Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 1:4–8
“John, To the seven churches in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen. Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.’ ”
Before John gets into the burden of the book, he opens things with a doxology; that is, a hymn of praise. It mingles poetry, as in verse 7, with prose. Some of the prose is virtually prayer form. The “Grace and peace” in verse 4 is a typical benediction, but “To him who loves us be glory and power for ever and ever” is prayer form. So you have benediction and prayer and this sort of hymn of praise and then God himself speaking in verse 8. It is all calculated together to form a picture of the God-centeredness of everything that comes.
This is not a book to be read as if it is going to offer you “14 Ways to Be Happy Though Married” or “How to Be Successful in the Normal Christian Life” or “How to Find Yourself and Be Self-Actualized.” This is a profoundly God-centered book right from the very beginning. How does it start? It’s wonderful. Even in uttering “Grace and peace,” it’s grace and peace from God, from not least Jesus Christ. Most description is given concerning him (verse 5). We’ll come to that expression in a moment.
Praise to him who loves us, anticipation of his coming at the end, and God himself, who was and is and is to come, the Almighty, insisting on his fundamental centrality. That is what apocalyptic is about, in large measure. Before it is about patterns of history or problems of persecution, it is a God-centered thing. There is nothing before A, and there is nothing after Z. He’s the whole thing. Alpha and omega are simply the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. It’s saying the same sort of thing.
Not only eternal but the Almighty (verse 8). You could, in theory, have an eternal being who was less than almighty so you still couldn’t trust him, but if he’s eternal and almighty, you can trust him. Now the seven spirits before his throne.… That is one of the most disputed titles, categories, labels, in all of the book of Revelation, and I will come back to that one next week. It crops up twice here, but I’m going to pass it by.
In brief, it could be a way of referring to the Holy Spirit, and some so take it here, because then you have a reference to the Father (him who was and is and is to come), the Spirit (the seven spirits), and Christ, sort of a Trinitarian reference. That’s possible, but there is another interpretation that marginally, I think, is more believable, but I’d rather deal with it later.
“… and from Jesus Christ,” and then there are a number of things that are said of him. First, he’s the faithful witness. The Greek word for witness is martus, from which we get the word martyr. Originally, up until the time of the book of Revelation, martus clearly meant witness, either in a legal court setting or just generally somebody who bears testimony, but so many Christians eventually gave their testimony by giving their lives the very term martus came to mean martyr; that is, someone who gives his or her life in a cause.
Now the word has gone through an extra metamorphosis. Now it means somebody who feels sorry for himself. “Oh, don’t be a martyr,” which doesn’t mean somebody is giving his or her life for a cause. It’s a form of opprobrium, a term of abuse. “Self-pitying slob,” something like that. The word has gone through changes.
First, someone who bears witness; secondly, someone who bears witness by his or her life; thirdly, someone who’s willing to die for a cause; and more recently, someone who’s so self-pitying they think they’re suffering for a cause when, in fact, they’re just being ignoramuses. The transition from the first stage to the second is going on in the book of Revelation.
A little farther on, Christ speaks of “My faithful witness, my faithful martus, Antipas,” and Antipas died. Which does it mean? It’s right on the border there, isn’t it? In exactly the same way, Jesus is the chief witness to what God is like. Do you want to know what God is like? Study Jesus.
Isn’t that John’s whole message in the book of Revelation? “In the beginning God expressed himself. This Word was with God and this Word was God. Then the Word became flesh.” Do you want to know what God is like? Look at God’s self-expression in the Son, in the incarnation, in Jesus. Thus, Jesus is the best witness to God.
But ultimately, if you want to know most what God is like, where does this witness disclose most fully what God is like? In his self-sacrificial death. Thus, even his witness-bearing function is tied to his death. What is meant here of Jesus? I’m not sure if it’s primarily witness or faithful martyr. He’s not martyr in the Stephen sense, borne along by historical events that he couldn’t deny or anything, but he certainly bears witness by his death.
