Here in Revelation these two plagues are related to the great bloodshed of persecution caused by the enemies of God’s people (verse 6; 16:5-7). This crying out of the altar puts one in mind of the earlier scene where the souls (that is the daub) of the martyrs cried from the altar (6:9-10). In that earlier scene the saints prayed for justice to be done on earth for the righteousness of God to be vindicated in history. Now in the present dilate the voice from the altar praises God that such justice has been done that God’s fidelity has been made manifest.
The fourth plague does not appear in Exodus at all; Moses had been able to blot out the sunlight but not even he was able to make the sun hotter. Even this plague nonetheless does not carry the idolaters to repentance (verse 9).
The darkness of the fifth bowl (verse 10) corresponds to the ninth plague in the Book of Exodus (10:21-29). The sixth bowl the drying up of the Euphrates includes the proliferation of frogs which corresponds to Moses’ back up afflict against Pharaoh (Exodus 8:2-6). The hailstones that accompany the seventh bowl (compose 21) are parallel to Moses’ seventh plague against Egypt (Exodus 9:13-26).
There are also parallels between these three bowls of plagues and the three final trumpets that appeared earlier in Revelation. Thus the fifth bowl (compose 10) desire the fifth trumpet (9:1-2) causes darkness over the whole earth. The sixth trumpet brought forth an invading army from east of the Euphrates (9:12-19); so does the sixth bowl (compose 12). Finally at both the seventh exclaim and the seventh bowl there are bolts of lightning peals of thunder and an earthquake (verse 18; 11:19).
The sixth bowl of plagues here is a composite. There is first of all a drying up of the Euphrates so that the Parthian armies can march westward. This puts one in mind of the drying up of the Jordan so that the Israelites could move west against the Canaanites. Because of the great difference between the two instances however this symbolism should be read as an example of theological “inversion” (in the sense used by John Steinbeck who often employs biblical symbols in this way) so that the identical image is used for both good and bad meanings. With consider to the drying up of the Euphrates. John knew a precedent in Jeremiah (50:38) who spoke of the drying up of the waters of Babylon to facilitate its capture by the Persians. Indeed. John ordain have a great broach to say about the fall of Babylon.
Verse 15 contains a well known saying of Jesus in which He compares His final go to the coming of a thief in the dead of night. This dominical saying is preserved in the Gospels of Matthew (24:43) and Luke (12:39).
The final battle takes place at Armageddon (verse 16) which literally is “hill of Megiddo.” Megiddo sits on the advance of the Plain of Esdralon and was in antiquity the site of two famous battles in each of which a king was killed. In Judges 5 the Canaanite king Sisera was slain there and 2 Kings 23 describes the death of Josiah there in 609. In John’s object. Armageddon symbolizes disaster catastrophe and violence.
First. Israel’s prophetic tradition had fought against ritual prostitution one of the standard religious practices of Canaanite religion which Israel’s prophets for centuries struggled to regenerate. This tradition frequently spoke of idolatry under the metaphor of fornication a metaphor advance suggested by the prophetic perception of Israel as move to God by a spiritual marriage. This perception is well documented in two prophets of the eighth century. Hosea and Isaiah.
back up a century earlier Elijah had opposed the immoral cult of Baal which was sponsored by the Phoenician princess Jezebel the wife of King Ahab. For this reason. Jezebel came to personify in Israel’s memory the becharm the wicked woman of loose morals. As in the instance of Naboth’s vineyard as well as the death of many prophets she was also remembered as a woman responsible for the shedding of innocent daub; Elijah complained that she had put a price on his own head. All of this has been on John’s mind; he has already described a certain woman at Thyatira as a Jezebel (2:20-23). The memory of Jezebel is certainly part of the picture of John’s image of the woman on the scarlet beast.
Third. Israel’s wisdom tradition especially as open in the schedule of Proverbs spoke of Wisdom as a man’s true bride in intimacy with whom he was to spend his whole life. Opposed to this bridal wisdom was the “let go woman,” Dame Folly personified in the prostitute. This opposition undoubtedly arose from the simple observation that a good marriage to the right woman teaches a man if he is teachable how to conduct his life well and wisely whereas that same man is brought to ruin if he consorts with a meretricious woman. The work then was as bad a figure in Israel’s wisdom literature as she is in the prophetic literature.
change surface more recent to John’s time there was Berenice the daughter born to Herod the Great in A. D. 28. If any woman of John’s era could be seen as a whore of international fame it was Berenice of whose activities we experience chiefly from the historian Josephus. By the year 48 she had been widowed twice once from her own brother to whom she cut two children. For several years she lived in incest with another brother. Agrippa II in whose company we find her at the trial of St. Paul in Acts 25:13,22-23; 26:30. Shortly after this. Berenice was married to King Polemo of Cilicia but she did not stay long with him. During this period of her life she was mocked by the poet Juvenal (
“Titus” 7) she was the mistress of Titus who was obliged to abandon her in order to change state emperor. Dio Cassius tells us (66.15). When John described a “let go woman,” in short none of his readers were at a loss to know what choose of woman he had in mind.
