THE BOOK OF REVELATION

THE last book of the New Testament has been wisely assigned its place at the close of our Bible. It is a large and comprehensive view of the conditions of the church and the course of history. It brings to our minds by anticipation the completion of God's work in humanity at large, the expansion of that germ which was once for all planted in the earth when, in the person of Jesus Christ, salvation was embodied and a new humanity created over which sin and death had no more dominion forever. In the study of this book our thoughts can rise from the beginning of the process to the end of the process, can pass from the beginning of the conflict to the end of the conflict, in the glory of the children of God and the gathering together of all the sons of God into one holy and blissful community in the presence of Christ, their Lord. These are only preliminary remarks, but they intimate to some extent the purpose and value of this book which we are considering.

The book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse, as it is so often called, is the revelation made to John the apostle; for all attempts to show that any other person than John was the author are futile in the extreme. Many of those who deny John's authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and even of the Epistles, are perfectly ready to concede that the Apocalypse is the work of John, and to hold that it has all the marks of a Johannine author

ship. It must, however, have been written at a different time from the Gospel and the Epistles, because there are very marked differences between it and those other works of the apostle. The Apocalypse was by far the earliest writing of the apostle John, and although it now constitutes the last book of the New Testament, it was by no means the last book that was written. A very considerable interval came between the writing of the Apocalypse and the writing of the Gospel and of the Epistles. The Apocalypse was probably written before the destruction of Jerusalem, perhaps in the year 68; it was written by the apostle John, in Patmos, where he had been exiled during the reign of Nero and in the very last portion of Nero's reign; it was written under a persecution which had its greatest violence at Rome, but the farthest circles of whose waves had reached out as far as Asia Minor to Ephesus, where John was then in charge of the churches which Paul had left to his supervision at his martyrdom.

John had remained in Jerusalem until the death of the apostles Peter and Paul had rendered it necessary that some one of apostolic authority should take charge of the great and influential churches that were located in the western part of Asia. You remember that our Lord, at his death, left his mother in the charge of John. Tradition relates that he not only took her to his own home, but that he remained in Jerusalem, caring for her as the representative of our Lord, until Mary's death; and this death did not occur until some thirty years after the death of our Lord. Then, in prospect of the destruction of Jerusalem, and knowing that the city of the Old Testament was soon to be

obliterated from the face of the earth, John made his way to Asia Minor, took up his residence in Ephesus, and began to take charge of the churches in that region. Soon after this there sprang up the persecution under Nero. John was banished to Patmos, and there, on a certain Sabbath day, the Spirit of the Lord opened to him the future, and prepared him to communicate great truths with regard to God's dispensation to the churches of Asia, of which he was the superintendent.

The early origin of the Apocalypse accounts for some of the main difficulties with regard to the genuineness of either the Apocalypse or the Gospel. We find that the Apocalypse is written in a style that, in some respects, is different from the style of the Gospel and of the Epistles. The main differences might be characterized in this way: The Gospel and the Epistles are in simple and flowing Greek. They are not broken, or rugged in style. There is a spirit of sympathy and of love in them, which you do not find so evidently present in the Apocalypse. In addition to this, you find some striking peculiarities of Greek construction in the Apocalypse, which are totally absent in the Gospel and in the Epistles. There are lapses of grammar. The Greek preposition which should govern the genitive is used occasionally with the nominative instead. Any student of Greek will recognize the strangeness of this peculiarity, and there are certain other things of a similar sort which I need not mention. I am inclined to explain this by saying that, during his early life, the apostle John had his dwelling-place in Jerusalem, and was accustomed mainly to the use of the Aramaic language. In other words, Greek was not in constant use.

and, therefore, when he goes to the churches of Asia Minor and begins to use Greek continually, it is with a less perfect familiarity than that which he attains afterward; and these lapses of grammar, and these peculiarities of style, are due to the fact that he had not worked into the Greek language as he afterward did. Thirty years afterward, when he had become an old man and Greek had become to him, as it were, his mother tongue, he uses it with perfect fluency, and not only with fluency, but with very remarkable beauty and smoothness and eloquence.

This is probably one of the reasons why the style of the Apocalypse differs from the style of the Gospel. But there is another reason: When John wrote the Apocalypse he was by no means so old as he was when he wrote the Gospel and the Epistles. It is true he was not young. You cannot call a man of fifty a young man. Yet a man of fifty still retains the freshness and fervor of his youthful style; and as you read the Apocalypse, I am very sure you will recognize some of that fire and vivacity, some of that intensity and energy which is indicated in the epithet "Boanerges," or "Son of Thunder," which our Lord conferred upon him. I suppose there are more thunderings and lightnings in the Apocalypse than in any other book of the Bible; and it seems very fitting that Boanerges, the Son of Thunder, John the apostle, should have been the author of it.

As time went on and the outward difficulties of the church were less, as the season of conflict gave place to a season of calm, as youth was succeeded by age, it seems only natural that John the apostle should have

become softened. In the Gospel and the Epistles you seem to hear again and again repeated the words which tradition ascribes to John in his old age, "Little children, love one another." Love became more and more the dominant key of his life; the Gospel and the Epistles represent this softened nature, this effect of the Spirit of God upon him, this maturity of Christian character. I do not say that the fiery element, the intense hatred of wrong is absent from the Gospel and from the Epistles. You find it there still, and yet it is toned down, as you do not find it toned down in the Apocalypse.

That the Apocalypse was written before the destruction of Jerusalem I think is very plain from some things in the Apocalypse itself, namely, the fact that the Jews are spoken of there as an existing hostile power, as they are not in the Gospel and in the Epistles. You remember that, toward the close of Paul's life, but during Paul's active ministry, Judaizing teachers were his most active, persistent, and malignant enemies; and the tendency to turn the church of Christ into an old-fashioned Jewish synagogue was the evil tendency of the day. The Jews were the persistent and malignant opposers of Christianity. In the Apocalypse you find the recognition of that present enmity and hatred, as you do not find it in the Gospel and in the Epistles. In the Gospel and in the Epistles John refers to the Jews as enemies of Christ, it is true, but it is perfectly evident that their power for evil has long since passed

away.

In the Apocalypse, when the apostle is describing those two witnesses that were slain and that lay dead