6:10-17

Blood Vengeance

 

Revelation 6:10:  “How long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?

 

            The martyred souls who have been slain for their testimony and the Word of God cry out for vengeance.  This is in fulfillment of the prophecy in Jeremiah 51:35:

The violence done to me and to my flesh [be] upon Babylon shall the inhabitant of Zion say; and my blood upon the inhabitants of Chaldea, shall Jerusalem say.

 

            The blood of Christ and His kinsmen, the Church, cried out for vengeance against the Jews who had slain Christ and persecuted His Church to the death.  In the time that the book of Revelation was written, the “inhabitant of Zion” was the Church; “the inhabitants of Chaldea” were the Pharisees and the other unbelieving Jews.  Babylon” being the capital city of “Chaldea“, was therefore, in the first century, a cryptic title for the earthly, fallen city otherwise called Jerusalem.

 

Answers to This Prayer For Vengeance:

            6:12- Moon becomes blood.

            8:8- Sea becomes blood.

            11:6-Waters turned to blood.

            14:20-Blood comes from the wine-press of wrath.

            16:6-Blood to drink.

            18:24– “And in her, (The Fallen City of Jerusalem) was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”

            19:2-Praise for the vengeance that was requested in 6:10.

            19:13-Christ‘s vesture was dipped in the blood of the wine-press.

This ‘Babylon’ is undergoing the vengeance foretold by the prophet Jeremiah, (51:35-36), for shedding the innocent blood of Christ and His Church.

 

Judgment

 

Revelation 6:10:  How long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood”:

 

            Lightfoot in his commentary on Acts 28:4 points out that the Rabbinic tradition believed so strongly in divine vengeance that even though the Sanhedrin did not exist, that the guilty person would fall into his just reward anyway, (vol. 4. p. 150).

            In light of Christ‘s statement in Matthew 19:28:

And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, that ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (Matt. 19:28)

 

Lightfoot says that this was fulfilled in the vengeance upon the Jewish nation.  It was

Not the persons, but the doctrines of the twelve apostles, (that) should judge and condemn that most wicked nation. (Vol. 4.p. 198, his Commentary on 1 Cor. 6:2).

 

            On 1 Corinthians 6:3-4:

Know ye not that we shall judge angels? How much more things that pertain to this life? 4 If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church.

Lightfoot says that by the preaching of the Gospel, the apostles spoiled the devils of their oracles and worship, drove them from their place and stripped them of their dominion.  The Rabbinic tradition separated the pecuniary judgments of this world as opposed to the capital judgments. [Lightfoot, vol. 4, pp. 200-201] Therefore, Paul was saying that if Christians could make the capital judgments of devils, then surely they could make the pecuniary judgments of this world.  This is in reference also to the fact that capital judgments had been taken away from the Sanhedrin about forty years before the destruction of the temple, perhaps in connection with the death of Christ.

 

Shaking of the Heavens

 

Revelation 6:12-13 RSV: When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.”

 

            The “Day of the Lord” is described by the prophets as a time when the heavens will be shaken.  Joel describes it:

And I will give portents (signs) in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.  The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.  And it shall come to pass that all who call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls. (2:30-32 RSV).

This passage is quoted in Acts 2:16-21 as having been fulfilled on the day of Pentecost.

            What are we to make of this?  If these things had indeed been literally fulfilled at that time, where is the record of these astronomical events?  We know that the sun was literally darkened when Christ was crucified, (Matt. 27:45).  Otherwise, we have no historical record of such cosmic disasters at that time[1].  Indeed, the order of the heavens was so regular that God Himself could swear by it as an example of eternity:

Once for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David.  His line shall endure for ever, his throne as long as the sun before me.  Like the moon it shall be established for ever; it shall stand firm while the skies endure. (Psalm 89:35-7 RSV).

The fall of David‘s throne, therefore, would be as much a cosmic event as if the sun and moon had fallen or been darkened.

            Jeremiah also sees God’s covenant with Israel as analogous to the Covenant of Time:

Thus says the Lord: If I have not established my covenant (berith) with day and night and the ordinances (chuqoth) of heaven and earth, then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his descendants to rule over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  For I will restore their fortunes, and will have mercy upon them. (33:25-6 RSV).

 

The word berith is usually translated ‘covenant’ and is the same word used for the covenant with Israel.  The word chuqoth is usually translated ‘ordinances’ and is the word used elsewhere for the ordinances of the Law.  (See also Jeremiah 31:35-6).

            In the language of time-telling, Israel‘s Temple was used as the reference point for the prime meridian and its various aspects as the marker of solstices, equinoxes, points of the moon’s movements and possibly the zenith and other significant factors.  When this structure was destroyed along with the very walls and gates of the city, there was nothing left by which to determine the exact time, just as if the very sun, moon and stars themselves had changed their eternal patterns.  As the earthly reference point, the Temple was part of the cosmic order.

            Joel had also described these events of the “Day of the Lord,” as the time: [1] when the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem would be restored, (3:1); [2] a time when the nations would be judged, (3:12); and, [3] a time of cosmic cataclysm when the sun, moon, and stars would be darkened for the multitudes in the valley of decision, (3:14-15).  For those who had not chosen the Lord, there came spiritual darkness and consequent destruction.