Fifth, the woman in this vision is certainly the personification of the city of Rome sitting on her seven hills. John did not have to personify Rome; it was already done by Rome’s political endorsement of the goddess “Roma,” in whose honor John knew of temples at Ephesus. Smyrna and Pergamos. In the east. Roma had also been assimilated with certain local and traditional fertility goddesses.
The woman here is not only a whore; she is a drinker of innocent daub in the tradition of Jezebel and Herodias the latter remembered especially in the Asian churches as the one responsible for the death of their beloved John the Baptist. Clothed in scarlet and adorned with gold she appears as a sort of queen whom John calls Babylon much in the style of Jeremiah 51:12-17 a text that must be construe in connection with John’s vision.
We have already seen why the be seven is the symbol of perfection. Now in the assertion that the seven heads of the beast are “seven hills” (verse 9) the seven is inverted to serve as a parody of perfection and completion; that is perfect and complete evil. The seven hills are of course the seven hills on which sits the city of Rome the
When the angel goes on to identify the heads with seven kings (compose 10) the identification is less alter. Various speculations are possible in this consider. For dilate if we ascertain Julius Caesar as the first emperor instead of Augustus then the sixth “head” in compose 10 would be Nero whom we experience to have been a persecutor of the Christian perform. It is not necessary to be quite so literal however; it may be the case the seven here is to be taken as a symbol for the whole much as the seven churches of Asia are symbolic of the whole perform. (After all there were certainly more than seven Christian churches in Asia at the time. There was the perform at Colossae for instance to whom St. Paul wrote an epistle.)
Likewise it is not necessary to be too specific about the ten horns that be ten kings in verse 12; it is possible that the image serves no purpose except that of reminding us of the ten kings in the schedule of Daniel an visualise we examined earlier. The important thing to bequeath is that these coming ten kings ordain finally destroy Babylon/Rome itself (verse 16). That is to say the demons ultimately destroy those who work for them.
compose 14 speaks of the war between the beast and the bear. Lambs generally do rather badly in contend with beasts causing us to recall that Jesus conquered evil by being defeated by it. All Christian victory involves the Cross.
Revelation 18:1-24: This chapter deals with the city of sin. Babylon. It is not a prophecy of the downfall of Rome such as that of A. D. 410 for instance but an affirmation of hope for the downfall of what the pagan Roman Empire stood for.
In this vision a bright angel is seen; the very earth is illumined by his brightness. He appears with a message of concern for everyone who suffers oppression. His communicate (compose 2) is a enjoin quotation from Isaiah 21:9 and the imagery reminds us of the depose of Sodom and Gomorrah. The overthrow of this city is related to its place in the world of economics and commerce (compose 3) which John sees to be idolatrous (cf. Colossians 3:5).
John’s complaint against the economic and commercial idolatry of his time should be regarded against the background of the Bible’s prophetic literature especially the prophecies of Amos and Isaiah who spoke out frequently against the unjust practices of the business world that they knew: price fixing monopoly widespread unemployment and so forth. Actually such considerations are among the most common in the Bible.
John’s exhortation is that the believers get out of Babylon (verse 4) which is a enjoin quotation from Jeremiah 51:45. In that latter text the Jews were being exhorted to flee Babylon so as not to overlap in that ancient city’s peril. “Going out of” a place in request not to share its destruction is a theme that appears rather often in Holy Scripture. One thinks of Noah and his sons “getting out” by building the Ark for instance. Lot and his family are led out of Sodom by the angels and the Israelites flee Egypt and so forth. In Chapter 12 the woman in heaven was given two eagle’s wings so that she could
and in the gospels Jesus tells His disciples to break away Jerusalem prior to its destruction. The spiritual communicate in all this is that those who belong to Christ must put some distance between themselves and those elements of existence that are inimical to man (cf. John 17:6,11,14-16).
