Sunday Morning at the Christadelphian Ecclesia, No. 309
“Exhort one another.”—Paul.
p. 324ONCE more we meet round the emblems of Christ’s death in obedience to his own command: “Do this in remembrance of me.” We are enabled by the truth to see the reasonableness, and beauty and suggestiveness of it in many ways. Even if we could not see this we should obey. Under the law of Moses it was a frequent form of speech, “Ye shall do” thus and so: “I am the Lord.” It was enough that God commanded. Israel’s wisdom and righteousness was to obey, though they might not see the reason of the command. Moses gave the reason for obedience similarly. “This is the thing which the Lord hath commanded,” he often said of God’s appointments, and therefore it was to be done. But in Christ, it is not only a matter of command, the reason of things appears. It is not merely the unquestioning obedience of a servant that is required, but the hearty and intelligent and admiring compliance of deeply indebted friends. “Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (Jno. xv. 14). The reading for the day (Isa. l. and Rev. x., xi.), in the latter portion harmonises with this reflection, for the “Revelation of Jesus Christ” is a special unveiling of the future by the spirit of God for the sake of “his servants,” who are at the same time his “friends.” The word of God is always powerful to build us up in our gathering round the bread and wine of his appointment; and certainly the portions before us are not the least strong in that direction.
Before looking at Revelation take a backward glance at the word of Isaiah given some seven hundred years before Christ. The spirit of Christ was in the prophet, and gave disobedient Israel through him the vision of one whom the Lord God would equip and “help,” and who would not be disobedient, but would, for God’s sake, suffer shame and reproach, and at last triumph gloriously, and abide for ever; while all his enemies should pass away like a moth-eaten garment. There is no mistaking the figure there before us: “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.” The New Testament record shows us Christ in just this position of unspeakable humiliation. What sustained him? The confidence revealed in the prophetic words: “For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded; therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”
The second reading is retrospective concerning these things: that is, Christ looks back in Revelation upon the conflict and the victory. “I have overcome.” “I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, Amen, and have the keys of hell and of death.” Look forward from Isaiah’s days a less period than has elapsed from the days of William the Conqueror until now, and the prophecy of Isaiah has been triumphantly fulfilled in Christ crucified, raised, and glorified. The fulfilment of all the rest is just as certain. The concluding exhortation of Isa. l. is very applicable to us in our low estate and despised position for the truth’s sake. “Who is there among you that feareth the Lord, and obeyeth the voice of His servant, that walketh in darkness and hath no light, let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God. Behold all ye that kindle a fire; that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand. Ye shall lie down in sorrow.” We fear God and strive to obey Christ, and we are in darkness; we are exhorted to trust in God, which the Word of God enables us to do. Misleading human beacon fires from many points shed their baleful glamour across the dark waters. We have nothing to do with any of them. They are the work of mere wreckers p. 325and death hunters. There is nothing from God for corrupters of His way, and speculators who reject Him and the Sun of Righteousness but a sorrowful grave. Christ is our light and life. He proclaimed himself the light of the world and “all that ever came before” (in rivalry), to be mere “thieves and robbers” and pretenders. The facts of the situation all favour this extraordinary claim.
The Revelation, from which we read to day (chaps. x. xi.), is witness to the truth of it. It comes down from the first century as “the Revelation of Jesus Christ.” It is deeply rooted in the prophets and Old Testament Scriptures generally in its symbolism, and aim and intention. It has been the subject of fulfilment in the realised anticipations of the study of centuries ago, as in the case of the drying up of the political Euphrates, which 200 years ago was expected from Rev. xvi. It is not understood by Christendom, in which a man is regarded almost as mad if he professes (and proves) understanding. This is in harmony with its prophecy which represents Christendom as intoxicated with Romish doctrine Nevertheless it is most intelligible to a mind enlightened in the truth. And in these latter days it has been caused to speak. When the prophet said: “At the end the vision shall speak and not lie”; it involved an understanding of this book on the part of God’s servants. We have the happiness to belong to that class. Through the labours of a man whom God used we have an exposition of Revelation which cannot be set aside with a due regard for the Bible and history.
