Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of End Times from Revelation 10
Before we come to the seventh trumpet, which we won’t look at tonight, we come to the interlude or the excursus it’s variously called. Just as there was an interlude or excursus in the series of seals between the sixth and the seventh, so is there one here in the series of trumpets between the sixth and the seventh, and there are other similarities as well.
In chapter 7, where you find this interlude or excursus, it has two parts: the 144,000 and the great multitude in white robes. I argue that although there is some difference of opinion, those two visions refer to the same people, the totality of the people of God under different guises. So also here this interlude or excursus is also divided into two parts. First, the angel and the little scroll (chapter 10) and, second, the two witnesses (chapter 11).
Whatever else these symbols involve (and they involve a great deal; they’re more complicated yet), again, they have to do primarily with the people of God, or at least the people of God are brought back into center stage. What are they doing while all of these judgments are coming upon those who dwell on the earth, what the NIV calls the inhabitants of the earth? What is happening to them?
Again, there is the same kind of excursus in the sequence. When you move on to the seven bowls, however, there is no interlude or excursus between the sixth and the seventh, almost as if the judgments at that point are running at such a breakneck pace you’re not going to stop them or interrupt them for any asides, as it were.
Now I’ve kept calling this thing an interlude or an excursus, but the word chosen needs some thought. If you use the term interlude, you may think of a period apart, a break in the flow. You have these judgments going on, and then you stop them before the seventh in the series comes, and you have an interlude.
An interlude for us is a temporal category, so if you refer to this break as an interlude, then you are more or less assuming by your language that you do have temporal sequence in the judgments or that there is a break in the judgments while you now look at something nice going on for the people of God, or at least something different going on for the people of God. That is why, I confess, I’m not too happy with the term interlude, although it’s found in many, many of the commentaries, including some of the ones I’ve assigned.
Excursus may be better because it has no necessary temporal connection. What you are now doing is looking at the redeemed party. You’re looking at the people of God. You’re looking at the whole thing from another slant. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily making a break temporally or chronologically between the sixth and the seventh. There’s nothing in the text that suggests that, and that kind of warning, it seems to me, needs to be borne in mind. Now let me read chapter 10.
“Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion.
When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from heaven say, ‘Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down.’ Then the angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven.
And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced …’ ”
In Greek that’s “just as he gospeled” or “just as he evangelized,” if you like. The verb is euaggelizomai. “ ‘… to his servants the prophets.’ Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: ‘Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll.
He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’ I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings.’ ”
I think there are many things in chapter 10 that are very clear. There are a couple of things I’m not certain about. The most difficult chapter in the entire book to interpret is chapter 11, in my view, although I’ll say more about that next week. We’re going to use most of our time now on chapter 10.
What are we to make of this vision? A mighty angel, first of all. “Another mighty angel,” the text says. Well, it’s simply an angel who must be mighty because he is yelling out to so many people. It’s like the mighty angel, if you recall, in chapter 4 and chapter 5, that vision. We needed somebody who was going to yell out to the whole universe who is worthy to approach this God and open the seals and bring forth God’s purposes.
As I said then, I can be a little louder by just getting closer to the microphone, but there they needed a mightier angel with big lungs who could address the whole crowd. So this is a mighty angel. He is big. His dress is remarkable. Because of his dress, many have argued that this is Christ. He’s robed in a cloud. Sometimes clouds are bound up with deity in Scripture. Clouds descend on Mount Zion, for example. Jesus is transfigured in a cloud.
The rainbow above his head? Well, there was some kind of rainbow in the vision of chapter 4 connected with the throne of God. “His face was like the sun.” Isn’t that what is said of Jesus in chapter 1 in the inaugural vision? “His face shone as the sun in all of its glory.” “… and his legs were like fiery pillars.” That may come out of the language of Exodus as well. So much of the Apocalypse does. Do you recall the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud giving protection and guidance in the Old Testament? It may come out of that sort of language.
So there are many people who do argue that this is nothing other than Christ. I’m not persuaded. First, there are some strong parallels in the description between this passage and the angel in Daniel, chapter 12, verse 7, who is clearly called Gabriel. Compare also Daniel 8:16. Second, the book of Revelation is full of angels of various sorts, but I’m not persuaded that the term aggelos is ever, in an indisputable way, applied to Jesus.
