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Revelation (Part 19)

Revelation 14:6–20

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 14:6–20


Now we come to really the second and third parts of 144,000, but in one sense, these two parts of chapter 14, verses 6–13 and then 14–20, are one. That is, they both have to do with judgment over against the first five verses, which we looked at last week, which really have to do with the people of God who are not condemned.

In other words, the first part, verses 1–5, sees the 144,000, the people of God, on Mount Zion with Christ. They have the mark of the Lamb, and they’re characterized in a number of ways, purchased from among men, and so forth. Now over against this there’s warning for everybody else. The result is a chapter that is, in many ways, simply horrific. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Because it raises so many questions in the contemporary mind about the eternality of hell and justice of God and things like that, it is important to stop and think it through carefully, see what it says, and then to ponder how this fits into the Bible generally and to what the Bible says about the love of God and so forth. So we will pause for a little extra theological reflection on this one, if you don’t mind.

Before we press on with the text, it’s worth pausing just for a moment to remember just how much of the Bible is given over to the theme of judgment. It is true and right to remember that the Bible as a whole is good news, but the Bible as a whole is good news only when we recognize how extraordinarily insistent the Bible is on our condemnation, on our genuine guilt, on all the bad news, if you like.

In fact, there is a sense in which the good news doesn’t make much sense unless one sees how much bad news there is in the Bible. If we have nothing to be saved from, then we don’t need a savior. Even when you just start looking at the frequency of the material, the frequency of the emphases, it is quite striking. You start off with Genesis 1 and 2 and creation. In Genesis 3 you already have the fall, a sentence of death, pain in childbearing, ground that requires hard labor in order to eat, smashed relationships, banishment from the garden of Eden.

The next few chapters you’re introduced to murder and mayhem and sex orgies and drunkenness and eventually all the destruction of chapters 6–9 and the whole cursing of the entire race, the flood. Noah gets out of that and promptly gets drunk. Then when you move to Exodus and Leviticus, not only do you see the individual evil of, let’s say, slavery, the oppression of the people of God, but you also see an awful lot of evil amongst the people of God. One of the slaves wants to kill another one of the slaves, if you recall.

When God does promise release through Moses, they don’t really believe. There’s endless murmuring and unbelief and doubt and complaining and jealousy for position and jockeying. You move to Leviticus, and you have endless chapters on clean and unclean and sacrifices and blood. Most of us nowadays haven’t been reared on a farm, but if you kill an animal by slitting its throat, there’s a lot of blood around.

The fact of the matter is when Solomon dedicated the temple that he built, there were 300,000 sheep killed. Can you imagine the blood and the gore? What’s it saying? That’s quite apart from all of the struggles to get into the land. Think of all of the curses in Deuteronomy toward the end, blessings and curses, but the curses are pretty horrific.

Then you come to Judges, one unending spiral downward with the constant refrain. “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes.” It just gets worse and worse and worse until you have the terrific story of the Levite with his concubine finally killed after being raped and molested and attacked. He slices her up and sends parts of her body around to the various tribes and says, “Is this what you want?”

There are some wonderful moments of heroism in 1 and 2 Samuel, but you also have wonderful barbarity, and even a man who is described as a man after God’s own heart manages to have an affair with Bathsheba and then arrange to have her husband killed. Kings and Chronicles take us through successive stages of decaying dynasty into the exile. Ezra no sooner has the temple going up again then everybody is trying to have mixed marriages and compromise the covenant.

Nehemiah finds problems. Look at the kinds of things that discourage David in the Psalms. Then you read the Prophets, Jeremiah and Lamentations. It’s not for nothing that Jeremiah is called the Weeping Prophet. All of the prophets connected with the exile. You turn to the New Testament and read what Jesus has to say in Matthew 23. “Woe to you, snakes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.” Think what he says of Judas Iscariot, saying it would have been better for him never to have been born.

Think what he says in the Sermon on the Mount. You ask the man on the street, “What’s the Sermon on the Mount?” If he knows anything about the Bible, he’s going to say, “Well, that’s the bit where you’re supposed to love one another and turn the other cheek.” Yes, read Matthew, chapter 7, the last part of the Sermon on the Mount, verses 21–23.

“Then will I say, ‘Depart from me, you cursed. I never knew you.’ ” That’s also in the Sermon on the Mount. “You workers of iniquity,” and so on. In a sense, therefore, when we come to Revelation 14, verses 6–20, it is important to remember the flow of the book, and it is important to remember how important the theme of judgment is in the entire Canon. In that sense, it is not anomalous. However unpleasant it is, it is not anomalous.

In chapter 12, you have Satan, the dragon, pursuing the people of God, operating through the two beasts in chapter 13, over against them, the people of God in chapter 14, verses 1–5. Now, before the final plagues are poured out in chapters 15–16 we find two horrific sections that, in fact, speak powerfully of judgment on all that opposes God. The first is the three heralds and their pronouncements, and the second is the figure of the harvest.

1. The three heralds and their pronouncements.

Verses 6–13: “Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.’ A second angel followed and said, ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.’

A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: ‘If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever.

There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name.’ This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s commandments and remain faithful to Jesus. Then I heard a voice from heaven say, ‘Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.’ ”

We see there are three heralds, three angels. Angels, as we’ve seen, are typical in apocalyptic literature, and they offer proclamations that are, as someone has said, interrelated and progressive. They’re all dealing with the same sort of thing, but they gradually take the narrative on a little bit farther each time.

