Revelation 6:15-17

Revelation 6:15-17. (4) These verses contain the fourth and last member of the description. Of the persons on whom the terror of God's judgments falls prominence seems to be given to the first, the kings. The words of the earth are associated with them, and the other appellations follow for the purpose of enlarging and completing the idea. The word ‘earth' must again be understood in its usual acceptation, not the neutral earth, but the earth as opposed to heaven, the seat of ungodliness and sin. The righteous have thus no place in the enumeration which follows; but the ungodly without exception, whatever their rank or station, are divided into seven groups in order to indicate that none escape. In alarm at the awful judgments which they behold immediately impending, they rush into the caves of the mountains and into the rents of their rocks, in order to seek not safety but destruction. The crushing of the rocks is nothing compared with appearing before Him who sitteth upon the throne, and before the wrath of the Lamb. The question has been asked, how it happens that these ‘kings,' etc., use the language of Christians in speaking as they do of Him that sitteth upon the throne and of the Lamb. But the answer is not to be found in the idea that we have in them the Church in its Laodicean state. The use of the word ‘earth' would alone forbid such an interpretation. We have rather here one of the most striking lessons both of the Apocalypse and of the Fourth Gospel, that those who reject Jesus shall have in this their chief element of condemnation, that they shall fully know what they have done. They shall believe, but believe to their destruction, not to their salvation. They have loved the darkness. At last they shall have light, but of what a kind! They shall see, as do the redeemed, Christ's glory, but with this tremendous difference that, along with that sight, their eyes shall be opened to behold their own sin and folly in having rejected Him. The very fact that they are now compelled to use Christian language, to confess in trembling to the truths which they have hitherto scorned, is the most fearful element in their woe.

There remains still one question regarding the sixth seal which must be briefly noticed. Does it bring us down to the end of the world, to the final judgment; or does it not? One answer only can be given, that we reach here the beginning of the end. The use of the word great before day forbids the thought of judgments exhibited in phenomena of the world's history which are either simply local or preparatory to the final issue. Nor, when the structure of the Apocalypse is taken into account, does it militate against this view that, when we come to the Trumpets and the Bowls, we shall have to go back to a point of time much earlier than that at which we stand, and that any thought of a continuous progression of the events of the book will thus be destroyed. To look for continuous progression is forbidden by the Apocalypse itself (see Introduction). With the sixth seal we reach the end, but the end is not yet described.