            Amos also foresaw the utter destruction of the ten-tribe nation Israel as a cosmic event, (Amos 8:2).  In this context he describes the fall:

‘And on that day,’ says the Lord God, ‘I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight’. (8:9 RSV).

This can only mean the spiritual sun of that nation, and must be understood in the allegorical sense.

            Jeremiah describes the predicted fall of Jerusalem to Babylon:

She who bore seven has languished; she has swooned away; her sun went down while it was yet day; she has been shamed and disgraced.” (15:9 RSV).

Clearly the meaning here is not a literal change in the motion of the universe, but rather a spiritual condition of Jerusalem.

            Isaiah‘s prophecy of the doom of Babylon also includes the prediction of cosmic disorientation:

Behold the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.  For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light. (13:9-10 RSV). 

The shaking of the heavens expresses the disorientation resulting from a complete change in the cultural environment of the people whose national and religious structures had fallen.

            Micah foretold that the false prophets were bringing night upon Jerusalem by their false prophecies:

Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision, and darkness to you, without divination.  The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them. (Micah 3:6 RSV).

 

Without the light of God’s prophetic word, the nation walked in spiritual darkness.  Again the meaning is that the natural, physical lights are an allegory of spiritual conditions.

            Forsaking the true word of the Lord and consulting mediums and wizards instead brings on this spiritual darkness.  Such words will not bring the “dawn” of the knowledge of God.  Isaiah describes their plight:

They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry; and when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will curse their king and their God, and turn their faces upward; and they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick darkness.  (Isaiah 8:21-22 RSV).

 

            But the light of salvation will come:

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.  (9:2 RSV).

 

This Light is brought by the birth of the Holy Child:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’  Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore.  The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.  (9:6-7 RSV).

            Isaiah 9:2 is quoted in Matthew 4:15-16 as fulfilled in the birth of Christ.  According to Jeremiah 33:25-6 only One person is required to keep the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in effect, and Christ is that One.  Those who refuse to accept Him fall into the kingdom of darkness.

            Clearly, the terms ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ describe spiritual conditions analogous to the physical sensations.  Satan is the “world ruler of this present darkness,” (Eph. 6:12), and those in his kingdom are in the kingdom of darkness.  Conversely, Christ‘s kingdom is the kingdom of Light, and “He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” (Col. 1:13 RSV).

            Although the greater significance of these Scriptures is in their spiritual application and their greater meaning is to be found in the analogy of natural to spiritual light, it is also Scriptural to assume that there will be great natural, cataclysmic, cosmic events accompanying the final Great Day of the Lord, just as there was upon Judea and Jerusalem in AD 70.  One precedent for this assumption is the great flood of Noah’s time.  While some scholars view this as merely an extraordinary local flood of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in which about eight feet of silt was laid down, this does not at all satisfy the requirements of the Biblical account.  The waters are said to have covered the mountains; the fountains of the great deep were broken up.  It seems that there were not only torrents of rain from above, but also geysers and volcanoes of water from beneath.

            Archaeologists believe that the axis of the earth has been changed suddenly and drastically at various times in the past by some cataclysmic event such as a collision of the earth with some other body.  This is witnessed to by the finding of quick-frozen woolly mammoths in the arctic region with butter-cups still in their mouths.  There is also a layer of cosmic ash in the strata which marks the close of the age of dinosaurs.  This witnesses to some kind of cosmic event such as a gigantic meteor striking the earth.  These kinds of events could have changed the entire orientation of the earth and would have literally darkened the sun, moon, and stars by the pollution of the atmosphere around the earth.

            If indeed the Flood was such an event, Mankind would have needed to remap the entire earth and re-orient themselves to the heavens.  There would have been no recognizable landmarks from the previous era.  It would have been as if it were a new heavens and a new earth.  Some such event will accompany that final Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.  In the meantime, we can take the fall of the nation of Judah, and Jerusalem, its capitol city, as the pattern which we can expect to see replicated when any nation or tribe or people forget God, refuse His chastening, and so come under His wrath.

            In the destruction of Jerusalem, there were signs in the heavens according to JosephusWars of the Jews (6.5.3):

Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city, and a comet, that continued a whole year.  Thus also, before the Jews’ rebellion, and before those commotions which preceded the war, when the people were come in great crowds to the feast of unleavened bread, on the eighth day of the month Xanthicus* [Nisan] and at the ninth hour of the night, so great a light shone round the altar and the holy house, that it appeared to be bright day-time; which light lasted for half an hour.  This light seemed to be a good sign to the unskillful, but was so interpreted by the sacred scribes as to portend those events that followed immediately upon it….Besides these, a few days after that feast, on the one-and-twentieth day of the month Artemisius, [Jyar,] a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared; I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armour were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities.

            Josephus also mentions an eruption of Vesuvius in Nero’s day (Wars 4.4.5; 6.5.3).  It is altogether possible that such an eruption may have literally darkened the sun, moon and stars.

 

Day of Wrath

 

Revelation 6:17:  “The great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?”

            The Day of Wrath is proclaimed.  It is the Day of the Lord, (or Lord’s Day of 1:10), the day of Vengeance.  The proclamation is that that Great and Notable Day has arrived.


442 We do know that there was an eruption of Vesuvius in AD 64 which spread pumice and ash over the land up to 70 kilometers, about 43.5 miles.  This event could well have darkened the heavens and made the moon appear red as blood as far as Jerusalem.

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