Third, we have already seen how sometimes the very same symbolism that can refer to one group can be used of another group. For example, in chapter 5, I argued that the 24 elders who have some of the accouterments of the elect … 12 plus 12, people of the Old Testament, people of the New, wearing white clothes, as the overcomers do in chapter 3, and so on. They have some of the accouterments of the chosen people of God. Nevertheless, I think you can show very strongly that they are a high order of angels.
In other words, some of the same symbolism you get for one group crops up with respect to another group. Many biblical symbols are not univocal. They vary a little. Thus, Jesus can be called the lion of the tribe of Judah, but the Devil goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. The symbol lion is not univocal. We’ve already seen that one of these beasts has teeth like a lion, which doesn’t mean teeth like Jesus.
The symbol itself is not a terminus technicus, a technical expression that almost always has the same value. So one has to see what’s going on. I think all one can infer from this is that this angel comes from the very presence of God. This is an angel on the good side. It’s not one of the demonic powers that have come out of the pit. It is an angel coming from the presence of God, robed in certain ways.
Above all, he swears with his hand to heaven by him who lives forever and ever certain things in chapters 5–7. That is language thoroughly inappropriate for Christ. Does Christ stand and make announcements in the name of him who lives forever and ever? The whole point of the book of Revelation is that he is one with him who lives forever and ever. He comes from the throne, in chapter 5.
Thus, from chapter 5 on, the Lamb is identified again and again and again with the one who sits on the throne. You have the formula again and again. “The one who sits on the throne and the Lamb, the one who sits on the throne and the Lamb, the one who sits on the throne and the Lamb,” again and again and again, half a dozen times just in the last chapter.
It is simply not appropriate in the imagery of the Apocalypse for the Lamb to be swearing by him who sits on the throne. That is suggesting some kind of disjunction that just won’t work here at all. No, I think what you have here is language that indicates that this angel is under a divine commission, with clouds of glory, the presence of brightness and holiness upon him, commissioned from God himself.
Moreover, what he holds in his hand has nothing to do with the scroll of chapter 5. That scroll is a big scroll, and it is in the hand of the Almighty, and it is Christ’s job to unseal it to bring about God’s purposes for redemption and judgment, as we have seen. This is a little scroll. It is not fastened with seven seals. It’s wide open. It is not in the hands of deity. It’s in the hands of this angel.
What you have now is a scene that has its closest parallel to Ezekiel 2:8–3:3. It’s worth our while taking a moment to look at that passage, remembering at the same time that John uses the Old Testament very often to develop his symbols, but he doesn’t use the symbols in exactly the same way as in the Old Testament. You have to assess them within John’s context, not simply within the context of the Old Testament book. Here one speaking addresses Ezekiel (2:8).
“ ‘You, son of man, listen to what I say to you. Do not rebel like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.’ Then I looked, and I saw a hand stretched out to me. In it was a scroll, which he unrolled before me.” It’s an open scroll. “On both sides of it were written words of lament and mourning and woe.
And he said to me, ‘Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel.’ So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. Then he said to me, ‘Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.’ So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.”
Later on we’ll find more parallels between this passage and Revelation 10. We’ll come back to this “sweet as honey in the mouth and sour and bitter in the stomach” in due course. Clearly, there’s a great deal of this imagery that’s drawn from that passage, and we’ll sort it out as we go along.
Now what does he do? He’s holding a little scroll, which lays open in his hand (the content of that scroll we’ll worry about inductively as we proceed), and he plants his foot on the sea and another foot on the land. In the doggerel poem I quoted last week it included the lines, “Swore with his hand raised to heaven that time was no longer to be.” That, of course, comes from the King James Version, from the Authorized Version.
“Time will be no more,” the text says, as if what the text is announcing is the end of history and the beginning of eternity, that time was no longer to be, but, in fact, it is simply not what the text means. The NIV has it correctly, as well as virtually all modern translations. He stands there and cries, “There will be no more delay!” “He swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay!’ ”
Now why the land and the sea? I mean, why have one foot wet and one foot dry in order to make this pronouncement? Well, most of the commentaries don’t deal with this one very well, it seems to me. They tend to say, “Well, this shows he’s speaking on the part of God over all creation. There’s not going to be delay anywhere.” I think that’s true, but there are many, many things in the Apocalypse that are introduced that make you scratch your head, and then they’re unpacked a little later.