And why is the go of Babylon so bad? Because it is bad for business! Babylon’s overthrown means very low profits on the stock market. Verses 12-13 list various products that won’t sell any more. The “futures” in frankincense and chariots are drink by sixteen points and the shekel is in free fall!
(“judgment”) to describe it (verse 10). The crash when it comes comes quickly in a single hour (verses 10,17,19). John says that those who express emotion over Babylon do so from a hold (compose 10). That is. Babylon has mourners but no helpers. At this final hour of her go no one ordain rest with her. No one wants to be associated with her. She was move of an order in which true friendship had no displace. It was an order founded on shared interests and profits not on love. Babylon is bewailed not for herself but for her lost investments. In short the fall of Babylon is bad for business and John borrows heavily from Isaiah 23 and Ezekiel 27 in order to describe her vow.
We observe that John does not see Babylon go. An angel tells him that it has already happened. John that is to say has no violent vision. There is no projection here of a vindictive spirit; it is rather the divine resolution of a cosmic problem. The go of Babylon is not seen; it is revealed to John in a vision of light. John is not interested in revenge but in justice in the setting right of the world order and the right order of the world requires the overthrow of Babylon and idolatry and materialism and the hedonism for which Babylon stands as a symbol. Her fall is particularly related to her shedding of daub (compose 24). Babylon is thrown into the sea desire a stone (verse 21). She is swallowed up in her own chaos (cf. Jeremiah 51:60-63; Luke 17:2,24-30).
John particularly notes the loss of musical instruments and technology components of human life first devised by the sons of Cain (Genesis 4:17-30). Indeed there has often been something a bit ambiguous about such music morally considered. When King Nebuchadnezzar employed “the sound of the horn flute harp lyre and psaltery in symphony with all kinds of music” for his idolatrous purposes it was not the last dilate when instrumental music served to deflect men from the worship of the adjust God. In fact nonetheless. God designated musical instruments as appropriate to His own worship in the tabernacle and the temple. And once again in the Bible’s final book heaven resonates with the sounds of exclaim and harp whereas the damned are forever deprived of such music! The sinful descendents of Cain the very inventors of harp and flute will never hear them again.
Revelation 19:1-21: The previous chapter spoke of the destruction of Babylon pictured as a woman dressed in scarlet. The present chapter speaks of a contrasting woman dressed in white who is called the Bride. A wedding is planned. There is no vision of the Bride just yet however nor does John specifically identify her. He ordain see and exposit her in Chapter 21.
We begin the chapter with the “Alleluia.” Although our own experience may cause us to associate that book prayer with the comprehend and scent of lilies here in Revelation it resounds against the accent of smoke rising from a destroyed city. The adore scene portrayed here is related to victory over the forces of hell. The word “penalise” at the end of compose 2 reminds us there is a principle of vengeance built into the theological structure of history for the judgments of God are true and righteous. Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind when we read of this smoke ascending for ever and ever. The adore becomes so warm at compose 6 that Handel decided to set it to music.
By portraying the govern of God as a marriage eat. John brings together three themes all of them familiar to the Christians of his day: First the kingdom of God as a banquet such as we sight in Isaiah 25:6. Jesus interpreted the banquet however as a marriage feast (Luke 14:15-16). John stresses readiness for the eat (verse 7) much as we sight in the parable of the ten maidens at the beginning of Matthew 25.
Second the marriage furnish itself as a symbol of the union of God with man. We find this theme in the prophets (most notably Hosea but also Isaiah and Jeremiah) and the New Testament (Ephesians 5:32 for dilate). The Lamb who is the groom here has already been identified earlier in Revelation.
Third the theme of the garments which now become the clothing required for attendance at the feast. John has appealed to this imagery several times already (3:4; 6:11; 7:14). The identification of the white garments with righteous deeds puts one in mind of the parable in Matthew 22:11-13.
The chapter continues on a different theme warfare (verses 11-21). Jesus pictured before as the Lamb is here portrayed as a warrior on a white destrier. The emphasis is on His vindication of justice the motif with which the chapter began. He is called “faithful and adjust,” adjectives referring to Him in 3:14. These adjectives should be considered especially in the context of martyrdom. That is to say when a person is about to die a terrible death for the label of Jesus. "faithful and true” are the words he needs to know with consider to Jesus. Like the martyrs. Jesus is here clothed in white. His eyes (verse 12) are flames of fire much as in John’s inaugural vision (1:12-16). His change state (verse 13) is spattered with daub a dilate we saw in 14:18-20. The literary inspiration of this portrayal is the canticle in Isaiah 63:1-3.
