Revelation 13:7-8

To make war with the saints.

War with the saints

Observe--

1. A war proclaimed; the beast makes war upon the saints, by bloodshed and persecution, and by the force of those weapons overcomes them; that is to outward appearance and in the opinion of the world. But really do the saints overcome him by their patience under sufferings, and by adhering to the truth.

2. The large extent of the beast’s power that was given him, namely, over all kindreds, tongues, and nations. Christ’s flock is a little flock, compared with antichrist’s herd: how wrong a note then is multitude of the right Church?

3. That as the power of the beast is universal, so is the worship also. “All that dwell on the earth shall worship him.”

4. We have a number excepted, “Whose names are written in the book of life.” Christ has His number of faithful ones, who are not defiled by antichrist’s pollutions; a number whose conversations are in heaven.

5. The title here given to our Lord Jesus Christ, He is styled “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (W. Burkitt, M. A.)

The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.--

Christ sacrificed in eternity

I. The things that are to happen in the universe in the most distant future are to God as facts already accomplished.

1. God’s intelligence is infinite.

2. God’s purposes are unfrustrable.

II. The principle of self-sacrificing love is an eternal principle in the creation.

1. It is the root of the universe.

2. It is typified in all material existences.

3. It agrees with the moral constitution of the soul, which is so formed--

(1) That it can recognise nothing as morally praiseworthy that does not spring from it.

(2) Its conscience can approve of no act of its own that is not inspired by it.

(3) Its happiness can be realised only as it is controlled by it.

III. Redemption is no afterthought in the arrangements of the universe.

IV. Our planet was probably formed for the special purpose of becoming the theatre of God’s redemptive love to man. Small in bulk as our planet is, compared with that of other orbs that roll in splendour under the eye of God, it has a grand moral distinction. Its dust formed, its fruit fed the body of the Son of God. Here He lived, laboured, suffered, and was buried, and here His grand work is being carried on. If it be moral facts that give importance to places, is there a more important spot than this earth? (D. Thomas, D. D.)

Eternal atonement

The prevalent opinion no doubt has been that the atonement is simply an historic fact, dating back now some fourteen hundred years; and that only the purpose of it is eternal. But Johann Wessel, the great German theologian, who died only six years after Martin Luther was born, got hold of the idea that not election only, but atonement also is an eternal act. And this, it seems to me, is both rational and Scriptural. Eternal election, profoundly considered, requires eternal atonement for its support. Both are eternal, as all Divine realities are eternal. And so the relationship of God to moral evil stands forth as an eternal relationship. Not that evil is itself eternal; but God always knew it and always felt it. It may help our thinking in this direction to remember that there is a sense in which creation itself is eternal; not independently eternal, but, of God’s will, dependently eternal. There must nothing be said, or thought, in mitigation of the ethical verdict against moral evil. The hatefulness of it, no matter what its chronology may be, is simply unspeakable. Wrong doing is the one thing nowhere, and never, to be either condoned or endured. Nor should any attempt be made to get at the genesis of moral evil. The beginning of it is simply inconceivable. The whole thing is a mystery, and must be let alone. Moral evil is not eternal; or there would be two infinities. Nor is it a creature of God; or God would be divided against Himself. And yet it had the Divine permission, whatever that may be imagined to have been. Practically, historic sin finds relief in historic redemption. Apparently, there was little, if any, interval between the two. But the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world suggests a far sublimer theodicy. We are taken back behind the human ages, behind all time, into awful infinite depths, into the very bosom of the Triune God. Trinity is another name for the self-consciousness, and self-communion of God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are vastly more than the revelation of God to man; they are the revelation of God to Himself, and the intercourse of God with Himself. They suggest infinite fulness and richness of being. Our scientific definitions of God do not amount to much. What we need is to see God in the life, both of nature and of man. God creates, governs, judges, punishes, redeems, and saves; but love is the root of all. This yearning, grieved, and suffering God is the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: Son of God, Son of Mary. This sinless child should have had no sins of His own. His sorrows could have been only those old eternal shadows of permitted sin. The Cross on which He died, flinging out its arms as if to embrace the world, lifted up its head toward the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Our hearts now go back to Calvary; and from Calvary they go up to God. One word more. This stupendous idea of eternal atonement carries with it the idea of universal atonement. Whatever it was, and is, it must needs have been infinite. No magnitude of sin, no multitude of sinners, can bankrupt its treasury of grace. “God so loved the world,” is its everlasting refrain. “He that will, let him take the water of life freely.” (R. D. Hitchcock, D. D.)

The Lamb slain

I. The designation here given to the Saviour. He is called “the Lamb.” This is a most appropriate title, since we look upon a lamb as the emblem of innocence, gentleness, and submission; qualities of goodness in which the blessed Redeemer was pre-eminent, and fairer than the children of men.

