CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 11, 1916.
“And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”—Rev. xxi. 5.
“And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”—Rev. xxi. 5.
These words were uttered by Him that sitteth on the throne, as the interpretation of the grand vision which passed before the Apostle at the conclusion of the Revelation vouchsafed to him. “I saw,” he says, “a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.... And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”
But this vision was the sequel of fearful scenes which had passed before the Apostle as the future course of the Divine judgments was unrolled before him. He had witnessed a terrible succession of destructions, and plagues, and wars, falling upon the inhabitants of the earth, involving miseries and sufferings incalculable. He had seen passing before him the awful punishments inflicted upon the enemies of God, of Christ, of righteousness, and truth. One quotation in the final scene will be enough to remind you of the nature of the visions. “I saw an angel,” says the Apostle (chapter xix. 17), “standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, small and great.” At length, when these fearful plagues and judgments are completed the Apostle sees a great white throne and Him that sat on it, from Whose face theearth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. Then the books were opened, and the dead, who stood before God, both small and great, were judged, every man according to their works. Then it is, after this awful consummation, that the Apostle sees a new heaven and a new earth. And He that sits upon the great white throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Such, in brief, is the burden of the Book of Revelation. It will be observed that it involves these two cardinal points: First, the judgment and the extirpation of all that is evil by a series of struggles and agonies; and secondly, after this terrible experience, the creation of all things new. The first part, however, in the process of the Divine administration, consists of a series of scenes of miseries, disasters, and bloodshed than which nothing more terrible can be imagined, and which are described with a lurid force to which no other human writing offers anything comparable. War and disease and the confusion of all the elements of human society, and even of heaven and earth, are brought before us, until men arereduced to cry to the very mountains and rocks to cover them. All is described as the inevitable result of the wrath of God against evil and its representatives, and a fearful joy is ascribed to the heavenly beings who behold this vindication of the Divine righteousness. The four and twenty elders fall on their faces and worship God, saying (xi. 17), “We give Thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, Which art and wast and art to come, because Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power and hast reigned. And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the Saints, and to them that fear Thy Name, small and great, and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.” And then in awful response are heard, in the temple of God, “lightnings and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake and great hail.”
These dread scenes, these fearful judgments, are depicted as the inevitable preliminary in the manifestation of the Divine Will and the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. This is the main factwhich stands out broadly from the Book. It is not necessary, for the purpose of appreciating this, to comprehend the signification of each of the awful scenes which are predicted. How far they are capable of any explanation before the final events may well be doubted. Old Testament prophecy remained in great part mysterious until the moment of its accomplishment, and the full interpretation of Christian prophecy can hardly be less dependent upon its actual realization. But one thing is plain, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ upon earth, the full realization of all its promises of peace and goodwill, the complete manifestation of the glory and power of its King—that these great hopes and blessed promises cannot, according to the Book of Revelation, be realized without the world passing through scenes of fearful struggle and misery, and without the execution of Divine judgment upon the evil and falsehood with which it abounds.
These are stern truths which it is well for us to bear in mind amidst the terrible scenes which are now being enacted in the present war. The New Testamentbegins with promises of peace, and it ends with a vision of peace and glory in which God will wipe away all tears from our eyes; but the warning is conveyed to us, through the mouth of the last Apostle, that this blessed condition cannot be reached except through a manifestation of Divine justice and Divine wrath, which will bring upon earth and upon all mankind inconceivable miseries. The sins of men must be brought into judgment. The Divine righteousness must expose their real character by the consequences they naturally involve. The truth must be manifested that there is a Judge of all the earth, Who brings every work of man into judgment, whether it be good or whether it be evil; and the evil in the works of men is so deep and far-reaching that its judgment must needs involve the most terrible suffering. In proportion as God takes to Himself His great power and reigns, the first result must be seen in these agonies of human nature, and must culminate in the disruption of the very elements of nature itself.
It is well we should remind ourselveshow fearfully these pictures of the Apostle of love have been fulfilled in the history of the world since his time. It was not long after he wrote, when a series of persecutions broke upon the Christian Church, which were at length avenged by terrible intestine wars between the heads of the Roman Empire, and in due course of time, by the overthrow of that Empire itself in a long series of wars and devastations, which can only be fitly described in some of the vivid language of the Apocalypse itself. It would be appalling if we could realize the extent to which Europe was filled with “blood and fire and vapour of smoke” during the five or six centuries which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. Then followed the incalculable miseries and untold bloodshed involved in the contest between the Christian and the Mohammedan world, throughout the long period of the Crusades. Add to this all the intestine wars between Christians themselves during the Middle Ages, and the fearful devastation of which the East was the victim in the course ofMohammedan conquests and revolutions, and you have before your eyes a picture not adequately described elsewhere than in this terrible Book. The Reformation was followed by a long series of wars, during which a great part of the surface of Europe suffered the most cruel devastations; and even to the present day the whole world open to our observation has been suffering from almost continuous bloodshed in one part or other of its surface.