We are enabled to see in the Revelation the purpose of God revealed in the Law and the prophets drawing towards its realization in the last days. The world for Christ: all things for the sake of God’s elect. It is what is so strikingly before us in the opening chapters. The Son of Man holds and controls, not only the ecclesias, but also all the world with reference to the coming Kingdom of God. At various stages of the revelation we see this great end before us. Thus, after the opening of the sixth seal, which results in the subversion by Christianity of the Pagan Roman World, we see the 144,000 who had been sealed in their foreheads standing with the Lamb in victory. Again, after the sixth trumpet, which results in the overthrow of the Eastern Roman Empire by the Euphratean Power of the still further East, we see the Rainbowed Angel with his roaring thunders upon earth and sea. And after the sixth vial, and the judgments of Babylon belonging to the seventh, we see the marriage of the Lamb, in which we hope to have part. The crises controlled by Christ are all illustrative in some way of the final perfection when the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom and possess it for ever.
We turn our attention to the “mighty angel” (Ch. x.) that John saw “come down from heaven.” He is the symbol of a community to which we hope to have the honour finally to belong. We remember the words of Jesus to the Sadducees, that the children of the resurrection shall be “equal to the angels.” But in the Book of Revelation the term “angel” is symbolic of a plurality of saints as seen in Ch. ii. 8-10, and it is so here. There are many members in the “one perfect man” Christ Jesus; he himself personally being the head of the body This will be the relation of things when the perfect state is reached, and is so expressed, whether by the figure of the rainbowed angel, or of the new Jerusalem measured by the golden reed of an angel “according to the measure of a man” (Ch. xxi. 15). The cloud-clothing of the angel reminds us of Christ: “Behold he cometh with clouds.” We shall be “caught away in clouds to meet the Lord.” “The Lord rideth upon a swift cloud and shall come into Egypt” (Is. xix.). “Behold a white cloud upon which sat One like the Son of Man” (Ch. xiv. 14). Multitudes of saints surrounding Christ in the day of glory when exalted to equality with the angels is the substance figured; the substance we hope for a share in as we gather round the bread and wine.
A rainbow was on the angel’s head. “The token of the covenant between God and the earth” Thus was the bow described to Noah in the “rest” that came after the deluge that destroyed all the corrupters of God’s way from the earth. It is Christ who likens his days to the time of Noah. He is the “Rest” for the world Both in Ezekiel and John, the visions of God that introduce the throne of His kingdom contain the rainbow as the token of the p. 326covenant. Other rest there is none for the world than God has provided in Christ. “I will give you rest,” he says; and in the day of the manifestation of the sons of God the world will find that he is as good as his word. The angel’s face was like the sun—blindingly glorious. That was how Christ appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus; how Moses, in less degree, appeared on Mount Sinai; how Christ says his people shall at last appear: “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.” It is no dream; the past is the earnest of the future. “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”: that is, if we “are Christ’s,” at his coming. “His feet like pillars of fire.” This reminds us of the opening vision which says the same things of the similitude of Christ. And we also call to mind Paul’s words: “The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The little open scroll in the angel’s hand reminds us of the seven-sealed scroll that the Lamb alone was found worthy to open. Just as God communicated to Christ the programme of human history for twenty centuries and more for his control and development, so Christ will communicate to the saints the divine programme for the subjugating of the world to God by judgment. They will “execute the judgments written” in all the earth, for the angel placed his fiery feet upon earth and sea. No doubt there is a precise geographical placing of the body of Christ in the earth in the day of his coming, as Dr. Thomas beautifully points out, tracing the advance of the Lord’s hosts from the south, after the pattern of the days of old. But, generally speaking, it is evident that the figure before us imports universal judgment upon the power of land and sea, upon the two great camps, as it were, into which we see the world dividing under the leadership of Russia and Britain, the earth-power and the sea-power respectively The lion-roaring of the angel reminds us that Christ is the “Lion of the tribe of Judah,” and that “the Lord shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem” (Joel iii. 16). Even Balaam saw that in the latter day there would be the shout of a King in Israel, and that he would “rise up as a great lion,” and not lie down till he had eaten the prey and drunk the blood of the slain” (Num. xxiii. 24)