Next week, God willing, we’ll look at chapters 12–13. There you find a triumvirate of evil, a kind of mirror image of the Trinity. There is the great Beast of chapter 12, who’s clearly identified for us as the Devil. “That great Serpent,” we’re told in chapter 12. Then chapter 13, there is a beast out of the land and a beast out of the sea.
A little farther on yet, they’re identified for us as Antichrist and False Prophet, and they’re all bound up in the schemes of the Devil himself in chapter 12. So now you have the Devil, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet, a kind of unholy triumvirate, which, in some ways, in John’s theology, tries to be an aping god. It tries to displace God. It’s the unholy triumvirate that is the wicked anti-voice to the voice of the Holy Trinity. The language is really quite shocking.
Now why these beasts are called the beast out of the sea and the beast of the land I’ll reserve for next week, because I think there, again, the language is very clear and the symbolism is easily understood. But if you have this beast out of the land and this beast out of the sea working on behalf of the Devil, and here now, a little earlier on, you have the angel from God standing with one foot in the sea and one foot on the land and now pronouncing judgment, “There will be no more delay,” then I think the language is a little clearer.
It’s God still saying, “Yes, there is the Devil. Yes, there is the beast out of the sea and the beast out of the land, but there is still only one sovereign God.” Only one. That’s why he’s introduced the way he is. If God comes down with his sanctions and says, “There will be no more delay; there will now be judgment,” there will be no more delay and there will be judgment.
This will not allow a polytheistic universe or a dualistic universe. There is still only one God: the Lord God Almighty. So he’s introduced as the one by whom the angel swears. Who is he? The one who lives forever and ever. He’s eternal. “… who created the heavens and all that is in them …” That includes the beasts out of the sea and out of the land. “… and the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it.”
Nothing escapes his sovereignty, his purview, his rights as Creator and Sovereign. Part of this description, then, is bound up, it seems to me, with the insistence that what is coming, whether of suffering, of judgment, or of blessing for the people of God, is still sanctioned by God’s own hand in this fallen, broken universe. That’s an important lesson to learn.
Now when he shouts (verse 3) with a loud roar like the voice of a lion, it may simply be symbolism for a loud terrorizing roar and that’s all, but it could be also the voice of royalty. He’s speaking for God. I’m not sure. When he shouts, there are voices of seven thunders, we’re told. Thunders are regularly bound up with judgments of one sort or another, but the intriguing thing here is not only the completeness of the thunders, seven of them, but just as John is to put down what is being said, a voice from heaven says …
Now this isn’t apparently the angel. This is a voice from heaven. Maybe the voice of the exalted Christ (we’re not told), maybe of one of the interpreting elders (we’re not told). “Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down.” What is going on here? What does that mean? There are parallels to this in Scripture. The most notable is found in Daniel 12. In Daniel 12:9, the prophet is told to shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end.
That vision is not going to be understood and unpacked until the time it is fulfilled. It’s not even going to be revealed or disclosed until the time of the end. In other words, there are some things God reveals and some things he does not reveal. That is, in fact, tied to a much larger stream of thought in the Bible. Do you remember Deuteronomy 29:29? “The revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, but the secret things belong to God.” God has not revealed everything.
Even to those to whom he has revealed, in highly symbolic terms, the great panoramic visions of a Daniel, for example, there comes a time when Daniel may be permitted to see some things and even not understand it. He’s terribly troubled, if you recall. Then he’s forbidden to reveal it. Or think of Paul in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12. He’s caught up into the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body he doesn’t really know.
There he is shown things, he says, which are not lawful to be uttered (King James Version). The expression is ambiguous. It could mean either which he is forbidden to utter or which are, in fact, unutterable. That is, they’re so far beyond our categories he doesn’t know how to get them across in our terms. I think, however, it means unlawful to be uttered. That is, he is not permitted to reveal them. Paul is elsewhere given some divine self-disclosure, which it is his precise mandate to articulate.
He says the gospel itself was given to him by revelation (Galatians, chapter 1). It is his burden, his responsibility to articulate it, but now for his own strengthening he’s permitted to see certain things in heaven which he is not allowed to talk about. In fact, he goes so far as to say in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 5–6, that he doesn’t want to talk about himself in those terms, lest, he says, people should think more of him than what is warranted by what he says and does.