A. The first angel summons all humankind to fear God and worship him.

Verses 6–7. We’re told he’s flying in midair, literally in mid-heaven, but it means almost certainly in this context the first heaven, which is our atmosphere, so we would say midair. That is, flying above to be seen and heard by all, as in chapter 8, verse 13, of the eagle of woe.

The proclamation again is to those who live on the earth (verse 6). That is, to people who are habitually tied to this fallen world order. Then it’s made clear, nevertheless, that this is not some small target. It’s to every nation, tribe, language, and people, to people everywhere. Now what is the content of the summons? There are basically two views, and it is very important to distinguish between them.

Some take the content of the “eternal gospel,” as the expression is.… “He had the eternal gospel to proclaim.” (Verse 6) Some take the content to be verse 7. In that case, the content of the eternal gospel in this context is, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.”

The result, if this interpretation were correct, is that the eternal gospel in this context is not what we normally mean by the gospel (that is, God’s redeeming grace in Christ Jesus by the death of God’s Son) but a final appeal to all humankind to turn to the God revealed in creation and conscience. There are variations on this. One party thinks, for example, that this final threat comes as the announcement of the end itself, and so forth.

Moreover, this interpretation today has become very common amongst those who want to argue for what is called an inclusivist view of redemption. Let me explain. There are three views along this particular axis: the exclusivist view, the inclusivist view, and the universalist view. In the universalist view, everyone will be saved at some point, without exception.

There are many subcategories under that sort of interpretation. Some say all religions are basically saying the same thing. Some are saying that transparently they’re not saying the same thing but they all reflect a greater reality than any one of them can express, or something like that. Some say they will all be saved at the end, but people will be redeemed out of hell, as it were. God’s love will still be pursuing people in hell itself until finally everybody is saved and hell is emptied of all of its citizens.

No matter how you cut it, that ends up in universalism. Most people who take their Bibles seriously don’t espouse that view. There are just too many texts that warn of things in quite a different mode, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time dealing with that one here. At the opposite end of the spectrum is what is often called the exclusivist view. That is, only those people are saved who self-consciously repose faith in Jesus Christ.

They would acknowledge that before Jesus Christ, they self-consciously reposed faith in the God who has disclosed himself up to that point in redemptive history by abandoning themselves to him in terms of the means of grace he has provided, which from our point of view, we look forward to Christ, but it’s still the same thing. The inclusivist view argues that if anyone is saved, he or she is saved by Jesus Christ and by no other but that such salvation is possible for some, even if they’ve never heard of Jesus Christ.

That is to say, from conscience or from whatever light they’ve received in creation, conscience, or whatever, they abandon themselves to the God they must see is there, and they say just, “God save me,” and he saves them by Jesus Christ even though they never hear of him. Thus many may be saved, maybe millions, maybe billions, from pagan backgrounds who have never heard of Jesus Christ but are nevertheless saved by him.

That view is today extremely common even amongst many confessing evangelicals. It starts off in a way that you can almost find faultless. That is to say, you don’t want to disallow the possibility that God may miraculously by his Spirit so prepare someone before a missionary gets there, for example, that when the missionary comes, the person is redeemed. Well, supposing the missionary had been dropped from an airplane before he got there.

Would the person, therefore, not be redeemed? You start working on hypothetical ifs, ands, ors, and buts … this sort of thing. After all, if Romans 1 and 2 say that God’s law is written on the heart, is it not at least possible that by God’s grace he might work in them so that they do call out and ask for mercy and ask for forgiveness without knowing much more than that?

So what is sort of allowed as a thin-edged possibility suddenly becomes in more recent literature in this age of pluralism not a thin-edged possibility that might be allowed under certain circumstances but somehow a way of saying that virtually nice people everywhere, provided they’re sincere and turn to God and ask for help, are converted.

So while it is still possible to argue that Christianity is the only way, the fact of the matter is, de facto, people are beginning to say that people can come from all kinds of religious backgrounds. That’s the inclusivist view. That view is often judged, then, to have support from this passage with this first interpretation. That is to say, here the good news is not “Trust in Jesus Christ and be saved.”

The good news on this view is chapter 14, verse 7, and the gospel in this context is a final appeal to all humankind to turn to the God revealed in creation. “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship the Creator; that is, the one who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the springs of water.”

For all that that view is increasingly common even amongst confessing evangelicals, I have to say I think it is wrong. I can just about allow the thin edge of the wedge under certain remote circumstances. It is a possibility in one text in Romans 2. I don’t take it that way, but I can’t quite rule it out. But I’m persuaded that many of the texts that are used to prove this point are really very mistaken, and this exegesis in this passage is also very mistaken.

You can test it at its more extreme point this way. If you assume, for example, that all kinds of people who are sincere in their faith and do seek God within the lights they have are genuinely saved, then surely on this light, if then they are presented with the gospel, they should instantly receive it, but that’s not what happens.

As a rule, the more sincere people are in their faith when they’re confronted with the gospel of Christ, the more they oppose it. It’s far more difficult to work with devout Muslims in Saudi Arabia than it is with secularists who don’t give a rip about anything in downtown Milwaukee. So do all of these people who are saved because they’re sincere and devout and have called on God in some sense.… Do they all then instantly lose their salvation now that they’ve been confronted by the gospel?

