see that the teaching of this 
 chapter must have been of immense encouragement to the 
 persecuted Christians to whom it was written. It told them 
 that the power that had warred against them had already been 
 overcome in heaven; that the intensity of its warfare upon 
 them was due to the fact that it realized this and knew that 
 the time of its earthly triumph was brief; and that they had 
 but to endure for a brief time in the name of Christ and 
 victory would be theirs. The same teaching constitutes the 
 Social Hope of the Christian to-day. The nature of evil is 
 described in its ultimate terms. It is not a temporary and 
 an historical fact out of which mankind may be expected to 
 grow, from which he may hope in due time to graduate. The 
 Book of Revelation knows nothing about evolutionary 
 optimism, the easy persuasion that man will develop of him- 
 self into perfection. Evil is here portrayed as a power so 
 malignant, and so rooted in the very constitution of the uni- 
 verse that it can be overthrown only by God Himself. That 
 ultimate struggle is here described, and its outcome. Milton, 
 as we all know, has made use of this passage in Paradise Lost, 
 and pictures how Satan and his defeated hosts were cast into 
 hell. Finally, the chapter gives us the picture of Christ, born 
 of woman, as the hope of the world. Satan sought to destroy 
 the young child, but He was caught away; and He shall rule 
 the nations, and although his servants shall be persecuted by 
 Satan for a time, they will ultimately "overcome him by the 
 blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony." Here 
 are the truths of the chapter which are in perfect harmony 
 with the teaching of the rest of the book and constitute its 
 permanent social message to the Christians of its time and of 
 all time. 
 
 Chapter 12:1. A great marvel was seen in the heavens: 
 a woman clothed with the planets and crowned with the 
 stars. 2. She cried out in the pains of child-birth. 3. 
 
120 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 And another portent appeared, a great warlike dragon hav- 
 ing the heads and horns and crowns that signify power 
 and rulership. 4. His tail swept away a third of the heav- 
 enly host and flung chem to the earth as he fell where the 
 woman was about to give birth to her child. And he stood 
 ready to devour it. 5. And she brought forth a son who 
 was destined to have universal rule, and he was caught up 
 for safety to the throne of God; 6. and the woman fled 
 to the wilderness where God protected her during the three 
 and a half years of the dragon's remaining power. 
 
 7, 8, 9. The fall of the dragon was the result of a conflict 
 in heaven, wheie he and his followers made war on God. But 
 Michael and his angels overcame him and threw him out 
 of heaven and his angels with him. 10. And this victory 
 was celebrated by a great song of praise because the King- 
 dom of God was rid by the power of Christ of this malignant 
 foe that had unceasingly opposed the righteous. 11. In 
 the end, those who loved Christ more than their own lives, 
 overcame him by the death of Christ and their own sacri- 
 fice. 12. But heaven's gain meant loss to the earth, 
 whose inhabitants must endure the concentrated anger of 
 the dragon who knows that his power will not long endure. 
 
 13. For when the dragon realized this, his fury against 
 the woman broke forth. 14-16. But her escape to the 
 wilderness was aided supernaturally, and the attacks of 
 the dragon were miraculously frustrated, and she was safe 
 during the time of the dragon's rule. 17. He therefore 
 vented his anger upon her children, those faithful Chris- 
 tians who must still endure persecution for a time. 
 
 Notes v. 1 The woman She cannot be identified with the 
 mother of our Lord, since she is the mother of all Christians 
 (v. 17) as well as of the Messiah. She may have been the 
 church of the Old Testament in the original Jewish oracle 
 which underlies this chapter. But our author plainly means 
 in verse 13 and following, the church of the New Testament. 
 It is safe, therefore, to have the woman stand for "the be- 
 loved community," the "ideal Zion," the symbol of God's 
 people of both the Old and the New Testaments. See 
 3:9, 11:19, 15:5, 21:12-14, where the "true Israel" embraces 
 alike the Jewish and Christian church. (cf. Isa. 54:1, 
 66:7-9; Gal. 4:26; II Esdras 10:7. Read Micah 4:9ff.) For 
 Old Testament suggestions of the description of her heavenly 
 glory, see Ps. 104 :2 ; Song of Sol. 6 :10 ; and Wisdom of Sol. 
 
THE DKAGON AND THE BEAST 121 
 
 6:10. v. 3 Dragon. (See Job 7:12; Ps. 74:14; 89:10; Isa. 
 27:1, 51:9; Ezek. 32:2; Amos 9:3.) It was easy to identify 
 this monster with the serpent of Eden and with the devil. The 
 number seven signifies, of course, completeness, while the ten 
 horns are taken from Dan. 7:7. The horn is a common sym- 
 bol of might, w. 5, 6 The child is, of course, in the earlier 
 verses, the Messiah of Jewish tradition. In the author's 
 Christian use of that tradition, he is Christ. The reader 
 will not look too closely in these verses for exact refer- 
 ences to his earthly life (as for example the presecu- 
 tion of Herod (v. 13), the escape into Egypt (v. 14), 
 or the ascension (v. 5). It is at least open to question 
 whether the author had these events in mind. The 
 whole description of the Messiah-child is not in the sphere 
 of the temporal and the historical, but in the realm of 
 the spiritual and eternal^ v. 6 The time-indication here 
 as in v. 14 is the stereotyped apocalyptical period for 
 the domination of evil. The central idea of this verse is that 
 Satan fails in his attempt to destroy the Messiah. W. 7-9 
 Michael in the later Old Testament is the patron angel of 
 Israel. (Dan. 10:21, 12:1.) Serpent It is an interesting 
 illustration of the essential unity of the Bible that the serpent 
 of Eden should reappear in the last book of the g^ible, to be 
 overcome by the child "born of woman." There is no con- 
 tradiction between the Jewish conception of the expulsion of 
 the dragon from heaven and the idea of the triumph of the 
 Christian over him on earth, w. 15-17 This section follows 
 logically after vv. 1-6. It will not do to base these verses on 
 the story of Israel's escape from Egypt (cf. Ex. 19:4), for 
 the details are very dissimilar, and the figure of eagles' wings 
 was a common and frequent Old Testament simile (cf. Deut. 
 32:11; Isa. 40:31; Jer. 48:9). The author has taken his 
 imagery not from the Old Testament but from some familiar 
 legend. For the time three and a half years (v. 14), cf. 
 above v. 6. That the author had the Genesis story consciously 
 
122 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 in mind seems apparent from the expression "the rest of her 
 seed" (v. 17) (cf. Gen. 3:15). 
 
 II. The Beast 
 Chapter 13 
 
 In approaching this chapter, also, we bear in mind the fact 
 that the present purpose of the author is to describe the 
 church as for the moment in the clutch of evil. It is a full 
 statement of the resources of evil as they are brought to bear 
 upon the Christian community. In chapter 12, that power of 
 evil is traced back to its ultimate source; but the assurance 
 is given that it has already been overcome in heaven, and 
 can and will be overcome on earth if the servants of Christ 
 will but hold fast for a time. In the conviction that "in the 
 world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have 
 overcome the world," the author goes on in this chapter to 
 describe how the intensified fury of the dragon will now fall 
 upon the church and the witnesses of Jesus. This description 
 is given in language so bizarre and fantastic as to baffle even 
 the reader who has begun to be acclimated to the strange 
 imagery of apocalyptic writing. His imagination is staggered 
 by all this fantastic and up-heaped conglomeration of beasts 
 that are killed and come to life, and of cryptic marks and 
 numbers. He finds it difficult to take it all seriously, and 
 is haunted by the suspicion that interpreters who try to find 
 a key to all these puzzles are deceiving themselves as well as 
 their readers. Without doubt patience is needed by the 
 modern mind which never thinks in these forms and has 
 habitually neglected all this kind of writing in Scripture 
 itself. If the reader, however, determined to follow the story 
 of this book throughout, and encouraged by such enlighten- 
 ment as has already come to him, will carefully study this 
 chapter, it also will be made to yield its secret which will 
 be found to be no less precious than that which has gone 
 before. 
 
THE DEAGON AND THE BEAST 123 
 
 In general, then, the reader will understand that there is 
 contained in this chapter the story of how the dragon, Satan, 
 the power of evil on earth, sets about to persecute the children 
 of God, the servants of Christ, the "seed of the woman." He 
 makes the Roman Empire his agent for this persecution. The 
 beasts of this chapter represent the Roman Empire in full 
 action against the church, and thus stand for forces, per- 
 sonalities, institutions which were most real to the first readers 
 of this book, however vague and unfamiliar they may appear 
 to us. Here the imperial edict to worship the Emperor is 
 set forth in all its horror. 
 
 In the next place, the reader must remember what has 
 been repeatedly urged, that this kind of language was very 
 familiar to the writer of this book and to those to whom it 
 was first addressed. It is the conventional language of all 
 apocalypses. Turn, for example, to the seventh chapter of 
 Daniel and read it carefully, and then there will be little 
 trouble with the main outlines of the chapter under discussion. 
 In Daniel, as in Revelation, we are introduced to four beasts 
 which come up from the sea. The first was like a lion, the 
 second like a bear, the third like a leopard, and the fourth 
 and the most dreadful of all was different from the rest and 
 had teeth of iron, and in his fury devoured and stamped and 
 broke in pieces all that opposed him. We read further (v. 
 15) that Daniel was perplexed and grieved in mind, just as 
 we are, at these strange and savage beasts, and asked for an 
 explanation of them, and the explanation was given. 
 
 These great beasts ... are four kings which shall 
 arise out of the earth (v. 17). And the fourth beast shall 
 be the fourth kingdom which shall devour the earth (v. 23). 
 But the judgment shall sit, and they (the saints) shall 
 take away his dominion to consume and destroy it unto 
 the end. 
 
 Ko one, that is, who is familiar with the symbolism of the 
 seventh chapter of Daniel can have any difficulty with the 
 essential meaning of the thirteenth chapter of Revelation. 
 
124 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Just as the beasts of that chapter stood for the kingdoms of 
 Babylon, of the Medes, of the Persians and of Syria, so the 
 beast of this chapter in Revelation (incidentally alluded to 
 in 11:7) stands for the Roman Empire in its different mani- 
 festations. The number of the beasts is reduced from four to 
 two, and the only difficulties are those of detail and of the 
 understanding not of the main outlines of the chapter, but of 
 some of its special features. 
 
 A few of these may well receive attention at this point. 
 Assuming that the beast which the author sees rising out of 
 the sea is Rome, what is meant by the seven heads and ten 
 horns and ten crowns'? Fortunately, we are not left in doubt 
 as to how these features are to be interpreted. If the reader 
 will turn to chapter 17, vv. 7ff., he will find the explanation 
 given there. The seven heads are expressly declared to be 
 the seven hills of Rome, as typifying seven emperors; the 
 horns are the ten emperors of Rome (whether we count 
 from Julius Cassar to Nero, or from Augustus to Vespasian) ; 
 and the ten crowns are the symbol of their authority. It ap- 
 pears certain, therefore, that the beast symbolizes the Roman 
 Emperors as Satan's agents in his war against the saints. 
 Moreover, seven of these emperors are said (17:10) to have 
 the "name of blasphemy," i. e. were worshipped as God 
 (omitting, that is, Galba and Otto and Vitellius. See later 
 in Notes, chapter 17). 
 
 But what is meant by the detail in v. 3, where we are told 
 that one of the heads was wounded to death, and his wound 
 was healed and the world wondered after the beast? 1 The 
 most plausible and generally accepted explanation is that this 
 verse refers to the legend about the death of Nero. He died 
 by suicide, alone, in his villa in an obscure place. These cir- 
 cumstances made possible the circulation of rumors that he 
 was not really dead at all, but had fled, and that some day 
 he would return to wreak fearful vengeance upon Rome. 
 These rumors spread with rapidity and persisted long after. 
 
 1 Beckwith, pp. 400ff. 
 
THE DEAGON AND THE BEAST 125 
 
 Decrees appeared in his name and imposters arose claiming 
 to be Nero. Thus he came to be a mysterious and super- 
 natural personality and in later Christian tradition was identi- 
 fied with Anti-Christ. Doubtless this idea was in existence at 
 the time the Book of Revelation was written, and allusion is 
 made to it in this verse. 
 
 A third detail, the most difficult of all found in this chapter, 
 calls for special comment. It is contained in v. 18. 
 
 Let him that hath understanding count the number of 
 the beast; for it is the number of a man: and his number is 
 six hundred, three score and six. 
 
 For a full discussion of this passage the reader is referred 
 to the authorities. 1 In the Hebrew and Greek languages the 
 letters of the alphabet serve also as numbers, so that every 
 name or even word has a numerical value. What the author 
 says in this verse, therefore, is that the letters which make 
 up the name of the beast yield the number six hundred and 
 sixty-six. The only question is, therefore, what is the signifi- 
 cation of this exact number, and to what person in contempo- 
 rary histoiy does it refer? Neither of these questions can be 
 answered with exactness. With respect to the first, the most 
 plausible explanation is that as the perfect number would be 
 seven hundred and seventy-seven, this number which falls 
 short of it denotes imperfection, or evil, just as eight hundred 
 and eighty-eight, which the name of Jesus can be made to 
 signify, surpasses it and denotes divine perfection. With 
 respect to the second question, all sorts of efforts to find 
 the name contained in the cryptogram have been made and 
 will doubtless continue to be made. All of these are per- 
 missible so long as one limits one's inquiry to contemporary 
 Roman history. When, however, one strays out into the broad 
 field of human history and tries to make out that Mohammed 
 or Luther or Napoleon is meant, one is departing from what 
 we have seen to be the intention and purpose of Revelation. 
 1 See Beckwith, pp. 403ff ; Porter, pp. 246ff. 
 
126 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 The consensus of the best opinion is that Nero Csesar is 
 meant. Other explanations are that the Latin Empire is 
 meant, or chaos, or a combination of chaos and Nero. "What- 
 ever we may now guess as to the number, we may rest assured 
 that it is the past and not the future that hides the mystery 
 of its meaning." 
 
 Two other features of this chapter may be discussed here. 
 As we have seen, there are two beasts. How are these to be 
 related to each other, understanding that the beast of verse 1 
 symbolizes the Roman Empire? What is the meaning of 
 verse 11, "And I beheld another beast"? Here there are two 
 possible explanations. One has been made by Ramsay. 1 
 Since in v. 12 it is expressly stated that the function of the 
 second beast is to execute the authority of the first beast, he 
 is of the opinion that the second beast typifies the civil and 
 religious administration of the Roman Empire to which was 
 entrusted the duty of carrying into effect the imperial decree 
 of emperor-worship. On the whole, however, scholars are in- 
 clined to accept the second explanation. 2 Since the second 
 beast is specially designated as a false prophet (v. 14), it is 
 felt that he stands for the pagan priesthood, or "the special 
 Roman functionaries charged with the maintenance and ex- 
 tension of emperor-worship throughout the Empire." 
 
 Finally, what shall we make of the mark (v. 16) which all 
 must receive in order to purchase or to sell food ? 3 This may 
 mean that a stamp which Christians would consider to be 
 idolatrous must be affixed to papers licensing buyers or sellers. 
 Since this would be a tacit acknowledgment of emperor-wor- 
 ship, Asian Christians would be ruined financially by the in- 
 fliction of this boycott upon traders who had not proved their 
 loyalty to the emperor. It is possible, however, that the ex- 
 pression refers to a future or imagined branding of the 
 emperor's name on the foreheads of those who refused to 
 bow the knee to the emperor's statue. In this case how elo- 
 
 1 Seven Cities, p. 97. 
 
 2 See Beckwith, p. 409. 
 
 3 See Ramsay, op. cit., p. 105ff. 
 
THE DEAGON AND THE BEAST 127 
 
 quent becomes the word of promise more than once uttered 
 in this book, "I will write upon him my new name" (cf. 17:5, 
 19:12, 22:4). 
 
 Truly, "here is the patience and faith of the saints"; here 
 is the situation which calls for endurance and fidelity. We 
 have described every form of persecution which can be 
 brought to bear: violence, deceit, overmastering power, the 
 relentless discovery of all who refuse to submit, starvation, 
 and obloquy. The chapter will stand for all ages as the sum- 
 mary of all possible affliction. But in the center of it there 
 stands always the shining hope. All of this evil is marked 
 for destruction. Its triumph is brief. There is the Book 
 of Life of the slain Lamb in which the names of God's fol- 
 lowers are eternally inscribed. At this point we must stand, 
 we must endure, we must be faithful. However powerless 
 for the moment the cause of Christ may seem to be, in the 
 end it shall prevail. If we were but able to take into our 
 souls a tithe of the meaning of this chapter, it would be to 
 us like iron in the blood. "Would that we could read this 
 chapter with imagination vivid enough to enable us to do 
 justice to the courage of those Christians in Asia! It would 
 make us ashamed of our feebleness and cowardice where the 
 cause of Christ is concerned. It is a summons to earnestness, 
 to endurance, to faith. And now, as then, it contains the 
 promise of ultimate victory." 1 
 
 Chapter 13:1. Again, I stood on the seashore and I saw 
 a huge beast come out of the sea, with all the marks of 
 authority and power, and on his heads were blasphemous 
 names. 2. In this beast were concentrated all the powers 
 of evil of the four beasts of Daniel's vision, and his mas- 
 ter, the dragon, gave him full authority and power. 3. One 
 of his heads was apparently slain, but the wound was healed 
 and the world went after him in wonder 4. and worshipped 
 both the dragon and the beast, for men felt that there 
 was no power on earth that could overcome him. 5, 6. And 
 he was permitted to utter blasphemies against God and 
 heaven for a limited time. 7. And the beast persecuted 
 1 Deane, p. 155. 
 
