Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

15:1-2
15
SEVEN LAST PLAGUES
The Song of Victory (15:1-4)
1 And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous,
seven angels who had seven plagues, which are the last,
because in them the wrath of God is finished.
2 And I saw, as it were, a Sea of glass mixed with fire, and
those who had come off victorious from the Beast and
from his image and from the number of his name,
standing on the Sea of glass, holding harps of God.
3 And they sing the song of Moses the bond-servant of God
and the song of the Lamb, saying:
Great and marvelous are Thy works,
O Lord God, the Almighty;
Righteous and true are Thy ways,
Thou King of the nations.
4 Who will not fear Thee, O Lord, and glorify Thy name?
For Thou alone art holy;
For all the nations will come and worship before Thee,
For Thy righteous acts have been revealed.
1 St. John now tells us of another sign in heaven,
great and marvelous. Twice before he has shown us a
great sign in heaven: the Woman clothed with the sun
(12:1), and the great red Dragon (12:3). As Farrer says,
it is “as though everything in 12-14 had been the
working out of that mighty conflict, and the next act
were now to begin.” 1 This new sign initiates the climax
of the book: seven plagues, which are the last, because
in them the wrath of God is finished. There is no
reason to assume that these must be the “last” plagues
in an ultimate, absolute, and universal sense; rather, in
terms of the specifically limited purpose and scope of
the Book of Revelation, they comprise the final
outpouring of God’s wrath, His great cosmic Judgment
against Jerusalem, abolishing the Old Covenant worldorder
once and for all. Like that of the Trumpets, this
series of judgments is to be performed by seven angels
(as we shall see in the following chapter, there are
several parallels between the proclamations sounded by
the Trumpets and the libations poured from the
Chalices). This opening statement is more or less the
superscription to the rest of the book, and is explained
in the following verses.
2 The vision begins: St. John sees, as it were, a Sea of
glass, the crystal Sea before God’s Throne (4:6),
corresponding to the sapphire “pavement” seen by
Moses on the Holy Mountain (Ex. 24:10), the blue
crystal “firmament” through which Ezekiel passed in his
ascension in the Glory-Cloud (Ezek. 1:26), and the
brazen Sea (the Laver) in the Temple (1 Kings 7:23-
26). In this vision, however, the Sea is no longer blue,
but red: The glass is mixed with fire. The imagery ties
this vision to the last scene in Chapter 14, that of the
great river of blood running the whole length of the
Land, a truly Red Sea, through which the righteous
have been delivered, but in which their enemies were
destroyed. Now St. John pictures the saints rejoicing at
the water’s edge like Moses and the Israelites after the
original Red Sea crossing (Ex. 14:30-31; 15:1-21),
victorious over the monster from the deep; literally,
they are those overcoming or the conquerors, “for it is
the abiding character of ‘conqueror’ on which emphasis
is laid, and not the fact of conquest.” 2 The description
of their conquest is threefold: They have come off
victorious from the Beast and from his image and
from the number of his name.
At the seashore, on the lip of the font, the conquerors
offer praise: Standing on the Sea of glass, holding
harps of God, they comprise the new priestly Temple
choir that stands at the cleansing Laver, by which they
were sanctified. St. Paul described the Red Sea
deliverance as a “baptism” of God’s people (1 Cor. 10:1-
2), and the Tribulation was indeed the Church’s
baptism of fire: “So the great glass bowl of the sea is
seen ‘filled with a fiery mixture.’ What the Israelites are
brought through to salvation, their persecutors undergo
to their destruction; Pharaoh and his hosts perish in the
returning waters. And so we know that the baptism of
fire must fall on the people of Antichrist; the vision of
the bowls [Chalices] wiIl show us how.” 3
A further interesting aspect of the Laver image comes
from the Chronicler’s story of the dedication of the
Temple by King Solomon: “Then he stood before the
altar of the LORD in the presence of all the assembly of
Israel and spread out his hands. Now Solomon had
made a bronze laver, 4 five cubits long, five cubits wide,
and three cubits high, and had set it in the midst of the
court; and he stood on it, knelt on his knees in the
presence of all the assembly of Israel, and spread out his
hands toward heaven” to perform the prayer of
dedication (2 Chron. 6:12-13). This was not the great
Laver in the southeast corner of the Temple (the
dimensions of which are recorded in 2 Chron. 4:2-5),
but one of several bronze lavers constructed by
Solomon (cf. 2 Chron. 4:6, 14). Solomon stood on this
“sea” before the Altar and offered his supplication,
thanking God for His mighty works, invoking His
righteous judgments, and entreating Him for the
conversion of all nations (2 Chron. 6:14-42; cf. Rev.
15:3-4). Immediately afterward, we read: “When
Solomon had finished praying, fire came down from
heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the
1. Austin Farrer, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Oxford: At the Clarendon
Press, 1964), p. 169.
2. Henry Barclay Swete, Commentary on Revelation (Grand Rapids: Kregel
Publications, [1911] 1977), p. 194.
3. Farrer, pp. 170f.
4. Heb. kiyyor, the standard word for laver: e.g. Ex. 30:18, 28; 40:7, 11, 30.
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