In other words, even the realm of experience in missionary endeavor begins to call this whole pattern into question. Moreover, I just don’t think it deals fairly with the way the Bible.… Paul in particular but the flow of the Old Testament and so on … deals with the nature of where religion comes from. It’s not that there is no truth in any other religion. There’s all kinds of truth reflected in all kinds of religion, of course.

For a start, it shows that human beings are incurably religious. That is, we want something beyond ourselves. We have an urge for the transcendent. We’re not simply naturalistic. We’re not locked in space and time, but we’re so turned from the God who made us that, at the end of the day, the knowledge of God that the race once enjoyed has been twisted in various ways until you finally have whole systems of religion that are miles from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ or from the God who discloses himself in Old Testament terms.

There are whole structures of pantheism, for example, in which every thing is god. That’s the heart line of a great deal of Buddhism. Forms of syncretism, the heart line of a great deal of Hinduism, and so forth. So you’re not dealing with things that are a little bit off. You’re dealing with fundamental notions of God that are the antithesis of what the Bible says about God. It’s a god manufactured because we have to have a god, but it’s not the God of the Bible. It’s not that there’s nothing to be learned from them. Of course there are things to be learned from them.

Inevitably, there’s some form of reverence in the one or some ethic of love in the other or whatever. The question is whether such knowledge is redeeming knowledge, saving knowledge. I’ve pursued that question for about a chapter in a book that’s now in the press, and I’m not going to pursue it any longer here except insofar as this particular passage is concerned, since my focus here is not on the whole structure of biblical and systematic theology but of the exegesis of Revelation.

In my view, the second interpretation of this passage is far more likely. It is this. The term gospel is by the end of the first century so strong and univocal a term wherever it’s used in the church that there is very little doubt of its content. In other words, it’s used so constantly.… It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus Christ, his coming, his death, his resurrection. Salvation is brought from God by him and by him alone. That is so common a term it just is not used anywhere else in the whole Bible in any other way.

Therefore, when you approach this text and he says he had the eternal gospel to proclaim, I don’t think any reader in the first century would see it as anything other than that. Moreover, it is the only thing that fits where we’ve been in the text already. Don’t forget how this whole series of visions kicked off in chapters 4 and 5. In chapter 5, there is only one way in which God’s purposes for redemption and judgment would be brought about.

How? Only one person could approach this God and take from him the scroll that was in the right hand and slit the seven seals to bring those things about. Only one, and that one is the lion who is the lamb, the one who comes from the throne and who has been a slaughtered lamb but now reigns. In other words, the whole development of the book turns on that whole vision in chapters 4 and 5, and now to start arguing that, “Oh well, it doesn’t really have to be that way after all,” is a bit much.

That means, then, that the connection between verses 6 and 7 is a little different. Chapter 14, verse 7, does not give the content of the eternal gospel. The content of the eternal gospel is already presupposed by the word itself. Verse 7, then, does not give the content of the eternal gospel but lays out the obligation of all humankind in the wake of the announcement of the gospel.

In other words, the announcement of the gospel follows hard on 14:1–5. In fact, the Greek is even stronger yet. It’s not just having the eternal gospel; it’s having the eternal gospel to gospel. Gospel can be used as a verb in Greek. The NIV has “He had the eternal gospel to proclaim.” Literally, it’s having the eternal gospel to gospel, almost as if John is using the one technical word that cannot be understood by any Christian in the first century in any other way than by what we mean by gospel.

Then verse 7 lays out the obligation of all humankind in the wake of the announcement of the gospel. “The gospel is announced. Therefore, fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come.” In other words, it’s a bit like the ending of a sermon in the book of Acts. You get the sermon, and then you have the people crying out, “Men and brothers, what shall we do?” at the end of chapter 2. The answer is, “Repent.” It’s the same sort of thing. Here is the obligation that follows the announcement of the gospel.

B. The second angel announces the impending downfall of paganism.

Verse 8: “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which makes all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.” This is, in effect, an announcement of what goes on in chapters 17–18 that we’ll look at later … chapter 17, Babylon sitting on the beast, and then chapter 18, the fall of Babylon. It is an announcement of all of this.

The language is drawn from the Old Testament. Isaiah 21:9: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon,” referring to Babylon on the Euphrates. Jeremiah 51:7: “Babylon was a gold cup in the Lord’s hand; she made the whole earth drunk. The nations drank her wine; therefore they have now gone mad.”

That’s what the language is drawn from. Babylon the Great. The expression occurs in 14:8, 16:9, 17:5, and three times in chapter 18. The historical Babylon in the time of the book of Revelation is an insignificant village. It’s irrelevant. But the language is drawn from the Old Testament. We think, for example, of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel, chapter 4, before he’s driven mad. “Is not this mighty Babylon which I have built?” The hanging gardens of Babylon were considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

It became, therefore, proverbial for self-absorption, for standing under the curse of God precisely because it was a kind of focal point of human pride and human achievement, a kind of more recent example of the tower of Babel. Babel and Babylon are not accidental euphonies. Clearly, as we have seen already, it’s tied to Rome in the first century. We’ll see that more clearly yet in chapter 17.

In principle, it is applied to every center of God-denying, God-destroying, human-centered culture. What the book of Revelation says again and again is that society set free from God is its own worst enemy, and this mighty Babylon has made all of the other nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries. That is imagery taken up in chapter 17 again that we’ll look at in the next hour.