128 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 God's children and conquered them, and all the rest of the 
 inhabitants of the earth. 8. And all men, except the elect 
 of God, worshipped him. 9. Give ear to this. 10. If one 
 is destined for captivity, to captivity he must go. If one 
 resists death with the sword, he must himself be killed. 
 Here is the opportunity to show endurance and fidelity. 
 11. And I saw another beast. This one came out of the 
 earth; and he had lamb's horns, but his voice was the 
 dragon's. 12. This was the agent of the first beast, and 
 carried out his will and made men worship the beast whose 
 wound was healed. 13, 14. He deceived men by use of su- 
 pernatural powers, and bade them worship the beast, be- 
 cause he made them believe that he was really alive and 
 could speak. 15. And he commanded that all should be 
 killed who would not worship him. 16, 17. And he compelled 
 men to worship him by making this worship a condition of 
 getting the necessities of life. 18. Would you know who 
 this beast is? His number is six hundred and sixty-six. 
 
 Notes v. 1 And I stood The Revised Version adopts an 
 alternate reading: "And he stood." In this case the sentence 
 belongs to the previous verse, and "he" refers to Christ. One 
 reading is as good as the other. The Beast For this word and 
 its use, cf. Note on chapter 11:7. In this chapter the word 
 refers to the Roman Empire (v. 1) or the Roman emperor 
 (v. 4ff). In the latter case, the beast is identical with Anti- 
 Christ. The coming of the beast out of the sea is taken di- 
 rectly from Dan. 7:3, but ultimately from some myth of the 
 beast as a sea-monster. In 11:7, 17:8, the beast comes from 
 an abyss, because the actual author of evil is meant. Seven 
 heads In 17:9 ; these are identified with the seven hills of 
 Rome, as symbols of the seven emperors who received divine 
 worship. Ten horns (see Dan. 7:7, 24). Here the number 
 ten is used symbolically. All nations are to be subject to 
 the beast (cf. 17:12). Names of blasphemy, i.e., divine titles 
 taken by the Roman Emperors, v. 2 This description com- 
 bines the first three beasts of Daniel, (cf. Hosea 13 :7ff.) The 
 fourth beast of Daniel is represented by the ten horns. The 
 meaning is that this beast is the concentration of all powers of 
 evil. v. 3 does not mean that the beast survives in spite of 
 the loss of one of his heads. Rather in this verse and also in 
 
THE DEAGON AND THE BEAST 129 
 
 v. 12 the beast is identified with the head, which here repre- 
 sents him. v. 5 Taken from Dan. 7 :8, 20, 25. Great here means 
 proud. Note once more the conventional limit of the time of 
 the power of evil. The point always is that there is to be 
 an end to the sway of evil, and that that end is fixed. This 
 note of hope is hardly absent from a single chapter in this 
 book. v. 6 Suggested by Dan. 7:25, 8:10. v. 7 (cf. Dan. 
 7:21, 23. See also Rev. 5:9). v. 8 Book of Life (see on 
 3:5). Here as in 21:27 called the Lamb's Book. The words 
 "Lamb slain" may possibly be an interpolation. In any 
 event the words "from the foundation of the world" are to 
 be joined with "written." The names of the faithful have 
 been there from the beginning, v. 10 The probably correct 
 reading of this verse has been suggested in the text. Chris- 
 tians are here urged to avoid the use of force in resisting 
 persecution. Not violence, but patient endurance will bring 
 the victory, (cf. Matt. 26:52.) v. 11 By coming out of the 
 earth, the human nature of this beast is possibly indicated. 
 This beast also is lamb-like in power as contrasted with the 
 might of the first beast (v. 2), and speaks with the guile of 
 the serpent, and not with the loud voice of blasphemy, v. 12 
 Before him, i.e., as in the presence of his master, (cf. Lk. 
 1:75; I Kings, 17:1.) w. 13-15 (cf. II Thess. 2:9; Mark 
 13:22; II Kings 1:10, 12.) w. 14b-15 refer to the Nero-myth, 
 and to the Christian tradition of Nero as re-incarnate in Anti- 
 Christ. "Legends of statues assuming the functions of life 
 are familiar in antiquity (as Pygmalion and Galatea), and 
 even in the saints-legends of the mediaeval church." v. 16 
 The mark On the whole, the idea of branding seems most 
 likely. Devotees of a god were accustomed to brand them- 
 selves with his mark. cf. Is. 44:5 (R. V. margin). This 
 practice is doubtless referred to in Gal. 6:17. Akin to this is 
 the custom of branding slaves with the mark of their master. 
 There is no evidence, however, that any edict contained this 
 demand for compulsory branding. It may have been used 
 
130 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 figuratively by the author to denote that all must give evidence 
 of loyalty, v. 18 Understanding, i.e. skill in deciphering the 
 meaning of the number, cf. Dan. 9:22. Count in this con- 
 nection means calculate. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE END 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 14, 15, 16 
 
 THE reader will bear in mind what the purpose of the 
 author of the book has been from chapter 9 onward. 
 That purpose, as we have seen, is to carry the conflict back 
 to its original sources, to trace it to its very roots, and to 
 point out that the victory with which the book is to end 
 is no temporary triumph, but the final conquest of the very 
 principle of evil by God and by the all-conquering Christ. 
 
 The author prepares for this culminating portion of this 
 great spiritual drama by receiving a fresh commission to 
 utter these sublime prophecies (chapter 10). Then he re- 
 assures his readers of the safety of God's servants in the 
 midst of the terrific impact between the forces of good and 
 evil which is to follow by the vision of the inner shrine and 
 the indestructibility of the witnesses of God (chapter 11:1-13). 
 Then, after a brief passage in which we hear a hymn of 
 ascription to God, and behold for a moment the ark of 
 safety in the temple of heaven (chapter 11:14-19), we are 
 led back in imagination to the original conflict between God 
 and Satan and are told how Satan, vanquished in heaven, 
 is permitted for a time to persecute with venomous hatred 
 the children of God and the servants of Christ on earth. 
 That persecution which now falls upon the early Christians 
 of the primitive church is told in detail in chapter 13. The 
 beast of the Roman Empire, receiving full authority from 
 Satan, commands them to worship the Roman emperor upon 
 penalty of death. This persecution they must endure with 
 
 131 
 
132 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF BEVELATION 
 
 patience and fortitude, knowing that they are the elect of God 
 and that one day the beast is to be overcome. 
 
 We now arrive at the point when that final battle is to 
 take place which will result in casting the beast into the lake 
 of brimstone and fire, and in the salvation of the children of 
 God. For the description of this great battle scene, the au- 
 thor makes elaborate preparation. First, he gives us a beau- 
 tiful picture of the followers of the Lamb as they are gath- 
 ered, faultless, before the throne of God (chapter 14:1-5). 
 Next he issues, as it were, a great proclamation, heralding 
 the beginning of this tremendous conflict and warning all 
 to flee from the wrath to come (chapter 14:6-20). Then we 
 have the final series of judgments, depicted in the emptying 
 of the seven bowls (chapters 15 and 16). After another 
 hallelujah chorus, the angels of God come forward and at 
 the word of command they empty the vials of the final judg- 
 ments of God upon the world (chapter 15:4-8, and chapter 
 16). Let us take up each one of these sections in turn. 
 
 1. The Vision of the 'Redeemed (Chapter 14:1-5) 
 
 As we have already noted, it is the habit of the, author to 
 contrast shadow and light. Over against the picture of evil 
 there is continually set the shining hope of ultimate victory. 
 This fact in itself constitutes one of the fundamental spiritual 
 messages of the book. We are never allowed to forget for 
 a moment what the ultimate outcome is to be. When things 
 are at their worst, some message always pierces the dark- 
 ness. Either we have given to us a short, sharp summons 
 to endurance, or a parable of assurance, or a hymn of vic- 
 tory breaks in triumph over our bewildered minds, or the 
 doors of heaven swing open for a moment and we see the 
 ten thousand times ten thousand who have endured to the 
 end and have received the crown of life. This alternation 
 of darkness and light makes up the social message of the 
 Book of Revelation. It is essentially a tract for hard times. 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 133 
 
 It is a book for the social worker to read. He can match 
 the darkness of those days with the darkness which he feels; 
 the burden which lay upon those souls with the burden which 
 lies upon his own. He knows that he is not called upon 
 to endure any worse trials than those which are depicted in 
 this book. But underneath it all and over it all and running 
 through it all, there is the spiritual assurance, the note of 
 victory, the knowledge that in a sense the fight already has 
 been won and that for him there remains only the duty 
 to endure to the end. This is the summons which cannot 
 be resisted. The fact that the life, of faithful endurance, of 
 refusal to bow the knee to Baal, and the willing acceptance 
 of any sacrifice which this loyalty entails numbers us among 
 the followers of the lamb now and forever in an imperishable 
 appeal and a promise of infinite hope. 
 
 This vision of the redeemed presents only a few features 
 which demand special mention. What does the author mean 
 by Mount Zion? Are we to think of it as in heaven or on 
 earth ? Here there is much difference of opinion. 1 It is doubt- 
 less true that anywhere in the Old Testament and in the 
 Jewish apocalypses, the name, synonymous with Jerusalem, 
 denotes the earthly and Messianic kingdom. (Joel 2:32; 
 Isa. 24:23; Mic. 4:7; etc.) In Heb. 12:22 it is also true 
 that Mount Zion is the perfect archetype of the earthly Jeru- 
 salem and not heaven as the abode of God. In this book the 
 author may be thinking of such an earthly Zion in a redeemed 
 world. Yet even with him it takes on heavenly features, 
 and for us it is impossible to think of anything save the 
 heavenly Jerusalem. It is not, therefore, a question which it 
 is important, even if it were possible, for us to decide. In 
 the second place, how are we to understand the number 
 144,000? Some feel that this number stands symbolically for 
 a select company of those who are specially distinguished by 
 their holiness. But the simpler interpretation is that it stands 
 
 J See Beckwith, p. 646. 
 
134 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 for the whole body of the sealed and the redeemed. 1 (See 
 chapter 7.) The clause denning their chastity is probably to 
 be taken literally. As over against the prevailing immorality, 
 the prophet thus depicts their ascetic purity. It is to be 
 noted, however, that there is nothing in the book to show 
 that celibacy was a part of our author's moral ideal. 
 
 The close parallelism between this section and the preced- 
 ing chapter will not escape the reader's attention. Over 
 against the mark of the beast, Christ's followers have the 
 Father's name on their foreheads. The worshippers of the 
 beast declared that no one could war against him; and here 
 the redeemed sing the might of God before his throne. And 
 both chapters begin abruptly: "And I stood and saw a 
 beast." "And I looked, and lo, a Lamb." 
 
 Chapter 14:1. Then in contrast to the beast and his 
 worshippers, I saw Christ in the heavenly Jerusalem sur- 
 rounded by the whole number of the redeemed who were 
 marked as belonging to God. 2, 3. And I heard the reverbe- 
 ration of many voices, accompanied by music, singing a 
 song before God which only the redeemed could under- 
 stand. 4. These have kept themselves from every manner 
 of evil and they shall follow Christ always. 
 
 Notes v. 1 The Lamb This is the common designation of 
 Christ in Revelation. The names Jesus or Christ is used but 
 five times, and the name Lord once. In all other cases the 
 Lamb is used (28 in all), and always in the most august scenes. 
 The reference is plainly to the redeeming work of Christ, 
 since this book is a Gospel of Redemption. The glorified 
 Christ is He who has suffered death to redeem the people 
 of God. Outside of Revelation and the Fourth Gospel, the 
 word is used but once in the New Testament, I Pet. 1:19. 
 W. 2-3 "Who the singers are is left indefinite as in 11:16, 
 12:10, 19:6. Probably they are the . . . hosts of angels." 
 (cf. 7:11; Lk. 15:10.) v. 4 The specific addition of the 
 words "with women" excludes a metaphorical use of this 
 
 1 See Beckwith, pp. 648, 650. 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 135 
 
 expression. This verse and that which follows contains an 
 admonition to all who would share the glory of the redeemed. 
 
 2. Last warnings. (Chapter 14:6-20) 
 
 We have here a series of short warnings or proclamations 
 in which, as it were, the field is cleared for action. These 
 announcements are made in the most solemn manner, seven 
 times over. First, an angel is seen flying in mid-heaven with 
 the glad tidings that judgment is near and calling upon all 
 to repent (vv. 6, 7). This glad tidings is the burden of the 
 book. It constitutes the hope of its social message. "The 
 hour of judgment is come." It is in this conviction that all 
 workers for truth and righteousness can continue to endure. 
 These tidings are like the word coming to an army that has 
 struggled to the limit of its strength, that the hour of victory 
 is at hand. It requires no imagination to understand what 
 these glad tidings meant to those early~ Christians. They 
 bring the same hope to us to-day. Again, a second angel 
 proclaims the impending fall of Rome, the agent of Satan and 
 the implacable foe of the people of God (v. 8). Let us re- 
 member what reaches of faith and spiritual confidence were 
 needed to make such a proclamation while Rome still stood 
 apparently invincible, with God's people helpless in its grasp. 
 It is a verse for all to lay to heart at some similar moment of 
 contrast between truth on the scaffold and wrong on the 
 throne. To the eye of this prophet, Rome in the sight of 
 God had already fallen. Its death-blow had already been 
 given. We must believe as he did. 
 
 "For right is right since God is God 
 And right the day must win; 
 To doubt would be disloyalty, 
 To falter would be sin." 
 
 A third angel pronounces sentence on the beast and all who 
 worship him (vv. 9-11). Here we have the reversal of the 
 
136 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 situation described in 11:7-10 and 13:12-17. Let it not be 
 forgotten that terrible as are these descriptions of the punish- 
 ment of evil, they do stand for spiritual realities. It is, 
 after all, a weakened sense of sin and of the moral law 
 which has banished from the modern mind the impression 
 of any meaning in these symbols of divine retribution. If 
 we had even a partial conception of the physical and mental 
 agonies endured in this life by those who have persistently 
 violated the laws of nature and of God, and of spiritual 
 remorse which like the furies pursues many an outraged con- 
 science, we should be in a better position to grasp the reality 
 here depicted: "an anguish which only spirits can know; the 
 sense of something lost, endless discontent for what has been 
 exchanged for it, the undying worm of conscience." The 
 author himself repeats a warning which he had already ut- 
 tered in the previous chapter (cf. v. 12, 13:10). Here, he 
 says, is the opportunity which the servants of Christ have 
 to exhibit their powers of endurance. Among all forms of 
 witness-bearing, none perhaps is more effective than simple 
 continuance in faithful living. Not to be weary in well-doing 
 is the final demonstration of true sainthood. It has been 
 the perseverance of the saints more than any other single 
 quality which has borne effective witness to the realities of 
 faith. A voice from heaven then pronounces a blessing on 
 the martyred dead (v. 13). This is one of the most familiar 
 verses in the Bible. It is made sacred for us by its use to- 
 day when we come to lay away our dead. But how its spirit- 
 ual eloquence and meaning are heightened when we under- 
 stand the circumstances which first caused it to be uttered! 
 Imagine what these words meant to those who first read them. 
 And it is our hope to-day that nothing is lost in the lives of 
 those who bear faithful witness to Christ. "They rest from 
 their labors but their works follow with them" (R. V.). Noth- 
 ing in the realm of righteousness is ever lost. Every right 
 word, deed, and thought is eternally conserved and has its 
 permanent place in a world that shall endure long after the 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 137 
 
 visible world has ceased to be. This is the blessing of those 
 who die in the Lord. They and their works are imperishable. 
 
 He that doeth the will of God abideth forever. (I John 
 2:17.) 
 
 A vision of the Messiah as harvester, reminiscent of Daniel 
 and of the parable of the tares, then follows (vv. 14, 16) ; 
 and another, reminding us of a familiar passage from Joel 
 (3:13), pictures God trampling his foes under his feet in 
 the winepress of his wrath (w. 18-20). It is not necessary 
 to separate these two in our thought of what they represent. 
 Harvest and vintage together represent the gathering of 
 all mankind before the judgment seat of God. It is a carrying 
 over to the moral field the lesson of nature. The natural 
 year is a parable of personal and of human history. "What- 
 soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." It is a final 
 repetition of a solemn lesson taught by the prophets and re- 
 inforced by Christ of the gathering of the wheat into the 
 heavenly garner, but casting out to be trodden under foot 
 that which was worthless in his sight. No one can fully 
 understand the graphic symbolism of the winepress who has 
 not witnessed an oriental actually treading the juice from the 
 grape. The prophet Isaiah has made use of it in a well- 
 known passage (chap. 63:1-6) to describe the divine wrath. 
 Doubtless our author had it in mind when he wrote. It is 
 needless to add that Julia Ward Howe found in this passage 
 from Revelation the inspiration for her opening verse of 
 the Battle Hymn of the Republic. 
 
 Chapter 14:6, 7. I saw an angel flying across the skies 
 and proclaiming the everlastingly glad tidings that men must 
 now, if ever, repent, since the hour of judgment has at 
 last arrived. 8. Another angel followed proclaiming, as 
 if it had already happened, that Rome has fallen because 
 of her sins. 9-11. A third angel told of the endless tor- 
 ments reserved for the idolatrous worshippers of the beast, 
 and for all who are marked with his name. 12. Here 
 appears the opportunity for the fidelity and endurance of 
 the people of God. 13. Then a voice from heaven spoke of 
 
 V 
 
138 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 the blessedness of those who were willing even to die for 
 Christ's sake. Their toils are over and all that they have 
 been and all that they have done goes on, undying, with 
 them. 14. Then 1 saw a figure like the Son of Man appear- 
 ing on a cloud, crowned like a king, and holding a sickle 
 in his hand. 15. And when an angel bade him, he reaped 
 what was ripe from the earth. 16-20. Still another angel, 
 when commanded to do so by an angel who had power over 
 fire, gathered the grapes of the earth and cast them into 
 the winepress of the wrath of God whence a flood of wine, 
 like blood, flowed over all the earth. 
 
