The Doom Of The Man Who Denies His Lord

14:9-12 And another angel, a third angel, followed them saying with a great voice: "If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark upon his forehead or upon his hand, he too shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, mingled undiluted in the cup of his wrath, and he will be tortured with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. The smoke of their torture ascends for ever and ever, and those who worship the beast and his image have no rest by day or night, nor has anyone who receives the mark of his name.

Here is the summons to steadfastness on the part of God's dedicated ones, who keep the commandments of God and maintain their loyalty to him.

Warning has already been given of the power of the beast and of the mark that the beast will seek to set upon all men ( Revelation 13:1-18 ). Now there is warning to those who fail in that time of trial.

It is significant that this is the fiercest warning of all. Of all dooms, as the Revelation sees it, the doom of the apostate is worst. The reason is that the Church was battling for its very existence. If it was to continue the individual Christian must be prepared to face suffering and trial, imprisonment and death. If the individual Christian yielded, the Church died. In our day the individual Christian is still of paramount importance, but his function now is not usually to protect the faith by being ready to die for it, but to commend it by being diligent to live for it.

The doom of the apostate is thought of in pictures of the most terrible judgment that ever fell on this earth--that of Sodom and Gomorrah. "Lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace" ( Genesis 19:28 ). John echoes the words of Isaiah describing the day of the Lord's vengeance: "And the streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch, and her soil into brimstone; her land shall become burning pitch. Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever" ( Isaiah 34:8-10 ).

The wicked will be destroyed in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. As we have seen before, part of the blessedness of heaven was to see the suffering of the sinner in hell. As 2 Esdras has it: "There shall be shewn the furnace of hell, and opposite to it the paradise of delight" ( 2 Esdras 7:36 ). We have the same idea in the Book of Enoch: "I will give them over (the wicked) into the hands of mine elect: as straw in the fire, so shall they burn before the face of the holy: as lead in the water shall they sink before the face of the righteous, and no trace of them shall be found any more" (Enoch 48:9). A feature of the last days will be "the spectacle of righteous judgment in the presence of the righteous" (Enoch 27:2, 3). When Chrysostom was encouraging Olympias to steadfastness, he encouraged her by promising that in due time she would see the divine torture of the persecutors, just as Lazarus saw Dives tormented in flames.

We may dislike this line of thought; we may condemn it as subchristian--and indeed it is. But we have no real right to speak until we have gone through the same sufferings as the early Christians did. Many a time the heathen had looked down from the crowded seats of the arena on the sufferings of the Christians; and the early Christians were sustained by the thought that some day the divine justice of heaven would adjust the balance of earth's injustices.