Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

5:5-7
St. John; and it seems as if the elder is so excited about
his message that he blurts out the climax before he
even explains who has conquered. He goes on to
describe Christ the Conqueror: the Lion from the tribe
of Judah, the strong and powerful fulfillment of Jacob’s
ancient prophecy to his fourth son:
You are a lion’s cub, O Judah;
You return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
Like a lioness – who dares to rouse him?
The scepter will not depart from Judah,
Nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
Until He comes to whom it belongs,
And the obedience of the nations is His. (Gen. 49:9-10)
It was David, the conquering Lion of Judah of the Old
Covenant, to whom God revealed both the plan of the
Temple (1 Chron. 28:11-19) and the plan of the
everlasting covenant, the “Charter for Humanity” by
which the coming Priest-King would bring the blessing
of Abraham to all nations (2 Sam. 7:18-29; 23:2-5; 1
Chron. 17:16-27; Ps. 16; 110; Acts 2:25 -36). 5 At last
David’s greater Son came and conquered, establishing
everlasting dominion and opening the Covenant.
Embodying and fulfilling all its promises, He is the One
“to whom it belongs.”
Christ is also called the Root of David – a strange
expression, to our way of thinking. We can more easily
understand Isaiah’s term: “a shoot from the stem of
Jesse” (Isa. 11:1). As a descendant of Jesse and David,
Jesus could be called a “branch” (Jer. 23:5; Zech. 3:8);
but how could He be called the Root? Our perplexity
originates in our non-Biblical views of how history
works. We are accustomed to thinking of history as if it
were a cosmic Rube Goldberg machine: Trip a lever at
one end, and a series of domino-like thingamajigs and
whatsits bang into each other, at long last producing a
whatchamacallit at the far end of the machine. By pure
cause and effect, each event causes other events, in
direct chronological succession.
Now, this is true – but it is not the whole truth. In fact,
taken alone and autonomously, it is not true at all, for
such a thesis is evolutionary in its assumptions, rather
than Biblical. History is not simply a matter of the past
causing the future; it is also true that the future causes the
past, as R. J. Rushdoony explains: “The movement of
time, according to the Bible, is from eternity, since it is
created by God and moves out of and in terms of His
eternal decree. . . . Because time is predestined, and
because its beginning and end are already established,
time does not develop in evolutionary fashion from past
to present to future. Instead, it unfolds from future to
present to past.” 6
A simple illustration might help us understand this. Let
us say someone finds you packing a sack lunch on a
warm Saturday morning, and asks the reason for it. You
answer, “Because I’m going to have a picnic at the park
today.” What has happened? In a sense, the future – the
planned picnic – has determined the past. Because you
wanted a picnic at the park, you then planned a lunch.
Logically, the picnic preceded, and caused, the making
of the lunch, even though it followed it chronologically.
In the same way, God desired to glorify
Himself in Jesus Christ; therefore He created Jesse and
David, and all the other ancestors of Christ’s human
nature, in order to bring His Son into the world. The
Root of David’s very existence was the Son of David,
Jesus Christ. The “effect” determined the “cause”! 7
The Lord Jesus Christ is thus presented in the most
radical way possible as the Center of all history, the
divine Root as well as the Branch, the Beginning and
the End, Alpha and Omega. And it is as the conquering
Lion and the determining Root that He has prevailed
so as to open the Book and its seven seals.
St. John turns to see the One who is described in this
way – and, instead of seeing a Lion or a Root, he sees a
Lamb standing before the Throne. This is the pattern
we first noticed at 1:11, in which John first hears, then
sees. Obviously, the One St. John heard about in verse
5 is identical with the One he now beholds in verse 6.
The Lion is the Lamb.
In what sense is Jesus Christ a Lamb? The passage is not
referring to Jesus in His Nature – He is not “lamblike”
in the sense of being gentle, sweet, or mild, as some
would falsely understand this text. 8 Christ is called a
Lamb, not in view of His Person (which pop-theology
degrades to the modern concept of “personality”
anyway), but in view of His work. He is the Lamb that
was slain, “who takes away the sin of the world” (John
1:29). Thus, the center of history is the finished,
sacrificial work of Christ. The foundation for His
mediatorial kingship (Christ as the Lion) is His
mediatorial atonement (Christ as the Lamb). It is
because of His sacrifice that He has been exalted to the
place of supreme rule and authority. Christ has attained
victory through His sacrificial suffering and death on
our behalf.
St. John emphasizes this by his specific language: a
Lamb standing, as if slain. Philip Carrington suggests
that the Greek word standing (heste – kos ) is “a rough
Greek translation of the Hebrew Tamid, which means
‘standing’ or ‘continual,’ and refers to the daily burntoffering
in the Temple. It is the regular technical term,
and forms the title of the section of the Mishnah which
deals with that sacrifice. The Lamb of the Tamid is an
intelligible expression, which might well have been
turned into the Arnion Heste – kos of the Greek. The
5. See Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “The Blessing of David: The Charter for Humanity,”
in John H. Skilton ed., The Law and the Prophets: Old Testament Studies
Prepared in Honor of Oswald Thompson Allis (Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 298-318.
6. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Nutley, NJ:
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1969), p. 11; cf. Rushdoony, The
One and the Many, p. 145; St. Augustine, The City of God, Bk. XII, Chap. 13-
15; Nathan R. Wood, The Secret of the Universe (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., [1936] 1955), pp. 43-45.
7. One of the clearest statements of this idea is in Gordon H. Clark, Bibiical
Predestination (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.,
1969), esp. pp. 18-30.
8. Hal Lindsey speaks in this connection of Christ’s “lamblike meekness and
gentleness” in There’s a New World Coming: A Prophetic Odyssey (Eugene,
OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1973), p. 94.
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