 Notes v. 6 Everlasting G-ospel Not the gospel of grace, but 
 the glad tidings that God's purpose for his people is about 
 to be accomplished (cf. Mark 1:15). v. 8 Babylon formed 
 the ancient parallel to Rome. In all later Jewish apocalypses 
 (probably also in I Pet. 5:13) Babylon became the mystic 
 name for the city of Rome. The language here is taken 
 directly from Isa. 21:9. (cf. Jer. 50:2, 51:8.) Two ideas are 
 blended in the phrases which follow: Rome's enticement of 
 other nations to idolatry and immorality, and the cup of 
 the wrath of God (cf. Jer. 25:15; Job. 21:20, etc.) 
 w. 10-11 Unending torment in fire is the conventional pun- 
 ishment everywhere in apocalyptical literature, and so in the 
 sayings of Christ, assigned to Satan and his followers. No 
 theory of "everlasting punishment" is thus to be read into 
 the words. The phrase "in the presence of the Lamb," sug- 
 gesting that the bliss of the faithful is in full sight, reminds 
 us of Lk. 16:23. v. 13 from henceforth, i.e. all through the 
 ages; works follow with them (cf. II Esdras 7:35). "The 
 work shall follow and the reward shall be showed, and good 
 deeds shall awake." w. 14-20 What is here revealed in an- 
 ticipating visions is fully described in chapters 19-20. Both 
 of these figures of the harvest and of the wine-press are 
 familiar to Bible readers, and both are descriptive of the 
 same event, v. 14 Son of Man Taken from Dan. 7:13. The 
 description here makes it probable that the Messiah and not 
 an archangel is meant. The fact that he is told by another 
 angel to thrust in the sickle does not present an insuperable 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 139 
 
 difficulty, since this latter angel evidently speaks for God Him- 
 self, (cf. John 5:19, and Acts 1:7.) For a similar de- 
 scription of the coming of the Son of Man, see Matt. 24:30, 
 26:64. v. 15ff (cf. Joel 3:13.) vv. 17ff (cf. Joel 3:13; Gen. 
 49:11; Isa. 63:2-4; Lam. 1:15.) The connection of this 
 vision with the preceding one is clear. The first pictures the 
 whole judgment by Christ, and the second a particular part 
 of it, viz. the vengeance of God upon the wicked executed 
 by an angel (Matt. 13:41, 49). v. 18 "from the altar." This 
 angel comes from the altar of incense to show that the 
 prayers of the saints are about to be answered. Power over 
 fire This detail is not clear, but the author's purpose may be 
 to associate him with the burning fires of incense which 
 ascend with the prayers of the saints, v. 20 without the city 
 refers probably to the traditional conception of the defeat 
 of the enemies of Israel near Jerusalem. A thousand and 
 six hundred furlongs — the symbolical representation of a 
 vast field of blood. It is not possible to say just why this 
 particular number is used. 
 
 3. The Final Judgments (Chapters 15 and 16) 
 
 We come at last to the long-delayed third series of judg- 
 ments. They had been heralded by the blowing of the seventh 
 trumpet-blast in chapter 11:15, and they look forward to the 
 final events in this great drama of judgment, the destruction 
 of Rome and the consummation of the moral order. Like 
 the first and second series of woes it will describe a terrible 
 and supernatural punishment of the world. Unlike them, 
 however, it will eventuate in the final establishment of the 
 kingdom of God upon earth. 
 
 Certain difficulties are presented to the reader by this third 
 series of woes. For one thing, it has been so long delayed 
 that one may have forgotten that it had not yet taken place. 
 The reasons for this delay have, however, already been stated. 
 Just because these are the final judgments, they are ap- 
 
140 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 proached with deliberation, and the author must make clear 
 that the struggle is carried back from the field of contem- 
 porary history, to the very origins of Satan's opposition to 
 God. Again, the absence of the special designation of these 
 woes by the sounding of the seventh trumpet (chapters 8:13; 
 10 :7) is somewhat perplexing. In place of this, we have 
 seven angels (chapter 15:1), with the seven last plagues. 
 This third series of judgments, then, takes its place as the 
 seventh in the list of trumpet-plagues, but by the change 
 of form is symbolized its completeness. No other series is 
 to follow. A third difficulty is this: as these judgments are 
 the climax of all the others, we should naturally expect them 
 to be more terrible than those which precede them, and to 
 be in a class, as it were, by themselves. Instead of this, 
 they are less detailed and less vivid and impressive in their 
 imagery and even appear to repeat the punishments that fol- 
 lowed the sounding of the six trumpets. Are we to suppose 
 that the author has, so to speak, exhausted his vocabulary 
 and his powers of imagination — that he has nothing new that 
 he can tell us? A more likely hypothesis is this: that in 
 the preceding series, the judgments are confined to the de- 
 scription of the punishments themselves. In this case, how- 
 ever, the mind of the author runs rapidly forward to the 
 consummation — the casting of Satan into the bottomless pit, 
 the general Resurrection, and the final blessedness of the 
 Redeemed. The real climax, that is, to the emptying of the 
 seven bowls is not to be found in chapter 16, but in chapters 
 17-20. There we have new and distinctive material, to which 
 chapters 15 and 16 are a mere prelude. 
 
 Another difference between this third series and the series 
 of the seals and the trumpets is to be noted. Each of these 
 is divided into two sections, first of four visions, then of three 
 which are different in character. When the seals were opened, 
 we had four horsemen and then the souls of the slain, an 
 earthquake, and the seventh seal opening up to the first 
 trumpet. Similarly, when the trumpets were sounded, we 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 141 
 
 had four plagues, then a falling star, an army of cavalry, and 
 the seventh trumpet leading up to the final wars. But in 
 the case of the seven bowls, the judgments are all alike and 
 the seventh bowl is poured out like the rest. Then an angel 
 is ready to show to the prophet the complete destruction of 
 Rome, the final collapse of evil. 
 
 When chapter 15 opens announcement is made of the ap- 
 proach of the seven last plagues, in which the wrath of God 
 is at last completely expressed and accomplished. As so often 
 before, there is light before darkness. We hear, before these 
 bowls of wrath are emptied, a hymn of praise by the saints 
 of God who are seen standing in heaven as victors over the 
 beast and glorifying God for his acts of righteous judgment. 
 It is a familiar hymn, as old as Moses and yet finding its 
 completion in the redemption of Christ. Then, with solemn 
 pomp and majesty the sanctuary of heaven is seen and seven 
 angels appear with garments of white and wearing (cf. 
 1:13) girdles of gold. From the presence of God Himself 
 and by the hand of one of the four living creatures that stand 
 nearest to Him, there are handed to these angels seven ves- 
 sels filled full with the wrath of God. A great cloud, the 
 symbol of God's presence and power, fills his temple, and 
 God's own voice bids the angels go forth and empty the 
 vessels of his wrath. This they do and plagues follow which 
 remind us of the plagues of Egypt and are not dissimilar 
 to those which resulted from the sounding of the trumpets. 
 There are two brief interludes in chapter 16. The first occurs 
 in vv. 5-7 when the angel of the rivers and the angel of the 
 altar join in praising God for his judgments. The second is 
 contained in v. 15, where the prophet inserts in the name of 
 the Lord a warning to be ready because of the suddenness 
 of the advent. In this way, these chapters take their place 
 in the whole plan of the book, and with literary skill and 
 dramatic power lead up to the final consummation. 
 
 In the spiritual interpretation of these judgments, as for 
 those which have preceded, we hold fast to the idea that 
 
142 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 the writer is thinking of his readers and of their necessities 
 and is keeping close to his purpose of encouraging them. A 
 favorite way of interpreting the Book of Revelation at one 
 time, the influence of which has not yet passed, was to find 
 in these judgments a prediction of coming historical events, 
 such as the Turkish Invasion and the French Revolution. 
 The world war has naturally stimulated that kind of in- 
 terpretation. Men have seen exact parallels between the ca- 
 tastrophes of this chapter and those which have befallen 
 the world during these past years. But the writer is think- 
 ing only of contemporary history. He finds the material for 
 his descriptions of judgment either in the Old Testament with 
 its Egyptian plagues, or in the catastrophes in nature or so- 
 ciety which actually befell, or were likely to befall, the Roman 
 world of his day. The spiritual meaning of the chapter, 
 however, is neither temporary nor local. The wrath of God 
 does fall upon a recreant world. His judgments are true and 
 righteous altogether. The cataclysm of the war years was 
 in this spiritual sense a repetition of these chapters of judg- 
 ment from the Book of Revelation. The Armageddon of the 
 prophet's imagination became in very truth the vast slaughter- 
 fields of modem Europe. No period in history since this 
 book was written bears such witness to the essential truth 
 of these chapters as that through which our own generation 
 has lived. No detail of this terrible chapter has been missing. 
 It has indeed been given unto us to drink "the cup of the 
 wine of the fierceness of his wrath." 
 
 Chapter 15:1. Then I saw another great and wonderful 
 portent in heaven: seven angels having the seven last 
 plagues which will complete the wrath of God. 2. But also 
 I had a vision of the blessedness of those who had refused 
 to worship the beast. These stood upon what looked like 
 a sea of fiery glass and with harps 3. they sang a song such 
 as Moses sang when the children of Israel were delivered 
 from Egypt, but they sang it of Christ by whose death they 
 had been redeemed, and they praised God whose righteous 
 ways are unerring 4. and whose power is now about to be 
 recognized by all the nations. 5, 6. Then I saw the seven 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 143 
 
 angels come forth all clothed in white. 7. And all of the 
 cherubim gave them seven gold bowls filled with God's 
 wrath. 8. And as of old the temple was filled with the 
 smoke of the glory and power of God, so that no one could 
 enter it until the plagues had been completed. 16:1,2. Then 
 the command came to the angels from God Himself, and 
 the first angel poured out his bowl on the earth and a ter- 
 rible ulcer afflicted the worshippers of the beast. 3. The 
 second angel emptied his bowl upon the seas, which became 
 thick red blood, and every living thing in it perished. 
 4. The third emptied his bowl into all fresh waters, and 
 they also were turned into blood. 5, 6. And when the guard- 
 ian angel of the waters declared that it was just that they 
 who have shed blood should drink blood, 7. the altar-angel 
 answered, Verily the judgments of God are lust. 8. The 
 fourth angel poured his bowl upon the sun whose terrible 
 heat then scorched men: 9. yet even then they reviled 
 God and refused to repent. 10. The fifth emptied his bowl 
 on the very throne whereon the beast sat, and darkness 
 fell upon his whole empire and his subjects gnawed their 
 tongues in agony, 11. cursed God because of their suffer- 
 ings, and would not repent. 12. The sixth angel poured 
 out his bowl over the great river Euphrates, which straight- 
 way dried up so that the Parthians could pass over as they 
 marched against Eome. 13, 14. Then I saw Satan and the 
 beast and the pagan priesthood emit evil spirits which 
 looked like frogs which should incite the nations of the world 
 to a terrible world-conflict, which will take place on God's 
 great day. 15. (Eemember, this day can come at any mo- 
 ment. Blessed is he who is watching and ready so that he 
 will not be unprepared.) 16. And the evil spirits mus- 
 tered the nations together for this last war at the place 
 called (in Hebrew) Harmagedon. 17. The seventh and 
 last angel poured out his bowl upon the air. A voice from 
 heaven declared this to be the end. 18. Then there fol- 
 lowed confused voices, lightnings and thunders and such an 
 earthquake as the world had never known, 19. which split 
 Eome into three pieces and shattered all other cities. Eome 
 was not forgotten. She drank to the dregs the cup of 
 God's anger. 20. Islands vanished, no mountain remained 
 to be seen, 21. and crushing hail-stones fell upon men who 
 continued to curse God because the distress caused by the 
 hail was fearful. 
 
 Notes 15:1 Seven is the complete number. (See Lev. 26:18, 
 21, 24, 28.) v. 2 Sea of glass (cf. 4:6) describing the pave- 
 ment of the throne-room of God. (See Ex. 24:10; Ezek. 
 1:26.) The notion of a sea in the heavens was common 
 
144 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 (Gen. 1:7), and may have been due to the likeness in ap- 
 pearance of sky and sea. In this case the suggestion of fire 
 here may go back to lightning. There is no special symboli- 
 cal meaning, v. 3 Song of Moses and the Lamb 1 For a 
 song of Moses for deliverance, see Exodus 15. Since the 
 plagues which follow bear certain resemblances to those of 
 Egypt there is no reason why this song may not have been 
 meant. It may, however, refer to the song of Moses in Deut. 
 32, which bears a closer verbal resemblance to the song in 
 this chapter, which is not one of deliverance so much as of 
 praise of the righteousness of God in his dealings with men. 
 The song is also of the Lamb because Christ is the agent of 
 God in the revelation and execution of his judgments, v. 8 
 For the cloud as a sign of the presence and power of God, 
 see Ex. 19:18, 24:16; I Kings 8:10fT; II Chron. 5:13; Isa. 6:4; 
 Ezek. 10:4. 16:2, 3 The first plague is like that of the boils in 
 Exodus 9:10, while the second reminds us of Ex. 7:20 and 
 Rev. 8:8. In the corresponding trumpet-plague, however, 
 only a third part of the sea was affected, w. 4-7 has its 
 parallel in Ex. 7:20, and Rev. 8:11. The song which fol- 
 lows is akin to 15:3ff, and has the same meaning. In the 
 angel of the altar reference may be made to the souls of the 
 martyrs, 6:9, or to the prayer of the saints, 8:3-5. v. 10 (cf. 
 Ex. 10:22.) v. 12 The drying up of the Euphrates has for 
 its ultimate origin, of course, the miracle at the Red Sea. 
 (Ex. 14:21ff. cf. Isa. 11:16; cf. Rev. 9:14.) The dragon 
 and his two agents make an unheralded entrance on the scene. 
 The kings here are different from v. 12. Here all nations 
 are meant, and are identical with those of 17:12-14. In this 
 passage we have the preparation for the world-conflict which 
 actually takes place in chapter 19. Of this preparation, the 
 possible attack of the Parthian kings and the gathering of 
 all nations are component parts, v. 13 Frogs Possibly sug- 
 gested by Ex. 8:6, but more likely by a familiar figure in 
 Persian mythology, v. 16 Harmageddon Not found in He- 
 i See Beckwith, pp. 676, 677. 
 
THE BEGINNING OF THE END 145 
 
 brew literature. The author either invented it or found it 
 in some source unknown to us and used it simply to give 
 pictorial precision to his picture of the great and final battle 
 between Anti-Christ and the Messiah, w. 17ff. In the de- 
 scription of the last plague the author endeavors by every 
 means to heighten the effect. The adjective "great" is used 
 seven times, and the resources of his vocabulary are exhausted 
 in his efforts to depict this final and tragical judgment. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE DOOM OF EVIL 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 17, 18, 19, 20 
 
 THE connection is clear between the chapters that have 
 preceded and these chapters which follow. There we 
 had described the beginning of the end. Here is the end 
 itself. Precisely as the author carried the evil which he tells 
 us is marked for destruction back from its temporary mani- 
 festations in history to its ultimate sources, so here in the 
 account of its destruction, he gives us not only the story of 
 the downfall of the Roman Empire (chapters 17 and 18), but 
 also of the overthrow of evil itself as it is incarnate in Satan, 
 the spirit of evil (chapters 19 and 20). Thus the full spirit- 
 ual purpose of the author and the full spiritual unity of the 
 book are achieved. What we are told in these chapters is the 
 summary of the Social Hope not only of its age, but of every 
 age. We are told, first, that this present world-order is un- 
 der the control of God and subject to his righteous judg- 
 ments. Nothing is more remarkable in the description of 
 Rome in the seventeenth chapter than the full justice done 
 to her power and regal glory. "There is not an untrue stroke 
 in it. The woman is arrayed in purple and scarlet, the colors 
 of empire. She is decked with gold and precious stones and 
 pearls. The wealth of the whole world is poured into her 
 lap. She holds in her hand the golden cup of an advanced 
 civilization. She is poised upon the beast, the symbol of 
 empire. She sits upon many waters, that is, rules over many 
 subject peoples and nations. Tributary kings carry out her 
 behests. It is a remarkable picture of the wealth and 
 
 146 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 147 
 
 glory and dominion of Rome which the author gives." 1 But 
 this is not the whole truth about her. Commensurate with 
 the power of Rome is the guilt of Rome. This, too, the au- 
 thor portrays with unflinching precision. He uses the harsh 
 language of harlotry which the Old Testament prophets had 
 applied to Jerusalem, and calls Rome the mother of harlots, 
 who not only had sunk herself to the bottom of immorality 
 and idolatry, but had seduced other nations to the sink-level 
 of her own iniquity and had herself become drunk with the 
 blood of martyrs. With these few swift strokes the author 
 depicts the terrible and irretrievable moral degradation be- 
 cause of which she is to be destroyed. 
 
 The spiritual truth of this chapter becomes the moral les- 
 son of all history, and is the burden of its social message 
 to its time and to all time. Pomp and glory count for noth- 
 ing in the eyes of God. Nations are judged by their moral 
 obedience to the eternal and just laws of God. The dirge 
 which our author intones over Rome is reflected in Rudyard 
 Kipling's noble Recessional: 
 
 "Far-called our navies melt away, 
 On dune and headland sinks the fire; 
 Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
 Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
 Lest we forget, lest we forget! 
 