Perhaps I should say in passing that there is a debate as to what exactly Babylon the Great has made the nations drink. The text says, if I were translating the text literally word for word, “The wine of the wrath of her fornication,” but the word rendered wrath can mean passion. Hence, some versions say, “The wine of her passionate immorality.” The NIV says, “The maddening wine of her adulteries.”

The word rendered passionate or maddening in some of our translations normally in the Bible just means wrath, in which case it’s not just that Babylon makes the nations drink the wine of her adulteries, in which wine makes her mad, just intoxicates her with this same self-centered approach to everything (that theme is picked up in verse 17) but rather makes her drink the wine of the wrath of her fornication.

That is to say, it not only makes her fornicate spiritually in the sense we’ve just seen at the end of verse 5, if you recall.… “They kept themselves from women.” We’ve seen that that is drawn from the Old Testament, having to do with not sexual purity or knocking down women but keeping themselves from spiritual adultery, spiritual apostasy. Here the nations have been drinking the wine of the fornication of the empire, and we’ll see exactly how that’s unpacked in chapter 17.

This brings wrath, so if they have been indulging in this kind of spiritual apostasy, the inevitable result is they’re attracting the wrath of God. That’s what they’ve been drinking. Thus, there’s a concatenation of ideas. What Rome thinks she’s dishing out is not really quite what she is dishing out. She’s dishing out spiritual apostasy, but the spiritual apostasy means also judgment, wrath. Thus you have movement to the next proclamation, which is full of terrible wrath.

C. The third angel vividly portrays the torments awaiting those who worship the Beast.

Verses 9–11: “The third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: ‘If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on their forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name.’ ”

In one sense, this is precisely the counter to chapter 13, verses 15 and 17. In chapter 13, verses 15 and 17, the Beast promises judgment will be seen to those who don’t have his mark. Now here is the ultimate fury, God’s fury, we’re told, for those who do not have the mark of God. Hence, it fits well with what we’ve just seen in verse 7. “Fear God, because the hour of his judgment has come.”

That’s not good news. That’s not talking generally about general revelation and how it saves you. What it is doing is warning of the impending judgment that is coming unless you do respond to this eternal gospel. Remember, too, the words of Jesus in Luke. “Do not fear those who can kill the body and afterward can do nothing more, but fear him rather who can cast both body and soul into hell.”

The cup of God’s wrath is a fairly common Old Testament picture. Let me give you some references. Job 21:20, Psalm 75:8, Isaiah 51:17, Jeremiah 25:15–38. Let me just read a few verses from the last-mentioned passage. “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. When they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.’ ”

Has it never struck you how many wars are insane? Don’t misunderstand me. There’s a sense in which all war is insane, but there are some wars where after the fact you can’t help but look back and say, “How could people be so incredibly stupid as to have gotten into that one?” Study the history of World War I.

In one sense, you had to fight the kaiser, I suppose, but to dig a trench almost 2,500 miles long and set up machine guns and artillery and simply shoot a whole generation of young men from both sides, 20 million of them, into the mud because you couldn’t advance at all, for four years … until the British invented the tank, which sort of gave them an extra advantage.

It was unbelievable. And for what? The commonalities between the German Empire and the British Empire were so overwhelming that to fight for a few extra territorial rights here and there was idiotic. Both sides would have been infinitely farther ahead if they had just resolved a couple of the disputes by throwing a die.

And no doubt Hitler had to be stopped in World War II, but the fact of the matter is that every historian but one or two who have looked at the matter have pointed out that he could have been stopped half a dozen times in the years going up to it with almost no bloodshed if there had been any sort of courage at all. By the time they tried to stop him, it was too late, and it cost 50 million more men.

You start wondering if sometimes it’s not the cup of God’s fury. It is the working out of God’s judgment so that they are mad. That’s what it says. “ ‘When they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.’ So I took the cup from the Lord’s hand and made all the nations to whom he sent me drink it: Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, its kings and officials, to make them a ruin and an object of horror and scorn and cursing, as they are today; Pharaoh king of Egypt, his attendants, his officials …”

“… all the kings of the Philistines (those of Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, and the people left at Ashdod); Edom, Moab and Ammon; all the kings of Tyre and Sidon; the kings of the coastlands across the sea; Dedan, Tema, Buz and all who are in distant places; all the kings of Arabia and all the kings of the foreign people who live in the desert; all the kings of Zimri, Elam and Media; and all the kings of the north, near and far, one after the other—all the kingdoms on the face of the earth. And after all of them, the king of Sheshach will drink it too.”

He was the king who was opposing the people then. This is all in the vision, obviously. He didn’t go literally to all of the kingdoms of the earth and make them drink. “This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Drink, get drunk and vomit, and fall to rise no more because of the sword I will send among you.” This is biblical language.

“But if they refuse to take the cup from your hand and drink, tell them, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: You must drink it! See, I am beginning to bring disaster on the city that bears my Name, and will you indeed go unpunished? You will not go unpunished, for I am calling down a sword upon all who live on the earth, declares the Almighty.’

Now prophesy all these words against them and say to them: ‘The Lord will roar from on high; he will thunder from his holy dwelling and roar mightily against his land. He will shout like those who tread the grapes, shout against all who live on the earth. The tumult will resound to the ends of the earth, for the Lord will bring charges against the nations; he will bring judgment on all mankind and put the wicked to the sword,’ declares the Lord.

