Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

19:12-15
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
Let the sea roar, and all its fulness;
Let the field exult, and all that is in it.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy
Before the LORD, for He is coming;
For He is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness,
And the peoples in His faithfulness. (Ps. 96:11-13)
He will not judge by what His eyes see,
Nor make a decision by what His ears hear;
But with righteousness He will judge the poor,
And decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth;
And He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,
And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked.
(Isa. 11:3-4)
Behold, days are coming, declares the LORD,
When I shall raise up for David a righteous Branch;
And He will reign as King and act wisely
And do justice and righteousness in the land.
In His days Judah will be saved,
And Israel will dwell securely;
And this is His name by which He will be called:
The LORD Our Righteousness. (Jer. 23:5-6)
12 The figure on the white horse is the same as the
Son of Man, the First and the Last, the Living One, of
St. John’s first vision, for His eyes are a flame of fire
(cf. 1:14): He is the omniscient Lord whose discerning
scrutiny is “able to judge the thoughts and intentions of
the heart” (Heb. 4:12). This majestic figure is already
victorious, many times over, as symbolized by the many
diadems He wears.
The gold plate on the forehead of the high priest bore
the sacred Name of the LORD; appropriately, after
taking note of the many diadems on Christ’s brow, St.
John sees that He has a name written. But this is a
name which no one knows except Himself. How are
we to understand this? As we saw at 2:17, the New
Testament use of the words for know (gino – sko – and oida)
is influenced by a Hebrew idiom, in which the verb to
know acquires related meanings: to acknowledge, to
acknowledge as one’s own, and to own (see, e.g., Gen.
4:1; Ex. 1:8; Ps. 1:6; Jer. 28:9; Ezek. 20:5; Zech. 14:7;
Matt. 7:23; John 10:4-5; Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 8:3; 2 Tim.
2:19). 14 Thus, the point in this verse is not that no one
can know what the name is (for in fact, as we shall see,
we do “know” the name, in the cognitive sense), but
that He alone properly owns the name; it belongs only
to Him. This is reinforced by the chiastic structure of
the passage:
A. He has a name written which no one owns except
Himself (v. 12b)
B. He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood (v. 13a)
C. His name is called the Word of God (v. 13b)
C. From His mouth comes a sharp two-edged sword
(v. 15a)
B. He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God
(v.15b)
A. On His robe and on His thigh He has a name written:
KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS (v.16)
The sharp, two-edged sword of 15a answers to 13b’s
characterization of Christ as the Word of God; 15b’s
information that Christ treads the wine press of wrath
explains how His robe became stained with blood in
13a; and 16 tells us the name that 12b says Christ
uniquely owns. 15
13 As we have noted above, Christ’s robe dipped in
blood is explained by v. 15b. The blood is, clearly, that
of Christ’s enemies, the “grapes of wrath”; yet (as we
saw on 14:20), there is a sense in which the bloody robe
is stained by Christ’s own sacrifice of Himself as well.
For the vision is truly an allegory of the Incarnation:
Here alone in Revelation, as in the Prologue to His
Gospel (John 1:1, 14), St. John calls Christ the Word,
speaking of His pre-existence and divine nature, and of
His becoming flesh, tabernacling among us. In the
passage before us, moreover, we have not only an
allegory of His Incarnation, but of His Atonement,
Resurrection, Ascension, and Enthronement as well.
This is not “only” the story of the outpouring of wrath
on Israel. It is the story of Jesus Christ, the King of
kings. We see here the Advent of the Son of Man: The
heavens are opened, and He descends to earth to do
battle with His enemies; stained with blood, He wins
the victory.
14 But Christ is not alone in this victory. He is
followed by the armies that are in heaven, “the called
and chosen and faithful” who are with Him in battle
(17:14). Again we must remember that from the
perspective of the New Testament, the Church is “in
heaven”: We are God’s tabernacle in heaven (7:15;
12:12; 13:6), we are seated with Christ in the heavenly
places (Eph. 2:6), we have come to the heavenly
Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels in festal assembly,
and to the Church of the first-born who are enrolled in
heaven (Heb. 12:22-23). The armies are composed of
Christians (it is possible that angels are in view here as
well), riding on white horses with their Lord in His
aggressive and triumphant campaign through the earth,
bringing the Word of God to the world. Because the
armies of heaven are the Bride, they are clothed in fine
linen, white and clean.
15 From the mouth of the incarnate Word of God
proceeds a sharp two-edged sword. St. John has used
this imagery before (1:16; 2:16); the sword (especially
as it comes from the mouth) is a clear Biblical symbol
for the powerful “prophetic word which is creative and
dynamic and brings to pass what it pronounces. The
word of a true prophet, such as the rider, transforms
word into action; that of the false prophet, such as the
second beast, is ineffectual.” 16 The Word of God is used
not only in battle, to slay God’s enemies (Eph. 6:17),
but also in the Church, to cut apart the sacrifice (Rom.
12:1-2): “For the Word of God is living and active and
sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far
as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and
14. See the brief discussion in Meredith G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980), p. 130.
15. Ibid.
16. J. Massyngberde Ford, Revelation: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1975), p. 323.
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