 "If drunk with sight of power, we loose 
 Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, 
 Such boasting as the Gentiles use 
 Or lesser breeds without the law: 
 Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, 
 Lest we forget, lest we forget!" 
 
 This "valiant dust that builds on dust" sinks into nothing- 
 ness in chapter 18 with a pathos and power of description 
 1 Deane, pp. 202-4. 
 
148 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OP REVELATION 
 
 which is not surpassed elsewhere in the book, and a piercing 
 lamentation is uttered by the beholders, who weep and mourn 
 and cry out as they look upon the smoke of her burning: 
 
 Woe, woe, the great city. She that was arrayed in fine 
 linen and purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and 
 precious stone and pearl! for in one hour so great riches 
 is made desolate. (Rev. 18:16, 17.) 
 
 The destruction of Rome, however, does not complete the 
 author's purpose to demonstrate that the very principle of 
 evil, of which Rome was the temporary and historical repre- 
 sentation and instrument, is itself marked for destruction. 
 To this consummation the author presses swiftly forward. 
 After a characteristic introduction, contrasting vividly the 
 picture of the ruin of Rome with the triumph of the hymning 
 servants of God, who prepare for the marriage-supper of 
 the Lamb, the heavens are opened, and Christ the conqueror 
 is seen to ride forth followed by the saints of God "in bright 
 array." "The King of Glory passes on his way"; and over 
 against Him there are the beast and the kings of the earth 
 and the pagan priests and all who have opposed God and 
 persecuted his people. The shock of the final conflict is 
 about to take place. That battle is not described. There is 
 no real opposition. Evil is helpless before Him who goes 
 forth conquering and to conquer. Only the sequence in the 
 different manifestations of its destruction is given us. First 
 the beast is taken, — Imperial Rome as personified in Anti- 
 Christ; second, the pagan priesthood and the false prophet 
 are cast into the brimstone lake; third, their followers are 
 killed with the sword. There remains only the dragon, Satan, 
 the original principle of evil itself. 
 
 The destruction of Satan is the theme of chapter 20, one 
 of the most fateful chapters of the New Testament, if we 
 consider its influence upon subsequent Christian thought. But 
 for one who has closely followed the spiritual interpretation 
 of this book, the meaning of this chapter stands out clear as 
 daylight. We should not expect that Satan could be dis- 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 149 
 
 posed of as summarily as his inferior agents. We would 
 look naturally for more resistance, for temporary escape 
 and for final capture and annihilation. Precisely that is the 
 account of the final duel in this chapter. Evil once taken, 
 it seems as if the millennium had come at last, and for a time 
 the people of God live in security and peace. But Satan will 
 not yet submit. His might has not yet been overcome. To 
 the very end, the author thus does full justice to the tre- 
 mendous and tenacious and inveterate power of evil. Satan 
 breaks loose once more for a time, but is at last taken and 
 cast into the brimstone lake, 
 
 Where are also the beast and the false prophet, and 
 they shall be tormented forever and ever. (Rev. 20:10.) 
 
 The doom of evil is complete. 
 
 The spiritual truth of these chapters constitute the final 
 basis of the Social Hope, since they describe the destruction 
 of evil itself. With that assurance, "hearts are brave again 
 and arms are strong." We can imagine what it must have 
 meant to those early Christians to read the description of 
 how, one after another, the beast and the pagan prophets 
 and finally Satan himself were sent headlong down into the 
 brimstone lake! Upon our hearts the truth falls with no 
 loss of meaning. Two thousand years have passed since this 
 glowing prophecy was written. Rome indeed has passed 
 away, but other agents and instruments of evil have taken 
 her place. Other beasts and pagan prophets have appeared 
 down to our very day. Satan himself remains "to compass 
 the camp of the saints about." Millions of the best lives 
 of our planet have within our own memory been sacrificed as 
 a witness to his power over the world. All of the intelligence, 
 civilization and even Christianity of the world have thus far 
 been unable to curb his power or stay his hand. What won- 
 der if counsels of despair prevail; if we are assured that 
 evil is in this world to stay; that all efforts to dislodge it 
 are necessarily partial and temporary; that human nature 
 
150 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 cannot be changed; that there will always be war and hatred 
 and its accompanying sorrows and sins; that only deluded 
 optimists will ever expect sin itself to be vanquished? Over 
 against all such unfaith there stands the imperishable mes- 
 sage of these chapters. Like a bulwark they stand between 
 our souls and ultimate despair in the moral victory of the 
 Good. "And the devil was cast into the lake of fire." Evil 
 shall ultimately be destroyed. Nothing in the end can with- 
 stand the ri ghteousnes s of G od and the omnipotence of Jesus 
 Christ. ( This is th e~so cial message of t he Boo k of Revelation. 
 He who takes it and holds it fast in his heart is equipped 
 and prepared to face, in the spirit of unconquerable op- 
 position and of undying hope, the principalities and powers 
 that still war against the purity of our souls and the wel- 
 fare of mankind. 
 
 1. The Scarlet Woman (Chapter 17) 
 
 This chapter ranks in obscurity and difficulty with chap- 
 ters 9 and 12, and 13 and 20. There may be some 
 points in this chapter which cannot be cleared up to 
 our entire satisfaction. Yet it needs to be remembered that, 
 if so, these are its subordinate features. The main outline 
 and meaning of the chapter is plain enough. There can 
 be no question, for example, that the scarlet woman is the 
 imperial city of Rome. When the last bowl has been 
 emptied, the judgment of God upon Rome is complete. 
 It remains only to describe her fall. This is done in chap- 
 ters 17 and 18. In verse 18, it is expressly stated 
 that Rome is meant. With this the woman's name agrees 
 (cf. v. 5, and 14:8), her position on the seven hills (v. 9), 
 the designation harlot, applied to Jerusalem and Israel (as 
 well as to Tyre and Nineveh) in the Old Testament, 
 and her identification with the beast, which we have seen 
 stands for the imperial power of Rome. The author's pur- 
 pose, then, in this chapter, is to describe Rome in her double 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 151 
 
 role as mistress of the world and the mother of harlots, 
 before her utter destruction is portrayed in detail in chap- 
 ter 18. 
 
 The interpretation of the woman sitting on the beast is 
 not difficult after chapters twelve and thirteen. The author 
 is here using the same traditional material, based on a myth 
 which has been worked over many times before it came to 
 its present use. It goes back, as we saw, to the chaos- 
 dragon of heathen mythology, which in the Old Testament 
 was transferred to Babylon, and again reshaped in the Jewish 
 apocalypses, and finally applied by the Christian writer to 
 explain the present and future persecution of the saints. 
 Rome is called a harlot because of the well-known licentious- 
 ness which prevailed there, which is reflected in the writings 
 of Paul. The many waters, as we learn from v. 15, are 
 many peoples. The seven hills represent the seven emperors 
 on whose authority the city's power is based. The names 
 of blasphemy refer to the image or superscription of the 
 deified emperor, which appeared and reappeared a thousand 
 times, so that the city was "full of the names"; the heads 
 and horns are fixed features that represent the power of 
 Rome against God, and the cup of abomination is only an- 
 other expression for "the sink of iniquity." 
 
 There are, however, two difficulties to be met in this 
 chapter. The first is the relation of the woman to the beast. 
 In verse 3, "the seven heads and the ten horns of the dragon 
 must represent the imperial power on which the city rests. 
 But at the end of the chapter (v. 16) the ten horns which 
 now appear as foreign kings are enemies of the woman and 
 bring about her overthrow." * Evidently the original figure 
 has been modified. The most probable explanation of this 
 strange conclusion of the chapter is this. As we saw, in 
 chapter 13, the beast was identified (in verses 3 and 15) with 
 one of Rome's emperors, Nero. Further, a Nero myth arose 
 after his death, that he had not really died at all, and that 
 
 1 Porter, p. 259ff. 
 
152 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 he would come at any time to make war upon his enemies in 
 Rome who had betrayed him. Later this mythical Nero was 
 identified, in Christian tradition, with Anti-Christ. In chap- 
 ter 17, this identification is made in verse 11, an obscure 
 verse which will be studied later. The returning Nero, a 
 mythical and semi-Satanic being returns, no longer as one 
 of the heads (kings), but the beast himself, the embodiment 
 of the evil spirit of the Roman Empire, who associates with 
 him the (ten) nations of the world and gives them power 
 to assail with him the city of Rome. "It is not surprising 
 that the explanation of the beast is enigmatical; in symbolic 
 representation, the symbol and the reality are in the nature 
 of the case often blended. ... In this case, the beast appears 
 at one time to represent a single person, and again seven 
 (or eight) distinct persons in . succession." x Always, how- 
 ever, he is a person: either the Roman emperor or emperors 
 (typifying Rome itself), or Nero, or Nero-Antichrist. It is 
 often difficult to understand just how or when these are shaded 
 into each other. 
 
 The other difficulty relates to the chronology of the kings. 8 
 The seven heads of the beast, we are told, represent seven 
 emperors (v. 10) and the beast himself (Nero) is the eighth, 
 though he is also a reincarnation of one of the previous seven 
 (v. 11). At the time that the author writes, we are told that 
 five of these emperors are dead, one reigns, and another is 
 to follow, whose reign will be brief. Then Nero-Antichrist 
 will appear and dominate the world for a time (12:6, 13:5) 
 before the coming of the Messiah. Assuming that the author 
 writes in the time of Domitian, for which there is strong 
 evidence, the question is by what system of calculation can 
 it be said that but five emperors have already reigned? For 
 whether we begin with Julius Caesar, or with Augustus, and 
 even if we omit the three military rulers, Galba, Otho and 
 
 1 Beckwith, p. 695. 
 
 2 See Case, "The Revelation of John," pp. 341ff ; Beckwith, 704ff. 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 153 
 
 Vitellius, the count does not come out right. 1 Commentators 
 have manipulated their mathematics in vain, and have sug- 
 gested the incorporation of older apocalyptical material, with- 
 out the requisite change in the figures. It seems not to have 
 occurred to them that the prophet might make a poetical use 
 of figures; that he was not at all concerned about mathemati- 
 cal nicety in computing exact dates, but was much concerned 
 about the question as to whether or not the deliverance for 
 which he looked was long to be delayed. Chronologists have 
 the same difficulty in Daniel which they encounter in Revela- 
 tion. In neither case is the apocalyptist an historian. In 
 both cases he is a prophet who tells a persecuted people that 
 deliverance is at hand. Throughout the Book of Revelation 
 seven is the perfect number. Why should it not be used in 
 this passage in th is symbolic sense? If seven, then, represents 
 the whole period of Roman domination, the author says that 
 five portionl of that period have already passed, and that 
 the seventh 'twill be brief and that the eighth is the Nero- 
 Antichrist whose function it shall be to destroy the Roman 
 Empire and j himself to succeed to power for a short time. 
 The sixtlifcng) then, will be that emperor in whose time the 
 author writes, that is, in all probability the Emperor Domi- 
 tian. The whole passage is not a bit of mathematical calcula- 
 tion, but rather a bit of apocalyptical symbolism. 
 
 Chapter 17:1. One of the seven angels then summoned 
 me to see the fate of the great harlot situated on many- 
 waters. 2. With whom the kings of the earth have been 
 implicated in all manner of vice, and the people of the 
 earth have been intoxicated with her immoralities. 3. So 
 I was carried away in the rapture of the spirit into a desert 
 place where I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which 
 was covered all over with idolatrous titles, and had seven 
 heads and ten horns, the known marks of world-rulership. 
 4. The woman was regally clad in purple and scarlet, and 
 decked with jewels, and the cup in her hand was filled with 
 her immoralities. 5. Her name was Babylon, the Mother 
 of Vice. 6. And I saw that she was drunk with the blood 
 
 1 In order, the emperors were : Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, 
 Claudius, Nero (Galba, Otho, Vitellius), Vespasian, Titus, Domitian. 
 
154 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 of the martyrs who had died for Jesus' sake. And I mar- 
 velled as I beheld her. 7. And the angel told me not to 
 wonder, for he would explain to me the hidden meaning of 
 the woman on the seven-headed beast. 8. The beast, he 
 said, once was but no longer is, upon earth. It will soon 
 ascend from the abyss, yet to perdition it shall go, and 
 all people on earth except those who are Christ's shall 
 wonder as they look upon the beast that comes again after 
 having existed once and then having disappeared. 9. Here 
 is the interpretation of a truly discerning mind. The 
 seven heads suggest the seven hills of Eome. 10. And 
 these in turn stand for seven kings, of which five have 
 passed away, one is now ruling and the seventh will follow, 
 whose reign will be brief. 11. Then the beast will come 
 whom we will reckon as the eighth although really he is but 
 a reincarnation of one of the seven, and he is destined for 
 destruction. 12. The ten horns also are ten kings although 
 they have no royal power as yet, but get their authority 
 for the brief time only in which they are associated with 
 the beast. 13. They have a common aim with the beast 
 to whom they give their allegiance. 14. These are they who 
 shall make war against the Lamb and be vanquished by 
 Him, because the Lamb is supreme and his followers are 
 faithful. 15. The waters on which the woman sits stand 
 for all nations. 16. And the ten horns are the kings who 
 in alliance with the beast shall turn against the harlot 
 Eome and utterly destroy her. 17. For God made these 
 kings and the nations which they represent to have one 
 mind in the matter and to surrender their rulership to the 
 beast until the decrees of God are fulfilled. 18. As for the 
 woman, you have seen that she is that great city which reigns 
 over the kings of the earth. 
 
 Notes v. 1 It is appropriate that one of the angels that 
 had the bowls should make this announcement since what fol- 
 lows is an elaboration of the vision of the seven bowls. Harlot, 
 (see Isa. 1:21; Ezek. 16:15; Hos. 2:4). Upon waters, cf. 
 French, "Sur mer," and see Jer. 51:13. v. 2 So Tyre and 
 Nineveh. (Isa. 23:17; Jer. 51:7; Nah. 3:4; Rev. 14:8.) 
 v. 3 Scarlet, not referring to the blood of martyrs, but a 
 sign of might. Names of blasphemy, see on 13:1. v. 4 The 
 imagery may be suggested by Jer. 51:7. v. 5 This may refer 
 to a similar custom among Roman courtesans, who wore head- 
 bands indicating their character. Mystery, i.e., something hid- 
 den. Suggested by the "mysteries" of Greek and Roman 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 155 
 
 religions, (cf. I. Tim. 3:9, 16.) The name is to be under- 
 stood mystically, v. 6 Here the sin of Rome reaches its 
 climax. For the phrase, cf. Isa. 34:7, 49:26. Martyrs, or 
 better translated, witnesses, or those whose testimony may 
 be relied on. It is not certain that the word means martyr 
 in the New Testament, although it occurs (2:13, 17:6; Acts 
 22:20) in cases where steadfastness led to death, v. 7 The 
 mystery which the angel explains includes not only the woman 
 and the beast, but the whole of the following chapters, i. e., 
 the doom of Rome. v. 8 See on chapter 13, vv. 3, 8. v. 9 
 See chapter 13:18. For mountain, in the sense of hill, see 
 Matt. 5:1, 15:29; John 6:15. w. 10-11 cf. introduction to 
 chapter 13 and to this section. For fallen in the sense of 
 die, cf. II Sam. 3:38. Goeth. into perdition, the destruction 
 of evil is insisted upon everywhere in the book. vv. 12, 13 
 One hour, i.e., a short time. Ten horns, derived directly 
 from Dan. 7:7, 24, although differently applied. There they 
 stand for a series of kings in the last world-empire (repre- 
 sented in this passage by the seven heads). Here they 
 symbolize not Roman rulers but kings, who receive their 
 power from Nero -Antichrist to war against Rome. The 
 number ten symbolizes the completeness of all earthly nations 
 subservient to Anti-Christ. V. 14 is a rhetorical parenthesis 
 anticipating, as frequently in this book, the final outcome. 
 Note once more the frequent ascription to Christ of titles 
 belonging to God, (cf. Deut. 10:17; Ps. 136:3; Dan. 2:47, 
 11:36). Those that are with him. The reading of the Re- 
 vised Version is correct. The saints belong to the overcoming 
 army of Christ (although not mentioned in 19 :llff ) : "Those 
 with him shall conquer because they are elect and called and 
 faithful." v. 15 For waters as symbol of peoples, cf. Isa. 
 8:7; Jer. 47:2. v. 16 (cf. Ps. 27:2; Jer. 10:25; Mic. 3:3; 
 Zeph. 3:3). Chapter 18 is an amplification of this verse, 
 v. 17 Will, better translated mind in the revised Version, and 
 refers to God and not to the beast. The nations are to re- 
 main subject to the beast, until the final battle is won 
 
156 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 (19:19ff). Rome's destruction by the beast refers to civil 
 war as an agent of God for the destruction of his enemies (cf. 
 Ezek. 38:21; Hag. 2:22; Zech. 14:13. cf. also Dan. 7:8, 24ff.). 
 See also II Thess. 2:3-8 for a description of the current 
 Christian conception of the destruction to be wrought by 
 Anti-Christ. 
 
 2. The Fall of Rome (Chapters 18, 19:1-5) 
 
 In this section we have a description in plain prophetic 
 language of the downfall of Rome. Here are no cryptic 
 figures of speech, no hidden allusions, no obscure passages. 
 It is a clear, consistent and eloquent account of the terrible and 
 final overthrow of the great Imperial City. With its close, 
 Rome as the agent of Satan vanishes forever from the scene. 
 The ruin of Rome is announced in seven distinct utterances. 
 First, an angel proclaims the certainty of her downfall (w. 
 1-3). Next, a voice from heaven warns God's people to flee 
 from her allurements and from the sure judgment which is 
 about to befall her (vv. 4-5). Again, the same voice calls down 
 vengeance upon her because of her continued sin (w. 6-8). 
 Then, the prophet describes the lament which the kings of 
 the earth will utter when they behold her destruction (vv. 
 9-19). In startling contrast to this, the rejoicing of God's ser- 
 vants are invoked, because of his vengeance upon their enemy 
 (v. 20). Then, Rome's disappearance is typified in a great mill- 
 stone which a strong angel hurls into the sea (w. 21-24). 
 Finally, the work is ended and a loud chorus in heaven cele- 
 brates the completion of God's righteous judgment (19:1-5). 
 
