Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

More documents

Recommendations

Info

21:9-11 The New Jerusalem (21:9-27) 9 And one of the seven angels who had the Seven Chalices full of the seven last plagues came and spoke with me, saying: Come here, I will show you the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb. 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high Mountain, and showed me the holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, 11 having the glory of God. Her luminary was like a very costly stone, as a stone of crystal-clear jasper. 12 She had a great and high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels; and names were written on them, which are those of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel. 13 There were three gates on the east and three gates on the north and three gates on the south and three gates on the west. 14 And the wall of the City had twelve foundation stones, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. 15 And the one who spoke with me had a measure, a gold reed to measure the City, and its gates and wall. 16 And the City is laid out as a square, and its length is as great as the width; and he measured the City with the reed, twelve thousand stadia; its length and width and height are equal. 17 And he measured its wall, one hundred forty-four cubits, according to human measurements, which are also angelic measurements. 18 And the material of the wall was jasper; and the City was pure gold, like clear glass. 19 The foundation stones of the City were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation stone was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; 20 the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolites; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst. 21 And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the City was pure gold, like transparent glass. 22 And I saw no Sanctuary in it, for the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb, are its Sanctuary. 23 And the City has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 And the nations shall walk by its light, and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory and honor into it. 25 And in the daytime (for there shall be no night there) its gates shall never be closed; 26 and they shall bring the glory and honor of the nations into it; 27 and nothing unclean and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. 9 This verse ties the final section of Revelation together, establishing the literary relationship of chapters 15-22. It is one of the seven angels who had the Seven Chalices who reveals to St. John the New Jerusalem, just as one of the same seven angels had shown him the vision of Babylon (17:1); and here the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb, is contrasted to the Harlot, the unfaithful wife. 10-11 St. John is carried away in the Spirit (cf. 1:10; 4:2; 17:3) to a great and high Mountain, a deliberate contrast to the wilderness where he saw the Harlot (17:3). We have seen (on 14:1) that the image of the Mountain speaks of Paradise, which was located on a high plateau from whence the water of life flowed out to the whole world (cf. 22:1-2). The apostle sees the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. The picture is not, of course, intended to evoke images of space stations, or of cities literally floating in the air; rather, it indicates the divine origin of “the City which has foundations, whose Architect and Builder is God” (Heb. 11:10). During Judah’s apostasy, the prophet Ezekiel saw the Glory-Cloud depart from the Temple and travel east, to the Mount of Olives (Ezek. 10:18-19; 11:22-23); later, in his vision of the New Jerusalem, he sees the Glory- Cloud returning to dwell in the new Temple, the Church (Ezek. 43:1-5). This was fulfilled when Christ, the incarnate Glory of God, ascended to His Father in the Cloud from the Mount of Olives (Luke 24:50-51), thereupon sending His Spirit to fill the Church at Pentecost. There was probably a later image of this transfer of God’s Glory to the Church when on Pentecost of A.D. 66, as the priests in the Temple were going about their duties, there was heard “a violent commotion and din” followed by “a voice as of a host crying, ‘We are departing hence!’” 14 Ernest Martin comments: “This departure of the Deity from the Temple at Pentecost of A.D. 66 was exactly 36 years (to the very day) after the Holy Spirit was first given in power to the apostles and the others at the first Christian Pentecost recorded in Acts 2. And now, on the same Pentecost day, the witness was given that God himself was abandoning the Temple at Jerusalem. This meant that the Temple was no longer a holy sanctuary and that the building was no more sacred than any other secular building. Remarkably, even Jewish records show that the Jews had come to recognize that the Shekinah glory of God left the Temple at this time and remained over the Mount of Olives for 3 1 /2 years. During this period a voice was heard to come from the region of the Mount of Olives asking the Jews to repent of their doings (Midrash Lam. 2:11). This has an interesting bearing on the history of Christianity because we now know that Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected from the dead on the Mount of Olives 15 – the exact region the Jewish records say the Shekinah glory of God remained for the 3 1 /2 years after its departure from the Temple on Pentecost, A.D. 66 . . . . The Jewish reference states that the Jews failed to heed this warning from the Shekinah glory (which they called a Bet Kol – the voice of God), and that it left the earth and retreated back to heaven just before the final seige of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. “. . . From Pentecost A.D. 66, no thinking person among the Christians, who respected these obvious 14. Josephus, The Jewish War, vi.v.3. On this and other events of A.D. 66, see above, pp. 252-55. 15. See Ernest L. Martin, The Place of Christ’s Crucifixion: Its Discovery and Significance (Pasadena, CA: Foundation for Biblical Research, 1984). 218