Isn’t that remarkable? Most of us go through life feeling that people will think too little of us. Paul goes through life fearing that people will think too much, and he refuses to talk about his most spectacular visionary, revelatory experiences, lest people will think too much of him. He can bring himself to talk about himself as this man caught up in the third heaven only in the third person even then. Contrast that with our age, where every visionary who comes along wants to make a big deal of it in order to gain a hearing, which is not exactly Paul’s way.
There is this whole stream of thought in the Bible, therefore, of some things that have been disclosed to some people that are not to be disclosed to others or that are sealed up until some later time. It’s not ready yet. In this particular case, you don’t even have a time limit on it. It’s just “Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down.” The long and the short of it, therefore, is we don’t know what the content is. We don’t know, in exactly the same way that we don’t know what Jesus wrote on the ground. There are some things we just don’t know.
On the other hand, although we don’t know what the seven thunders spoke, that they’re thunders suggests judgment. That there are seven of them suggests a certain parallelism to the other sevens of judgment. We’re about to have seven bowls. We’ve had seven trumpets and seven seals. It may be another way of saying, “Look, there are judgments and judgments that I haven’t even introduced yet,” which is a frightening thought.
I’m not going to give you a pattern for all of history. I’m not going to tell you all of the worst things that will happen. You’re still talking about in history. You’re still not talking yet about the end, because, after all, at the end of chapter 9 we’ve seen, after all of these things have happened, the rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent.
You’re still at a time where potentially at least people could repent. You’re not in some split-second time immediately before the coming of Christ. You’re in history here with sequences of judgments taking place in history. That’s what you have. And still people do not repent. Then the seven thunders, clearly judgments, are hidden from the people, as if to say, “And there are sequences of judgments even yet that I do not disclose but that are just awful.”
If we do not know what is the content of those thunders (it’s “Seal up what the seven thunders have said,” not, “Seal up what the little scroll has said”), can we know what is in this little scroll? You must not confuse the content of the thunders with the content of the little scroll. When the angel shouts, the voices of the seven thunders spoke, and what they said is sealed up, but the scroll is presented as being open to view, open in content.
What does it say? Well, to make an intelligent guess, you have to follow the flow. Let me follow it quickly and then come back to pick up the details. It’s at that point that the angel raises his hand and announces there will be no more delay. Then verse 7, which we’ll come to in a moment, and then the seer is told to take the scroll and to eat it.
He’s to imbibe it, ingest it. It’s to become his. It’s going to be sweet to him, but it will be bitter to him. We’ll look at that in a moment. Then immediately he’s told, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages, and kings.” It seems to me you have one of two choices in terms of identifying the content of the scroll.
You can either identify the content of the scroll as the content of this prophecy against many peoples and nations and kings, in which case the content of this little scroll is of apiece with all of the judgments that are coming down the pike. That’s possible. Commentators are split about half and half on this one, but I think there’s an alternative interpretation that is marginally more likely.
Remembering that these two excursuses, if they match the excursuses in the sequence of seals, are looking at things more from the perspective of God’s people, I think John is given here a double commission. First, he’s given the little scroll, and then, in addition to the little scroll, he’s told he must prophesy again (the again is significant) about many peoples, nations, languages, and kings.
So the little scroll content, I think, is bound up with the content of chapter 11, which is still dealing with the people of God, as we’ll see more closely next week. Then from chapter 12 on again, you’re getting a whole vision of judgment of people again. I think there you have some of this prophecy against peoples, nations, languages, and kings. John fulfilling the second part, then, of this commission, as it were.
The question, therefore, in terms of chapter 11 is whether the content of the little scroll is the same as the content of 10:11, the commission to prophesy, or there are two parts: the content of the little scroll is in particular for the people of God and is, thus, equivalent to chapter 11, and then the command to prophesy to all of the kings, nations, priests, and so on is picked up again in chapter 12 as the judgments continue there. I think it is this latter that explains the structure of the book a little better.
Now before we take a look at this eating the scroll and what it might mean, take a look at verse 7. “In the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.” What does that mean? The mystery of God, the musterion of God. It is concomitant with the sounding of the seventh trumpet. Within this period of time, introduced by the seventh trumpet blast, the mystery of God is being accomplished.