This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Look! Disaster is spreading from nation to nation; a mighty storm is rising from the ends of the earth.’ At that time those slain by the Lord will be everywhere—from one end of the earth to the other. They will not be mourned or gathered up or buried, but will be like refuse lying on the ground. Weep and wail, you shepherds; roll in the dust, you leaders of the flock. For your time to be slaughtered has come …”

Clearly, the Old Testament judgment scenes like this that start off with the cup of God’s fury are bound up with temporal judgments … war, slaughter, and so on. This merely takes that kind of language and says its ultimate fulfillment is one notch higher. It’s in hell itself. Look at some of the little bits. “He will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength.”

In the ancient world, wine was commonly cut by water, three to one to ten to one. That is, three parts water to one part wine all the way to ten parts water to one part wine. Of course, the strength of wine depends very much in terms of the sugar content and the heat in the land and so forth. It’s not like a distillery where you get strength depending on how long you actually distill it.

In the case of whiskey, of course, something that you distill, the strength of it depends on how long you distill it, but in the case of wine, it doesn’t work like that. I suppose a good wine is something like 30 proof or 15 percent, in that order. If you cut it three to one, then it’s down to something like 5 percent. You cut it ten to one and it’s down to 1.5 percent. A very weak beer is 1.5 or 2 percent. A strong Canadian beer is closer to 3.5 or 4 percent.

In the ancient world, although people drank an awful lot of wine, most people drank it cut, and to drink it uncut was to drink what we would call strong drink, which was frowned on much more. That’s the way they did it. So now to use the language of the cup, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath, it’s a way of saying that all the wrath God has demonstrated up until now has been like the wine that you drink. It has all been cut, but now you’re getting the real McCoy. Now you’re getting the uncut wine. Now you’re getting the uncut wrath.

It’s a way of saying that all the pictures of wrath up until now throughout the whole Bible have been dilute, which is a shocker considering the passages we’ve just read. The burning sulfur is clearly language drawn from Sodom and Gomorrah. Even if some of the language of hell is symbolic, and I think you have to take it that it is, it is not less serious for that but more. The reason I take it that some of the language of hell is symbolic in Scripture is because at the level of symbol it conflicts.

For example, if you have a place where it is viewed sometimes as a place of unbearable darkness and then also as a place of burning sulfur, well, if you have something burning, you have light. Or it’s a place of terrible burning and yet at the same time it’s a place where the worm doesn’t die. Well, normally worms don’t live where you have a lot of burning. You clearly have different images to talk about how horrid it is rather than trying to draw exactly a picture of the whole thing.

“In the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb” I think is not a question of gloating, as if they’re sitting around laughing at people, as of added torment, like the account of the rich man and Dives, as he’s called in tradition. There’s a great gulf fixed. He can’t go over, but he can see what he’s missing out in some way or something like that. Maybe it’s also a way of justifying the triumph of the Lamb. Then verse 11: “The smoke of their torment rises forever and ever.” That is, the punishment is eternal with no end.

Now before we go on, here is where I want to pause a bit and refer to another debate that is very common in contemporary evangelicalism: debate over what is sometimes called annihilationism or conditional immortality. It is the view that argues either when you die that’s it; you’re annihilated, cessation of existence, unless you’re redeemed, in which case you go on. That, for example, is the view of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

More common in evangelical circles is a different kind of annihilationism sometimes called conditional immortality. What it argues is that if you are among the lost, when you die you are punished for a while in hell, but ultimately you are consumed so that ultimately you are annihilated. How long your punishment is is a reflection of God’s perfect justice. So not everybody is punished the same amount, but it all ends the same way. Eventually all are annihilated, save those who are perfectly saved.

I have to point out that there have been some very good evangelical leaders who have adopted that view, including John Stott, Philip Hughes, John Wenham, and a host of lesser lights. At one time in evangelicalism it was decidedly a minority view, a few people on the fringe, but with the publication of Stott’s views on this subject in ‘87 or ‘88, a number of people came out of the closet instantly and said, “I think this is right.”

So also in this book that’s just going to press now, I spent a whole chapter on that one question working through the texts and so on. What they argue is that, first, the punishment is eternal in either case. It’s that the conscious torment ends. In other words, if they are finally annihilated and there’s no coming back, it is an eternal punishment. So the passages that speak of the eternality of death or the eternality of punishment are still entirely met by this criterion provided there’s no coming back.

Second, they would argue the actual symbolism that is used, like fire and the like.… All that we think of in terms of fire is in terms of consumption. If something is burned, it’s consumed. Eventually it’s destroyed. So the language itself lends to that kind of interpretation. Third, they would argue no matter how bad sin is, no matter how ugly it is, no matter how revolting it is, at the end of the day, we’re only finite people. We can only commit finite sins. How would it be fair for God to give us eternal self-conscious punishment?

Fourth, they argue wouldn’t there be some kind of dissonance in heaven if people knew that some of their relatives are still in hell? Could heaven be heaven in those cases? Wouldn’t it mean somehow that God is somehow defeated if there’s a corner of the universe that is not acknowledging his lordship?

There are all those sweeping texts, like Colossians 1, about everything in heaven and on earth being subsumed under the lordship of Christ, but if all are annihilated, then eventually there’s no rebellion anywhere. So you can mount a case that has a certain kind of plausibility to it, and I have to say at a certain level I wish I could believe it were true, but I really don’t think it is. I don’t think it’ll work at all. Let’s consider a number of factors.

