Revelation 12 - James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary

CHRISTIANITY AND WAR

‘There was war in heaven.’

Revelation 12:7

And if in heaven, where the Lord Almighty works His plans of goodness and love, then, without surprise, on earth, with its fallen passions and selfish, unholy ambitions.

I. But what has the gospel of Christ to say to the whole question?—How does Christianity speak with regard to the right and wrong of war? Certainly there is an answer. The spirit of Christianity, the ethics of the gospel, the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ are opposed, absolutely, to the spirit of war in itself. In old days, in the times before Christ, war nearly always, on one side or the other, and not infrequently on both, represented the savage instincts and rude elements of human character and infirmity. And war was lightly entered upon, even within our own history, in a spirit of pride and cruelty, hate and revenge. And war, as hate, is wrong, absolutely. And only gradually, as the spirit of Christianity is better loved and understood, are the evil springs of war abandoned and its selfish cruelties put away. And at least we must admit that in these days the brighter the light of Christianity is, in any nation, the more wonderfully are all these features changed even in the very conduct of war itself.

II. We, a great Christian empire, have frequently had thrown upon our hands the unwilling, painful task of rising up to defend by force our dependent peoples from evils under which they cried. Our very Christianity calls us to the terrible conflict of war sometimes. And if war were always and inevitably wrong, then the greatest empire in the world ought to exist without an army and without a fleet. And the most peace-loving Christian man could not contemplate that, with the world as it is, as a sane or even a possible situation.

III. Again, war is God’s scourge for many things that are more deadly wrong than war.—In a fallen and struggling world the Almighty uses war as a drastic remedy for many a slow and cankering poison. He makes ‘even the wrath of man to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain.’ War has its terrible mercies and its grim healing. We can look back on our own civil wars and learn that. We can read it in the lurid glare of the French Revolution. We can unearth it in many an ancient story of a decaying nation and a corrupt people. A new race of unselfish and devoted men, of pure and noble women, of high and worthy ideals, can come in only by war sometimes, and in a baptism of grief and blood.

—Rev. Dr. E. Hicks.

ST.

MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS

‘Michael and his angels.’

Revelation 12:7

The belief in angelic creatures has been a favourite article in the universal creed, but the most unequivocal and direct evidence of their existence and ministry is to be found in the Bible. Fifteen, at least, of the inspired writers have described them.

I. Of the vast number of the holy angels there is very little doubt.—The Jewish Rabbis state that ‘nothing exists without an attendant angel, not even a blade of grass.’ The great Aquinas asserts that ‘there are more angels than all substances together, celestial and terrestrial, animate and inanimate.’ St. Gregory calculates that ‘there are so many angels as there are elect.’ Charles Kingsley maintains that ‘in every breeze there are living spirits, and God’s angels guide the thunder-clouds.’ But what saith the Scripture? On its pages their number is variously stated. (See case of Moses, Elisha, Daniel, St. John.) At the advent of Jesus there appeared ‘a multitude of the heavenly host,’ and one dark eventide, near Gethsemane, He declared to St. Peter that if He prayed to His Father He would give Him ‘more than twelve legions of angels.’

II. But all the angels are not of the same rank.—Michael, for example, is represented in Scripture as being the next in rank to the Angel-Jehovah. In the Book of Daniel he is spoken of as ‘one of the chief princes’ in the celestial hierarchy, and in the Book of St. John as ‘the archangel.’

III. The ministry of angels.—They were ever the servants of Jesus during His incarnate life, as they are now in His glorified life; and sometimes God has employed them to punish the wicked. But they are specially ‘sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation.’ Nor do they forget the body which enshrined the soul. They guard its sleeping-place, as they did the sepulchre of Jesus, until the early dawn of the resurrection, when they will give up their trust.

THE VICTORIOUS CHARACTER

‘And they loved not their lives unto the death.’

Revelation 12:11

If we Christians believe at all, we must believe in an ideal for humanity. Jesus Christ is the Son of Man, and therefore He represents so completely the ideal for manhood, apart from any of the idiosyncrasies of race, that we feel He must be the expression of the Divine will for all humanity.

Let us see how one of the disciples of the Master conceived of this ideal, to realise some of the features of the type and ideal of character which the writer of the Book of the Revelation puts before us. He says:—

I. A man must have faith in good.

II. A man must realise, because of the very strength of his confidence in good, that it is worth paying a price for.

III. A man must also read this deep spiritual principle, so often forgotten by superficial teachers—that it is not enough that he shall be a believer in goodness, that a man must pay a price to maintain good in the world; he also thinks that only they will adequately promote good who have participated in the spirit of the ideal.

—Bishop W. Boyd Carpenter.