Stephen Alexander Hunter

“ Although devoid in a large measure of the humanistic idea of literature for its own sake, they yet subserved the truest aim in that they brought to the surface and made verbal those deeper tides of thought and feeling which move and flow in the universal heart, those wide-spread and enduring currents which they instinctively felt were shared by the men of their own generation. Writing only for a religious purpose, and because they had a message for life, the development of their thought-forms was more or less incidental, and was the product alike of the man, his religion, and his environment. ”

“ The extreme brevity with which are described and grouped together so many great events of the far future that so deeply affect the Christian hope, serves to indicate that the chief aim of the Revelation does not consist in fully manifesting these events which lie hidden in the hand of God, but in preparing the church for what precedes them, both of trial and of conflict. “Like a flash of lightning in the darkness the vision lights up the whole line of God's purposes to the end” ”

“ For whatever else may be its lessons, we must not leave out of view this practical purpose of divine monition to the world of men, which has so deeply impressed itself upon every generation of Christians. Its message of warning is inwrought with and reënforced by its prophetic scenes of terror and reward: for the Apocalypse is the book of the future as well as of the past and present, and that future is ever near in prophetic vision, however far it may be in historic relation, and to John's eye is always filled with the figure of the returning Christ who comes to judgment and to victory. ”

“ The two most obvious principles that pervade the book of Revelation and underlie its ever changing scenes, are, first, God's method of government in the world by the trial of his people and the judgment of the wicked; and, second, God's method of developing character in moral agents by moral conflict. Accepting these as in a measure interpretative of the ways of God with men, the Apocalypse approaches the standpoint of the divine perspective, and traces the great lines of the divine purpose as they traverse the entire field of human history. ”

“ Ch. 21:1-22:5 The vision of the New Jerusalem is a crowning picture of redemption consummated, a vision of triumph and peace after the conflict is over and the victory won, portraying the eternal bliss of the redeemed in the immediate presence of God, whose glory is realized in the intimate fellowship and ultimate well-being of his creatures that have been finally recovered from sin and fully confirmed in righteousness. In this closing vision of the Revelation we reach the goal of Christian hope in the future life with God. ”

“ John is the meeting ground of the Old and New Testament: what binds the long succession of books—by so many authors, of so many different ages—into a unity is expressed by the saying that ‘the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.’ The whole of prophetic literature yields its imaginative figures to adorn this final Revelation; all history is made one by the central thought of the kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of Christ.”—Richard G. Moulton,—in Literature of the Bible. ”

“ The Sixth Seal 12 And I saw when he opened the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became [pg 068] black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon became as blood; 13 and the stars of the heaven fell unto the earth, as a fig tree casteth her unripe figs when she is shaken of a great wind. ”

“ And any view which assumes for the author a narrow field of vision, such as that he merely grouped together the current apocalyptic conceptions of his time in order to fling them in fierce polemic against the Roman Empire and to foreshadow its defeat and fall,51 rests upon a manifestly imperfect judgment that fails in religious depth, missing the spiritual significance of the message, and lacks in literary insight, denying the evident marks of originality, genius, and inspiration in the most wonderful and unique composition of its kind that has ever been produced. ”

“ Like a parable an apocalypse flings a great truth across our path, instinct with the touch of spiritual life.
The revelation made to John doubtless took the Apocalyptic form because it was the prevailing literary method of that time for the treatment of the theme dealt with by his prophecy, and its constructive symbolism already filled and colored his thought. But notwithstanding that it is cast in a Jewish mould, the Christian thought everywhere triumphs over the Jewish form. ”

“ Moved by the visions which it records, John wrote to the churches in Asia a message not only for them but for all believers in all time; for its lessons lie not alone in the events of that age, but in the wider and permanent relations of the church and the world throughout the centuries, and they appeal to us with new force as the varying conditions continue to change with the revolving years. The lessons of the book are for us in our day no less than they have been for others in the past, and as they will be for still others in the advancing future ”

“ This term which is here introduced, “the kingdom of our God”, though used but twice in the book of the Revelation, is the most notable phrase in the New Testament. It occurs nearly a hundred times, either as “the kingdom of God”, or “the kingdom of heaven”, a term which signifies the rule of God in the earth, God becoming king among men. The kingdom of God, it should be seen, has a far broader meaning and wider sweep than the church, for it serves to include all that God is ever doing the ages through for the spiritual uplift and permanent betterment of mankind. ”

“ The forms of the Two-horned Beast today are just as deceiving and defiling to men, and as much opposed to the kingdom of God, as they ever were of old. And not only are all the world-religions the abiding manifestation of the Second Beast, but even the Christian church also, whether Catholic or Protestant, may become subservient thereto, whenever or wherever it, or any part of it, may be dominated by the spirit of the world-religions, and thereby yields its God-given prestige to this Beast. ”

“ The evils inflicted by the heathen nations upon mankind, especially the evils of war with their concomitant results, are here indicated by this forceful figure; yet these, though deep and terrible, entirely fail to turn the rest of men, who escape death, from idol worship and its attendant impurities—a marvelous forecast of the path of history, for the heathen powers have time and again become the agents of woe to mankind, yet the people have not awakened to the true source of their sorrow in idolatry. ”