First, let’s consider these two texts. “The smoke of their torment rises forever and ever.” Some point out, “Well, look. It’s not that they’re tormented forever and ever but that the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever. It’s a kind of memorial. There’s a kind of eternal memorial about it to justify the ways of God.” There are one or two passages in the Old Testament that could be understood that way. The problem is the text then goes on to say, “They have no rest night or day.” Stott in his exposition of this passage doesn’t even mention that clause.

Moreover, it is linked (I don’t see how one can avoid it) with chapter 20. Look at chapter 20, beginning in verse 10. “The devil, who deceived them …” That is, the nations and so on. We’ll come to this in a couple of weeks. “… was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur …” So you’re apparently talking about the same place. “… where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

What Stott, Pinnock, Wenham, and several others say is, “Look … first of all, this says nothing about people being tormented.” Secondly, they say, “The Beast and the False Prophet are principles that recur again and again and again, but they’re not, in principle, ‘tormentable.’ ” To which I would reply.… “First, I’ve argued that the Beast and the False Prophet, far from being abstract principles that are not “tormentable” are recurring realities in space-time history, human beings that recur again and again and again. They’re not non-people; they’re repeated people.

More importantly, Stott doesn’t mention the fact that the Devil is mentioned here, and Stott would be the first to acknowledge that the Devil is a person … not a human person but a person. Which raises this question.… If there is even one sentient being who is tormented forever and ever, which is what the text says, how would it be less just for God to torment other sentient beings than this particular one?

Let us all acknowledge that the Devil is worse than others, but he’s only finite. He’s not God. If the Devil is tormented forever and ever, by their logic wouldn’t it also follow that the sovereignty of God’s way is not resolved if the Devil still is being tormented somewhere in some corner? But it’s more than that. Look on.

“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.

The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up their dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”

Who else is in there? “If anyone’s name …” What they say is, “Well, surely this means that if death and hades are thrown in there, it’s a way of saying there’s kind of a death to death. Everything is finally destroyed.” On the contrary, we’ve just discovered a few verses farther on that this is a place where the torment goes on forever and ever. It seems to me the natural way of reading it is if the Devil is tempted there forever and ever, now if anyone is thrown into it, the same thing happens.

I think there are other considerations that need to be thought of. I don’t think there is any evidence of any repentance in hell. There are theologians who argue against that. They think that everybody is going to be so repentant in hell and everybody is going to want to get out. I don’t see that at all. Do you remember how the Bible ends in the last chapter? Verse 11: “Let him who does wrong continue to do wrong; let him who is vile continue to be vile; let him who does right continue to be right; and let him who is holy continue to be holy.”

In a certain way, it’s talking about from here to the end. That is, those who are already holy by God’s grace, let them continue to be holy in expectation of the end. Let those who are vile (the judgment is already falling down) continue to be vile to the end. But it is anticipation of what is the state beyond as well, it seems to me. That is, one is holy now in preparation for the holiness that is perfected on the other side, and the vileness, likewise, is perfected on the other side.

Is hell really going to be made up of people who love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and their neighbors as themselves? If it’s not, then hell is a place where people keep on sinning and are punished, keep on sinning and are punished, keep on sinning and are punished, and keep on sinning and are punished.

There are horrendous reactions sometimes in this book of Revelation. God pours upon them in judgment, we read, and all they do is curse God. Hell is the same way. No repentance. It’s not a question, therefore, of eternal punishment for finite sin. It’s ongoing sin and ongoing punishment. Besides, I’m not sure that we are in any place to measure sin and its significance as we commit it by our own finiteness.

Is an offense against a person measured by the finiteness of the person committing it or by the infinite glory maligned of the person who has been blasphemed? I don’t know, but I’m quite sure I’m not in any good place to judge. Moreover, it has to be said that even if these people somehow miraculously did get to heaven, they wouldn’t be happy there, where God is the center and the Lamb is the center and be devoured by the brightness of the glory and the holiness of God. How would that be a delight to them? It wasn’t a delight here.

Maybe from God’s point of view, hell looks, in part, like the vindication of his own justice. You see, we think of suffering first and foremost in terms of suffering; that is, my subconscious reaction to it, but if it’s viewed in biblical terms first and foremost not in a therapeutic model but first and foremost in a justice model, then it has more to do with retribution. There should never be any delight in cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Never.

If, on the other hand, hell is portrayed in Scripture not as a place where God is being wonderfully cruel, world without end, amen, and Christians are enjoined to partake the same cruelty, but a place simply where God’s justice works out, then God may view hell, in some ways, the way he views the cross; namely, as the ultimate defense of his own justice.

If Christians in the consummation look at things the way God looks at things, maybe we’ll see things that way more clearly too. Even at the level of the psychological, the emotional, it is very important to remember that the person in Scripture who speaks most graphically most often about hell is Jesus.

The last thing I’d want to say about hell for now is this. The secular world thinks of hell as a place concocted by right-wing fundamentalists to damn everybody who don’t agree with them. Thus, it becomes synonymous with bigotry and malice and hatred, which means that if we give anything of an Elmer Gantry sort of presentation of hell in our preaching we do tremendous damage. One should never, never, never give an impression that one enjoys talking about hell and who’s going to be there.

On the other hand, if this is what the Bible says, it’s hard to imagine how any responsible Christian would avoid talking about the subject again and again and again, because if the Bible gives such stern warnings in this regard, don’t we have the same obligation? Don’t we have the responsibility to say, “Flee from the wrath to come”? Don’t we have a truncated view of God and his truth unless we say that?

