Revelation 14:6,7

And I saw another angel flying in the midst of the sky with an everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell upon the earth and to every race and tribe and tongue and people. And he was saying with a great voice: "Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and the springs of waters."

One of the signs which were to precede the end was that the gospel would be preached in all the world for a witness to all nations (Matthew 24:14). Here is the fulfilment of that prophecy. The angel comes with the message of the gospel to all races and tribes and tongues and peoples.

The angel comes with an everlasting gospel. Everlasting could mean that the gospel is eternally valid, that even in a world which is crashing to its doom its truth still stands. It could mean that the gospel has existed from all eternity. Paul in the great doxology in Romans speaks of Jesus Christ as the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began (Romans 16:25). It could mean that the gospel is the eternal purpose of God for man. It could mean that it deals with the eternal things.

It may seem strange that the angel with the gospel is followed immediately by the angels of doom. But the gospel has of necessity a double-edged quality. It is good news for those who receive it but it is judgment to those who reject it. And the condemnation of those who reject it is all the greater because they were given the chance to accept it.

The words of the angel are interesting. They are a summons to worship the God who is the Creator of all things. This message is not specifically Christian but the basis of all religion. It corresponds exactly to the message which Paul and Barnabas brought to the people of Lystra, when they told them that they must "turn from these vain things to a living God who made the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all that is in them" (Acts 14:15). H. B. Swete called this "an appeal to the conscience of untaught heathenism, incapable as yet of apprehending any other."

THE FALL OF BABYLON (Revelation 14:8)

14:8 And another angel, a second angel, followed him saying: "Fallen, fallen is the great Babylon, who made all the nations to drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication."

Here is prophesied the doom of Rome. Throughout the Revelation Rome is described as Babylon, a description which was common between the Testaments. The writer of 2Baruch begins his pronouncement against Rome: "I, Baruch, say this against thee, Babylon" (Baruch 11:1). When the Sibylline Oracles describe the imagined flight of Nero from Rome, they say: "Then shall flee from Babylon a king shameless and fearless, whom all mortals and the best men loathe" (Sibylline Oracles 5: 143). In the ancient days Babylon to the prophets had been the very incarnation of power and lust and luxury and sin; and to the early Jewish Christians Babylon seemed to have been reborn in the lust and luxury and immorality of Rome.

The fall of Babylon to Cyrus the Persian had been one of the shattering events of ancient history. The very words which the Revelation uses are echoes of those in which the ancient prophets had foretold that fall. "Fallen, fallen is Babylon, said Isaiah, "and all the images of her gods he has shattered to the ground" (Isaiah 21:9). "Suddenly Babylon has fallen, said Jeremiah, "and been broken" (Jeremiah 51:8).

Babylon is said to have made all the nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication. In this phrase two Old Testament conceptions have been fused into one. In Jeremiah 51:7 it is said of Babylon: "Babylon was a golden cup in the Lord's hand, making all the earth drunken; the nations drank of her wine; therefore, the nations went mad." The idea is that Babylon had been a corrupting force which had lured the nations into a kind of insane immorality. The background is the picture of a prostitute persuading a man into immorality by filling him full of wine, so that he could no longer resist her wiles. Rome has been like that, like some glittering prostitute seducing the world. The other picture is of the cup of the wrath of God. Job says of the wicked man: "Let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty" (Job 21:20). The Psalmist speaks of the wicked having to drink the dregs of the red cup in the hand of God (Psalms 75:8). Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem having drunk the cup of God's fury (Isaiah 51:17). God instructs Jeremiah to take the wine cup of his fury and to give it to the nations to drink (Jeremiah 25:15).

We might paraphrase by saying that Babylon made the nations drink of the wine which seduces men to fornication and which brings as its consequence the wrath of God.

Behind all this remains the eternal truth that the nation or the man whose influence is to evil will not escape the avenging wrath of God.

THE DOOM OF THE MAN WHO DENIES HIS LORD (Revelation 14:9-12)