In the seven teaching segments of each major section of Revelation, as we have noted, John shows us in the first four features of life in this world in every age, and speaks of the future only when he comes to the last three. So it is here.
We are to hear him say (14:14), "I have shown you what is always happening behind the scenes, first in the world, and then in the Church. Now let me show you how it will all end."
There is no mistaking the fact that that is what he now has in view, for he uses language which echoes the Lord's own about the end of the age. He says (v. 14), "Then I looked, and lo, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown upon his head a sharp sickle in his hand."
This is the sort of language Jesus consistently used to speak of His return at the end of the age: "Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory ... He will send out His angels, and gather His elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the end of heaven." (Mark 13:26)
Recall Acts 1:9 also: "As they were looking on He was lifted up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight," and v. 11 "This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven."
Daniel too (7:13), had spoken in this way about the coming of the Son of Man: "In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power."
Clearly Christ is in view, when He brings to the earth its final judgment.
The Golden Crown echoes what Daniel had written about the authority, sovereignty and rule which were given to Him; that it is a golden crown means that His is a Pure and Regal Authority. One is reminded of Isa. 9:6, "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders ... Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever."
Now, as we noted above, we meet a second trio of angels. Note there are two who reap (Christ and Angel No. 2) and two who tell them what to reap (Angels 1 & 3).
1. Angel No. 1 comes out of the Temple
... and calls to Him Who sits upon the cloud to put in His sickle and reap.
The Temple is the abode of God, so the message He brings is from the Father.
If at first it seems strange that an angel should issue a command to Christ, remember what Jesus Himself said, "Of that day and hour no-one knows, not the angels of God, nor even the Son, but only the Father." (Mark 13:32) So the Lord depends on a signal from the Father that the hour has come, and it is the angel who gives that signal.
The sickle in His hand indicates that He is to "harvest the age" - so He had said in Matt.13:38: "The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They (the angels) will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth like the sun in their Heavenly Father's realm."
It is the will of God that judgment should finally overtake the world. It is long delayed, but it may not be for ever delayed. There must be an end to evil. God rightly - and righteously - wills the termination of evil. There is a 'time,' an 'hour' for it, which only God the Father may determine. John speaks of that hour here.
The phrase 'fully ripe' in v.15 refers to a concept like the one in Gen. 15:16, 'the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.' "In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full." God does not bring judgment on until a certain condition is fulfilled. He waits until 'the iniquity of the earth is full.' It means that a society, or a nation, or in this case, mankind as a whole, has so far yielded to evil that there remains no further possibility of repentance - when Belial has entire possession of the minds and hearts of men.
The phrase also means that "all Israel is ready to be saved." Rom. 11:25, "I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved."
The life of this world will reach a point at which there is no possibility that any more will repent, and so the last of men and women to be saved will have been gathered in.
It means that as the end draws near life will become grimly, unbearably evil.
Note that whilst the angels communicate God's orders, it is Christ Who carries them out: He Who sat upon the cloud it is who swings His sickle on the earth and it is reaped.
2. Angel No.2 also comes out of the Temple
The angels assist Christ in the reaping - they do not do it for Him or instead of Him, and this is precisely what Jesus Himself had said: Matt. 16:27, "For the Son of Man will come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done." That suggests rewards for the righteous as well as punishment for the unrighteous. For although in the Old Testament the harvest is always of the wicked, Jesus included a harvest of the righteous too: "He will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other." (Matt. 24:31) "Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: 'First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.'" (Matt. 13:30)
Since Angel No. 3 reaps the harvest of God's wrath, it seems reasonable to see Angel No. 2 as reaping the harvest of the righteous.
3. Angel No. 3 "came out from the altar"
To understand what John means by saying that the third angel came out from the altar as distinct from the temple we must go back to 8:1-5; there the angel with the censer who offered the prayers of the saints on the altar before God was the same who "threw fire on the earth."
When the seventh Seal was broken there followed a silence in heaven - a silence in which the prayers of the saints were heard, ascending like incense before the Throne of God. The angel then took that mingled incense and threw it on the earth - with the result that a series of disasters was thrown down to the earth. John was making the surprising assertion that as Christians pray for the triumph of the Kingdom of God - really pray - things at first get worse, not better. Their prayer is, "Thy Kingdom come." What sort of Kingdom will it be? A Kingdom of righteousness and truth. But if righteousness and truth are to prevail then unrighteousness must be overthrown and the lie be undone. Judgment must come.