 The model for this description of the destruction of Rome 
 was naturally similar passages from the Old Testament in 
 which the prophets describe the downfall of ancient pagan 
 cities. Readers will refer to such passages as Isa. 13:19-22, 
 21:9, 34:8-15; Jer. 51:8, 31-58; Ezek. chapters 27ff. The 
 Babylon of the author's time was not dissimilar to the ancient 
 Babylon which aroused the indignant invective of the 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 157 
 
 prophets of the Old Testament. George Adam Smith thus 
 describes the place which Babylon occupies in Scripture: 
 "Throughout the extent of Bible history from Genesis to 
 Revelation one city remains which in fact and symbol is 
 execrated as the enemy of God and the stronghold of evil. 
 In Genesis we are called to see its foundation as of the first 
 city that wandering men established and the quick ruin which 
 fell upon its impious builders. By the prophets we hear it 
 cursed as the oppressor of God's people, the temptress of 
 nations, full of cruelty and wantonness. In the New Testa- 
 ment, its character and curse are transferred to Rome, and 
 New Babylon stands over against New Jerusalem. Babylon 
 is the atheist of the Old Testament as she is the Anti-Christ 
 of the New. Her haughtiness and secure pride are the fruit 
 of an atheistic self-sufficiency. 'I am, and there is none be- 
 sides me. I shall not sit as a widow; neither shall I know 
 the loss of children' are the words which the prophet puts 
 upon the lips of the city. The same spirit inspires the new 
 Babylon of the Apocalypse, 'She saith in her heart, I sit a 
 queen and am no widow and shall in no sense see mourning.' " ' 
 Parallel to the doom pronounced upon ancient Babylon is 
 the judgment visited here upon Rome. It is the last ap- 
 pearance of Babylon in Scripture. 
 
 Once more, we must render account of the inspired faith 
 of the prophet which, in a day when Rome was apparently 
 secure and its ruin was by no means imminent, could not 
 only clearly see but could also exult in the downfall of the 
 city as if it were something which already had taken place. 
 Centuries were to pass before this prophecy was literally 
 fulfilled; but so sure of it is the prophet that he can cast 
 it all in the present tense, and can call upon the servants of 
 God to endure, as if they, as well as he, could see with their 
 own eyes the picture of the desolation of the city of the 
 Caesars. 
 
 Once more we need to remind ourselves of the eternal 
 'Isa. II, p. 188ff. Quoted in Scott, p. 275. 
 
158 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 message of this dirge over Rome which runs like a solemn 
 refrain all through the book and here rises to sublime heights 
 of inspired eloquence. For Babylon never dies, until Satan 
 himself is destroyed. As long as evil remains, it will be 
 incorporated on earth in some visible embodiment of its 
 power. The conscience of the Christian church will always 
 confront some Babylon. If it accepts the message of Revela- 
 tion, it will confront its Babylon in the exalted mood of this 
 chapter. What a wonderful repetition of it we have witnessed 
 in our day! No one will be able to read this book for years 
 to come without thinking of the utter desolation of that great, 
 proud empire which only a few years since stood like a 
 monster with drawn sword above Europe while all who beheld 
 it said: "Who is able to make war with him"?" Once more 
 and in no less terrible fashion than in the ancient days the 
 judgment of God has been visited upon the embodiment in 
 history of the principle of evil. No one imagines that the 
 process will end here. The New Babylon will continue to 
 rise from the ashes of the old until He hath put all things 
 under his feet. Whenever the faith of men is tried; when- 
 ever their courage is put to the test; whenever arrogant evil 
 seems to mock the good and to flourish its triumph in the 
 face of righteousness, this chapter will constitute the ground 
 of the Social Hope of Christians. With the faith of this 
 seer, they will confront each new manifestation of evil and 
 utter this prophetic dirge over it, "Babylon the great is fallen, 
 is fallen." 
 
 Chapter 18:1. Afterwards I saw come down from heaven 
 another great and powerful angel whose brightness lit up 
 the earth. 2. And he cried with a loud voice saying, The 
 mighty Babylon is fallen, and now she is but the haunt of 
 demons, the den of all foul spirits, the cage of every un- 
 clean and loathsome bird. 3. For all nations have par- 
 ticipated in her vice, and all rulers have been corrupted 
 by her, and profiteers have grown rich through her ill- 
 gotten spoils. 4, 5. And I heard another voice bidding God's 
 people to leave her so as not to share in her heaped-up 
 sins and in the punishment which God will not forget to 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 159 
 
 inflict. 6. Yea, may she receive what she has meted out 
 to others, only in double-measure, a double draught of her 
 own medicine. 7. Let her misery be as great as the parade 
 of her glory and luxury. She imagines that she is secure 
 and happy as a queen. 8. But in a day's time lamentation 
 and death shall come upon her and she shall be burned with 
 fire, for strong is the God who judges her. 9. And the 
 rulers who lived in luxury and sin because of her shall 
 weep over her destruction as they see her burn. 10. Stand- 
 ing at a distance, afraid of the conflagration, they cry out 
 in sorrow, saying, Alas, for the great city whose doom has 
 come in one brief hour. 11. And merchants mourned the 
 loss of her trade, 12, 13. in all manner of luxuries and food- 
 stuffs and cattle and of the traffic in slaves and the souls 
 of men. 14. And vanished are the accumulations of thy 
 soul's desire, all thy pretty adornments have gone, never 
 to be recovered. 15, 16, 17. The traders in these wares, I 
 say, mourned over the city that was once so rich and in 
 an hour has lost all her wealth. And sea-captains and 
 sailors likewise 18. bewailed the destruction of the city as 
 they beheld its burning from afar, 19. and lamented the 
 loss of the city whose trade had made them rich. 20. But 
 let heaven and all its saints gloat over her, because God 
 hath avenged you on her. 21. Then a strong angel lifted 
 a huge boulder, and flung it into the sea, saying, Thus shall 
 Babylon be hurled into the depths never to be seen again, 
 22. and no more music shall be heard there, and no crafts- 
 men shall toil there, and the hum of labor shall not be 
 heard, 23. and there will be no light, nor voice of merry- 
 makers, for though the magnates of the earth traded with 
 thee, thou didst corrupt the nations, 24. and she was the 
 great slayer of prophets and saints. Chapter 19 : 1. After that 
 I heard a sound like the shout of a great host ascribing praise 
 to God, 2. because of his just judgment of Rome for her 
 corruption and persecution of his servants. 3. Again they 
 repeated their Halleluia as the smoke of the city continued 
 perpetually to ascend. 4. And the four and twenty elders 
 and the four living creatures joined in the chorus of praise. 
 5. And in response to a heavenly command, all the people 
 of God join in a mighty Halleluia. 
 
 Notes 18:1 Power This may mean either having great au- 
 thority (so R. V.) or power to utter his message so that 
 all might hear it. For the last clause of the verse, see Ezek. 
 43:2. v. 2 For this description, cf. Isa. 13:19-22, 34:11-15; 
 Jer. 50 :39, 51 :37 ; Zeph. 2 :15. v. 3 It is probably a mistake 
 to find in this verse and chapter proof of the ascetic ten- 
 
160 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF BEVELATION 
 
 dencies of the author. It is not the possession of wealth 
 against which he inveighs, but its abuse. Thus, the word 
 "abundance" (A. V.) should be translated "power" (i.e., 
 arrogant luxuriousness). v. 4 (See Jer. 50:8, 51:6, 45; Isa. 
 48:20, 52:11.) v. 5 (Jer. 51:9; Ezra 9:6.) v. 6 (Jer. 50:15, 
 29, 51:24, 56; Ps. 137:8; Isa. 40:2; Jer. 16:18, 17:18.) v. 7 
 (Isa. 47:7-9; Jer. 50:29). The hatred expressed in this 
 chapter, as throughout in the Bible, is neither personal nor 
 racial but is moral hatred directed against the evil of 
 which, in the Old Testament the pagan nations, and in 
 the present passage Rome, are the visible embodiment. In 
 this sense the motive is essentially and fundamentally Chris- 
 tian. It would be in the interest of Christianity to-day that 
 we should recover some of its robustness and directness, v. 9 
 (cf. Ezek. 26:16, 18, 27:5, 28-36.) v. 10 (Isa. 34:10; Ezek. 
 28:18.) w. 12-14. The list here is in imitation of Ezek. 27:5- 
 24 (cf. Ezek. 16:9-13). The author's fondness for the number 
 seven, in groups of three and four, can be detected in this 
 enumeration. The merchants lament not only the loss of 
 trade, but the waste of the articles themselves, v. 17 Perhaps 
 suggested by Ezek. 27:29, 32. (See Ps. 107:23.) v. 20 
 Illustrates the author's fondness for parenthesis and con- 
 trast, as throughout the book. v. 21 Suggested by Jer. 51 :63 ; 
 Neh. 9:11. v. 22 (cf. Jer. 25:10; Isa. 24:8; Jer. 7:34, 16:9; 
 Ezek. 26:13.) The abrupt changes from the second to the 
 third person (cf. vv. 14, 15) are a common occurrence in 
 the Old Testament, (cf. Ps. 52:4-6, 62:1-4, 81:10-12; Ezek. 
 32:11-12; Amos 6:3-7.) Chapter 19:1-5 This passage plainly 
 belongs to what precedes rather than to what follows. It 
 looks backward and not forward. In verse 6, however, the 
 new subject is introduced, v. 3 (cf. Isa. 34:10.) w. 4, 5 Com- 
 bine Pss. 134:1 and 115:13. 
 
 3. The Victory of Christ over the Beast (Chapter 19:6-21) 
 
 We have seen how it is the author's method to set over 
 against the dark picture of evil on earth the glowing descrip- 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 161 
 
 tion of the joy, the triumph and the praise of "the heavenly 
 host." And it is in proportion as we imitate the practice of 
 this inspired book that we shall share in its hope and catch 
 the spirit of its immortal courage. It is as we think of 
 ourselves as "encompassed about" with a great cloud of 
 faithful and triumphant witnesses that we shall receive 
 strength to run the race which is set before us. The vision 
 of them keeps breaking over the mind of our writer and the 
 sound of their music penetrates his heart. This fact con- 
 stitutes an imperishable part of the social message of the 
 book. There is no separation between the church militant 
 and the church triumphant. The struggle on earth is watched 
 with breathless interest by the redeemed; and the strugglers 
 on earth are sustained by the presence of those who have 
 already come out of great tribulation, and in a real sense are 
 fighting the battle with them and for them. 
 
 The first outbreak of this heavenly music, as we have seen, 
 looks backward and celebrates the downfall of Rome. But 
 with verse 6 there comes a change. Rome is done for, her 
 dirge has been sung, the forces of evil that lie behind Rome 
 must next be dealt with. So we have first this hymn in 
 anticipation of the approaching triumph of Christ and his 
 saints over the beast, the Anti-Christ. This chorus is sung 
 in verses 6 to 9. It looks forward to what is about to happen. 
 The relation of God to his people and of Christ to his ser- 
 vants in the figure of marriage is so common both in the 
 Old Testament and in the New, and it has interwoven itself 
 so intimately in the language of Christian devotion that it 
 requires no comment for its understanding and appreciation. 
 Over against the faithless harlot is placed the shining figure 
 of the faithful bride of Christ. The bride in the New Testa- 
 ment is variously interpreted as the individual, the church, 
 and, in the closing chapter of this book, the whole beloved 
 community, the New Jerusalem. Just as Jerusalem and the 
 people of God are closely identified in the Old Testament, so 
 in the apocalyptist's vision of the renewed world, the figure 
 
 I 
 
K 
 
 162 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 designating those who compose the community is easily trans- 
 ferred to the community itself. In using this intimate lan- 
 guage to describe the final union of Christ and his church, the 
 author is, as every reader of the Gospel knows, but reproducing 
 the very mind of Christ Himself. 
 
 Verses 9 and 10 furnish a sort of transition to what is to 
 follow. Precisely as the angel in chapter 10 (v. 5:61:.) gave a 
 solemn assurance of the outcome before the trumpets were 
 sounded, so here we have a promise of victory before the 
 last great battle is joined; and in verse 10 we find the prophet 
 overwhelmed by the vision of the redeemd and filled with awe 
 at the thought of the impending shock of the conflict between 
 Christ and Satan. 
 
 The passage from verse 10 to verse 17 gives us an im- 
 mortal picture of the conquering Christ. As we have already 
 noted, this description of Christ as a warrior is an important 
 and much-needed supplement to the picture of the meek 
 and lowly Jesus as found in the Gospels. A great deal of 
 incredulity which is felt, even if unexpressed, concerning the 
 adequacy of the Christian ideal to the needs of the world as 
 it is, centers at this point. The gentle and compassionate 
 Christ appears as an inadequate ideal and influence in the 
 midst of the blood and iron of this actual world of history 
 and events. So also does the Christ of suffering and sacrifice. 
 "It is not a suffering but a militant leader, we are told, to 
 whom men must look for their salvation. It is not by suffer- 
 ing that God conquers death but by fighting. There may be 
 sufferings, but they do not of themselves bring victory. The 
 symbol of the crucifix jars on our spirit. We cannot accept 
 the Christian crucifix and pray to a pitiful God." ' Mr. Wells, 
 and they who feel like him, have but to turn to this passage 
 of the book to find a conception of Christ entirely adequate 
 to their ideas of a militant and conquering leader. Let it be 
 remembered that this picture reproduces the masterful Christ 
 of the Gospels too often overlooked by those who trust to 
 
 3 H. G. Wells, God, the Invisible King, pp. 100-102. 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 163 
 
 tradition for their conception of Him rather than to the 
 narratives of the Gospels themselves which give us many a 
 glimpse of his heroic qualities, and to the idea of Him to be 
 found in the Epistles, where He is described again and again 
 as the Captain of our Salvation, putting all things under his 
 feet and conquering every foe. Indeed, this passage in the 
 Book of Revelation gives us precisely that foundation for 
 the Social Hope to which, by the effort of their own minds, 
 unaided by revelation, these earnest thinkers themselves have 
 arrived. Not only does it give us the picture of a champion 
 riding forth to challenge the enemy of mankind, but it invests 
 Him with the titles and prerogatives of God Himself. Nothing 
 short of this will answer. He must be King of Kings and 
 Lord of Lords. He must indeed be the invisible King, and 
 such the prophet proclaims Him to be. This conception of 
 itself spells ultimate moral victory. 
 
 The final passage of the chapter (verses 17 to 22) an- 
 nounces the final overthrow of the principles of evil of which 
 Rome was the immediate, visible and temporary manifesta- 
 tion. The struggle itself is not described in any detail. Christ 
 and Anti-Christ come finally face to face (verse 19) ; all is 
 over. Victory happens infallibly, inevitably, automatically. 
 The beast himself, and the false prophet, the priests of the 
 pagan cultus, are sent headlong into the brimstone lake. Not 
 only is Rome done for, but the Anti-Christ, the evil genius of 
 Rome, is destroyed. We have the completion of the old myth 
 found in chapter 12, where we might have looked for an ac- 
 count of the victory of the Messiah after he had grown to 
 manhood. What is more, we have the completion of the 
 prophet's idea, which is that evil itself, and not merely a 
 temporary manifestation of it, is destined to be destroyed. 
 This is the root of the message of the book. 
 
 Let us understand this, and the terrible vindictiveness of 
 this language can give us no offense. Without doubt the spirit 
 is revengeful, but so ought the spirit of a true soul to be 
 against evil. "Ye that love the Lord, hate evil." (Ps. 97:10.) 
 
 N 
 
164 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Remorseless hatred of evil is a sign of sainthood. The blood- 
 thirsty language is doubtless drawn from Jewish sources and 
 is not tuned to our Christian consciousness. But it must be 
 remembered that to be Christian is not to be tolerant in the 
 face of wrong or to acquiesce meekly in the presence or con- 
 tinuance of unrighteousness. It may offend our taste to think 
 of such a supper of God, but the idea underlying it is es- 
 sentially, if terribly, true. It needs to be remembered that 
 the language is always figurative describing only the consum- 
 ing wrath of God. 
 
 Chapter 19: 6. And I heard a confused rumbling and 
 roaring of the voice of multitudes ascribing praise to God. 
 7, 8. Let us hail Him and be glad, for the hour set for the 
 marriage banquet of the Lamb has arrived and the bride 
 herself is arrayed and ready. 9. And the angel told me 
 of the blessedness of those invited to this marriage feast, 
 and that these are the genuine words of God. 10. And 
 when I fell at his feet to worship him, he said, No; for 
 I am but a fellow-servant with you and your brothers who 
 are witnesses of Jesus. God only is to be worshipped. And 
 this witness of Jesus is the very breath of prophecy. 11. 
 And out of the opened heavens I saw a heavenly rider, 
 named Faithful and True, on a white horse, and his judg- 
 ments are just and his warfare is righteous. 12. His eyes 
 blazed like fire, and he wore many crowns, and he had 
 a mysterious name known only to Himself. 13. His garment 
 was blood-red, and "The Word of God" is his name. 14. 
 And troops of heavenly cavalry in white followed Him. 
 15. Out of his mouth came words sharp as a sword with 
 which to smite the nations, and He shall rule them with an 
 iron hand and execute the wrath of God, 16. for He bears 
 the name King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 17, 18. And 
 an angel in the sun summoned the vultures to assemble for 
 the carrion-feast of the bodies of kings and captains, and 
 horses and slaves, and high and low. 19. And then I 
 saw the beast and his armies in battle array against Christ 
 and his host. 20. And the beast was captured and the 
 false prophet that deceived the people and caused them to 
 worship the image of the emperor; and both of them were 
 cast headlong into the brimstone lake, 21. while the rest 
 were slain with the sword, and the birds were glutted with 
 their flesh. 
 
