Revelation 14:14-20

14–20. There are two difficulties in these verses: one is, are they a vision of the Last Judgement? the other, is the Reaper Christ the Lord? The first is not the hardest: if we suppose the visions to have been seen at intervals, it would disappear altogether, for it is clear that if so, chaps, 13, 14 if not 12–14, are a whole in themselves, of which Revelation 15:2-4 are the epilogue: even if chaps, 4–22 are the record of a single ecstasy, it would still be true that each of its stages seems to close with a glimpse of the end, which afterwards is more fully revealed (see on Revelation 6:12 and parallels). Apart from this, the order in which the visions succeed each other, though doubtless always significant, cannot be pressed as marking in all cases the chronological succession of the events foreshewn. Revelation 11:7 in some sense anticipates the events of chap. 13, while chap. 12 goes back to events earlier, probably, than any others indicated in the book. In this chapter itself we have in Revelation 14:8 an anticipation of chap. 18. We need not therefore hesitate to suppose that here we have an anticipation of chap. 20. And a vision of the Last Judgement might be fitly interposed here to encourage “the patience of the Saints” that is to be so sorely tried. But if the Harvest here too is the End of the World, must not the Reaper be Christ? He is seen sitting on a cloud: is it not He Who comes with the clouds, Revelation 1:7? He is like a Son of Man: is it not He Who in the same likeness walks in the midst of the Seven Golden Candlesticks? It is no difficulty that He waits for God’s word to thrust in the sickle: so far Alford’s reference to Acts 1:7 is relevant, see also St John 5:19; John 5:30; but this does not meet the difficulty that the word is sent to Him by an Angel out of the unseen depths of the heavenly temple. Not to quote the parable of the tares, where the Son of Man Himself sends forth His Angels to reap, how are we to harmonise such a representation with the homage paid by the Angels to the Lamb, Who has prevailed to open the Book with the Seven Seals, on which they are not able so much as to look? Then again, if the Reaper be Christ, what of the Angel with the sickle who gathers the clusters of the vine of earth, and casts them into a winepress that, it seems, a multitude of horsemen tread? The Rider of the White Horse, in chap. 19, has trodden the winepress alone on earth: that is why He rides in blood-dipt raiment at the head of the white-robed armies of heaven. Tyconius seems to have turned the difficulty by applying his rule that what is said of Christ may be understood of His Body the Church, which may certainly be enlightened by angels in her office of judging the world. If so, the figure of the Son of Man would come back to its primary sense in Daniel, where it certainly symbolises the whole body of the Saints of the Most High. If this be unsatisfactory, we must choose between putting on the words, “one like unto the (or ‘a,’ see on Revelation 1:13) Son of Man,” the gloss “An Angel in the likeness of the Messiah” (which in view of Revelation 14:17-20 is not impossible, though difficult), and supposing that the Seer is reproducing in some measure the language of Jewish apocalypses without being led to supply their shortcomings. In the former case we should also have to suppose that one of God’s typical and anticipatory judgements is described in terms suitable to the last. Then it might be possible that the Reaping was suggested by the first stage of the Jewish War, and the Vintage by the second and more terrible, of which the scene was Jerusalem: as Nero, seen spiritually, bore the likeness of the Beast, Vespasian, or “his angel,” may have borne the likeness of a son of man.