What else is said of him? The reason that is brought up right away is because in the book of Revelation as a whole, although there is a fantastic conflict going on between good and evil, the way the Lamb triumphs, except at the very end, is by the way of suffering and death. This book has a tremendous amount on how Christians are willing to bear persecution.
In chapter 12, for example (we’ll look at that chapter later), those who overcome the Dragon do so by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony, and they do not love their lives even unto death. That, too, is simply following Jesus, who did not love his life even unto death. That’s why the category is introduced here so quickly.
Later on we’ll see that either you have the mark of God on you or you have the mark of the Beast on you. You either have the mark of the Beast on you and, thus, you face the wrath of God, or you have the mark of God on you and then you face the wrath of the Beast. You’re going to belong one side or the other. Whose wrath would you rather have? You’re going to face one or the other. That’s the way the whole thing is looked at.
So in part, this whole book of Revelation is a book telling you how to face opposition. Who faced opposition first? Who bore witness first? Who died first? We do not have a God who simply says, “Get with it. Suffer for me.” He’s the one who suffers first. So that’s the way this Christ is introduced right at the beginning.
“Grace and peace to you from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead …” That is, he’s the first one to come back from the dead with resurrection body. He’s not the first one to come back from the dead. Lazarus beat him to it. There are some from the Old Testament who beat him to it. But he’s the firstborn from the dead, to use the Pauline language of 1 Corinthians 15, with resurrection body and anticipation of the end.
“He’s the ruler of the kings of the earth.” I don’t think that is saying he is the one who will ultimately be ruler of the kings of the earth. He is already the ruler of the kings of the earth. Does not Jesus say, for example, at the end of Matthew in the Great Commission, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth”? Again and again and again, Jesus is presented now as already ruling. He’s the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
The question is not whether he’s actually still in sovereign control. The question is whether there’s any opposition, and there is. One day there won’t be. That’s the difference. The difference is not whether he is still ruling. First Corinthians 15 likewise depicts all of God’s sovereignty mediating through Christ. God has given all authority into his hands. Everything. He must rule, he must reign, until he has put everything under his feet.
When you’re facing persecution from the Roman Empire, it is important to remember that above thrones are other thrones until there’s only one throne, and the one who sits on that throne is Jesus. He’s the ruler of the kings of the earth. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the church, this book has often been studied and cherished and loved, whether it has been fully understood or not, at times of deep persecution, because this book gives all kinds of comfort and strength and basic theological reminders to Christians who are really going through it.
One of those reminders is that Christ still now and forever is the ultimate ruler. Moreover, he’s not merely an arbitrary one or a callous one. No, no, no. The praises go to “him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.” Now if you have an older English version, like the King James Version, you know it says “who washed us from our sins with his blood.”
In fact, when I was a child at Sunday school, I learned a chorus. “Now to him who has loved us and washed us from sin, to him be the glory forever, amen.” It was drawn from here. In fact, if so, it would be the only passage in the New Testament that speaks of being washed by the blood of Jesus. There are a lot of passages that speak of the blood but don’t use wash. There are textual variants in the manuscript. My guess, however, is that the NIV has it right: “who freed us.”
The problem is there are two words, l˙ō and lo˙o. They’re pronounced exactly the same way. They’re spelled a bit differently. L˙ō is the verb he freed us, to loosen, to free us. Lo˙o is the verb for to wash, and they’re pronounced exactly the same way. In the past tense they’re pronounced exactly the same way. He freed us. He washed us. Elousen. It’s pronounced the same way.
Very often in the ancient world, in the days before printing presses, when you wanted to make copies of a manuscript, you might just make it privately by candlelight late at night … read a line here, copy a line here, read a line there, copy a line there. But if you wanted to make a lot of copies, you did it in what was called a scriptorium.
There you had one person reading the script at dictation speed to six or eight or ten or twelve scribes around the wall standing at desks. They didn’t sit at desks in those days; they stood. They would copy it out by dictation. That was mass production. Gutenberg hadn’t invented the printing press, so you dictated it.