 Notes v. 7 (See Isa. 54:1-6; Jer. 31:32; Ezek. 16:8; Matt. 
 25:1-10; Eph. 5:32.) v. 8 Righteousness means righteous 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 165 
 
 conduct, purity, v. 10 This verse (as well as the last clause in 
 verse 8) is regarded as an interpolation by many scholars. It 
 is duplicated in 22:8, 9. If the prophet were forbidden to 
 worship the angel here, it is hard to see why he should do so 
 there. The last clause of v. 10 is obscure. The work of 
 testifying to Jesus, is the spirit of Jesus at work in the Chris- 
 tian; and this is the inspiration of those who prophesy for 
 Him (see I Pet. 1:11; I Cor. 12:10; II Pet. 1:21). Thus 
 the angel and the prophet are fellow-servants of Christ. 
 V. llff Some of the features of the Messiah may have been 
 suggested by the young sun-god of the early myths. Others 
 are taken from Isa. 63:1-6 and Isa. 11:1-5. v. 12 The idea 
 of a secret name has been discussed in 2:17. There was a 
 current belief in the marvelous power of such a name. See 
 Ecclesiasticus 47:18 and the Prayer of Manassas 3. Many 
 crowns signify universal rulership. The Word of G-od doubt- 
 less refers to the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, but it has little 
 relation to it and is here used in a different sense. This is 
 probably not a later attempt to decide what the secret name 
 was. It is an addition to that idea. Dipped in blood, i. e. 
 of his enemies. (See Isa. 63:1.) There is here no reference 
 to the Cross, v. 15 (See Isa. 11:4; II Esdras 13:9-11, 27-38.) 
 w. 17, 18 (See Ezek. 39:17-20.) 
 
 4. The Destruction of Satan (Chapters 20:1-10) 
 
 Rome has fallen. The beast and the false prophet who 
 were the incarnation of the wickedness and pagan idolatries £\^ 
 of Rome have been captured and destroyed. It remains to 
 reckon with Satan himself, who is back of Rome (chapter 12), 
 and from whom the beast has received his authority (chapter 
 13:2). Not until Satan himself has been destroyed will 
 victory be complete. This thoroughgoing vindication of \ | 
 righteousness constitutes the moral greatness of this book. 
 The author carries the conflict back from temporary mani- 
 festations of evil to its ultimate sources and roots. Root and 
 
166 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 branch, evil is to be destroyed. Chapter 20, one of the most 
 important and difficult and fateful chapters of Revelation, 
 has this for its essential theme: the overthrow of Satan him- 
 self, the author and source of all evil. 
 
 Let the reader understand this fact, and the place which 
 the chapter thus occupies in the thought of the author and in 
 the development of his theme, and there will not be confusion 
 in its interpretation. The one purpose of this chapter is to 
 describe the destruction of Satan and the deliverance and 
 reward of those who have opposed him at the risk and cost 
 of their lives, precisely as the purpose of chapter 18 was to 
 describe the downfall of Rome, and of chapter 19 the over- 
 throw of the beast. 
 
 In the treatment of his subject, the author uses three dif- 
 ferent sets of material. First, he employs the old myths which 
 we found wrought into the fabric of chapter 12. Next, he 
 uses familiar Old Testament and later Jewish traditions with 
 regard to the Messianic kingdom which all Jews expected 
 would be set up on earth. Finally, there are ideas of his 
 own, which are not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. These 
 three sets of material are all arranged and governed by the 
 single idea which the author holds before him in this chapter: 
 "the destruction of that old serpent which is the Devil," and 
 the deliverance and reward of the witnesses of Jesus. 
 
 In the first place, then, the author goes back to the old 
 myths. We should expect this, since the author has already 
 shown in chapter 12 that in dealing with the aboriginal 
 sources of evil, he bases his description upon ideas common 
 to all mythologies. The notion that evil powers are under 
 the earth probably goes back for its origin to earthquakes 
 and volcanoes; or, back of that, to the binding of the chaos 
 dragon, which signified the setting of fixed bounds to the 
 waters, "so that the earth can be freed from its ravages and 
 can produce life." * This idea, reproduced in one form and 
 another in different mythologies, found its way without doubt 
 
 1 See Porter, p. 276. 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 167 
 
 into Jewish apocalypses, and was made use of in this book. 
 Only here, the binding of the dragon takes place "not at or 
 near the creation of the world," but at the re-creation of the 
 world, the setting up of God's kingdom on earth. Thus the 
 author turns the old myth to his own use. 
 
 In the old mythologies we also have the idea that the dragon 
 was bound, breaks loose again for a time, but subsequently is 
 retaken and destroyed. In the Persian mythology the dragon 
 Azhi Dahaka is conquered and kept bound for a period but 
 afterwards becomes free again and is slain. 1 This idea is 
 reflected, if it is not reproduced, in certain Bible passages. 
 A second conflict with heathen powers is found in Ezek. 38 :39. 
 (cf. also Isa. 24:21; II Pet. 2:4; Jude v. 6; Thess. 2:7-8.) 
 Our author is simply utilizing old mythical ideas for his own 
 special purpose, which is to affirm the final destruction of 
 Satan. 
 
 In addition to this mythical material, the author uses, also, 
 the familiar Jewish traditions about the coming of the 
 Messianic age. All readers of the Old Testament prophets 
 know that they expected and foretold the setting up on earth 
 of an ideal kingdom in which the unity and splendor of the 
 reign of David should be reproduced with the Messiah as its 
 ruler. As time passed, however, and this kingdom was not 
 realized on earth, there was a tendency to idealize, even to 
 etherealize, it (see Isa. 52:11, 60:10-14). In the minds of 
 expectant writers, it took on heavenly attributes and features, 
 and there was a tendency to detach it altogether from the 
 earth. The kingdom became transcendental and universal, its 
 realm embraced new heavens and earth, and its people were 
 the risen saints of God. Between these two, reconciling them, 
 and bringing them together in a single conception, we find in 
 the later Jewish writings the teaching that the first of these 
 two kingdoms, the earthly and historical kingdom, is to be 
 temporary in duration, the historical prelude, as it were, to 
 the eternal and heavenly kingdom. The Messiah will be the 
 
 1 Beckwith, p. 736. 
 
168 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 head of the first, and God of the last of these kingdoms. This 
 conception is found in the Old Testament apocryphal books. 
 See II Esdras 7:2811, where the earthly kingdom is four 
 hundred years long. The author of Revelation has reproduced 
 this tradition for his own purpose. He gives the figure 1000 
 as the duration of the earthly kingdom, possibly suggested by 
 a combination of Gen. 2 :2 and Ps. 90 :4. Like all other num- 
 bers in Revelation, its significance is symbolical and simply 
 denotes perfection. 
 
 Finally, the author inserts an idea in this chapter which 
 is all his own, and is not found elsewhere in the Bible. It is 
 the idea contained in verses 4-6, which have been called 
 "fateful verses which have produced one of the least fruitful 
 chapters in the long history of human thought." 1 In these 
 verses, upon the basis of traditional material which has just 
 been described, the author advances a Christian idea which is 
 wholly new with him, that Christ is to rule on earth for a 
 period of one thousand years with his saints, after which 
 Satan is to resume his sway until the final judgment and 
 the final resurrection. "These few verses standing alone in 
 Biblical utterances, and apparently deriving their formal con- 
 tents from external sources, have given occasion for con- 
 troversy running through the ages, and for vast practical 
 delusions." 2 And to-day, upon the basis of these three verses, 
 there are thousands of people who believe that this literal 
 millennium is to take place, when a visible Christ is to set up 
 his kingdom on earth and reign for a thousand glorious years 
 with his saints. 
 
 It is not our purpose to inquire into the genesis, the history, 
 or the moral value of this literal millennial idea. But it must 
 be pointed out that such an interpretation of these verses is 
 wholly foreign to the whole method and spirit of this book. 
 From beginning to end, the author's purpose has been to 
 describe in poetic and symbolical and prophetic language the 
 
 1 Porter, p. 277. 
 *Beckwith, p. 737. 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 169 
 
 eternal and spiritual truth that evil shall be overthrown, and 
 that God and his people shall triumph. He is doing this for 
 a very practical purpose. He is not seeking to plot out the 
 remote future, or give us either the chronology or the 
 geography of the New Jerusalem, but rather to steel the hearts 
 of Christian martyrs at a particular time and for a particular 
 purpose. He uses in his preaching all the available material 
 that he can find. Some of this we have been able to trace 
 and some of it we cannot trace. Behind this idea, for example, 
 of a temporary reign of Christ on earth with his saints, 
 which, as we have seen, stands all by itself in explicit utter- 
 ance, there may run a Christian tradition unknown to us, 
 reflected in such Pauline passages as I Cor. 15:20-28, 6:2, 3. 
 (See Matt. 19:28.) It has even been suggested that our 
 author, upon the basis of this tradition, himself believed that 
 such an earthly future millennium would actually take place. 
 No one can answer that question definitely, either one way 
 or the other. The whole spiritual interpretation of the book, 
 however, plus the fact that there is no known previous Chris- 
 tian tradition to support it, argues strongly against the sup- 
 position that he did. In either case, his aim in this chapter is 
 not "the revelation of a chronological program in the world's 
 history," or the prediction of a future era, but something far 
 more practical and spiritual and real. His aim is to set forth 
 to those early Christians in a dramatic way, the spiritual 
 truth that a special spiritual reward awaits those who are 
 faithful unto death. Precisely as in the earlier chapters that 
 reward is described in terms of a new name, or crown, and a 
 permanent place in the Temple of God, so in this closing 
 chapter it is described as reigning with Christ in glory and 
 security. For that purpose those verses were written, and 
 that is their use and value to us to-day. Whether or not our 
 author believed that there would be any such literal and future 
 millennium (and the strong presumption is that he did not), 
 "we ourselves ought certainly to value it only for the dis- 
 tinctively Christian truth which it images forth, namely, that 
 
170 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF KEVELATION 
 
 the conquest of evil and real ralership in this world belong 
 to Christ and to those who truly belong to Him." 1 The es- 
 sential truth and meaning of these verses both to the author 
 and to ourselves is contained in the Beatitude of Jesus : 
 
 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' 
 sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 As for the ideas of the final judgment, and the second 
 death and resurrection, with which the chapter closes, these 
 are taken freely from familiar Jewish apocalyptical writings. 
 The description of Satan's final effort to assert himself is a 
 favorite theme in such writings, and the notion of a divine 
 account of men's deeds on earth according to which they are 
 to be judged is found both in the Old Testament and in 
 later Jewish books. The idea of restoring to life some who 
 had died is also common in the later apocalypses. Thus in 
 the Book of Enoch we read (I En. 51:1) : 
 
 In those days shall the earth also give back that which 
 has been entrusted to it, and Sheol shall give back that 
 which it has received, and hell shall give back that which 
 it owes. 
 
 A general and final resurrection and a fiery torment for the 
 wicked are familiar notions of Jewish writings, reflection of 
 which are to be found in the Gospels. 
 
 This chapter, in its message to its own time, to our time 
 and for all time, takes its place beside the other great chapters 
 in this book. It is the same spiritual message which lays the 
 foundation of our Social Hope and nerves us, as it did those 
 early Christians, for our work as faithful witnesses of Jesus. 
 First, it tells us that old Satan is going to be bound; evil, 
 that is, is going to be controlled, and when it is, the world 
 will seem like Paradise restored, it will seem as if the kingdom 
 had come, as if the millennium had dawned. It is a description 
 of a temporary flourishing of righteousness, temporary be- 
 cause Satan is only bound and not destroyed. The thousand 
 
 1 Porter, p. 280. 
 
} 
 
 THE DOOM OF EVIL 171 
 
 years express no period of time. They express an idea. The 
 author might have used four hundred or seven hundred or 
 twelve hundred or any other sacred number; but the number 
 makes no difference. The point is, so long as evil is con- 
 trolled but not destroyed, the freedom from struggle will 
 be temporary, and not eternal. After the respite is over, 
 then evil will break out again. There will be a recrudescence 
 of wickedness. Right again will be on the scaffold and 
 wrong on the throne. It is not an easy victory, that of right 
 against wrong, of God against Satan. He is not to be 
 bound all at once. He may seem to be down, but he gets up 
 again. We may seem to have him fast, but he will break 
 loose once more. Is that true or is it not? We see it in 
 history. Is there any better or truer way of interpreting the 
 awful days of these past years than as a fresh eruption of 
 Satan? We thought we had him down. We were going along 
 so nicely. We were getting rich so fast. We had everything 
 we wanted. We knew all there is to know. We had become 
 so cultured, so wise, so self-sufficient, it looked as if we 
 were on the borderland of perfection. Then, Hell broke 
 loose; the devil escaped. In such a time, let us remember 
 the immortal hope that is held forth in this chapter, which 
 does full justice to the power of evil — the hope that one day 
 Satan will be cast into the lake of fire where the beast and 
 the false prophet are, and will remain there forever and ever, 
 Amen. The chapter tells us that if we would reign with 
 Christ, we must suffer with Him; if we would sit down with 
 Him in his throne, let us overcome, even as He overcame. 
 In a world still in the grip of evil and under Satan's sway, 
 there remains the possibility of being faithful unto death, 
 and so becoming priests of God and of Christ and reigning 
 with Him in security and peace. The message of this chapter 
 confirms and fulfils the message of the entire book. It promises 
 the ultimate extinction of evil, and the sure blessedness of 
 those who endure. Let us lift our eyes to that consummation 
 and fix them firmly upon it. Not Satan bound, but Satan 
 
172 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 destroyed, is the ultimate purpose of God. "And the begin- 
 nings of that experience are now. The overcoming- Christ is 
 with us, and will dwell with us by the might of his spirit." * 
 
 Chapter 20:1. Then I saw an angel come down from 
 heaven having the key to the abyss and a great chain. 
 2. And he laid hold of the dragon, that is, Satan, bound 
 him, and 3. cast him into the abyss and locked him up 
 there for a thousand years, after which he must have free- 
 dom for a last brief period. 4. In contrast to the fate of 
 Satan, I saw many thrones and they which sat on them 
 were those who had suffered death for the gospel's sake. 
 They sat now as judges, and their special reward was to 
 share for the thousand years in the reign of Christ. 5. 
 The rest of the dead were not restored to life until the 
 thousand years were passed. 6. Blessed therefore are those 
 that share in this first resurrection, for they will never 
 taste death again, but will continue for the thousand years 
 as priests of God and of Christ. 7. But when the thou- 
 sand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison 
 and 8, 9. shall assemble the remote nations of the earth in 
 a numberless multitude for a final assault upon the city 
 and people of God. But fire from God consumed them 
 utterly 10. and Satan was cast down into the brimstone lake 
 where the beast and false prophet are, to suffer eternal 
 torment. 11. Then I had a vision of a God on a great white 
 throne. From his presence earth and sea fled so far that 
 they were no more to be found. 12. And I saw all the dead 
 stand before God while their books were opened and they 
 were judged by their deeds written in the books. And an- 
 other book, even the book of life, was also opened. 13. 
 And sea and death and hell delivered up their dead to be 
 judged. 14,15. And death and hell were themselves cast" 
 into the lake of fire. And if any one's name was not found 
 recorded in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake 
 of fire, which is the second death. 
 
 Notes 20:1 For the key to the abyss, see 9:1. v. 3 Sealed 
 (See Dan. 6:17; Prayer of Manas. 4: Matt. 27:66.) v. 4 
 Suggested by Dan. 7:9, 10, 22. The martyred saints sit on 
 the thrones and judge the world. Judgment means the func- 
 tion of judging, (cf. Lk. 22:30; Matt. 19:28; I Cor. 6:2.) 
 Actual martyrs are here meant, v. 5 The rest All except the 
 martyrs; righteous and unrighteous alike. These are dis- 
 tinguished in vv. 12ff. Only the martyrs share in the glory 
 
 1 Charles Brown, Heavenly Visions, pp. 247-248. 
 
THE DOOM OF EVIL 173 
 
 of Christ's reign. Their resurrection comes first. The general 
 resurrection follows, v. 6 Priests (See 1:6, 5:10; Isa. 61:6.) 
 v. 8 Such a general onslaught of nations is described in F>zek. 
 38-39, and II Esdras 13 :5ff. The names Gog and Magog oc- 
 cur in Ezekiel and probably go back to an earlier tradition. 
 It is the author's own idea to represent Satan as leading them 
 in this final attack. And God Himself destroys Satan, whereas 
 in chapter 19 Christ overthrows the beast. Note again the 
 interchange of the future and past tenses, w. 8, 9 Four 
 corners of the earth (cf. 7:1; Isa. 11:12). v. 9 Camp So 
 Ex. 16:13; Deut. 23:14, not to be distinguished in meaning 
 from "city." An earthly Jerusalem is meant. For destruction 
 by fire, cf. Ezek. 39:6; 38:22. vv. llff This judgment scene 
 follows closely Matt. 25:31-46; Rom. 14:10; II Cor. 5:10; II 
 Esdras 7:33ff. v. 11 Throne (cf. Dan. 7:9; Isa. 6:1.) The 
 existing earth is removed (II Pet. 3:10-13) to give place to 
 the new world, v. 12 (See II Cor. 5:10.) A bodily resurrec- 
 tion is meant. On book of life, see 3:5. Works means their 
 whole spiritual being and activity. So in 14:13. v. 13 Death 
 and hell (See 1:18, 6:8.) v. 14 God's servants are to be 
 delivered from the fear of death. (Heb. 2:15; I. Cor. 15:26.) 
 V. 14 The first death is ordinary physical death. Consign- 
 ment to the lake of fire is here spoken of as a new (second) 
 sort of death. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ' THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 
 
 Revelation, Chapters 21, 22 
 
 WITH the close of chapter 20, the last word has been 
 spoken concerning the doom of evil. Every last 
 vestige of it has been destroyed. It needs to be borne in mind, 
 however, that this has been no easy victory. The long, hard 
 struggle with Rome, with the beast, with Satan, has stretched 
 through the Book of Revelation from beginning to end. The 
 full and entire resources of God, of Christ, and of their 
 servants and followers have been needed to put an end to 
 evil; and the time required has tested the patience and en- 
 durance of the people of God. Here Revelation brings to us 
 a much-needed social message. The trouble with workers for 
 righteousness is that they expect a too speedy and too easy 
 victory. They grow weary in well-doing because their efforts 
 are not rewarded soon enough. They make up their minds 
 in advance when they feel the end should come, and if it does 
 not come, lose heart. This book teaches us otherwise. It tells 
 us that potentially the victory has already been won; but it 
 also tells us that actually it is a long way off. It bids us 
 prepare for a long journey so that we shall not be disap- 
 pointed if we do not arrive too soon. A journey is no longer 
 than we make it in our minds. It is all according to the way 
 we pitch our expectations. A great moral need in our day 
 is the proper moral perspective. Revelation gives us that 
 perspective, and this is not the least of the book's contribu- 
 tions to our equipment for social work. 
 