The roaring was accompanied by the voice of “seven thunders.” John himself was “a son of thunder.” With his brother James he shared the name bestowed by Jesus, of Boanerges, sons of thunder. He was much more a man of thunder than popular religion remembers. When the Samaritans refused to receive Christ, James and John were for calling down fire from heaven to avenge the insult. But their royal master said, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.” So Boanerges stood rebuked, and learned of him, in the spirit of patient suffering, to hold forth the word of the kingdom for the salvation of men’s lives. But there is a time for the thunder; just as there was a time and place for the fire from heaven in the days of Elias of which they spoke. John suffered unto death and qualified for the honour of executing the judgments written. It is not the purpose of God that Christ’s people shall for ever be prevailed against. They restrain themselves for a while that power may be given to them by-and-bye.
John was forbidden to write what the thunder-voices uttered. It is an intimation that the details of the judgments to come are reserved in the mind of God. They are state secrets, as it were, that are not to be divulged before the time. The knowledge is not necessary for the saints during the days of their probation, and so it died with John, as far as they were concerned, until the day when he shall be upon the scene again, when there will be a very definite and glorious work before them, a work for which the trials and chastenings of the present will at last be recognised to have been the indispensable preparation. The angel declared with an oath that there should be delay no longer but that the mystery of God should be finished in the days of the voice of the seventh angel; even the mystery God has declared as good tidings to His servants the prophets. We are about 100 years into “the days of the voice of the seventh angel.” The second woe, or the sounding of the sixth p. 327angel, ended with the ascription of glory to God, after the terrible time of the French Revolution (Rev. xi. 13). This was in 1794, when Robespierre, shortly before he was guillotined, presided at a great religious festival at which the nation proclaimed its faith in the “Supreme Being.” We are in the midst of signs that characterise the days of the voice of the seventh angel as defined in the end of Ch. xi. The nations are angry, and from other signs of the times, as well as from the chronology of the case, we know that the time of the dead is upon us.
John was instructed to take the little book out of the angel’s hand and eat it up; which he did, finding it sweet as honey in his mouth, but afterwards bitter in his belly. This is the experience of all who eat the truth. It is sweet as honey in its uplifting and enlightening and delivering effects, but bitter in the experiences to which it immediately subjects us But bitterness of this description will all be past in the days of the thunders of the rainbowed angel. The bitterness will be the execution of the sore judgments upon the adversary. This idea finds illustration in the events of the third trumpet, in which Attila (symbolically called Wormwood in the vision) brought death and destruction over northern Italy by his “bitter” judgments. The prophet Ezekiel, after eating the roll of “lamentation, mourning and woe,” went in “bitterness and the heat of his spirit” to rebuke the house of Israel. John was finally told: “Thou must prophecy again, before many peoples and nations and tongues and kings.” This, of course, involves the resurrection of the dead, which is assured in Christ, who is the first fruits of them that sleep, and whom we bring to mind thus weekly in showing forth his death till he come. For the time being we are under the chastening rod, which Ch. xi., in symbol, shows to be the part of Christ’s people now; but it will give place to glory, honour and immortality in due time if we are “exercised thereby;” for at the end of the chapter the temple which in the beginning was measured off for affliction, is seen “in heaven;” and Christ is present with the saints, for “there was seen in his temple the ark of his covenant.” Thus the word of God in the prophets, and communicated by Christ to an apostle, is powerful to build us up in showing us “things to come,” and instructing us, in view of the mighty changes impending, as to “what manner of persons we ought to be in all holy conversation and godliness.”
EDITOR.