The term mystery (musterion in Greek) is found 27 or 28 times in the New Testament. There’s one textual variant; hence, 27 or 28. It’s most common in Paul. What it means needs to be sharply distinguished from what the contemporary word mystery means. Mystery for us means either something that is in essence intrinsically mysterious, beyond comprehension, almost ineffable. We speak of the “mystery of the Trinity” or the “mystery of the incarnation.” That is, there are elements to it beyond our comprehension.
We do not mean it is illogical or impossible. We do mean it has some elements beyond our ken to it. The second contemporary use is a whodunit, a mystery novel. That is, something where everything seems dark, but once you get to the end of the narrative, all is explained. Neither of those senses is what is meant in the New Testament use of the term.
The New Testament use of the term varies a bit, but in almost every instance (not quite every one, but in almost every one, probably 24 or 25 out of the 27 or 28), musterion is a term that, in fact, comes from apocalyptic literature. The corresponding Semitic word is found only in the book of Daniel: raz, mystery. What does it mean? It is bound up with that which has been hidden in times past by God and is now revealed.
Now it may not have been absolutely hidden, but it was hidden at least in some measure in times past and now revealed. When you look at concrete passages in Paul, for example, in Colossians 2:2, the mystery of God there is Christ, hidden in some measure in times past but now disclosed, in whom are hidden the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. In Romans 11:25 you have, “I give you a mystery,” and it’s bound up with Israel. (That passage is difficult. I won’t go into it now.)
In 1 Corinthians 15:51, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” I know they put that in nurseries, but that’s not quite what is meant. The point is we shall not all die, but we shall all be transformed. Not only those who have died shall be transformed but those who are alive, and this is a great mystery. That is to say, it has been hidden in the past. That was not all carefully explained, but it is now being explained.
The most remarkable passage in the New Testament, I think, on mystery language is in the last three verses of Romans: Romans, chapter 16, verses 25–27. Before I read it, let me give you a word of introduction. Some of the mystery passages in Paul clearly refer to the gospel. That means you face a remarkable tension in reading the New Testament.
On the one hand, the gospel is said to be something that is prophesied in the past and is fulfilled in the new. On the other hand, insofar as the gospel is mystery, it’s said to be hidden in the past and revealed in the new. Do you hear that? How can one and the same gospel be said, on the one hand, to be prophesied in the past, thus disclosed, and now fulfilled in the new (that is, the events come to pass) and, on the other hand, said to be hidden in the past, mystery, and only now revealed?
If it’s disclosed so it can be fulfilled, how can it be hidden and only now revealed? Do you hear me? Now read chapter 16, verses 25 and following. “Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him—to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.”
Have you not read that and said, “Hey, which is it?” It’s hidden in ages past and only now revealed, according to the prophetic writings. They’re prophecy. It’s prophesied in times past and is now fulfilled. At the risk of another simplification, one could make a case for suggesting that the whole stream of Reformed thought, covenant theology generally, has emphasized prophecy and fulfillment, continuity between the covenants, and the whole stream of dispensational thought has represented what’s new, what has been hidden in the past is only now revealed.
So you find dispensationalists writing endless books on musterion, on mystery, and you find the covenant theologians writing endless books on prophecy and fulfillment, and neither side writes books on the other side until very recently. The bridges are beginning to be bridged a bit. Isn’t that very interesting? Here Paul sticks them together. Does that mean you can be a dispensationalist covenant theologian? Well, no. There are problems with that.
It does suggest that sometimes our systems of theology have been based on a reductionistic choice of the evidence, and the solution for how you put some of these things together is going to be more broadly based. Now this particular subject interests me a great deal, so I must be very careful I don’t get carried away and talk about this till the cows come home, but at the risk of oversimplification, I would want to argue that in the New Testament, both things are emphasized because both things are true in slightly different ways.
On the one hand, there is text after text after text that insists that Christ in his coming, birth, ministry, sufferings, death, and resurrection is fulfilling antecedent Scripture. Moreover, the people of Christ’s own day are bawled out, as in Luke 24, if they haven’t read the Scriptures in those lights. “O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the Scriptures have written. Ought not the Christ to have suffered?” Jesus says to the two he met on the Emmaus road.
They should have seen it. Question: Who did? Who understood that the messianic King who would be Son of God, son of David, one with God, one with David, would also be suffering servant and slaughtered lamb? Who understood all that? I don’t think anybody did. I think you get small hints here and there. For example, “And a sword shall pierce your heart also” to Mary. How much was really understood of all of that?