So if you came to a homonym like elousen, it would be very easy, unless somebody actually spelled it out, to put down the other one. I suspect that the division in manuscript came about early on because somebody heard the word while copying it out and put down the other one. So one is making an intelligent guess about which one was original from the manuscript evidence.
It’s not vitally important, because both are true in a sense. If he washed us in his blood, it still is a metaphorical way of saying he cleaned up our sin because he gave his life. If he freed us from our sins by his blood, it still is a way of saying we are freed from the guilt and burden and condemnation of our sin because he shed his blood and thus gave his life. This is used as the ultimate proof of his love. “To him who loved us and freed us from our sins.”
Now may I give a small pastoral excursus at that point? Recently I was in Papua New Guinea, largely with Wycliffe people. There are about 670 or 680 Wycliffe missionaries in Papua New Guinea. I was there for a couple of weeks, partly just sort of expounding Scripture to the mob and partly giving some technical stuff to translators on Greek. Inevitably, I spent a fair bit of time with individual missionaries, a meal here, a meal there.
Missionaries are people too. They have their hurts. Some of them were going through tough things. They had their teenagers, and they needed an outside voice to talk to. That’s part of it when you go to these places. I spent a bit of time with one lovely woman. Barely a year before, one of the nationals had put an ax through her husband’s head, and she was staying on to finish the translation. She was in the next room at the time.
On this particular day, I went to this couple’s place, and I had said some things in a sermon just asides that they had taken some umbrage at and wanted to push me a bit. They told me how they had had a visiting preacher from America there some time before, and he was trying to deal with adults who had been abused as children, girls or boys who had been abused physically, perhaps sexually, and who felt, as a result, distant from God. All kinds of stories show it’s hard to feel loved by God when you’ve never felt loved by your parents.
This fellow had tried, therefore, to get the people in the group who came from this rotten background to reimagine their birth. This fellow told me how he had reimagined how he dropped from his mother’s womb with Jesus standing there to catch him and give him a warm cuddle and hold him close. It became such a moving thing for him that he wept and wept and wept, and for the first time he felt that he was genuinely loved by Jesus. It had been immensely cathartic for him.
He asked me, “Are you going to criticize that?” because basically I had criticized some of that stuff in one of the sermons. He said, “It has helped me. I feel more mature, more stable, loved by Christ. What’s wrong with any of that?” What would you have answered? “Oh, I’d rather that you not feel the love of Christ, thank you”? What I said to him was, “Look, if in consequence of this experience you are better able to feel the love of God in Christ Jesus, I’m happy. I’m not going to throw stones, but I’ll tell you frankly you’ve chosen second best.” He said, “I beg your pardon?”
I said, “Where in Scripture is the love of Christ most greatly manifested? It’s manifested in the incarnation. It’s manifested in the sufferings and, supremely, the cross work of Christ.” Isn’t that what all of the New Testament writers come back to again and again and again? Isn’t that what’s going on here? Isn’t that what Paul says? He’s describing justification, if you please, in Galatians 2:20–21. He mentions Christ Jesus, and then he says “… who loved me and gave himself for me.” Now likewise here. “To him who loved us and freed us from our sins in his own blood.”
What I said to him was, “Look, you could have had the same catharsis, the same feeling of emotional reintegration, in the context of gospel application of basic gospel truths. Where does the Bible speak of discovering the love of Jesus by projecting in your imagination Jesus standing there at your mother’s womb as you drop from her belly?” I said, “The truth of the matter is in your own mind you do not now think of the power of the gospel to reintegrate your life but the power of imagination.
Now if you’re reintegrated and you’re beginning to be able to feel again, I’m not going to throw stones, but you’ve still chosen second best. You have it aligned and associated in your mind not with what God discloses you should have it associated with but with something that, in time, if not checked, could eventually take you off into all kinds of psychological solutions to this and imaginings of that and transcendental meditation on something else instead of that which is the finest, historical, God-centered, space-time-history, real demonstration of the love of Christ; namely, the cross.
