The book of Revelation is the supreme statement in the New Testament of God's sovereignty. It rings with the conviction that in spite of all appearances to the contrary, God is still on the Throne of this world, ruling it in every age by means of both judgments and mercies, and pressing history forward to a climax altogether worthy of Him Who began it.
John opens his book with a vision of Christ among the lampstands Who is the Lord of the Church. By means of letters to seven representative churches, there follows a statement of the way in which the Risen Lord rules among His own. He does so by discipline and renewal - by judgment and by mercy ... so that He is shown continually speaking to His church in reproof and in promise.
But the Lord of the Church is also Lord of the world, so the second section of the book of Revelation, chs. 4-11, opens with a vision of Christ before the Throne of God, whence He rules the world by judgments and by mercies - by judgments because He is relentless in His passion for righteousness, and by mercies because He is resolute in His passion to redeem.
We have already seen how the theme of God's judgments began to be unfolded. War, strife, famine, disease and death are all of them instruments - natural instruments - in the hand of Christ by which He chastens mankind for its rebellious folly.
However lightly we on earth may esteem it, sin is a grim reality as seen from heaven, a real menace to our welfare; and because God loves us truly, He cannot allow us to remain too long deceived about the peril into which it bring us.
The attitude that says, "I would not dream of upsetting him," is not the attitude of love. The more true our love is, the less content we are for those we love to be happy in contemptible ways. You may be content to let your neighbour's child be snotty and dirty in his habits, but not your own child. You love your own child more, which is why you discipline him more severely. So, whilst it is no part of God's desire for men that they should suffer and be miserable (He does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men Jeremiah reminds us - Lam. 3:33) nevertheless, He does not shrink from chastising them for their own good.
As Isaiah wrote (26:9-10), "When God's judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. If favour is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; even among upright men he will persist in wrongdoing, and pay God no heed."
In the deepest sense of all, the very judgments of God are an expression of His mercy, for the inner meaning of all His judgments is that by means of them God calls us to a change of heart that He might thereby truly bless us. It is not vindictiveness that motivates God in His punishment of sin, but concern - the concern of a Fatherly heart. As the Lord said to the church at Laodicea, "As many as I love I rebuke and chasten" (3:19).
But what delights Him is to show mercy, not to stir up wrath. It belongs to His nature that He would rather His kindness induced us to repent than that His wrath should. It is only when we presume upon the wealth of His kindness and patience and forbearance, misinterpreting them as a licence to persist in sin, that His anger is stirred up - as it must be. (Rom. 2:4-5)
God walks a tight-rope, so to speak, in His moral government of our lives - a tight-rope between indulgence on one side and harshness on the other. If He is too lenient, He may actually encourage us to sin; if He is too severe, He may so embitter us as to harden our resistance.
In these chapters John shows us how God keeps the balance.
On the one hand, He punishes us for our sin by giving us over to it. He has to do that: He cannot support us in it, so He withdraws His support; and that means He exposes us to its power over us and its consequences.
On the other hand, He contains its destructiveness, limits its consequences. He is continually damming back the effects of sin, the headlong rush toward total ruin in which it would otherwise carry us. His restraining mercies are continually mitigating sin's consequences. As Paul said to the people of Lystra, "In past generations, God suffered all the nations to walk in their own ignorant and misguided ways. Yet He has never left Himself without witness - has never given us cause to misread His intentions - in that He did you good, giving you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness." (Acts 14:16-17)
And that is no more than Jesus said Himself, "Your Father in heaven is merciful, for He is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish, making His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sending His rain on the deserving and the undeserving."
For we are hardly ever motivated to repent by disasters alone. They may induce terror in us, even remorse; but they may also induce bitterness in us, and with it a deeper hardening of our hearts. We need to be able to see through God's judgments - past them - to the promise of mercy and forgiveness that waits beyond them, or they will miscarry. Unless there is hope for us still, beyond them all, where is the point of repenting? Men repent only when they perceive the connection between God's judgments and His Gospel. There must be something better in God to trust than His anger; behind His anger, we must be assured of His love. It is not the vision of hell that awakens faith in us, but the vision of God. Not alone His wrath must drive us, but His grace must draw us, or we shall never run into His Fatherly arms.
And so it was given to John to see that the Lamb of God rules the life of this world by means of His mercies as well as by means of His judgments.
Christ's rule by means of His mercies is described in these two chapters 6 and 7 of Revelation in four ways.
The first of them is express in 6:8, where John tells us that Death and Hades are given power over only a fourth part of the earth. That is a picture of restraint.
Death is the wages of sin, but sin's power to destroy is limited, held in check. It is not permitted to reach its full strength, or anything like it ... only a fourth part.
God punishes mankind for its sin by giving them over to its power and its consequences; but then He limits its power and limits its consequences, holding them on a tight rein, lest they plunge us into swift and total ruin. As Jeremiah wrote, "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed." (Lam. 3:22)
"The mystery of God's judgments," wrote D. T. Niles, "is not that they happen, but that they are restrained, and so long delayed."
The reason for this restraint is supplied in the second of John's statements in 6:11. When the cry of the martyrs is heard - "How long, O Lord, how long before the flow of evil shall at last be staunched, and the suffering of your faithful people have its issue in the final victory of your kingdom?" - they are summoned to contain their souls in patience until the number of their brethren to be gathered in shall be complete.
The time is not yet for God to make a full end of human wickedness, for out of the multitudes who abide under His wrath a great host will yet repent and stream home to the Father's house.