So, “O fools and slow of heart to believe …” They didn’t really believe, according to Jesus, but when you look at the Old Testament and start asking, “Okay, then, where in the Old Testament do you get all of these prophecies about Jesus’ death and coming and birth and being in the tomb for three days and so on?” so many of them are bound up with typologies, are they not? Oh, there are some clear ones, but so many of them are bound up with typologies, structures of thought that are not just clear prediction.
Have you ever asked yourself, “Why doesn’t Isaiah 53 read like this?” At the risk of scandal, if you were writing a book, making it all up, couldn’t you have produced a better prophecy than Isaiah 53? How about this? Seven hundred years before Christ. “And it shall come to pass in the days of an emperor called Caesar Augustus.… (Footnote: He will be emperor of the Roman Empire, which, of course, at this point doesn’t exist, but believe me, it will.)
In the time of Caesar Augustus, under the Syrian governor Quirinius (footnote: in fact, he’s going to rule twice; this is the first time he rules), there will be born to a young woman called Mary and Joseph, a young boy who will be called Jesus in the town of Bethlehem. They’ll get there because this Caesar Augustus will issue a decree that all the Roman world should be enrolled for taxation purposes.”
Then you go through the account, and you talk about the magi and the shepherds and what they’ll say, and then you talk about the boy Jesus when he’s 12 and goes up to the temple and what will happen then, and you talk about all of the people he’ll meet, and you talk about Pilate, and you name them all. That would be a real wingding of a prophecy, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that be far more convincing?
Why all this mealy-mouthed stuff and typology that you can hardly understand and that, in fact, nobody did understand and then got blamed for not understanding it? Why not just make it a lot clearer in the first place? I have no disrespect for that, but most of us, if we’ve thought about these things at all, haven’t we sometimes wondered why the prophecies weren’t a wee bit clearer? As soon as you ask the question, I think the answer becomes clear straightaway.
Let’s say you put yourself in Pilate’s place now, and you have this wonderful prophecy all about Pontius Pilate and how he’s going to wash his hands and who his wife is and how he doesn’t get along too well with the Roman emperor anyway. Now suddenly you have before you this chap called Jesus. Because the prophecies are so explicit and fit so well, you cannot possibly not be aware of what is going on. Here comes Jesus. “Uh-oh, here we go.” Now what do you do? Do you wash your hands or do you not?
Well, if you don’t wash your hands, then the prophecy is a lie. That’s unthinkable. This is God’s universe. If you say, “Well, I might as well wash my hands; I don’t have any choice …” Because who wants to be the character Pontius Pilate turns out to be in the prophecy? I don’t want that kind of judgment on my head, thank you very much. So what happens? Well, you don’t want to wash your hands, so you say, “I won’t do it, I won’t do it,” and something just drags your hands over there, and you get your hands washed whether you like it or not.
You think we have problems with tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. That’s nothing like the tension we’d have if you started having prophecies like the ones I’ve just created. It really would make an utter joke of any notion of human accountability, of volitional acts. It is just impossible to see your way out of it, as far as I can see. So what has God done? He has given us prophecies, many of them verbal predictions that are explicit. Yes, Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, according to Micah. Explicit verbal prediction.
He has also given us prophecies that are not verbal predictions but models, types, if you will, patterns: a whole priesthood system to show us what a mediator between God and man looks like; a sacrificial system to show what alone was going to avert God’s wrath; a temple with an approach to the Most Holy Place to show that you can’t just saunter into the presence of God who is angry with you, whose fire comes out and devours the people; a covenant community to show you what a covenant community looks like; a kingdom to anticipate the kingdom of God; a temple, sort of type of the great antitype, the very abode of God himself.
In area after area after area, God predicts things by models, by types, by patterns, and not just by institutions and rites and religious heritage but by people: King David. So King David becomes a type in the later Prophets. “I will send my servant David.” Yes, Yahweh, in Ezekiel 34, is the great shepherd of Israel who will come and shepherd his people. Then he says, “And I will send my servant David who will shepherd my people Israel.” Then along comes Jesus and says, “I am the Good Shepherd.”
What happens to David becomes a kind of picture in advance of what great David’s greater son must go through. Did David suffer abuse from his friends? Did he cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So also must great David’s greater son. In fact, in some ways, Jesus is the antitype of Israel. Does Israel suffer in the Old Testament? Is Israel the vine of God, which God plucks and plants and nurtures but which produces only stinkers, according to Psalm 8 or Isaiah 5? Jesus is the true Vine.