Have I told you the story of Andrew Bonar and Murray M’Cheyne? Murray M’Cheyne in Scotland in the last century was known throughout the Highlands as “the godly Mr. M’Cheyne,” known for his powerful preaching, for the great godliness and discipline of his life. He was a bachelor. He died at the age of 29.

His brief literary remains and some of his diaries and so on were edited together by his friend Andrew Bonar, another preacher who lived to a ripe old age, in a little book called Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, reprinted every once in a while by Banner of Truth. It’s still worth buying and reading.

M’Cheyne developed a whole Bible-reading cycle by which you get through the Old Testament once and the Psalms and the New Testament twice in a year of Bible reading. I still often use M’Cheyne’s reading schedule to get through the Bible at that pace in my own devotions.

Bonar and M’Cheyne used to go out walking on Mondays together. Their parishes were adjacent or nearby, and they used to compare notes on what was going on and pray together and talk about what they had preached about on the previous day and who was being converted and who seemed to be giving trouble and so on. They were fast friends.

Bonar reports that one day when they were out on one of these walks, Bonar told M’Cheyne, “Yesterday I preached on hell,” and M’Cheyne asked him, “And were you enabled to preach it with tears?” Now that’s profound, and it pictures Jesus, who goes through the woes of Matthew 23 and ends up weeping over the city. Hell is never something to be preached in a fit of rage, damning all of the people who disagree with you, damning all of the people who are destroying the country. It is to be preached with tears.

What this calls for, then, remembering that all of this comes upon all those who worship the Beast and his image, anyone who receives the mark of his name.… You have these exclusive categories. You’re in either one camp or the other. We’ve seen that developing all through the book of Revelation. “This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s commandments and remain faithful to Jesus.” In other words, it is saying, “Look, justice will be done. Hang in there. Endure.”

“Then I heard a voice from heaven say, ‘Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ” Not “Blessed are they from now on; before if they died they weren’t blessed,” but “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” From the moment of their death, they’re already in the presence of the Lord.

The final resurrection may not be yet. The onset of the new heaven and the new earth may not be yet, but from now on already they are blessed. Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. To depart and be with Christ is far better. “ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.’ ” Now we find …

2. The figure of the harvest.

Here the arrival of God’s judgment is depicted in two agricultural metaphors or two agricultural portraits: first, the grain harvest and, second, the wine harvest.

A. The grain harvest.

The grain harvest portrays the inevitability of judgment … at the right time, at harvest time. Verses 14–16: “I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like a son of man with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.

Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.” The language is again drawn from the Old Testament.

Joel 3:13: “Put in a sickle, for the harvest is ripe.” Do you see? There were temporal judgments that typified the ultimate judgment long before this final judgment. The Son of Man here, in language drawn from Daniel 7, is surely Jesus Christ, not an angel. The reason some have objected to that is that an angel conveys the Father’s command to Jesus, and some say that is surely so implausible, an angel conveying the Father’s command to Jesus.

I’m not sure. After all, there are angels that minister to Jesus in the days of his flesh. In any case, in this passage, it’s not a question of harvesting only the righteous or of harvesting only the evil. It’s a bit like the parable of the wheat and the tares. What does the master say? The master says, “Don’t do it. Not yet. Let both grow together.” The point here is that when the time is right, then the sickle is put in. It inevitably comes.

The brevity of verse 16, then, prepares for the enlargement of the next portrait. Verse 16: “And the earth was harvested.” That’s all it says. It doesn’t say anything about where anybody went or about any final suffering. It doesn’t say anything about division of humankind. All it’s saying is, “There is an end. When the harvest comes, that’s it. The sickle is put in. Growing time is over. That’s it.” In other words, the whole focus in this first agricultural image is the inevitability and finality of the end.

B. The wine harvest.

By contrast, the agricultural image of the treading of the winepress is one of the most frightening images in Scripture. It emphasizes the violent thoroughness of God’s wrath when it is finally poured out. Verses 17–20: “Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle.

Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, ‘Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.’ The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.”

You must understand what this is depicting. In the ancient world, when the grapes were harvested they were pulled off all the stems and thrown into stone vats of various sizes. Some of them could be really big on a big vineyard. Then slaves or farm workers, as the case would be, would take off their shoes, roll up their clothes, and then they’d just tramp in the stone vat. There would be little holes at the bottom of the vat down by the edge.

They’d just tramp, tramp, tramp. More grapes, and they’d tramp them down, and out would come the grape juice from these holes. That would all be collected, and that’s what would finally be fermented and be made into wine. Now you’re throwing people in, and God is tramping them down. This is the winepress of God’s fury, and he’s squishing them down and squishing them down until the blood comes out, and it rises to this fantastic height over an enormous distance.

That’s what the picture is. Clearly, it’s symbolic again, but the symbolism doesn’t mean it’s not real. It means simply that the reality is so ghastly it needs metaphors that we can appreciate even to begin to understand it. The altar here is connected with the prayers of God’s saints in chapter 6, verse 9 and chapter 8, verses 3–4. So again, the idea is not so much on suffering as on justice.

Look at the little touches. “Outside the city.” The city increasingly becomes what enfolds the people of God. In Revelation 21:22, the city is the whole people of God. These are outside the city. As Jesus was accursed and hung on the cross outside the city, so these who do not know him are now themselves outside the city.