I tell you frankly you could have had all of the emotional experience, all of the sense of reintegration, all the brokenness, all the tears, by meditating on a passage like Ephesians 3:14–21. ‘That you might be able to grasp, with all the saints, the height and length and breadth and depth of the love of God in Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.’ What you need is to integrate your experiential grasp of love with the gospel. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time until you drift off to mere pursuit of experience divorced from God’s self-disclosure of the gospel.”
Now that’s one of the things this passage authorizes. It’s not directly addressing that problem, of course, but it is one of many, many passages in Scripture that remind us that, at the end of the day, the greatest demonstration of the love of God for us is not some sort of projected imaginings of cuddliness; it’s the cross.
There our Maker bore our sins in his own body on the tree, and there the just became unjust, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. There he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon him. “Now to him who loved us,” the text says. Lest you miss the location, “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood—to him be glory and power.”
Not only has he freed us from our sins, but he has made us to be a kingdom and priests. That is language used of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament. It’s language used of the church by Peter in 1 Peter. Now it’s used by John. We are the domain of God’s saving reign, his kingdom, already breaking out amongst us, and we’re priests … all of us. That is, the Christian church does not have a subset of people called priests, mediators between God and others.
We are all (that is, not all of society but all true Christians) priests in that we are to mediate God to the world at large and mediate the world back to God. We represent the world to God and pray for the world to God, and we are to represent God to the whole world. In this sense, we are not a group that has priests; we are priests. We are God’s saving realm. That is what he has done by his love, mediated by his cross work. To him, then, be glory and power forever, amen.
“Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.” There are two or three things that must be said about this passage, all of which anticipate themes that are unpacked a little later, so I won’t deal with them now in detail. I’ll just mention them quickly on the fly.
First, there is throughout the book an orientation to the end. That is part of the common New Testament perception that unless Christians live their lives in the light of the end, they are not really spiritual. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? What shall he give in exchange for his soul? Do not fear him who can cast your body into the fire, but fear him, rather, who after casting your body into the fire can cast both body and soul into hell.”
There was a time, of course, when Christians fought and debated so much over their particular eschatological systems and whether you got the pre- right in your premillennial, pretribulational, pre-whatever it was that it was a ground for dividing from other Christians. Thank God, quite frankly, that day is largely gone.
On the other hand, we have perhaps, in some instances, succumbed to something worse; namely, a form of evangelicalism that just doesn’t think about the end at all. How many in the last month have awakened and thought, “Jesus could come today”? It’s not a common outlook. Or who think of their whole life’s calling, vocation, ministry, relationships, family, and children in terms of the end; all of their values are shaped by the end.
I would want to argue (I shall argue later) that is such an elementary part of any genuinely faithful biblical outlook that not to have it is to compromise something essential. Not least when you’re going through it, when you’re going through real persecution, real opposition, real difficulty, is it helpful to remember, as the old Negro spiritual put it …
This world is not my home; I’m just a-passin’ through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.
Let me insist in the strongest terms: that’s not a cop-out. That’s just elementary gospel. It’s sometimes people who have not gone through it who find it most difficult to think in those terms. “Look, he is coming with the clouds.”
The second thing I want to say about this little hymn is this is one of those instances in the book of Revelation that alludes to an Old Testament passage. The book of Revelation is singularly free from extensive Old Testament quotations. In this regard it’s unlike Luke/Acts. It’s unlike John. It’s unlike Hebrews. It’s unlike Matthew. It just does not have a whole lot of Old Testament quotations.
On the other hand, it is constantly alluding to the Old Testament; in this case, to Zechariah 12, which speaks of those who pierce him. “Every eye shall see him, not least those who pierced him.” It is a fundamental Christian view, a fundamental part of a Christian outlook, that at the end of the day Jesus is the judge of everybody. This whole world is rushing to final judgment, and everyone shall give an account to him of everything that has been said and done and thought, not least those who pierced him.
