Revelation 13:1,2

The third Woe, or the seventh Trumpet, came to an end with chap. 11; and, as the seven Trumpets followed immediately after the seven Seals, we might now have expected that these, in their turn, would be followed by the seven Bowls. The pouring out of these Bowls, however, does not begin until we reach chap. 15. Three Chapter s intervene; and it becomes both important and difficult to fix their place in the articulation of the Apocalypse as a whole. The inquiry is rendered more difficult than it might otherwise have been by the fact that chap. 12 seems distinctly to take us back to the beginning of the Christian era, to the birth of Christ. Can it be, then, that hitherto we have witnessed only the fortunes of the Jewish Church, and that the Christian Church is now to be brought before us in the wider sphere of the Gentile mission? The supposition is plausible, but it is hardly possible to accept it. The Church of Christ is not thus divided by St. John into two parts. He takes his figures, indeed, at one moment from Judaism, at another from Gentilism, but it is always one Church that he has in view, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek. The enemies of the Church, again, described in chaps, 12, 13, are certainly not peculiar to her Gentile branch, but are equally hostile to all believers from whatever quarter they come. The course of events, too, under the seven Bowls is so strictly parallel, though at the same time climactic, to that under the seven Trumpets, that it is impossible to regard the former in any other light than as a series of visions directed to the same object and filled with substantially the same meaning. How then explain this long intercalary portion of three Chapter s? The key is to be found in the words of Revelation 15:1, ‘Seven plagues, which are the last, for in them is finished the wrath of God.' We are on the verge of the seven final and most disastrous plagues. The moment is thus far more critical than any at which we have previously stood. The purposes of the Almighty are now to be fully accomplished. The whole mystery of His dealings with a sinful world to which He has offered salvation is about to end. No place, therefore, could be more suitable than the present for once more gathering together the main elements of the conflict and the main features of the result.

The first object of the Seer is to give us a full and correct idea of the three great enemies of the people of God. Of these the earliest and chief is the Dragon; and to make us acquainted at once with his power and with his weakness is the aim of chap. 12. The chapter obviously divides itself into three pans or scenes, the relation of which to one another will come before us in the course of exposition.