21:12-14 miraculous signs associated with the Temple, could believe that the structure was any longer a holy sanctuary of God. Josephus himself summed up the conviction of many people who came to believe that God ‘had turned away even from his sanctuary’ (War, II.539), that the Temple was ‘no more the dwelling place of God’ (War, V.19), because ‘the Deity has fled from the holy places’ (War, V.412).” 16 Writing while these events are still uppermost in the minds of the Jews, St. John declares that the Shekinah, the Glory of God, now rests on the true Holy Temple/ City, the consummate Paradise – the Bride of Christ. The New Jerusalem is further described as possessing a luminary (pho – ste – r) – literally, a star or light-bearer (cf. Gen. 1:14, 16 [LXX], where it is used with reference to the sun, moon, and stars); St. Paul uses the same term when he says that Christians “shine as luminaries in the world” (Phil. 2:15; cf. Dan. 12:3). This parallels the sun with which the Woman is clothed in 12:1 – except that now the Bride’s luminary, brighter than even the sun, shines with the Glory of God Himself: like a very costly stone, as a stone of crystal-clear jasper, in the image of Him who was “like a jasper stone and a sardius in appearance” (4:2-3). C. S. Lewis wrote: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal . . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.” 17 12-14 The Woman of 12:1, in addition to her glorious clothing, wore a crown of twelve stars; this is now to be replaced with another twelve-starred crown – this time a “crown” of jewelled walls. But inasmuch as the Bride’s clothing also corresponds to that of the enthroned Glory of 4:3, St. John is careful to make her “crown” correspond to the circle of twelve in that passage as well. There, the Throne was ringed about with two twelves, the twenty-four enthroned elders. So here, the Bride-City is crowned with a double twelve: the patriarchs and the apostles. “The transition from a crown on the lady’s brows to a ring of city walls was mere routine for St. John’s contemporaries; the standing emblem for a city was the figure of a lady with a battlemented crown.” 18 It is implied in Ezekiel’s vision that the City has a great and high wall, for “the gates about which the prophet speaks [Ezek. 48: 31-34] are the gatehouses, porches or gate towers which constitute a city wall”; 19 this is made explicit in St. John’s account. The twelve gates of the City are guarded by twelve angels (cf. the cherubim who guarded Eden’s gate in Gen. 3:24), and are inscribed with the names . . . of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel, another feature in common with Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 48:31-34). Sweet comments: “The twelve portals of the Zodiac in the city of the heavens are brought under the control of the Bible: Israel is the nucleus of the divine society.” 20 The City has three gates on the east and three gates on the north and three gates on the south and three gates on the west. We saw in the discussion of 7:5-8 that the twelve tribes of Israel are listed by St. John (and before him, by Ezekiel) in such a way as to “balance” the sons of Leah and Rachel. The order in which the gates are listed (east, north, south, west) corresponds to this tribal list – which we would naturally expect, since St. John mentions the gates, with their unusual order, immediately after mentioning the twelve tribes. In other words, he intends for us to use the information in this verse in order to go back and solve the riddle of 7:5-8 (see the charts on pp. 92-93). There is another intriguing point about this verse: St. John tells us that the gates are, literally, from the east, from the north, from the south, and from the west – giving, as Sweet suggests, “the picture of many coming from the four points of the compass (Isa. 49:12; Luke 13 :29).” 21 As St. John later shows, the nations will walk by the City’s light, the kings of the earth will bring their wealth into her, and her gates will always be open to them (v. 24-26). St. John extends his imagery: The wall of the City had twelve foundation stones, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. This, of course, is straight Pauline theology: “So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the Cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together is growing into a holy Temple in the Lord; in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:19-22). It should be needless to say also that both St. Paul’s and St. John’s concept of the City of God, the Church, is that it comprehends both Old and New Covenant believers within its walls. As the historic Church has always recognized, there is only one way of salvation, one 16. Ernest L. Martin, The Original Bible Restored (Pasadena, CA: Foundation for Biblical Research, 1984), pp. 157f. 17. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1949; revised cd., 1980), pp. 18f. 18. Austin Farrer, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 215. 19. Ford, p. 341. 20. Sweet, p. 304. 21. Ibid. 219
Page 1:
But when you see Jerusalem surround
Page 4 and 5:
Copyright @ 1987 by Dominion Press
Page 6 and 7:
FOREWORD Foreword Readers of the Bo
Page 8 and 9:
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE Publisher’s
Page 10 and 11:
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE case for esch
Page 12 and 13:
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE this book bec
Page 14 and 15:
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE In contrast,
Page 16 and 17:
INTRODUCTION St. Irenaeus is somewh
Page 18 and 19:
INTRODUCTION we must be saved” (A
Page 20 and 21:
INTRODUCTION previous relationship
Page 22 and 23:
INTRODUCTION You have lain down as
Page 24 and 25:
INTRODUCTION are only elaborating a
Page 26 and 27:
INTRODUCTION early churches had suc
Page 28 and 29:
INTRODUCTION actions mean more than
Page 30 and 31:
INTRODUCTION Some will complain tha
Page 32 and 33:
INTRODUCTION Outline of Revelation
Page 34 and 35:
1:1-3 that must shortly take place.