For many, it will not be a time of unmitigated blessing, because they will be able to plead his death. The text says, in the third place, “All the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him.” Then, if you please, it ends up, “So shall it be! Amen.” It is very important to see that texts like this do not leave a lot of space for these vague universalistic hopes that afflict a lot of liberal Christianity and a little bit of left-fringe evangelical Christianity these days too.
“Well, maybe God will save everybody eventually.” “All the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.” Later on, three-quarters of the way through this course, we will look at what the Bible says about hell, how we should think about it. It is not a happy thing to think about, but precisely because we don’t want to think about it, we must.
In an age and generation that is thinking about hell all the time, calling down hellfire on all and sundry, there need to be some renewed lessons on forbearance and forgiveness and the love of God and its limitless dimensions, but in a generation that becomes increasingly pluralistic and endlessly tolerant of almost everybody and anything under all circumstances, it becomes important to think through the brute reality that the person who talks most about hell in all of the Bible is Jesus.
The book of the Bible with the most horrendous descriptions of it, however metaphorical they are, however symbol-laden they are, is the book of Revelation. This book will take you to the highest heavens and to the lowest hells.
“I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: ‘Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.’
I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone ‘like a son of man,’ dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: ‘Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive forevermore! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later. The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.’ ”
We shan’t go through this chapter in enormous detail. There’s just too much of it. But I want to draw your attention to a number of features here. John, if this is John the apostle (and I think it likely), describes himself as a brother and companion of the church, not least in their suffering. He has apparently been banished to the island of Patmos, which is just off the coast of Asia Minor, not too far away, as the crow flies, from Ephesus.
He is there, we are told, because of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus, which is another way of saying he was there for the gospel’s sake. He was there not because he was a criminal who had robbed a bank or bopped a policeman on the head with a truncheon. He was there for the gospel’s sake. He was being persecuted. He was banished.
He was, he says, on the Lord’s Day in the Spirit. This is the only occurrence of the Lord’s Day in the whole Bible, and it is clearly the first day of the week. It’s a peculiar expression in the Greek. Probably the expression comes from the Lord’s Table. It’s the only other place where you have this particular adjective, kyriakos, being used of the Lord’s something.
The Lord’s Table is celebrated on the Lord’s Day. Christians gathered together on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, the day he rose from the dead, and they remembered his death. When they took the cup and the bread, they remembered that Jesus said, “This do in remembrance of me.” So Sunday came to be called the Lord’s Day because it was the day on which they met at the Lord’s Table to take the Lord’s Supper.
So though he was banished, on the Lord’s Day he was quietly worshiping on his own or quietly contemplating, and we are told he was in the Spirit. In the Spirit is an expression that can mean different things in different contexts. One can only judge from the context what it means. For example, Jude tells us we’re to pray in the Spirit, which presumably means you could conceivably pray out of the Spirit.
You could pray in a merely formulaic way. You could just sort of mutter your prayers and think God is going to hear you for your much speaking, but to pray in the Spirit, in the context of Jude, means not that you’re in some particular ecstatic frenzy; it means you pray in line with all of the gospel, in line with the mind of the Spirit, in a spiritual frame.
Here it clearly means more than that. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day,” perhaps in some exalted state of Christian experience, but in any case, what is clear here is that it is prolegomenon to a vision. This same expression crops up later in Revelation 4, when you have the great controlling inaugural vision, this sort of prolegomenon vision, of chapters 4 and 5 that we’ll look at in a couple of weeks that control a great deal of the rest of the book of Revelation.
So he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and now he hears a voice, a voice like a trumpet; that is, it is clear, piercing. He can’t miss it. It’s not some sort of a whispered mutter half in his imagination. This voice then says, “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches.” We’ll come to this scroll business in chapter 4 again. Then he names the seven churches. We’ll place them on a map in a few moments.
