The Revelation of Jesus Christ - The Herald

"And the symbol is extremely proper. The pressure of the grapes till their blood comes out,
as their juice is called in Deut. 32:14, aptly representing the great pressure or affliction and
effusion of blood."
Commenting on Rev. 14:19, this writer thus elaborates:
"To tread a winepress, as before remarked, is a prophetic description of destruction. The
images of this vision are very strong and expressive. The largest winepresses were used to
be in some places out of the city. So in [Rev. 14] verse 20, 'The winepress was trodden
without the city,' and seems to intimate the great numbers that shall be involved in this
general destruction. This judgment seems to be in the future. No past period or event
appears exactly applicable to it. It must be, therefore, left to time to more fully explain
it."
Concerning what the great winepress itself symbolizes, we quote the words of Mr. Russell:
"It pictures to our minds the last features of the great time of trouble which shall involve
all nations, and of which we are so abundantly forewarned in the Scriptures."
Concerning who is to tread the winepress we have this explanation by the same writer:
"The fact that the King of kings is represented as treading the winepress 'alone' indicates
that the power exerted for the overthrow of the nations will be Divine power, and not
mere human energy. It will be God's power that will punish the nations, and that will
eventually 'bring forth judgment [justice, righteousness, truth] unto victory.' 'He shall
smite the earth with the rod of His mouth; and with the breath of His lips [the force and
spirit of His Truth] shall He slay the wicked.' (Isa. 11:4; Rev. 19:15; Psa. 98:1.) To no human
generalship can the honors of the coming victory for truth and righteousness be ascribed.
Wild will be the conflict of the angry nations, and world-wide will be the battlefield and
the distress of nations; and no human Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon will be found to
bring order out of the dreadful confusion. But in the end it will be known that the grand
victory of justice and truth, and the punishment of iniquity with its just deserts, was
brought about by the mighty power of the King of kings and Lord of lords."
It will be noticed that in this last citation we have the thought that the great victory over
the enemies of God, the great "vine of the earth," will be accompanied by a wonderful
outpouring of truth; not alone truth on God's Word, but truth concerning the rights and
wrongs of men, both high and low--truth which will expose or bring to the lime-light the
unrighteousness, selfishness, injustice and un-Christlikeness upon which the present socalled
Christian civilization is founded, and has been built. And this is in perfect harmony
with the Apostle Paul's description of the overthrow of the "man of sin" (the Papal
hierarchy), one of the very noted events that will occur seemingly just before this treading
of the symbolical winepress. The remarkable diffusion of knowledge which began to come
in the opening years of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the "time of the end," and
which has greatly increased since, is doubtless one factor that has exposed the false claims
of the great religious systems and governments of Christendom.