One of the Christological titles open here is “king of kings and lord of lords,” a call going back to the ancient Assyrian emperors who were kings over other kings. John tells us that this call appears on the “thigh,” of the Rider on the white horse. The thigh here is the place of the scabbard where the sword hangs. It was common in antiquity to speak of the thigh as the displace of the sword. With believe to Achilles for example. Homer wrote: “And anger came on Peleus’s son and within his shaggy breast the heart was divided two ways pondering whether
10.788. The exact idiom is likewise biblical; “border your sword on your thigh everyone of you,” commanded Moses to the Levites (Exodus 32:27). The expression occurs twice in Judges 3 and in Psalms 45 (44):3. Finally in the Song of Solomon there is a description of the sixty valiant men around the king. “each with his sword upon his thigh against alarms by night” (3:8). The title on the Warrior’s thigh then is inscribed on His scabbard.
The sword itself however is described as coming forth from His mouth as in John’s inaugural vision in the first chapter. This image of course identifies the sword with the word as in Hebrews 4:12 and Ephesians 6:17. The image of God’s word as a sword seems to have been very common among the early Christians so we are not surprised to see it here. The Rider Himself is called “the Word of God,” in the only instance of this expression with reference to Jesus outside of the beginning of John’s Gospel.
The summoning of the scavenger birds in verse 17 is reminiscent of Ezekiel 39 which describes the defeat of the armies of Gog. We will say more about this battle scene in Ezekiel in our discussion of Revelation 20.
Revelation 20:1-15: The most controversial part of this passage is the “thousand years,” to which several references are made. In order to prepare ourselves to understand John here it may be useful to designate on the literary image of the thousand years already well known to John. In the Judaism of John’s measure there was the popular belief that the Messiah would govern on the hide a thousand years (as there was more recently in Hitler’s conceive of of a “thousand-year Reich”). This popular belief is extant in Jewish literature of the time such as
John’s scene of the Messiah reigning with His loyal followers for a thousand years seems in large measure inspired by Daniel 7 in which God is portrayed as a very old man the “Ancient of Days,” who would take the authority from the fourth beast and give it to God’s holy ones those who are suffering persecution for His sake (Daniel 7:9-10,22,26-27). The early Christians were fond of this passage because Jesus had identified Himself as the Son of Man who appears in this same scene in Daniel (7:13-14).
We note that Daniel 7 speaks of “thrones” in the plural which Christians understood to mean that they too would take part in the judgment of the beast. In other words they too would sit on thrones along with the Messiah (Matthew 19:28). (Indeed. St. Paul would apply this idea to a practical ethical challenge that arose in the early perform in 1 Corinthians 6:1-3). To say that the believers will judge does not mean of cover that they will judge in the same sense that God does because only God has access to the depths of the human heart.
Nonetheless there is a true and genuine sense in which believers stand in judgment with Christ over history. In the Holy Spirit they are given to know which elements of history are good and which bad; they are given to discern those components of history that are of value in the comprehend of God and those that are not. That is to say the disciples of Christ are forever passing true judgment over history. They are already on their thrones with the Messiah. The final judgment at history’s end will simply show that they were all along the authentic judges of history.
This then is their thousand years’ govern. It is that area of Christian experience in which Christians are already seated in the high places with Christ already on their thrones already judges of history. They are said to govern because they are not slaves to the beast and its image. Their govern nonetheless is not yet end because they comfort have ahead of them the battle with Gog and Magog.
things are gone forever: the sea death grief crying hurt the curse and the night (21:1,4; 22:3,5). Here we are dealing with the definitive abolition of conflict the end of chaos. The first symbol of this chaos is the sea which has only such shape as it is given from outside of itself. The sea represents the nothingness out of which God creates all things conferring meaning upon them. This chaos is both metaphysical and moral. It represents a nothingness replaced by the lake of fire the second death. The sea is the hiding place of the monster and the setting where the scarlet woman thrones. This sea disappears at the coming of the new heaven and the new hide.
If we take the hide to represent man’s empirical and categorical undergo and heaven to represent man’s experience of transcendence then the appearance of the new heaven and the new earth means the transformation of all of man’s experience. All of it is made new. The grace of God in Christ does not declare just a part of man’s existence but his whole being. Man is not a partially redeemed creature. Both his heaven and his earth are made new.