Now John turns around. Apparently this voice has come from behind him. “John, write what you’re about to see on a scroll and send it to the seven churches.” So he turns around to see. “Who’s talking to me?” What he sees is this preamble vision. What he sees is clearly a vision of the resurrected Christ. It is not a vision of God the Father; it is a vision of Christ. That is made clear from verses 17–18. “I am the Living One, and I was dead.” The Father could not say that.
But when you read the description of Jesus in verses 12–16, some of the language is drawn from Daniel 7, where the Ancient of Days, God, gives a kingdom to one like the Son of Man, but in this repeat of that, some of the descriptions there used for God are now applied to Jesus. In other words, some of the very descriptions used to depict God in Daniel’s vision in Daniel 7 are now transferred holus-bolus to Jesus.
That’s not uncommon in the New Testament. If, in fact, Jesus is one with God, if he is simultaneously the God and a man, if he is simultaneously a human being and none other than God, then the very descriptions and depictions of God used in the Old Testament are transferred without embarrassment to Jesus. That’s a common thing. It’s a common thing in Paul. It’s a common thing in John. It’s done in Matthew. It’s done in the book of Revelation.
So this is not trying to be a direct quotation from Daniel 7. It’s picking up the language. But there are some elements that are not from the book of Daniel. “I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone ‘like a son of man.’ ” That shows that it really is Christ, a human being, picking up the language of Daniel 7, but he’s “dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet.” That either signifies priestly status (in the Old Testament it was the priests who were dressed like that) or, conceivably, royal status.
In the Roman army, the longer your robe, the higher rank you had. So the centurions were down to here, the tribunes were down to here, but only the emperor had robes all the way down to the feet. Then the golden sash around his chest is, again, indicating superior royal status. “His head and hair were white like wool.” That’s language drawn from Daniel 7 of God to indicate the Ancient of Days.
Now we just don’t think of gray heads with quite that kind of reverence today. We’re a sort of youth-oriented society. But in many parts of the world, age is a mark of honor. I don’t want to go to China until I’m about 25 years older. Then I’ll be properly honored when I’m there. At the moment, I’m not going to be honored. I’m too young. You get there and your hair is all falling out or it’s all gray or white, then you’re bound to get a little more honor. You’re aged.
Well, Jewish society was much like that, so the picture of God as being the Ancient of Days is one that pictures him with head and hair white like wool, as white as snow. That doesn’t mean he’s decrepit. Usually when you get that aged, your eyes sort of fade. Maybe Paul Newman at the age of 70 still has deep blue eyes, but nobody else does. (I suspect contact lenses.)
But eventually, if you live long enough, your eyes fade over a little bit. They get a little glazed. The purity of the color is not quite there anymore. But not this one. He might have all the signs of age, but his eyes are sparkling like fire, blazing fire, vitality, seeing everything. “His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace …” That’s drawn from the symbols of the visions of the book of Revelation.
We’ll come back to the details of that vision later. “… and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.” You’ve probably all been to Niagara Falls. If you go to Niagara Falls and take the cave route and come behind the falls and listen to the thunder or go downstream three or four miles to the Glen.… You can park pretty far down.
You walk down to the bottom of the gorge, and the river goes by there at a tremendous clip. Anywhere around there, right down to the river or in the Maid of the Mist or the cave behind, the water thunders by, and it’s not as if you can’t talk to somebody. You can talk to the person next to you with a normal voice and they can hear you. If you’re a little farther away and you turn the opposite direction they don’t hear you, but right up to them you can still talk and you can be heard.
But you can’t escape the thunder. You can’t escape the sound of the many waters. It’s powerful. It’s all-consuming. It’s not as if it drowns out conversation. It’s rather that it is inescapable, all-pervasive. That’s the picture here. His voice has the clarity of a trumpet when it speaks to John. On the other hand, it can be depicted another way. It is all-pervasive and inescapable. It extends everywhere. That’s the kind of imagery that’s at stake.
