Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

6:9-10
And authority was given to him to bring four plagues
upon the four-cornered Land: to kill with sword and
with famine and with death and by the wild beasts
of the Land. This is simply a summary of all the
covenantal curses in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.
Moreover, it parallels God’s listing of His four basic
categories of curses with which He punishes ungodly
and disobedient nations – “My four severe judgments
against Jerusalem: sword, famine, wild beasts, and
plague to cut off man and beast from it!” (Ezek. 14:21;
cf. Ezek. 5:17). At this preliminary stage, however –
and in keeping with the “fourness” of the passage as a
whole – Death and the grave are given authority to
swallow up only a fourth of the Land. The Trumpetjudgments
will take a third of the Land (cf. 8:7-12), and
the Chalice-judgments will devastate it all.
Perhaps the most significant obstacle to a correct
interpretation of this passage has been that
commentators and preachers have been afraid and
unable to see that it is God who is bringing forth these
judgments upon the Land – that they are called forth
from the Throne, and that the messengers of judgment
are the very angels of God. Especially vicious and
harmful is any interpretation which seems to pit the
Son of God against the court of heaven, so that the
curses recorded here are seen as somehow beneath His
character. But it is Jesus, the Lamb, who breaks the seals
of judgment, and it is Jesus, the King of kings, who rides
out in conquest, leading the angelic armies against the
nations, to destroy those who rebel against His
universal rule.
It was crucial for the early Christians to understand
this, for these judgments were even then breaking loose
upon their world. In every age, Christians must face the
world with confidence, with the unshakable conviction
that all events in history are predestined, originating
from the Throne of God. When we see the world
convulsed with wars, famines, plagues and natural
disasters, we must say, with the Psalmist, “Come,
behold the works of the LORD, who has wrought
desolations in the earth” (Ps. 46:8). Ultimately, the
Christian’s attitude toward God’s judgments upon a
wicked world is the same as that of the four living
creatures around the Throne, who joyfully call out to
God’s messengers of judgment: “Come!” We too, in our
prayers, are to plead with God to bring down His wrath
on the ungodly, to manifest His righteousness in the
earth. Faced with these awesome revelations of
judgment, what is our proper response? We are told, in
22:17: The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come!”
The Martyrs Avenged (6:9-17)
9 And when He broke the Fifth Seal, I saw underneath the
altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the
Word of God, and because of the Testimony which they
had maintained;
10 and they cried out with a loud voice, saying: How long,
O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge
our blood on those who dwell on the Land?
11 And there was given to each of them a white robe; and
they were told that they should rest for a little while
longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their
brethren who were to be killed even as they had been,
should be completed also.
12 And I looked when He broke the Sixth Seal, and there
was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as
sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like
blood;
13 and the stars of the heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree
casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind.
14 And the heaven vanished like a scroll when it is rolled
up; and every mountain and island were moved out of
their places.
15 And the kings of the earth and the great men and the
commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave
and free man, hid themselves in the caves and among the
rocks of the mountains;
16 and they said to the mountains and to the rocks: Fall on
us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the
Throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb;
17 for the great Day of His wrath has come; and who is able
to stand?
9-10 For the first-century readers of this book, the
tribulations depicted in it were becoming all too real:
Each church would soon know the anguish of having
some of its most forthright and able leaders imprisoned
and executed because of the Word of God, and
because of the Testimony which they had maintained.
For many Christians, all across the empire, the coming
months and years would involve great distress, as
families would be separated and loved ones killed.
When tragedy strikes, we are tempted to ask: Does God
care? This question is especially intense when the pain
is caused by vicious enemies of the faith bent on
destroying God’s people, and the injustice of the
suffering becomes apparent. If Christians were truly the
servants of the King, when would He act? When would
He come to punish the apostates who had first used the
power of the Roman State to crucify the Lord, and now
were using that same power to kill and crucify the
“prophets and wise men and scribes” (Matt. 23:34)
whom Christ had sent?
Thus the breaking of the Fifth Seal reveals a scene in
heaven, where the souls of those who had been slain
are underneath, or around the base of, the altar. The
image is taken from the Old Testament sacrifices, in
which the blood of the slain victim would stream down
the sides of the altar and form into a pool around its
base (“the soul [Heb. nephesh] of the flesh is in the
blood,” Lev. 17:11). 17 The blood of the martyrs has been
poured out (cf. 2 Tim. 4:6), and as it fills the trench
below the altar it cries out from the ground with a loud
voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost
Thou not judge and avenge our blood upon those who
dwell on the Land? The Church in heaven agrees with
the cherubim in calling forth God’s judgments: How
long? is a standard phrase throughout Scripture for
invoking divine justice for the oppressed (cf. Ps. 6:3;
13:1-2; 35:17; 74:10; 79:5; 80:4; 89:46; 90:13; 94:3-4;
Hab. 1:2; 2:6). The particular background for its use
17. See Rousas John Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come: Studies in Daniel and Revelation (Tyler, TX: Thoburn Press, [1970] 1978), p. 145.
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