The prayer of the Church "casts fire on the earth." John has no uncertainty about that at all. Prayer - the true prayer of the righteous - is dynamite. It is simply not true that the only effect of prayer when it is in the Spirit is healing, sweetness and light. It works like the leaven of which Jesus spoke in one of His parables, working up an absolute ferment in society. Both God's righteousness and the prayers of the saints cry out for justice finally to be done.
Finally, it is God's will that the peace of the earth be shattered, because it is a false peace, founded on a lie.
John does not spare us now the solemn truth. His picture of the judgment that must fall is gruesome, blood flowing as high as a horse's bridle through the length and breadth of the land.
The gory detail is typical Jewish hyperbole. It is the kind of exaggeration even our Lord shared with His people when He spoke of camels being threaded through a needle's eye. One of the intertestamental books of Jewish Apocalyptic, I Enoch, speaks of the last days as a time when "the streams flow with blood, and a horse shall walk up to the breast in the blood of sinners, and chariots shall be submerged in it to their full height." Nearer to John's time - much nearer - when the Jews recalled the bloodbath in which Jerusalem was destroyed by the Emperor Hadrian's Roman troops, they said that they "murdered people continually, till a horse sank to its nostrils in blood." "The blood," they said, "poured into the sea to an extent of four miles" - forty miles away! (G. Beasley-Murray, "Revelation", New Century, p. 230) As documentary it is lamentable, a clear exaggeration - and so in all probability is John's use of the same sort of imagery here; he is conveying an idea by his language, not a literal detail. But there is no escaping his purpose in resorting to such language - the destruction and the suffering will be awful. 1600 stadia was the length of the Holy Land North to South (from Dan to Beersheba). No part of the land will escape the judgment - it will be universal.
Even more to the point is John's use of numbers again: 1600 is the square of forty. To square a number, as we have seen, is to intensify what it stands for, and among the Jewish people forty was the traditional number for punishment and judgment. The flood was brought on by forty days and nights of rain; the punishment for their lack of faith the Hebrew people had to suffer with Moses was forty years in the wilderness; the standard punishment for many criminal offences was forty stripes (save one - lest viciousness sully the impartial administration of justice).
John means that the whole earth is to be judged. Earlier, in ch. 8, where he spoke of the dimension of judgment as it applies to life in every age, he spoke of only a third of the earth being subjected to judgments. Not now. John is telling us that the age will come to a climax in an absolute cataclysm of destruction.
The idea that the saints will all be raptured before this time of tribulation receives no mention here; in a passage where final judgment is seen to overtake the world, no hint is given of it. I feel obliged to say that it may turn out to be a mischievous notion, because it does nothing to prepare Christians for the intensifying ordeal that will herald the end of the age. I believe it to be true that as the end draws near it will become harder and harder to be a Christian, and to promulgate illusions about the tribulations they will have to face would be a dereliction of duty. I am content to rest the verdict with events, not arguments.*
John the Baptist it was who first spoke of the double harvest: "His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." (Luke 3:17) Wheat and chaff.
There is a long interval between sowing and reaping. During that interval wheat and tares grow together as Jesus told us. Any attempt to pull up the tares prematurely will result also in the destruction of wheat, and that, said Jesus, is a thing God will not permit. No grain of wheat, not even the smallest, will be lost when God gathers in those who are His own. Nothing will have been for nothing! All will be finally harvested, both the least good that we have sown, as well as the least evil. As Browning expressed it in his poem "Abt Vogler",
There shall never be one lost good. What was shall live as before;
What was good shall be good, indeed, so much good more!
On earth a broken arc, in heaven a perfect round.
"A recurring phrase of John in his letters to the churches is 'he that overcometh.' That is not a reference to those who win the race, but to those who finish it. To 'overcome' does not mean to beat one's fellow runners, but to defeat the obstacles of the race itself. To arrive at the finish, that is the victory.
It is this victory which is assured. It is this victory that God will win.
That is the harvest. And it happens because the Lord of the Harvest is Himself the seed that was sown. As He said to the disciples, "The grain of wheat must first fall into the ground and die; but if it die, it bears much fruit." *
"He shall see the fruit of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied." He shall look on us and shall be satisfied, even as we shall be satisfied to behold Him.
* I do not believe it is true that as the Second Coming draws near we Christians will have nothing to fear because the Lord will whisk us all away into the sky before the wrath of God is unleashed on the earth. I am persuaded that we shall suffer along with the rest of the world until the final unimaginable deed of God brings history as we know it to a cataclysmic end. I do not enjoy feeling an obligation to say this (I do not imagine John did either), and I am well aware of taunts about "the blessed hope of the Great Tribulation."
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