Page 36 and 37:
1:4-6 accomplishment. We probably h
Page 38 and 39:
1:7-8 observe that a central aspect
Page 40 and 41:
1:9 14 And His head and His hair we
Page 42 and 43:
1:16 That all the peoples, nations,
Page 44 and 45:
1:20 things that must shortly take
Page 46 and 47:
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO Part Two H
Page 48 and 49:
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO The confli
Page 50 and 51:
2:4-6 endure evil men. . . . And yo
Page 52 and 53:
2:9-10 dead, and has come to life:
Page 54 and 55:
2:14-16 expression (none of which m
Page 56 and 57:
2:18-23 and leads my servants astra
Page 58 and 59:
2:26-29 end, to him I will give aut
Page 60 and 61:
3:4-6 church, or even against a nat
Page 62 and 63:
3:8-11 And I will clothe him with y
Page 64 and 65:
3:14-16 sons disinherited and cast
Page 66 and 67:
3:21-22 the elders of a church, and
Page 68 and 69:
INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE The laws
Page 70 and 71:
4:2-3 numerous names and descriptio
Page 72 and 73:
4:5-8 superseded and transcended; t
Page 74 and 75:
4:5-8 19) led Biblical writers to s
Page 76 and 77:
5:1-4 family worship; it is radical
Page 78 and 79:
5:5-7 St. John; and it seems as if
Page 80 and 81:
5:8-10 have gained the victory for
Page 82 and 83:
6:1-2 6 IN THE PATH OF THE WHITE HO
Page 84 and 85:
6:3-4 forth conquering, and to conq
Page 86 and 87:
6:9-10 And authority was given to h
Page 88 and 89:
6:15-17 that Israel’s time has ru
Page 90 and 91:
7:4-8 Though he flourishes among th
Page 92 and 93:
7:4-8 they were listening to the Ap
Page 94 and 95:
7:9 is presumably deliberate, for i
Page 96 and 97:
7:10-14 inheriting the Kingdom (Mat
Page 98 and 99:
7:15-17 They will not hunger or thi
Page 100 and 101:
8:3-5 for that would be about the l
Page 102 and 103:
8:6-7 rout the Midianites, in Judge
Page 104 and 105:
8:12 13 And I looked, and I heard a
Page 106 and 107:
9:13 The vegetation of the earth is
Page 108 and 109:
9:20-21 lations advanced by some co
Page 110 and 111:
9:20-21 men much more atheistical t
Page 112 and 113:
10:2-4 beyond reasonable doubt that
Page 114 and 115:
10:8-10 the Spirit at Pentecost was
Page 116 and 117:
11:1-2 angelic priest measures the
Page 118 and 119:
11:7 have the power to shut up the
Page 120 and 121:
11:11-14 climax with the murder of
Page 122 and 123:
11:16-18 month in the liturgical ye
Page 124 and 125:
12:1-2 12 THE HOLY WAR The Book of
Page 126 and 127:
12:1-2 birth to the Christ, to brin
Page 128 and 129:
12:4 Daniel repeats the same idea i
Page 130 and 131:
12:5-9 Chronologically, this explan
Page 132 and 133:
12:12 And when we see the Lord warr
Page 134 and 135:
12:17 for the action of Pharaoh, wh
Page 136 and 137:
13:3-4 of the ten imperial province
Page 138 and 139:
13:8-10 The Beast was given authori
Page 140 and 141:
13:13-14 character and office (1 Co
Page 142 and 143:
13:18 work throughout Revelation ar
Page 144 and 145:
13:18 ✩ ✩✩ ✩★✩ ✩★
Page 146 and 147:
14:1 14 THE KING ON MOUNT ZION St.
