The War and the Gospel: Sermons and Addresses During the Present War

by Henry Wace

Divine Judgment and Renovation.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 11, 1916.

“And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”—Rev. xxi. 5.

These words were uttered by Him that sitteth on the throne, as the interpretation of the grand vision which passed before the Apostle at the conclusion of the Revelation vouchsafed to him. “I saw,” he says, “a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.... And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”

But this vision was the sequel of fearful scenes which had passed before the Apostle as the future course of the Divine judgments was unrolled before him. He had witnessed a terrible succession of destructions, and plagues, and wars, falling upon the inhabitants of the earth, involving miseries and sufferings incalculable. He had seen passing before him the awful punishments inflicted upon the enemies of God, of Christ, of righteousness, and truth. One quotation in the final scene will be enough to remind you of the nature of the visions. “I saw an angel,” says the Apostle (chapter xix. 17), “standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, small and great.” At length, when these fearful plagues and judgments are completed the Apostle sees a great white throne and Him that sat on it, from Whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. Then the books were opened, and the dead, who stood before God, both small and great, were judged, every man according to their works. Then it is, after this awful consummation, that the Apostle sees a new heaven and a new earth. And He that sits upon the great white throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Such, in brief, is the burden of the Book of Revelation. It will be observed that it involves these two cardinal points: First, the judgment and the extirpation of all that is evil by a series of struggles and agonies; and secondly, after this terrible experience, the creation of all things new. The first part, however, in the process of the Divine administration, consists of a series of scenes of miseries, disasters, and bloodshed than which nothing more terrible can be imagined, and which are described with a lurid force to which no other human writing offers anything comparable. War and disease and the confusion of all the elements of human society, and even of heaven and earth, are brought before us, until men are reduced to cry to the very mountains and rocks to cover them. All is described as the inevitable result of the wrath of God against evil and its representatives, and a fearful joy is ascribed to the heavenly beings who behold this vindication of the Divine righteousness. The four and twenty elders fall on their faces and worship God, saying (xi. 17), “We give Thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, Which art and wast and art to come, because Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power and hast reigned. And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the Saints, and to them that fear Thy Name, small and great, and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.” And then in awful response are heard, in the temple of God, “lightnings and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake and great hail.”

These dread scenes, these fearful judgments, are depicted as the inevitable preliminary in the manifestation of the Divine Will and the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. This is the main fact which stands out broadly from the Book. It is not necessary, for the purpose of appreciating this, to comprehend the signification of each of the awful scenes which are predicted. How far they are capable of any explanation before the final events may well be doubted. Old Testament prophecy remained in great part mysterious until the moment of its accomplishment, and the full interpretation of Christian prophecy can hardly be less dependent upon its actual realization. But one thing is plain, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ upon earth, the full realization of all its promises of peace and goodwill, the complete manifestation of the glory and power of its King—that these great hopes and blessed promises cannot, according to the Book of Revelation, be realized without the world passing through scenes of fearful struggle and misery, and without the execution of Divine judgment upon the evil and falsehood with which it abounds.

These are stern truths which it is well for us to bear in mind amidst the terrible scenes which are now being enacted in the present war. The New Testament begins with promises of peace, and it ends with a vision of peace and glory in which God will wipe away all tears from our eyes; but the warning is conveyed to us, through the mouth of the last Apostle, that this blessed condition cannot be reached except through a manifestation of Divine justice and Divine wrath, which will bring upon earth and upon all mankind inconceivable miseries. The sins of men must be brought into judgment. The Divine righteousness must expose their real character by the consequences they naturally involve. The truth must be manifested that there is a Judge of all the earth, Who brings every work of man into judgment, whether it be good or whether it be evil; and the evil in the works of men is so deep and far-reaching that its judgment must needs involve the most terrible suffering. In proportion as God takes to Himself His great power and reigns, the first result must be seen in these agonies of human nature, and must culminate in the disruption of the very elements of nature itself.

It is well we should remind ourselves how fearfully these pictures of the Apostle of love have been fulfilled in the history of the world since his time. It was not long after he wrote, when a series of persecutions broke upon the Christian Church, which were at length avenged by terrible intestine wars between the heads of the Roman Empire, and in due course of time, by the overthrow of that Empire itself in a long series of wars and devastations, which can only be fitly described in some of the vivid language of the Apocalypse itself. It would be appalling if we could realize the extent to which Europe was filled with “blood and fire and vapour of smoke” during the five or six centuries which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. Then followed the incalculable miseries and untold bloodshed involved in the contest between the Christian and the Mohammedan world, throughout the long period of the Crusades. Add to this all the intestine wars between Christians themselves during the Middle Ages, and the fearful devastation of which the East was the victim in the course of Mohammedan conquests and revolutions, and you have before your eyes a picture not adequately described elsewhere than in this terrible Book. The Reformation was followed by a long series of wars, during which a great part of the surface of Europe suffered the most cruel devastations; and even to the present day the whole world open to our observation has been suffering from almost continuous bloodshed in one part or other of its surface.