So what do you have? Some verbal predictions but also many, many, many predictions based on typologies, structures, models, types, if you will. Now I suggest within that framework that if we had been godly people, sinless.… I don’t mean all of us, because then there would be no point for a redeemer coming, but if there had been a godly person, sinless, perfectly good, really knowing the mind of God, as God has disclosed himself in Scripture, such a person would have put together the Old Testament in the right way.
It is a terrible indictment on the first-century believers and on the many centuries of believers since then that they could not put it together like that because they couldn’t imagine a God who would suffer like that. They could imagine a God of power. A God who would suffer, a God who would be not only the God of the temple but also the priest and the sacrifice, the high priest and the lamb? Who thought in those terms?
What kind of kingdom will it be? The Scriptures can say simultaneously that these things were prophesied in the past and fulfilled in the present and hidden in the past. In some measure, they all were, in types, in structures, in models, and now disclosed. Second, it’s on that basis that God can nevertheless blow out the people of his day for not seeing. “O fools and slow of hearts to believe.” I don’t see how else you can put these patterns together.
Now that has considerable ramifications on how you structure your theology on several fronts that I can’t tease out here. As far as the book of Revelation is concerned, when you come to this remarkable passage about mystery, it’s very important. “In the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced [gospeled, evangelized] to his servants the prophets.”
You go back to the first introduction of mystery in the New Testament. Where do you find it? You find it in the teaching of Jesus, Mark 4/Matthew 13 parallels. “This mystery of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world. That is, this kingdom insofar as it has been hidden in the past and is now being revealed already in my ministry.
Oh, you people are ready for a messianic kingdom. You’re ready for a total kingdom. You’re not ready for the kingdom to come as, in fact, it’s coming, inaugurated now, still to be consummated later, bound up with a suffering king now, a king to rule in unabashed, unshielded glory later, but the mystery of the kingdom is dawning already.”
The mystery language is regularly bound up with that kind of degree of hiddenness in the past, which is now disclosed in Christ Jesus. Likewise in 1 Corinthians 2, something hidden in the past now disclosed with the coming of Jesus. At our funerals, we often cite the words from 1 Corinthians 2: “Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him.”
We think our dear departed sister or brother now is in that unshielded glory. Well, there’s truth to that, but it’s not what that text is saying in the context. My father used to say, “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.” In the context, what does the passage say? “Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him, but God has shown it to us by his Spirit.”
In other words, we live in the age when the hidden things are now disclosed. That’s a major New Testament theme. This passage is saying, thus, that in the time of this seventh trumpet, the mystery of God, that is the dawning of the new age, the dawning of the kingdom, the coming of the kingdom, the coming of the Messiah, is now brought to accomplishment.
This seventh trumpet (whatever it is; we haven’t gotten to it yet) will bring us right up to the consummation. It will be fulfilled. This mystery of God is now utterly disclosed. “There will be no more delay! But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.”
Now then, “The voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more.” That could be the voice from a little earlier up or it could conceivably be the voice of Christ, the voice that first spoke to him like a trumpet from heaven, but because it does not say “like a trumpet” (the voice like a trumpet becomes almost a key to identifying Christ in the book of Revelation), I suspect this is simply the voice of the angel again.
Now it says, “ ‘Go and take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ And I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.’ ” What does that mean?
Well, there’s the passage I’ve already mentioned in Ezekiel 2:8–3:3, but there are other passages. Do you remember how the psalmist says in Psalm 119, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth”? Or Jeremiah: “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart.”
What is meant here? At one level, this seer takes in the words of God from the scroll, and they’re wonderful. Isn’t that your experience as a Christian? You work hard on the words of God, and as you study them, as you think about them, as you hide them in your heart, they delight you. Don’t they? I don’t see how any Christian can say no to that question. The Word of God is wonderfully nurturing when it’s allowed to play its proper place in our minds and hearts.
It’s why you people are here. It’s not because I’m a wonderful teacher. I’m just one of many, but the Word of God nurtures. If I came here and said, “I’m going to give you 10 weeks, 3 hours a shot, on playing whist,” there wouldn’t be 75 people here, or at least not this 75, because what you want is the Word of God, which nurtures, which feeds. It’s sweet to the mouth. You go away and are fed for the whole week on this kind of thing.