The scenes which strike us with such horror at this moment are but a specimen of agonies which have been endured for long generations in the successive struggles of mankind; and if we are horrified at the wars and agonies around us, we may be reminded, by the readiness of all nations for such conflicts, that they are almost the normal condition of humanity. In the middle of the last century Burke calculated that, assuming the numbers of men then upon earth to be computed at 500 millions at the most, the slaughter of mankind in the various wars and revolutions which were known up to that date amounted to upwards of seventy times that number, or 35,000 millions. That,on what he thought a moderate estimate, represents the amount of bloodshed which the passions of men had, up to his time, inflicted upon human society. How much more is to be added to that tremendous calculation for the wars which have followed since that date in the East and West? Taking these facts into account, we shall see good reason to recognize that the Book of Revelation, in its fearful scenes, is but a true description of the actual experience of mankind. The plagues, and destructions, and slaughters which that Book depicts, as the result of the just judgments of God, have, as a matter of fact, been realized, and it is through scenes of suffering and misery of this nature that the world is being conducted by the Divine justice to its ultimate goal.
But we have the more reason to be inexpressibly thankful that that goal is revealed to us as one of peace and bliss. It is when we bear in mind the miseries and agonies which the Book of Revelation depicts, and which are brought so bitterly home to us by such a war as the present, that we realize the full force of the promise that “God shall wipe away all tears fromtheir eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” Seeing what the world has been hitherto, and the miseries by which it is burdened now, we might well despair of such a result, unless we had the express assurance of Revelation that there is One sitting upon the throne Who gives this as the very definition of His work, “Behold, I make all things new.” We should, indeed, be ungrateful not to recognize that the state of things around us contains in itself some pledge and earnest of this revelation. Grievously as the passions of mankind degrade them in practice, there is nevertheless publicly recognized, in principle, a higher standard of responsibility, a higher and more universal obligation to maintain peace and goodwill on earth, than at any previous time in the world’s history. Even amidst such a war as is now waging, principles have been established for its conduct, which produce a great alleviation of its miseries, compared with those which were suffered in the great struggles of nations and of races in previous ages, or evenduring the last century. But still, none must feel more grievously than those who have the conduct of human affairs how slight would be our hopes of the establishment of complete peace on earth, did it depend simply on the wisdom or strength of even the wisest leaders of mankind. They cannot extirpate the passions which are the real ultimate cause of the wars and fightings among us. They cannot take out of men’s hearts the lusts which war in their members, and which nullify the best laws and institutions. Our hope lies in the assured faith that all the terrible scenes of which the earth is full, like those in the Book of Revelation, are under the control of Him that sitteth on the throne, that they are working out great purposes of truth and justice, that the actions of all men, small and great, are subject to His ultimate judgment, and that, finally, when the issues of right and wrong in this world have been thus worked out, in a manner which shall vindicate the truth and righteousness of God, He will fulfill His great work, in which He is even now engaged, of making all things new.
It is, indeed, an unconscious faith ofthis kind which sustains men, and has ever sustained them, amidst the confusions and sufferings of life and history. A deep instinct compels them to believe that they are in the hands of a God of justice and truth, and to appeal to Him in the midst of their struggles, and even in those crises in which their best efforts seem to be defeated. But it is the special privilege, the special grandeur, of the Christian Faith to have an explicit assurance of this truth from the mouth of the Judge Himself. He said unto His Apostle, “Write, for these words are true and faithful.” He, the King of Peace, left with His last Apostle the warnings and the promises of this Book. Lest men should be discouraged by the terrible experiences through which they were yet to pass, He warned them beforehand that such experiences were inevitable, and that the world would have to pass through a purgatory of this kind; but at the same time He told them that, when judgment was completed, a new Heaven and a new Earth would be the result, and He bade them be assured that, amidst whatever darkness and confusion, He wassitting on the throne making all things new.
All that we have to do individually is to see that we are true to Him, and in our hearts live in obedience to His will. In the text He goes on to say to the Apostle, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the water of life freely. He that overcometh shall inherit all things; andIwill be his God, and he shall be My son.” “Blessed,” he says again, “are they that do His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” We are not able, with our limited and earthly vision, to discern “the work that God worketh from the beginning of the world,” or the course of His judgments in the world at large. That is beyond us, and we must submit and take our part, whatever it may be, in these mysterious manifestations, possessing our souls in the patience which such assurances as those in the textcan alone provide. But we can have the comfort, for our own selves, of passing through this strange and painful scene in sure and certain hope of our ultimate blessedness, provided in our own hearts and souls we give ourselves up to the rule and the order of Him Who is the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, provided we make it the whole purpose of our lives to do His commandments, and, by His grace, overcome the evil which besets us in our own lives. Our personal and private lives reflect in greater or less degree those stern experiences which this Book describes in the case of the world at large. We have our sins, and as the consequences of our sins our sufferings and sorrows, desolations and punishments of various kinds, and we must expect to have to bear them till the moment of our departure arrives. But by God’s grace we are also allowed in some measure to anticipate the privilege which is held out to the world at large, and which is our own ultimate hope. The fulfilment of the blessed promise of making all things new is not merely commenced, but, if we will, is consciously commenced, within our hearts and souls while we are uponearth. “We ourselves,” says St. Paul, “groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body,” just as “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” But we have the first-fruits of the Spirit. His grace is within us at all times to give us new hearts and new spirits, to introduce His peace into our souls, and to enable us to spread that peace around us. Let us only seek it faithfully, and the renewing and replenishing water of life will restore us and maintain our energies, and will be in us as a well of water springing up into everlasting life.