II. The slaughter. “The Lamb slain.” The slaughtered Lamb was a prominent element in the Jewish ritual, and a standing type of the Lamb of God, whose obedience unto death procured the life of the world. There were three remarkable instances of this under the Old Testament dispensation. The first is the case of Abraham in offering his son Isaac. St. Paul tells us that this was a figure of the death and resurrection of Christ. The second distinct instance of the typical allusion, is the paschal lamb. This is shown by the observation of St. Paul, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast. The third instance in which this animal is used as a type of Christ was on the daily sacrifice.

III. The date of this transaction--“from the foundation of the world.” How is this to be understood?

1. He was slain in the purpose of God. Contingency with man is certainty with God. Purpose and accomplishment are the same with Him.

2. Not only in purpose but in type is the doctrine true.

3. He was so in effect. (American National Preacher.)

The place of the Cross in the world

The Lamb is said to have been slain from the foundation of the world. It was not the result of an accident; it was not the result of an emergency; it was something involved in the plan of the creation itself--a design of its being. Its first stone was laid with a view to the development of the sacrificial life. Was St. John, then, an optimist, or a pessimist? In the worldly sense of these words he was something different from either, and something which admitted a truth in both. On the one hand he holds with the worldly optimist that all things do work for the highest good; the universe is to him the product of love. But on the other hand, just because it is the product of love, he could never admit that it is a field for self-gratification. He found in it a sphere that, from the beginning to the end of the day, disappointed every selfish hope, wrecked every ship that sailed only for its own cargo. And why so? Because to him the essence of God was love. If God be love, the highest good must be to be made in the image of love. St. John asked himself how that could be done on the Greek principle of self-indulgence, or the Jewish principle of s physical Messiah. He felt that if the end of life were simply to wear purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day, and if life itself were amply suited to such an end, then life was incompatible with love. This world, in short, is to St. John a development and an upward development; but it is a development of self-sacrifice. The Apocalypse has been called a sensuous book; it is to my mind the least sensuous book in the Bible. It describes the process of the ages as a process of self-surrender. This, then, is the meaning of the passage, “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” It means that Christ was all along the goal of creation, and that creation is a making for Christ. More particularly, it means that the line of this world’s progress has been a development of self-sacrifice. It seems to me that in this last point the writer of the Apocalypse has come nearer to a philosophy of history than all who went before him. If you take any other line of progress you will fail, in my opinion, to prove that there has been an advance in the march from the old to the new. Shall we take intellect? Do we feel that the amount of mind force is greater in the modern Englishman than it was in the ancient Greek? It would be difficult to feel it, and it would be impossible to prove it: are Plato and Aristotle inferior to the best intellects among us? Shall we take imagination? Have we reached the architectural conception which planned the pyramids? Have we outrun the triumphs of Greek sculpture? Have we surpassed the poetry of Homer? Have we sustained the fame of the mediaeval painters? Have you ever considered how much of invention is itself due to the spread of the unselfish principle? Why have the great ages of discovery been the ages after Christ? Is it not just because Christ has been before them? Is it not because the spirit of sacrifice has awakened man to the wants of man? The times of self-seeking were not the times of invention. St. John says creation is moving toward a type--a lamb slain, and it is moving toward that type in a straight line--the line of sacrifice. It is climbing to its goal by successive steps which might be called steps downward--increasing limitations of the self-life. To what extent did St. John see this? He saw in visible nature a series of gospel pictures; everything seemed to live only by losing itself. He saw the waves of the sea of Patmos passing into waves of light; he beheld the waves of light passing into eddies of the sea. It seemed to him that even in that lonely spot God had inscribed upon the walls of nature the image of a cross. By and by, before the eyes of the seer there flashed a higher order of creation, and it was clothed in the same garb--the robe of sacrifice. He passed from the pictorial representation of sacrifice in nature to its actual, though involuntary, representation in animal life. The very reference to a slain lamb is a reference to an animal sacrifice. How did St. John reconcile himself to that spectacle of an involuntary sacrifice of the animal life prescribed by the Old Testament? He said it was a type of Christ. If sacrifice be the law of the highest being, it is desirable to reach it. You can only reach anything by a repeated experience of it. There passed before him the natural sacrifices of the human heart. I believe that the cares of the heart prevent every man from living the full amount of his natural years. What is the difference, then, between the sacrifice of the animal and the sacrifice of the man? It is an inward difference; the obligatory has become the voluntary. What has made it voluntary? It is love, a force to which in the animal world nothing exactly corresponds, a force which adds to the sacrifice, and at the same time helps to bear it. And yet merely natural love is far from having reached the goal. It is noble; it is beautiful; but it is not the topmost triumph. The mother’s love, the brother’s love, the husband’s love, the son and daughter’s love, are each and all the search for something kindred to ourselves. St. John looks out for a vaster type--a love that can come where there is no kindred, no sympathy. He seeks a love that shall strive for the survival of the unfittest--the blood of a spotless soul that can wash the sins of the absolutely impure. This is to John the perfect type of altruism--the Lamb that was slain. It is the progress towards this type that constitutes to St. John the philosophy o| history. (G. Matheson, D. D.)