“ And while all Hebrew literature is essentially grave, and devoid of the element of humor, yet Apocalyptic is abidingly overshadowed by a weight of world-woe from which men seek to escape into another sphere and into new and better conditions of life.
The larger study of Apocalyptic Literature must continue to have its effect upon the interpretation of the Apocalypse which is indisputably its greatest masterpiece. ”

“ The symbol of battle and victory, it depicts the conflict of the centuries, and points to the assured triumph that awaits the people of God in the end of the world, while it incites men to persistent faith and hope ”

“ In the light of modern criticism the primary question to be decided is whether we are dealing with an ordinary Jewish-Christian apocalypse of similar value with a multitude of others in the past, and with no essentially deeper meaning or diviner message; or whether we have not in the Apocalypse of John a true revelation, given in this literary form because of its particular suitability to the condition of the time, and its fitness for the needs of the generation that first received it. ”

“ Its light is like unto a stone most precious, and the materials of its structure are most costly; the building of the wall is of jasper, the city and the street of pure gold, and the foundations of the wall adorned with all manner of precious stones,574 while the several gates are each of a single pearl,—the mingled symbols of brilliancy, glory, costliness, and beauty. ”

“ All the current interpretations may be classified under one or other of the above heads, yet in the hands of individual interpreters they are often modified and blend into each other in their application—a manifest recognition of the fact that there is an element of truth underlying each view, which we may perhaps say has been unduly emphasized, for all agree that the interpretation is somehow and somewhere to be found in human life and history. ”

“ We find, for example, that the divine method in history is uniformly viewed as in the Apocalyptic Literature, and contrary to general experience, as chiefly one of crisis and catastrophe rather than of gradual development—the sudden and striking hiding from view the continued and ordinary. And we cannot but inquire how far this conception is with John the result of literary form and spiritual mood, rather than intended to set forth the intimate nature of the divine method ”

“ The falling of a star was regarded as a sign of some great disaster about to happen, and is here apparently intended to be typical of judgment sent from heaven, while the name Wormwood signifies the bitterness of the trouble which it entails upon men. But beyond this all is indefinite, a quality characteristic of Apocalyptic which often heightens rather than lessens the general effect. The bitter waters expressed the moral bitterness that men must taste because of their sin: the wide result is thus covered by an unspoken appeal to thought through a significant symbol. ”

“ The Purpose of the Apocalypse, as indicated by its introductory words “The Revelation”, is the revealing or unveiling of mystery. In the Christian sense a mystery is a former secret of divine truth that has now been at least partially revealed (Eph. 3:1-11) , while an apocalypse is the process of revealing it, and also the revelation itself containing the truth made known. ”

“ The matter of supreme importance for us is to apprehend aright the far-seeing and ulterior purpose in the mind of the Spirit in giving the Revelation. And in search for this we should not allow our zeal for the original interpretation to lead us to forget the significant lesson of the Old Testament, that the primary teaching of prophecy has often not voiced its deeper message, that God's thought has mostly proved wider than man's first apprehension ”

“ For we should not forget that while the visions of the Apocalypse, like the voices of prophecy and the parables and teachings of our Lord, had their immediate occasion and purpose, yet this becomes in turn the ground and instrument of a wider and permanent divine message to all mankind, and that this is the message which is our chief concern. ”

“ This was a fundamental weakness of the Apocalyptic point of view, which found the proper design of the world in its speedy ending and not in its longer continuance, a mistake that unfortunately has been perpetuated in Christian thought as though it were fundamental to it, whereas the victory and the End may well be as far apart as the creation from the victory. The Apocalypse sounds the note of the End without hesitancy or discussion. ”

“ No other passage in the New Testament has taken a deeper or more permanent hold upon the minds of believing men than this pregnant prophecy of a millennium, in which the thousand years is six times named in as many verses. ”

“ The symbol of an innumerable multitude made more intense by multiplication, becoming thereby an innumerably innumerable multitude, and this again doubled. The countless number of the vast invading army of horsemen under the sixth trumpet which destroy a third part of men from the earth; the world-forces which under direction of the world-rulers of the darkness work world-ruin among men—a significant figure of the mighty power and destructive agency of the heathen world as it appeared to John's mind in the great Apocalyptic vision. ”

“ And we are thus amply assured that a correct apprehension of the form and fashion of Apocalyptic thought will undoubtedly guide us in all that pertains to the material framework of the Apocalypse, though certainly we should not forget that we must always go to the Old Testament and to the New when we would reach its inner heart. ”

“ The Apocalyptic form is so foreign to our way of thinking, and the mysticism is so peculiarly Oriental and Jewish, that these are apt to perplex rather than enlighten us. The Apocalyptist, deeply absorbed in the later prophecies of the Old Testament, especially those of Daniel and Ezekiel, and his mind steeped in the dreams and images of current Jewish apocalypses, found under the influence of the Spirit a fitting sphere for his prophetic fervor in a series of strange symbolic visions such as belonged to the fashion of his time. ”

“ If we interpret of Rome, then the ruin of the one empire with its rulers and parts foreshadows that of every other earth-power that opposes the rule of Christ among men, and the overthrow of the one city with its social and civic forces allied with evil, prefigures that of the entire anti-christian social and civic power throughout the world. ”