Verse 15
15. Great voices in heaven Alford suggests that these voices were from the four living beings as distinguished from the twenty-four elders.” But that destroys the mysterious beauty of the apostle’s thought, which is, that the voices rolled and reverberated spontaneously through the heavens with no apparent utterer. They were as if the celestial spaces spake them.
Kingdoms The preferable reading seems to be kingdom, in the singular, of course including the italic repetition of the word inserted by the translators. The world’s kingdom, no longer the devil’s kingdom, has become God’s and his Christ’s kingdom.
Throughout this lofty prelude, the consummation of the entire events of the seventh trumpet is announced as already completed. The utterers take their mental stand-point at the end of the whole history, and contemplate its future completion as already past. This is the prophetic future-preterite; the past tense for the future.
The sounding of the trumpet is of course the signal for the panorama of symbols to move on. The announcement of the heavenly voices utters in one sentence the glorious result of the whole movement, and is the signal for the profound worship and thanksgiving of the elders which follow.
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