Those who shall be saved will be many, not few, for the number 144,000 who shall be sealed is again part of John's code. It is 12 x 12 x 1000. Twelve is the number for God's people on earth, His true Israel. Indeed so truly Israel are they, that the names of Israel's 12 tribes are their fitting symbol. To square a number, in John's code, is to intensify the meaning of the symbol, and to multiply it by 1,000, is to magnify it to abundance. Twelve squared means they are truly God's people, absolutely and without qualification, for of those Who are to be His own He will lose not one. That is why they are sealed in their foreheads. The seal is the mark of God's ownership stamped upon them - they are His absolutely: and the seal is stamped upon their foreheads. The reference here is to the prophecy of Ezekiel in 9:4 where the prophet was bidden to "go through the city and put a mark on the foreheads of those who sighed and groaned over all the abominations that were committed in it." It is John's way of saying that God's people are truly saved. It is the same as Paul said in I Cor. 6:11, "You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God." To be sure, from our point of view on earth, our cleansing, our sanctification looks a very unfinished business, so we are tempted to wonder it if will ever be fully accomplished; but viewed from heaven, there is no shadow of doubt about the outcome. No-one seeing us from there has any doubt that the good work God has begun in us, He will finish at the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6). We are seen as "complete in Him," (Col. 2:10), "sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, Who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire the full possession of it." (Eph. 1:13-14) Seals in the ancient world were marks of ownership and guarantees of quality.
So in 7:3-8 John sees the company of the sealed on earth, and in 7:9-12 the company of the redeemed in heaven: the church militant and the church triumphant; together they constitute a great multitude which no man can number, and their number shall be complete. Not one will be missing
And so that none shall miss his place at the last, time must be allowed to them in which to repent. For their sake, the destroying winds of judgment must be held back from the four corners of the earth (7:2-3).
Those verses are in fact John's third statement of the mercy that contends with judgment.
7:1 "I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree." (Notice how '4' is again the symbol for anything that concerns the earth). The four winds are held back from howling across the earth's face to the destruction of everything in their path ... a picture of the earth preserved.
As He promised Noah, God will not suffer the earth be plunged back into the chaos out of which it was brought into being, until God's purpose of salvation shall be complete. "While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer an winter, and day and night shall not cease." (Gen. 8:22). "Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees till we have sealed the servants of God upon their foreheads." (v. 3).
So by His kindness, by His faithfulness to His promise even to sinful men under the covenant with Noah, God would give men time, and safety too, in which to repent. It is for men's salvation that God incessantly works, and they must see His grace if they are to believe.
The final statement of mercy lies in John's phrase in 6:16 where he says that the wrath that abides on men is 'the wrath of the Lamb.' In that strange phrase there are blended together the two great themes of the Bible that are never separated but always spoken of together in the same breath: the one is the retribution that always and everywhere overtakes men in their sinfulness, and the other is the persistent mercy of God that always and everywhere hovers above them with forgiveness. That forgiveness of God is the only thing that ever separates us from our sin, and stops the chain reaction of spreading retribution.
Where sin abounds, there grace much more abounds. Indeed, where sin reigns in death, there Grace also reigns through righteousness to eternal life. The wrath that is to be feared is the Wrath of the Lamb. He is slow to anger; indeed, as Micah tells us (7:18), He does not stay angry, even when His anger is aroused, because His real delight is in tender mercies. The Lamb would not endorse Gough Whitlam's dictum from the steps of Parliament House (in 1975), "Maintain your rage." Rather, from the steps before God's Throne, He cries, "In overflowing wrath, for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, for I am your Redeemer." (Isa. 54:8). "His anger is but for a moment, but His favour is for a lifetime." (Psalm 30:5).
Judgment and mercy are one and indivisible, because they are both expression of the one love.
All this explains why the church's proclamation of the Gospel and her works of mercy are so vital an ingredient in God's government of the world. Unless the Church's witness to God's grace is heard, the purpose of God's judgments will miscarry. The Church's witness is crucial and indispensable.
And so is her humble ministry of love. Let me meet the objection that might understandably be raised by all that was said in the last chapter especially - the objection that runs, "If war, revolution, famine, disasters, disease and death are all of them God's judgments on sin, and represent His will, then doesn't that mean that we work against His will if we strive for peace, and bring relief to those who suffer, and offer healing to the sick?"
That is a wholly false conclusion to draw. It is to be blind to all the truth we have been spelling out - blind indeed to the whole revelation of God we have been given in Christ Jesus. For what we have been made to see in Christ is that God Himself, in the person of His Son, plunges into the very arena of this world's life where all His judgments are abroad, bears them Himself as Jesus did, because He cannot for righteousness' sake lift them, and then works ceaselessly for their mitigation - as Jesus did when He went about doing good, healing all who were oppressed by the devil and proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. In the midst of His own judgments, He was busy with His mercies - as we must be: "for as He was, so are we in this world." (I John 4:17)
Unless the Church of Christ embodies in her life the truth that the God of Righteousness is at the same time a God of grace and tender mercies - a God who nerves even the arm that strikes Him - then she makes her life a lie upon the truth. By her proclamation of the Gospel and her works of mercy - both ... at the same time and equally - she makes her witness to the truth as it is in Jesus. And that truth she must both proclaim and demonstrate, or both God's judgments and His mercies will have no meaning in men's eyes, and so bear no fruit unto their salvation.
PRAYER
O God our Father, direct and order our thoughts in this brief hour of worship that we may think of You steadfastly and purposefully.
Grant us
... reverence as we contemplate your glory
... penitence as we ponder your holiness
... gratitude as we realise your love
... yieldedness as we remember your tender mercies, and
... eagerness as we awaken to your loving purposes.
So may we rise from our worship
... with knowledge deepened
... with love kindled, and
... with strength to live more nearly as we ought.
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