You turn it over in your mind, and then it feeds you and nurtures you. It rebukes. It calms. It exhorts. It edifies. Then it gets down in your stomach and gives you a first-class bellyache. What is going on here? What is going on is the fact that this is not only the general experience of Christians as they take in the Word of God. It’s the peculiar experience of prophets, like a David, like a Jeremiah, like an Ezekiel.
You cannot give out the Word of God until you take it in. You ingest it. You eat the scroll. That’s the point. It’s not that the scroll is made of chocolate or something or that they’re forced to eat paper. You’re dealing in symbolism again. You’re taking this material, and you have to ingest it. It has to become yours. As you take it in, because it is the Word of God, it is nurturing. It is wonderful to you. Then what is the burden you have to give out? In Jeremiah’s time, in Ezekiel’s time, in John the seer’s time, judgment.
Let me give you one quick example of that without the scroll language being given. You will see right away that the same idea is at stake. Turn to Isaiah 6. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple.” It probably means the hem rather than the train. Oriental monarchs didn’t have trains in those days. The Hebrew word probably means hem.
In other words, all that Isaiah really sees is just the hem of his garment. He doesn’t actually look on God himself. In every case where it says, “I saw the Lord,” there’s always immediately some qualifying feature about it until the new heavens and the new earth. “Above him were seraphs, each with six wings …” We’ve seen some of the same imagery picked up in chapters 4–5 of Revelation. Exactly the same thing. They’re crying out, “Holy, holy, holy,” and so forth.
When Isaiah looks on this, he recognizes how terribly sinful and guilty he is. How can he stand in the presence of deity? “ ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.’ ” In the earlier chapters, he has cried “Woe” to the people. “Woe to the people for this. Woe to the people for that. Woe to the people for something else.” Now he stands in the presence of God and says, “Woe is me. I am undone.” Everyone is abashed before this God.
But God the Almighty commissions one of his seraphs to go and purify Isaiah’s lips, and as he stands there in the presence, his guilt taken away, his sin atoned for, he overhears the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” Isaiah, freshly cleaned up, cries out from the bottom of his heart, “Here am I. Send me!” This isn’t some, “I’m boldly volunteering, Lord. Though others will not go, yet here am I.” No, no, no. This is a plaintive, “Couldn’t you use me? Here am I. Look at me, Lord. Don’t ignore me. Won’t you send me, please?”
So God says, “Go.” Isaiah is commissioned. And what is he commissioned to preach? “Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” How do you like that for a positive message? The power of positive thinking hadn’t reached Isaiah.
Isaiah recognizes it. That’s why he cries out, “For how long, O Lord? I don’t mind doing that for a few months or maybe a few years. Then you’re going to send revival, aren’t you?” God answers, “Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted, until the fields are ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away …” That is, in exile. “… and the land is utterly forsaken.”
If that’s not enough, “And though a tenth remains in the land, you still keep preaching, for it will again be laid waste.” Now are the words sweet or are they bitter? At the end of that chapter, there’s one small hint of promise to come. “As the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”
I think it’s saying that this tree will sprout again, and it leads to the prophecy of Isaiah 11:1 about a root coming out of the stump of Jesse. Meanwhile, the fact of the matter is that Isaiah had it as his burden to preach judgment and judgment and judgment and judgment and judgment and judgment, and it would not stop until the exile came, until the people were slaughtered, the people transported. “That is your job, Isaiah.” And it was Ezekiel’s job and Jeremiah’s job.
“So the word of God came to me, and because it was the word of God, it was sweet to my mouth, and I ingested it. And when I was full of it, I saw what it was, and it was bitter.” The question is.… In our generation, can we be preachers of the gospel of Christ without also being preachers of judgment? As Western culture goes to hell in a handcart, how do you get to be a preacher of judgment without just sounding like an angry man?
How do you do it with tears and compassion but nevertheless thunder, “Thus says the Lord,” so that as you study the Word of God, it’s sweet to you, and you realize that what you must say will give you a stomachache? Isn’t that part of the crisis of the ministry today?
Now I have to say, this has been a pretty discouraging evening. If I can give you any word of encouragement, it is this. If I had to summarize next week’s chapters, it would be “How to beat the dragon.” Next week it’s how to beat the dragon, and there the triumph of the gospel comes through again very loudly and clearly.