Page 148 and 149:
14:6-7 have seen, the Church on ear
Page 150 and 151:
14:9-13 understanding (Prov. 9:1-6)
Page 152 and 153:
14:14-16 I may find them prompt; na
Page 154 and 155:
14:19-20 And now, O inhabitants of
Page 156 and 157:
their Chalices of wrath, one of the
Page 158 and 159:
15:3-4 sacrifices; and the Glory of
Page 160 and 161:
15:8 We should be reminded in this
Page 162 and 163:
16:1-3 5 And I heard the Angel of t
Page 164 and 165:
16:10-11 the heat of the sun by the
Page 166 and 167:
16:15-16 established here, for the
Page 168 and 169: 16:19 thereof, concerning which the
Page 170 and 171: 17:1 17 THE FALSE BRIDE While some
Page 172 and 173: 17:3 action throughout history in s
Page 174 and 175: 17:8 Jerusalem’s whole history, i
Page 176 and 177: 17:13-16 (v. 2), as the instruments
Page 178 and 179: 18:1-2 priority over the kingdoms o
Page 180 and 181: 18:6-8 His people to come out of Ba
Page 182 and 183: 18:17-19 sanctuary two lampstands r
Page 184 and 185: 18:20-21 They went down into the de
Page 186 and 187: 19:1-2 19 THE FEASTS OF THE KINGDOM
Page 188 and 189: 19:3-8 of vengeance, in order that
Page 190 and 191: 19:10 Church admitted its members t
Page 192 and 193: 19:12-15 Let the heavens be glad, a
Page 194 and 195: 19:16-18 of wealth, or wasting dise
Page 196 and 197: 20:1 20 THE MILLENNIUM AND THE JUDG
Page 198 and 199: 20:1-3 Christ established His media
Page 200 and 201: 20:1-3 The great fathers and teache
Page 202 and 203: 20:4 The relationship between the p
Page 204 and 205: 20:5-6 earth? The answer should be
Page 206 and 207: 20:7-8 ministry; that was Satan’s
Page 208 and 209: 20:9-10 St. John’s image for the
Page 210 and 211: 20:12 redeemed with Thy precious bl
Page 212 and 213: 21:1 21 THE NEW JERUSALEM The Bible
Page 214 and 215: 21:1 Pet. 3:5-7; cf. the same analo
Page 216 and 217: 21:3-5 will be established finally,
Page 220 and 221: 21:15-21 Covenant of Grace; the fac
Page 222 and 223: 21:24-27 And deep darkness the peop
Page 224 and 225: 22:3-4 Paradise is not, therefore,
Page 226 and 227: 22:6-9 Final Warnings and Blessings
Page 228 and 229: 22:17-21 unconquerable strength and
Page 230 and 231: CONCLUSION the pure Bride-City, is
Page 232 and 233: CONCLUSION does not exempt us from
Page 234 and 235: APPENDIX A it is reflected in “It
Page 236 and 237: APPENDIX A make him a pillar in the
Page 238 and 239: APPENDIX A and wine the night befor
Page 240 and 241: APPENDIX A Babylon, falsely priestl
Page 242 and 243: APPENDIX A B. CHRISTIAN WORSHIP 1.
Page 244 and 245: APPENDIX B been the defining mark o
Page 246 and 247: APPENDIX B The Bible teaches us tha
Page 248 and 249: APPENDIX C APPENDIX C Common Grace,
Page 250 and 251: APPENDIX C for all eternity because
Page 252 and 253: APPENDIX C better arrangement cultu
Page 254 and 255: APPENDIX C be destroyed. The two ex
Page 256 and 257: APPENDIX C universe. It is governed
Page 258 and 259: APPENDIX C completed, the world was
Page 260 and 261: APPENDIX C deceive the nations. The
Page 262 and 263: APPENDIX C creeds and theological u
Page 264 and 265: APPENDIX C coherence that at least
Page 266 and 267: APPENDIX C There is continuity in l
Page 268 and 269:
Athanasius. On the Incarnation of t
Page 270:
________. The Institutes of Biblica
show all

Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?