 Neither can it be said that the spiritual prophecy of this 
 
 174 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 175 
 
 book has failed of fulfilment. It is true that Rome did not 
 fall within the lifetime of the author. But fall at length it 
 did, and many a Rome has fallen since. It is true that no 
 visible Anti-Christ appeared in the prophet's day. But the 
 Nero-spirit was slain by the Spirit of Christ who assumed the 
 control of the on-coming centuries. It is true that the end 
 has not yet come. But it is also true that we have sufficient 
 proof in history of the vindication of righteousness and the 
 ruin of evil to assure us of the moral nature of that end 
 when it shall come. The faith of the prophet has been 
 abundantly fulfilled. Two thousand years of proof should 
 be sufficient to cause us to embrace and cherish this faith in 
 the struggles which still lie before us. 
 
 With the condemnation of evil behind him, our author has 
 only to describe the salvation of God's people in order to 
 bring his glowing book to a close. This he does in the two 
 remaining chapters. These chapters fall naturally in two 
 sections: first, the description of the Holy City, the New 
 Jerusalem, chapters 21:1-22:5, and second, the epilogue, 
 chapter 22:6-21. 
 
 1. The Holy City (Chapter 21:1-22:9) 
 
 To the Christian heart these chapters are among the dearest 
 of all not only in this book, but in the Bible. They help to 
 explain how the Book of Revelation found its way at last into 
 the New Testament canon. The history of the book is peculiar. 
 "At the outset it was generally accepted. In the second cen- 
 tury, it was among the earliest books to be included in the 
 growing New Testament. Hardly any one doubted its right 
 to be there. Yet in the third ' century the Greek theologians 
 of Alexandria — Origen and those whom he influenced — were 
 repelled by it, as are many to-day. Scholarly training could 
 not understand it and could not reconcile itself to its strange 
 thought and grotesque expression. . . . For centuries it was in 
 debate in the Greek church: ... to this day it is not a part 
 

 176 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 of the official Syrian New Testament." ' The Roman Church, 
 however, held fast to the book, and it was finally accepted as 
 one of the authoritative books of the New Testament. 2 What 
 were the causes that led to its retention? Chief among them, 
 without question, was the immortal appeal of the book to 
 faith and fortitude, and its glowing assurances of ultimate vic- 
 tory. But also, we may believe, these final precious chapters 
 had much to do with the result. Doubtless they were read 
 and re-read by early Christians as they have been by Chris- 
 tians ever since. They brought unspeakable comfort to them 
 as they do to us. The Christian heart found that it could 
 not do without them. There was no substitute for them to 
 be found elsewhere in the New Testament. Their spiritual 
 value made the church reluctant to lose them. They were 
 found to be the best description of heaven, in the poetry of 
 the human heart, ever put into language. Men have always 
 wondered what heaven is like. To the Christians for whom 
 this book was written whose friends may already have suf- 
 fered or were to suffer martyrdom, these chapters brought an 
 imperishable message of comfort. That message it has 
 brought ever since. Any vision of heaven is welcomed by the 
 hungry souls of men. Let any one be able to speak of what 
 he feels heaven to be like, and multitudes will hear or read 
 what he has to say. In "Chapters from a Life" by Elizabeth 
 Stuart Phelps, we have a graphic illustration of this fact 
 (chapters 5 and 6). About the year 1863 a little book was 
 written by an unknown schoolgirl only twenty years of age. 
 "At that time the country was dark with sorrowing women. 
 The regiments came home, but the mourners went about the 
 streets. The Grand Review passed through Washington: four 
 hundred thousand ghosts of murdered men kept invisible 
 march to the drum-beats and lifted to the stained and tattered 
 flags the proud and unreturned gaze of the dead who have 
 died in their glory. Our gayest scenes were black with crepe : 
 
 1 James Hardy Ropes, Harvard Theological Review, Oct. 1919. 
 
 2 See E. C. Moore, The New Testament in the Christian Church, 
 pp. 182-187. 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 177* 
 
 the drawn faces of bereaved wife, mother, sister, and widowed 
 girl showed everywhere. Gray-haired parents knelt at the 
 grave of the boy whose enviable fortune it was to be brought 
 home in time to die in his mother's room. . . . Into that 
 great world of woe my little book stole forth trembling. But 
 the very title, 'Gates Ajar' caught the attention of the sor- 
 rowing multitudes." The book was everywhere read, and that 
 Andover school-girl's description of what heaven is like 
 brought comfort to hundreds of thousands of bereaved and 
 lonely souls. This incident in literature helps us to under- 
 stand the sacred and permanent meaning of these final chap- 
 ters of Revelation to the heart of Christians. 
 
 Of the place and meaning of these chapters in the plan of 
 the author, it is not necessary to speak. They are an amplifi- 
 cation and confirmation of those promises to the faithful wit- 
 nesses of Jesus contained in the previous chapters of the book. 
 In no more beautiful way could the author have completed his 
 inspired message. And in no more wonderful way could the 
 Bible itself have come to an end. What a unity the whole 
 Bible message has thus achieved! Genesis and Revelation 
 stand over against each other, the last book in the Bible ful- 
 filling even in detail the story of the first. There man was 
 created; here he stands redeemed. There the heavens and 
 the earth were fashioned. Here is a new heaven and a new 
 earth. There were cities of evil, here is a Holy City. There 
 was the tree of which man was forbidden to eat; here is the 
 tree of life. There was the curse; here is no more curse. 
 There the first man was driven out of Paradise; here is the 
 welcome, "Whosoever will, let him come." ^ 
 
 The promise of immortality has its permanent place in 
 the social message of Revelation. Faith in immortality is in- 
 dispensable to the worker for righteousness and for a world 
 that hopes to achieve righteousness. This faith is not a mere 
 selfish desire for the perpetuation of the personal life, or the 
 selfish expectation of a personal reward. Rather it is the 
 indispensable assurance of the permanence of the sohl that 
 
178 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 strives, and of the permanence of those spiritual ideals for 
 which it strives. It is only as one believes that "he who 
 doeth the will of the Lord abideth forever," and that "our 
 labor is not in vain in the Lord," that one is given the spiritual 
 convictions that fill his social striving with hope and joy. 
 All history and biography go to prove that faith in im- 
 mortality, and achievement in the realm of moral and spiritual 
 endeavor, go hand in hand. These chapters are an essential 
 part of the social message of the Book of Revelation. 
 
 The author found materials for his immortal description 
 of the Holy City in the Old Testament. 1 We may trace their 
 development in the following way: We find in the Old Testa- 
 ment the idea of a restored Jerusalem after its first fall. As 
 we have seen, Ezekiel and Isaiah, when they picture the New 
 Jerusalem rising from the ruins of the old, begin to use super- 
 natural language. Sometimes it is only a city that has become 
 morally pure, a "holy city" in literal terms. (Isa. 52:1.) 
 Often the city is invested with an unearthly glory. 
 
 I will set thy stones with fair colours and lay thy founda- 
 tions with sapphires. And I will make thy pinnacles of rubies 
 and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of precious 
 stones (Isa. 54:11, 12). Thy gates also shall be open continu- 
 ally; they shall not be shut day nor night. The glory of 
 Lebanon shall come unto thee (Isa. 60:11, 13). 
 
 Ezekiel in chapters 40-48 gives us such a spiritualized de- 
 scription of the New Jerusalem, closing with the word: 
 
 And the name of the city from that day shall be, The 
 Lord is there. 
 
 Of course it was of an earthly Jerusalem that these men 
 wrote. Yet the more glorious the city was imagined to be, 
 the easier it was to arrive at the idea that God Himself had 
 first fashioned the city in heaven, and that from there it 
 would descend to earth. This idea of a pre-existent Jerusalem 
 is not clearly found in Jewish writing's until after the destruc- 
 J See Porter, pp. 282ff. 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 179 
 
 tion of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Christian era. Then, 
 however, with the complete obliteration of all earthly hopes, 
 this exalted and unearthly conception of a Jerusalem existing 
 in heaven plainly appears. Thus in II Esdras we read: 
 
 And the bride shall appear, and she coming forth shall 
 be seen that now is withdrawn from the earth (7: 26). 
 And Sion shall come and shall be shewed unto all men 
 being prepared and builded like as thou sawest the hill 
 graven without hands (13:36). For unto you is Paradise 
 opened: the tree of life is planted, the time to come is pre- 
 pared, plenteousness is made ready, a city is builded (8: 52). 
 For in the place where the Highest beginneth to shew his 
 city, there can no man's building be able to stand. And 
 therefore fear not . . . but go thy way in and see the 
 beauty and greatness of the building, as much as thine eye 
 is able to see (10:54, 55). 
 
 And reflections of this idea of a heavenly Jerusalem are 
 found in certain New Testament passages, as in Gal. 4:26, 
 and Heb. 11:10-16, 12:22, 13:14. 
 
 These, then, are the materials which the author uses. It is 
 useless to ask how far he shared in these Jewish beliefs. That 
 the early disciples held them, we know (Matt. 20:21, Acts 
 1:6). We know also that they gave gradually away before 
 the pressure of more distinctively Christian ideas and that 
 few survivals of them are to be found in the later and more 
 spiritual portions of the New Testament. It is true that 
 our author was saturated with Jewish ideas, of which this 
 was one. But it is also true that he was a Christian. The 
 fact that he uses Jewish material does not prove that he 
 shared in the Jewish faith which produced it. He is for- 
 ever turning material to his own ends. That he himself 
 looked forward to an idealized Jerusalem on earth seems 
 most improbable. What he describes is no earthly city. 
 "The heavenly city remains heavenly in character though it 
 descends to earth." He uses this symbolic language to depict 
 the New Jerusalem which, most probably for him and cer- 
 tainly for us, is none other than the heaven of the Chris- 
 tian's hope. Using the longings of Israel for a New Jeru- 
 
180 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 salem, touched with the customs and longings of the Chris- 
 tian heart, he has given us this incomparable description of 
 Jerusalem the Golden; of the presence of God and spiritual 
 communion with Him of his faithful people. None but the 
 most incorrigible literalist will think of analyzing these meas- 
 urements of the walls, or of constructing any material no- 
 tions from them. We understand this language to be wholly 
 symbolic, used to give the impression of the glory, vastness, 
 beauty and perfection of the heavenly life. It is indeed "to 
 our great advantage that the Jewish prophets expected an 
 earthly consummation, for they were able to give to this a 
 vivid, concrete emotional expression, and the language of 
 beauty and feeling in which they voiced their hope is a far 
 more adequate expression of our more ideal aspirations than 
 we could create for ourselves. Figurative language is the 
 only language in which we can express our hope of heaven, 
 and no figures can have greater power to suggest this hope 
 than those taken from the literal longings of exiled Israel 
 for the recovery of its land and city." 1 
 
 Chapter 21:1. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth 
 for the first heaven and earth had vanished, and the sea 
 no longer exists. 2. And I saw the holy city descending 
 from heaven arrayed like a bride. 3. And a voice from 
 heaven told me that this meant that God would now dwell 
 among men 4. and take from them tears and death and 
 sorrow and pain, because the first things had passed away. 
 5. And God from his throne declared that his word is to 
 be trusted that He makes all things new. 6. He said: 
 It is finished. I am the First and the Last, and I will 
 give water without price to all that are thirsty. 7. The 
 victor shall inherit all this and we shall be as Father and 
 son. 8. But the faint-hearted and the faithless and the 
 wicked shall have their share of the lake of fire. 9. And 
 one of the angels who had the bowls told me that he would 
 show me the New Jerusalem, the bride of Christ. 10. 
 And, as in a vision, I saw the holy city descending out 
 of heaven 11. having the glory of God and shining like a 
 diamond, and clear as crystal. 12, 13. It had great walls, 
 and twelve gates, four on each side, corresponding to the 
 twelve tribes of Israel. 14. And the wall had twelve founda- 
 1 Porter, pp. 287, 288. 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 181 
 
 tions, one for each of the twelve apostles. 15,16. And the 
 angel measured the city with a golden reed, and found 
 that it measured fifteen hundred miles, and its length and 
 breadth and height were the same. 17. He also measured 
 the wall and it was about two hundred feet thick accord- 
 ing to man's way of measuring which was the standard 
 adopted by the angel. 18. The wall was of diamond, but 
 the city itself was like transparent gold. 19,20. The twelve 
 foundation stones were twelve different jewels, 21. and each 
 gate was a single pearl, and the streets transparent gold. 
 
 22. There was no temple because God and Christ are there. 
 
 23. And there was no need of other light than their glory. 
 
 24. By this light shall the nations walk, and kings will 
 bring their treasure into 25. its ever-open gates, which 
 are never closed by day, and night there is none. 26. Yea, 
 the splendour of the nations shall be brought there. 27. Yet 
 nothing unclean shall enter into it nor any save them whom 
 Christ hath chosen. Chapter 22:1. And he shewed me the 
 living water which flowed forth from God's throne 2. through 
 the streets of the city. And on each side of the river was 
 the tree of Life which bore fruit twelve times a year 
 sufficient to feed the nations, and the leaves of the tree 
 served to heal them. 3. No one who is accursed shall be 
 there, but the throne of God and of Christ shall be there, 
 and his servants will serve Him 4. and see Him and bear 
 his name. 5. And there shall be no night, and they will 
 need neither lamp nor sun-light, for the glory of God will 
 shine upon them. So they shall live and reign forever. 
 
 Notes 21:1 No more sea The Hebrews shared intensely the 
 ancients' dread of the sea. Every voyage recounted in Scrip- 
 ture ends in shipwreck, (cf. Isa. 57:20; Ps. 107:25-28; 
 Ezek. 28:8.) The idea may go back to the mythical notion 
 that the sea is the symbol of chaos. V. 3 (cf. 7:15; Ezek. 
 37:27; Zech. 2:10, 8:8; II Cor. 6:16.) v. 4 (Isa. 25:8, 35:10, 
 65:17, 19; Hos. 13:14.) v. 5 (II Cor. 5:17.) v. 6 (Isa. 55:1, 
 44:3; Ps. 42:lff, 63:1; John 4:10,14; 7:37ff.) v. 8 (Ps. 
 11:6; Isa. 30:33; Ezek. 38:22.) v. 9 By using one of the 
 angels with the bowls for this purpose, the author contrasts 
 the picture of the Holy City with that of the harlot city in 
 chapter 17. Note the close correspondence of chapters 17 :1,3, 
 and 21:9, 10. v. 11 (cf. Ezek. 43:5; Isa. 60:1.) Jasper is 
 probably our diamond. 1 v. 12 (See Ezek. 48:1-20.) v. 13 
 
 1 See Hastings' Bible Dictionary, article "Precious Stones." 
 
182 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 Taken directly from Ezek. 48:31ff. (See Isa. 62:6; II Chron. 
 8:14.) v. 14 (Isa. 28:16; Heb. 11:10; Eph. 2:20; Matt. 
 16:18.) w. 15,16 (Ezek. 40:3-20.) It is not apparent that 
 the author means to draw a distinction between the city and 
 the wall. The two form a single idea. Each dimension meas- 
 ured 1500 miles, v. 17 Since the height of the wall has al- 
 ready been given, it seems natural to understand this meas- 
 urement to refer to its thickness. (See Ezek. 40:5, 42:20.) 
 v. 18 The details are suggested by Isa. 54:llff; Tobit 13 :16ff. 
 w. 19-20 (See Ex. 28:17ff, 39:10ff; Ezek. 28:13.) v. 22 The 
 author leaves the prophets here where the temple is a promi- 
 nent feature of the glorified city (Isa. 44:28, 60:13) and 
 speaks like a Christian (John 4:21, 23). v. 23 (Isa. 60:19ff.) 
 vv. 24-26 The author does not hesitate to introduce alien na- 
 tions in his picture of the Holy City, since his desire is to 
 describe the universal sway of God to whom all are subject. 
 He is using well known passages for this purpose. (See 
 Isa. 60:3, 11; Tobit 13:11.) v. 27 (See Isa. 52:1; Ezek. 44:9.) 
 22:1 Ezekiel is closely followed here. (See Ezek. 47:1-12.) 
 v. 2 The first clause in this verse is best joined with v. 1. 
 Tree of Life suggested from Gen. 2 :8, 9. (cf. II Esdras 7 :53, 
 8:52. See Ezek. 47:12.) The healing properties of leaves 
 suggests the use of plants as medicines, v. 3. No more curse, 
 or, more likely, no more accursed thing (Jos. 7:12). v. 4 
 (See Ps. 17:15; Matt. 5:8; I Jn. 3:2.) v. 5 (Dan. 7:27; 
 Rom. 5:17.) 
 
