The Revelation of St. John the Divine

by A. H. Ames

It cannot be said that this same truth is so patent in the Revelation, but it is there by justifiable inference. The fact that the saints live and reign with Christ implies that the kingdom is a united one. The union and fellowship of the saints with each other, without division or alienation, is assumed. The obviousness of the truth was sufficient reason for less explicitness of statement. At any rate, if the apostle can be accused of any omission here he made ample amends in the prominence given to the subject in the fourth gospel, in which he records the prayer of our great High Priest, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”

The subject which thus opens out to us is one of such absorbing interest as to demand ample consideration. If it be true, as the words of the prophet and, indirectly, of the apostle seem to indicate, that one result of that spiritual quickening by the Holy Spirit called conversion or regeneration is to bring about union between all who call themselves disciples of Christ, then that regeneration cannot be regarded as complete or normal which does not produce fellowship with all other believers; neither can any Church be said to have attained a state in any great degree approaching its ideal which is not in union with the whole Church of Christ. And, in addition, any instrumentalities we may employ in order to bring about the conversion of the world must be ineffectual, or, at least, greatly shorn of their influence, until there exists in the Christian world a unity which finds its example and the source of its power in the divine nature.

Upon this important question there is entire consentience of opinion among the inspired evangelists and apostles of the New Testament. They record their conviction that Caiaphas was speaking as a true prophet of God, however faulty his motives in so doing, when he said that Jesus should die in order to “gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad.” Appreciating the immense loss of power which had resulted from the schism between Judah and Ephraim, a loss felt even more severely in the moral than in the political world, they strove with all their might to prevent a like division between the Jewish and Gentile converts to Christ. Nor did they cease their efforts, although laying themselves open to the imputation of inconsistency, until finally the matter became one of life or death to Christianity. With a tenacity which appears to us akin to obstinacy, they clung to the hope that the Jewish nation would accept Christ as Messiah and King, that the old Church would, under the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, merge into the new as the dawn melts into the day, and that thus the continuity of history would be preserved.

There can be no question that the rejection of Jesus as Saviour by his own people was a serious disaster. It created a division among those who believed in a living God, a personal Providence, and broke the unity of their testimony in the court of mankind. It sent Christianity out to its work heavily handicapped; and acute opponents, like Celsus and Porphyry, were not slow to avail themselves of the advantage it gave them. Nor has the loss of power therefrom accruing been recovered to this day. The event is sufficient justification for the wise conservatism which marked the actions of the apostles.

As little room can there be now for question that the divided, distracted, segmentary condition of Christendom, with the animosities, envies, sectarianism, undue exaltation of non-essentials, concentration of efforts upon things of minor importance, and cultivation of bigotry caused thereby, operates as a most active factor in shearing the religion of Christ of its legitimate influence. Nor could increase of power within and superiority to the world without be brought about so quickly by any means as by a unity of believers—such unity as the New Testament inculcates. This statement in no degree conflicts with the uniform declaration of the Scriptures that the word of God and the blood of Christ are the two all-important and all-sufficient agencies for the furtherance of the kingdom; it only asserts that the Bible and the cross will not have accomplished their purpose until such unity shall have followed their acceptance.

Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, no less emphatically affirms with all his authority the necessity of this union. A careful study of his epistles will show that he divides the religious history of the world into three distinct periods—Judaism, Gentilism, and a final period in which these shall be united.

First was Judaism, which began with Abraham, the pioneer and father of such as believe in a living, personal God. It ran its course, fulfilled its mission, and had attained what Paul calls “the fullness of times” when “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” The office of Judaism in the rôle of redemption was to bear witness to the supernatural. The Jew believed thoroughly in God as the Creator, the Providence over nature, the Ruler and Judge of mankind; in God as a person distinct from nature and supreme over it. He fully recognized the obligation of the commandment, “The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” But he exalted the supernatural so highly as to put an impassable chasm between God and his creatures. The immanent presence of God in nature was lost sight of in the conception of his transcendency over it. An incarnation of the Deity and, above all, any such contact of God with humanity as to admit of the possibility of his suffering was abhorrent to the mind of the Jew. And so when Christ came to his own as the Word “made flesh” his own received him not. And, with his foot almost upon the throne of the world, the Jew stumbled and fell.

Following this period, in Paul’s conception, was that of Gentilism, which has also its peculiar mission, runs its destined course, and has its times of fullness toward which it tends (Romans xi, 25). This was also the conception of Christ himself; for he had said, “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke xxi, 24).

The mission of the heathen Gentilism lay in the sphere of nature and humanity. With all the beauty, grace, order, motion, and life of the world the Gentile was in sympathy. His defect was that he rose no higher. The gods he believed in were simply human and natural forces personified and exalted. His need was to be impressed vividly with the conception of the reality of the supernatural and to recognize the divine Being above and beyond man and the world.

To meet the needs of all classes of humanity God has employed those two great instrumentalities to which reference is so constantly made in the Revelation of St. John—on the one hand, the Bible, the written word, the sword of the Spirit, with its intense realization of the presence and power of God in nature and history; on the other, the cross, the blood of the Lamb, with its rich testimony to the fact that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”