Sixteen hundred stadia is about 184 miles, but it’s not the real distance that is important. The point is that 1,600 is 4 times 4 times 10 times 10. Probably again the 4 corners of the earth, the 4 winds, times the square of 10. The judgment of God portrayed is taking place outside the holy city. It extends to all men everywhere who find themselves beyond the pale of God’s protection, with the blood rising to five or six feet, a horse’s bridle, for a distance of 184 miles in all directions.

The point is not the exact distance. It’s that there is this people gathered from all the corners of the earth. Now it is essential not to read into the text a kind of Elmer Gantry superciliousness here, a kind of angry hellfire preaching. What is at stake here is the sheer violent thoroughness of God’s wrath. You can’t hide from it at the end.

This vision establishes for us what is of utmost importance and, therefore, forbids us from displacing the central by the relatively peripheral, as if the gospel is first and foremost designed to make us feel better. It’s first and foremost designed to enable us to flee the wrath to come. Questions on this passage?

Male: Going back to your discussion earlier on the inclusive and exclusive views on salvation, would you say that it’s historically heretical to say that a person can be saved without the knowledge of Christ?

Don Carson: It is overtly and clearly heretical, in the strict definition of heresy, to say that a person can be saved by any means other than Christ, but the inclusivist view doesn’t quite argue that. It says without the conscious knowledge of Christ. In church history, the view has been condemned many times, but there have been some remarkable people who have held it. A minority, but there have been people who have held it. So one wants to be careful to use the word heresy advisably.

The problem in my view today.… See, every generation of believers is influenced to some extent positively or negatively by the surrounding culture. The problem in every generation is always how to read the Scripture honestly and fairly from where we are while trying to maximize the ways in which the Scripture helps us reform our culture rather than domesticating Scripture to our culture.

In the Western world, there is so much today that is bound up with either philosophical or empirical pluralism that theologians bend over backwards to try to say something that doesn’t make them seem too narrow and bigoted and right-winged, and that’s the way it comes out. So I think the reason there are more people who take this view today than there have been for some time is a reflection of where the church stands in this culture and its inability to stand up to the culture.

Male: And, naturally, we do not want to be any more exclusive than Scripture. We want to be as inclusive as we can. Are not the majority of evangelicals then exclusive when it comes to children?

Don: Correct. That’s one of the arguments. In the large arguments they would say, “Well, look, are there not little children, for example, who are saved by God’s grace without conscious knowledge of Christ?” That becomes one of the thin edges of the wedge, and the vast majority of evangelicals would have answered yes to that question.

My response to that question is a little different. My response to that question is, “I don’t know. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” I don’t think the texts say. I can imagine several possibilities. I could even imagine there’s an election according to grace, but I don’t know. The texts that people adduce to prove it one way or the other don’t convince me as being relevant.

The last couple of verses of Jonah. You know, “There were 120,000 who didn’t know their left hand from their right hand.” Well, great. I can introduce you to a lot of adults who don’t know their left hand from their right hand too. It doesn’t prove anything. One cannot resolve one difficult question by appealing to a putative answer from another difficult question, it seems to me.

Male: It’s easier to discuss on an academic level than pastorally when you’re given the mother who just lost her infant. You can hardly say anything but, “Well, the baby is with God in heaven.”

Don: You want to bet? I remember when I was a seminary student I had a lecturer who was arguing for the traditional view. You know, the baby dies and goes to heaven. Being even more perverse then than I am now, I raised some objections. I said, “It may be, but I can’t see how any of the texts that you’re adducing prove it. What would you say?” He was getting all worked up. Then the bell rang and ended the class.

The next day, he came back to class, and you could see he was all het up. He was emotionally all drawn up inside. He said, “There was a question at the end of the last class, and I want to speak to it again.” He said, “When I was a pastor in North Bay, Ontario, while I was cutting the grass one day, I looked up just in time to see a dump truck that was parked in my neighbor’s driveway back over their 18-month-old son.”

He said, “I saw it, and I went with the parents, who were in shrieking disorientation, in the ambulance with this squashed bit of plasm.” By this time, tears were streaming down his face, and he said, “If you cannot give gospel consolation under those circumstances, stay out of the ministry!” Well, I didn’t stay out of the ministry, but at the end of the day I have been in places not exactly like that, but very similar, and the consolation I give in that case again and again and again.… These were non-Christians next door to him.

The consolation I give in that kind of situation.… The first question is, “Will I see my child again?” No, that’s not the first question. “Why? Why? Why? Where was God?” That’s the first question. The answer is, “I cannot explain it all away. I do know the greatest demonstration of God’s love for you is that he lost his Son too. I cannot give you formulaic answers about things God himself does not speak to us clearly on. What he does speak to us clearly on is the Judge of all the earth does right. This is the measure of his love for us in his Son.”

The interesting thing is that in this particular case, there was not a believing family. Does that mean you have no gospel consolation for the outside family? I think that is a mistaken notion of covenant theology. I mean, I know it’s a common view, but in my view, that element of high Presbyterianism will not stand up.

The way I would respond to it turns on how I understand Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36, Joel 2, and other new covenant promises and how they relate to old and new covenants. It would take too long to unpack it here, but in my view it’s a mistaken view. In any case, it wouldn’t solve what my theology instructor was telling me at seminary. It won’t surprise me if when we get to heaven all of those babies are there, but I don’t know. I think it is very important not to claim to know that beyond which Scripture speaks.