 2. The Epilogue (Chapter 22:6-21) 
 
 With the fifth verse of the last chapter of Revelation the 
 visions come to an end. There is nothing left for the author 
 to do but to end the book itself. Readers will compare this 
 epilogue carefully with the prologue. The correspondences 
 between the two make it evident that they were composed to- 
 gether with the express purpose of having the same ideas 
 stand both at the beginning and at the end. They are held 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 183 
 
 together by the solemn announcement of the same purpose, 
 the same warnings, and the same assurance. Possibly the 
 prologue may have been composed after the epilogue already 
 had been written. At any rate it was certainly influenced 
 by it. In both, we have the assurance that the revelation 
 comes from God Himself (1:1, 22:6); and from Christ (1:1, 
 22:16); by means of an angel (1:1, 22:16); through John 
 (1:1, 4, 9; 22:8) duly commissioned (1:1, 9-11; 22:8, 10); it 
 is to be read in the churches (1:3, 11; 22:16, 18); it prom- 
 ises a sure reward to the faithful (1:3; 22:7, 12, 14) ; and sure 
 punishment to the faithless (1:7; 22:11, 18); the coming of 
 the Lord is near (1:3; 22:6, 20) ; who was the historic Jesus, 
 but is now the ascended and victorious Christ (1:5, 7; 
 22:13, 16). These are the ideas with which the book begins, 
 and ends. 
 
 No one can read this epilogue and escape the conviction 
 that when the author wrote it, he was in the grip of great 
 spiritual excitement. It is as if he were tossing into this 
 closing passage one after another the thoughts that rose like 
 a tumult in his soul. Cool, critical analysts have found in 
 these disjointed sentences, these ejaculatory interpolations, 
 these repetitions and interruptions, proof of the composite 
 nature of the book, and they would smooth it all out and 
 arrange it according to logical sequences of their own. They 
 only reveal how much they themselves are strangers to in- 
 spiration and unacquainted with prophetic moods and in- 
 stinct. All through this book there have been interruptions 
 and repetitions. It is part of the author's manner. He has 
 sketched his drama in the large, and has followed his spirit- 
 ual purpose from beginning to end with passionate precision. 
 As we have seen, in constructing the different scenes he has 
 thrown together his materials with regard to pictorial effect 
 and general impression, rather than with a view to logical 
 order and connection. That is what we should expect of an 
 apocalyptical writer. He moves in a realm of great, general 
 ideas and he labors under great spiritual emotion. He fills up 
 
{ 
 
 184 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 his chapters with a wealth of material; repeats the same idea 
 in different form; has an eye to contrast; his fervid spiritual 
 imagination leaps from one idea to another; he interjects 
 brief prophetic utterances that disturb the exact sequence 
 of thought; and breaks out in impassioned appeals and warn- 
 ings as these capture his mind. It is all in the way of his 
 writing. It is all according to his purpose. 1 
 
 So, in this final passage, bringing his book to an impas- 
 sioned end, he throws together what has been in his mind 
 from the first. 2 Those early Christians must stand firm in 
 their hour of trial. The Christian faith is at stake. The 
 church is at the cross-roads. Be firm. These promises are 
 sure. Christ is coming quickly. His reward is with Him. 
 Blessed are the faithful. Swift and sure is the punishment 
 of the faithless. This book is indeed the very word of God. 
 come, Lord Jesus. Amen. 
 
 Two ideas stand out from this final passage which call for 
 comment. One is the repeated asseveration that John writes 
 from a felt conviction received from God Himself. These 
 are not John's ideas. They are a message from God con- 
 veyed through him. Over and over again this idea has been 
 insisted upon; in these last verses it is once more solemnly 
 asserted. The author of this book, that is, is a veritable 
 prophet. He closes the long line of inspired Bible writers. 
 He speaks out what God has given him to say. We are re- 
 minded here of the uniqueness of Bible inspiration. There 
 is nothing like it in all literature. The difference between 
 the Bible and other books, as Frederick Denison Maurice once 
 remarked, is that in other writings we have men's thoughts 
 about God, but in the Bible we have God's thought toward 
 man. The Book of Revelation measures up to Bible standards. 
 Nowhere in the Bible do we have literature as such. No Bible 
 
 1 See Beckwith, pp. 241ff. 
 
 2 "Civilization will not be saved by flabby optimism, nor by irreso- 
 lute good-will. It needs the virtues of the warrior and no call to 
 its service is even more pressing now than ever was the call to 
 arms," President Richard C. Maclaurin. 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 185 
 
 author writes merely for the sake of writing. Each writes 
 from a conscious motive and for a particular moral end. So 
 writes this inspired author. His message came to him from 
 God. It came from Christ. It bore their authentication. It 
 was given to the churches. It was given for a purpose. They 
 who read it must not, could not, doubt its truth. The au- 
 thority of the message of this book thus rests in the fact that 
 it is grounded in the moral purpose of God. It is not some- 
 thing that can be questioned or debated. It is as if the 
 honor of God were at stake. "These sayings are faithful 
 and true." 
 
 For us to-day, the ultimate value of the social message 
 of the Book of Revelation lies in the fact that here is no 
 theory of social salvation, no scheme of social redemption, 
 no human plan of social readjustment or amelioration. The 
 world is glutted with these. Panaceas and cure-alls abound 
 on every hand. Every age and generation has its own methods 
 of reform. Behind all these, the worker for righteousness 
 has this inspired book. It tells him that behind all the move- 
 ments of history, and underlying all human efforts for a better 
 world-order, there is a God at work; there is the omnipotent 
 Christ traveling in the glory of his strength. Evil cannot 
 permanently withstand these divine forces that already have 
 decreed its overthrow. The victory of righteousness is in- 
 volved in the very nature of God. Christ is the guarantee. 
 Here is the unshakable foundation. In his darkest days in 
 darkest Africa, David Livingstone could write these words: 
 "He will keep his word. He will bring it to pass. I may 
 fall by the way, being unworthy to see the dawning I had 
 hoped to see. It will come through; it must come, and I 
 do not despair of the day one bit. Doubt is here inadmis- 
 sible, surely." It is the only sure foundation of the Social 
 Hope. "These sayings are faithful and true." 
 
 What are we to make of the author's repeated assertions 
 that Christ is to come quickly? The idea is repeated more 
 than once in this brief passage. Let the book remain open, 
 
186 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 instead of being sealed as in the case of the book of Daniel, 
 for the time is at hand. Let the unjust remain unjust. There 
 is no time for moral change. "Surely I come quickly." Did 
 the author expect the speedy advent of the visible Christ? 
 Did he look for the consummation of things in the near 
 future? Was the whole Apocalypse an imminent event? 
 
 A careful reader of the New Testament will hesitate to 
 answer that question dogmatically. It may well be asked 
 "Who can say?" We know that the expectation of the quick 
 coming of Christ runs all through the New Testament from 
 beginning to end. We know that it was the fervid hope of 
 many who lived at the age of our author, when the very 
 contrast between Caesar and Christ was such that nothing but 
 an immediate return of the Son of Man in power and great 
 glory would seem to answer the situation and assure the sal- 
 vation of the people of God. Our author may have shared in 
 that hope. Yet even if he did, it is to be noted that it is 
 the spiritual and not the material meaning of that Advent 
 which he impresses on his hearers. The sure coming of Christ 
 is not a substitute for struggle; rather it is an incitement to 
 renewed fidelity and endurance. The knowledge of his coming 
 is to provide them with the spiritual assurance which they 
 need in order to continue to be faithful unto death. That 
 Christ is coming is the message of Revelation as it was 
 of the Gospels. Be ye therefore ready, faithful, watching, 
 waiting, working, struggling. 
 
 In this sense the truth of the coming of Christ is a neces- 
 sary part of the equipment of Christ's servants to-day. It 
 is a mistake to banish the notion of the second coming as if 
 it were a remote and unpractical truth, lying in the sphere 
 of speculation, yet having no message for us to-day. The 
 Advent hope, on the contrary, is an indispensable part of 
 our moral equipment. Without it, it must be urged at the 
 end as at the beginning of this study, we are bereft of a 
 spiritual assurance which is precious and essential. 
 
 It is possible, however, that our author in voicing his ex- 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 187 
 
 pectation of the coming of Christ was not thinking of his 
 visible Advent, or imagining that the end of the world was 
 indeed at hand. It may be that what he was looking for was 
 an immediate manifestation of Christ in history, which should 
 show itself in judgment upon Rome, and the immediate de- 
 liverance of Christian believers from persecution and death. 
 This we have seen to be the theme of the book from begin- 
 ning to end. At no time has the prophet peered into the 
 future. Throughout, he has focused his eyes on the terrible 
 emergency of the present hour. No single passage in the 
 book taken by itself contains the idea of the bodily return 
 of Christ. The whole argument of it moves in the realm of 
 spiritual ideas. The whole point of it is that deliverance is 
 at hand; and that this deliverance is bound up with the per- 
 son of Christ. When, therefore, at the end the author says, 
 "I come quickly," it is as if he said, "Salvation is at hand; 
 the hour of victory through Christ is about to dawn." In 
 that sense the words were literally true, and in that sense 
 they were literally fulfilled. Christ came in judgment upon 
 Rome. Christ came and vindicated his cause. There will 
 never be an hour in history when the coming of Christ was 
 so evident in its meaning and in its results as that fateful 
 hour in the moral history of the world when into the hands 
 of Christ there passed the control of the moral destinies of 
 mankind. It did not come in the life-time of the prophet 
 or of those to whom he wrote. But who can read the con- 
 test between Christ and Caesar from the day of the birth of 
 Jesus to that of the triumph of Christianity without echoing 
 in wonderment at the suddenness of that transition, the words 
 "Surely I come quickly"? 
 
 When one surveys the history of the world since the day 
 when this book was written, what is more evident than the 
 quick coming of Christ in judgment upon the world, and in 
 vindication of his truth? How quickly that revelation has 
 come in our day! Men were eating and drinking, marrying 
 and playing, working and traveling in entire ignorance of 
 
188 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 what was "about to happen/' in the year of grace 1914, when 
 without warning there fell upon this world a terrible judg- 
 ment, a swift and awful reckoning such as it had never known. 
 In an hour, thrones crashed to the dust, and institutions that 
 seemed embedded in the very structure of society crumbled 
 into nothingness. The social message of this book tells us 
 that such swift comings of Christ in judgment are a part of 
 the moral order. Upon them the witnesses of Jesus may de- 
 pend. Such do not need to measure their hope by the slow 
 movements of time, the gradual progress of the age, the dis- 
 appointing ebb and flow of popular idealism. Over and a.bove 
 all this watching and guarding his cause there is the Divine 
 Author and Reviewer of events. At any moment He may 
 appear on the field of history when a thousand years shall 
 be in his sight as one day, and that shall be brought to pass 
 for which men may long have waited and yearned. This is 
 the social message of the reiterated faith in the sudden com- 
 ing of Christ. When the hour is darkest and hope is dim- 
 mest, and obstacles seem insuperable, and evil is triumphant, 
 one can echo the sublime words with which the book closes. 
 
 Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus. 
 
 Chapter 22: 6. The angel assured me that these promises 
 were genuine and trustworthy, and that they would soon 
 be fulfilled. 7. Behold (said Christ Himself), I come quickly. 
 Blessed the man who lays this prophecy to heart. 8. I my- 
 self, John, saw and heard these things. And again I felt 
 like worshipping the angel. 9. But again he restrained me, 
 saying, I am but a servant like yourself and your brothers 
 who lay to heart the sayings of this book. Worship God 
 alone. 10. And he told me not to seal the book for it must 
 be read at once. The time is near. 11. Every one must 
 not keep the character he has acquired: unjust, impure 
 and righteous alike will remain as they are, 12. for I now 
 come to reward each according to his deeds. 13. I am the 
 beginning and the end. 14, 15. Blessed are they that are 
 clean and pure (R. V.) and so have entrance to the blessed- 
 ness of heaven from which all the wicked and the impure 
 are excluded. 16. It is I, Jesus, who have sent this message 
 to my churches through mine own angel: I, who am the 
 promised Messiah, the Morning Star. 17. Both the Spirit 
 
THE BLESSED CONSUMMATION 189 
 
 and the church bid all who will to come to the blessedness 
 of eternal life. 18, 19. Let no one add to or take from the 
 words of this book lest its penalties be visited upon him, 
 and he be excluded from the blessings of heaven. 20. He 
 who bears this testimony (Christ the real author of this 
 revelation) says once more, Surely I come quickly. And 
 the yearning cry of his servants is this: Yea, come, Lord 
 Jesus. 21. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with 
 you all, Amen. 
 
 Notes v. 6 These sayings, i.e. the whole message of the 
 book, although the immediate reference is to the vision pre- 
 ceding. The God of the prophets, i.e. the spirit of prophecy 
 (See 19:10. cf. I Cor. 14:32). i.e. the divinely inspired 
 prophets. God controls their inspiration. Thus their utter- 
 ance is true and final. Angel here standing for every form 
 of mediation by which the message of the book was received. 
 v. 7 As if Christ Himself spoke in the angel. The Lord speaks 
 directly, (cf. Rev. 1:5.) The last words of the verse may 
 belong to the apocalyptist. Keep means lay hold on, guard, 
 lay to heart, v. 8 assumes that John was well known to them, 
 v. 9 (see 19:10). If either passage is an interpolation, it 
 must be the earlier one. It seems natural here. There may 
 be intended a protest against angel-worship (see Col. 2:18). 
 v. 10 See Dan. 8 :26, 12 :4, 9, where the book, supposedly writ- 
 ten long before the events described, is to be sealed in order 
 to preserve its contents. Just the opposite is the case here. 
 v. 11 (see Dan. 12 :10; Ezek. 3 :27). "There is a tone of irony 
 in the utterance" (Beckwith). v. 12 (see Isa. 40:10, 62:11; 
 I Cor. 3:8; Ps. 62:12). v. 13 Added to give solemn assur- 
 ance of what has just been said. This is the language used 
 of God in chapter 1, but applied here to Christ. This in- 
 terchange of attributes is not the least remarkable feature 
 of the book, if we remember that the author was a Jew, 
 writing within a generation of the death of Jesus, v. 14 
 The better reading is that of the R. V. (cf. I Cor. 6:11.) 
 v. 15 Dogs (See II Kings 8:13; Ps. 22:16, 20; Phil. 3:2.) v. 
 16 Jesus Used to emphasize his historic character. The name 
 is used fourteen times in all the book, and almost always 
 
190 SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EEVELATION 
 
 in connection with the work of witnessing. Churches The 
 seven churches are meant. Root means scion. (Isa. 53:2, 
 11:10; Ecclesiasticus 47:22.) Star (cf. Num. 24:17. See 
 2:28.) v. 17 Spirit, i.e. speaking- through the prophet; 
 heareth, all who hear the book read in the churches. These 
 will join in the prayer for the Advent of Christ. Then, 
 thinking of these hearers, the prophet changes his thought 
 abruptly and appeals to all who will to come and take what 
 Christ has to offer (cf. 13:9, 14:13). vv. 18, 19 (cf. Deut. 
 4:2, 12:32; Jer. 26:2). This message must be received by 
 the hearer without any effort to change its meaning or to evade 
 its consequences, v. 20 He who testifieth The whole con- 
 tents of the book is meant, v. 21 The book closes with the 
 familiar Pauline benediction. 
 
BIBLIOGEAPHY 
 
 Indispensable to a study of the Book of Revelation are: Ar- 
 ticles in Hastings' Bible Dictionary, and in the Encyclopedia 
 Biblica; The Old Testament Apocrypha; Introduction to the 
 Literature of the New Testament by James Moffatt (Scribner's, 
 1914) ; The Apocalypse of John by Isbon T. Beckwith (MacMillan, 
 1919); The Revelation of John, by Shirley J. Case (University 
 of Chicago Press, 1919) ; and The Messages of the Apocalyptical 
 Writers by Frank C. Porter (Scribner's, 1909). 
 
 Helpful books of reference are: Robert H. Charles' Apocrypha 
 and Pseudepigrapha (Oxford Press, 1913); William M. Ramsay's 
 St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (London, 1896) and 
 especially The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (Armstrong, 
 1905) ; The Revelation of St. John, the Divine, in the Expositor's 
 Greek Testament (New York, vol. V, pp. 279-494) ; The Book of 
 Revelation by John T. Dean (Edinburgh, 1915) ; and C. Anderson 
 Scott's The Book of Revelation (New Century Bible, New York, 
 1902). A helpful devotional study of the book is John T. Dean's 
 Visions and Revelations (Edinburgh, 1911). See also Frederic 
 Palmer, The Drama of the Apocalypse (MacMillan, 1903) and 
 Shirley J. Case, The Millennial Hope (University of Chicago Press, 
 1918). For fuller bibliographical notes see Porter pp. 359-363, 
 and Case, The Revelation of John, pp. 408, 409. 
 
Date Due 
 
BS2825.C155 
 
 The social message of the book of 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00034 0473