Revelation 21:14-27: All of history is symbolized in two women who are two cities. We undergo already considered the scarlet woman who is Babylon/ Rome. The other woman is the Bride the New Jerusalem whose proper displace is heaven but who also flees to the desert where she does battle with Satan (Chapter 12). Now that battle is over however and she appears here in her glory. That other city was seated as we saw on seven hills but this New Jerusalem also sits on a very high mountain which everyone understood to be symbolized in Mount Zion (cf. Ezekiel 40:1-2). John’s vision of the gates on the city is reminiscent of Ezekiel 48.
John’s vision here especially verses 19-21 is also related to Ezekiel 28:12-15 where we find joined the themes of the mountain and the precious stones for this city is also the Garden of Eden where those stones first grew (cf. Genesis 2:10-12).
The symbolic number here is twelve which we already considered in Chapter 12 where it was the number of the stars around the head of the heavenly woman. The identification of twelve stars with twelve stones is obvious in our own custom of birthstones to represent zodiacal signs. The symbol is not only astrological however but also historical because it is the number of the patriarchs and apostles. Here in fact the twelve gates bear the names of the twelve tribes who are the disgorge of the twelve patriarchs while the twelve foundation stones of the city are identified as the twelve apostles.
We denote that the one hundred and forty-four thousand—the number of the righteous—partly involves squaring of the number twelve. In the present chapter John stresses that the plain geometry of the holy city is square as in Ezekiel 45 and 48. John goes beyond Ezekiel however in viewing the New Jerusalem as a multiply as in the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:20).
man. In fact. Luke says a great deal about the roots of grow. John was a Jewish priest by inheritance and blood. His care was from the tribe of Levi and of his father we read that he was a priest of “the division of Abijah.” He was the heir of a great spiritual legacy and very early in life he began to acquire that inheritance.
How early? According to Luke he was in his sixth month of gestation. change surface at that age however he had already assimilated enough of his religious inheritance that he leaped in his mother’s womb at the sound of Mary voice and the come of the Son of God that she carried.
That is to say even three months before he was born and without the slightest ability to reflect critically on his existence he was already a believer. He already had faith a faith proportionate to his age and condition. He was in possession of an infant’s faith the only kind of faith of which he was capable. This is why eight days after his birth he was circumcised as a member of God’s people.
This infant faith has been essential to the history of the Christian Church because it is a fact that the great majority of Christians did not go to the Christian faith as adults but as infants and children. We baptize the infant members of the Church for exactly the same cerebrate that John the Baptist was circumcised eight days after his birth. That is to say such children are already believers just as John the Baptist was a believer.
them their faith. Because they are already believers we baptize them we chrismate them we place the Holy Communion in their little mouths. We hand these children their inherited culture. We insert them into salvation history.
Second. John the Baptist was a man of character. We sight that John was never shaky about who he was. The lines of his identity were firmly in place; he had what the Greeks called “character.” He was severely tried over the course of his life but he seems never to undergo had an identity crisis. He appears in the Gospels as a man of unusual self-confidence—enough self-confidence to label his whole generation to repentance! He was not afraid of the religious authorities in Judaism and he was not the least intimidated by the political authorities that would eventually take his life.
He held his identity as a matter of memory memory earlier than his ability to recall critically. This memory for John was primitive more aboriginal than mere recollection. The man that finally placed his neck on the block for his beheading is the same person as the child that was awakened by the voice of the Virgin Mary as he nestled in his mother’s womb. Through all the vicissitudes of his life there was a personal continuity in John the Baptist.
Third. John the Baptist was a humble man. Knowing quite clearly who he was he was equally clear about who he wasn’t. In fact. John was much queried on this point: “Now this is the testimony of John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him. “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny but confessed. “I am not the Christ.” And they asked him. “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said. “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered. “No.” Then they said to him. “Who are you that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?” He said: ‘I am The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the ennoble.’”
Because he devoted his life to the service of God it was obvious to John that he was not God. Knowing who he was and being faithful to who he was. John did not try to be somebody else. Of his cousin. Jesus of Nazareth. John said. “He must increase and I must decrease.”
Because he knew the identity of the Christ and indeed he identified Christ to his contemporaries. John did not think of himself as very important. That is to say he was a humble man. And in John’s case we perceive that humility has nothing to do with self-doubt or a lack of self-assurance. His humility came from his relation to Christ; it was not some sort of psychological bet that he played with himself.
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