Revelation 14:20 They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.
There are a few passages in the Scriptures that seem to get pulled out of context with the purpose of discrediting the Scriptures as a whole. The choice morsels become ammunition to try to force Christians to shut up about their faith. It often takes the form of “what kind of god would say something like this … and expect us to follow him?”
What often happens after this kind of attack is that the Christian is left without an immediate answer, so the conversation comes to an abrupt end. The person who threw the objection gets their way. They are left comfortably in their ignorance, while the Christian is left flustered.
I have found that almost all of these attacks can be solved if the conversation can actually be turned to the passage where it was unceremoniously ripped. The passage itself will often resolve the conflict. It will provide the context in which the text finds fuller meaning and contextualization, thus making much more sense to the modern reader.
Our text today could be one of these passages that gets ripped out of context and quoted. On the face of it, the trampling of people to death to the point that their blood flows creating a lake five feet deep and 180 miles outward or 36o miles across. Think how much liquid that would be? My calculation says 105,990,800,808,499.2 gallons of blood, or the blood of 70,660,533,872,300 people. There aren’t 70 trillion people on the planet!
OK, enough with the numbers! Our text is not a mathematical text. It is a text of apocalyptic literature, filled with extraordinary creatures, events and categories. Things are not what they seem. They have symbolic and spiritual meaning. They are not to be taken literally and thrown into a formula and calculated. My bad!
So if we aren’t to calculate this scene, what does it portray? What message are we to take from the passage? The first thing we should take from the passage as a whole, is that we want to be part of those who are in God’s family. We don’t want to be on the receiving side of God’s wrath.
The message of the Gospel has gone out to the whole world by the first messenger in this procession of seven messengers. The “eternal gospel” is proclaimed to “ever nation, tribe, language and people.” Everyone has had the chance to respond to God’s gracious invitation. And yet some have not accepted that message.
This season of judgment will be horrendous. Many will die in this judgment, too many to even imagine. And this horror gets depicted in our text with the image of people being put in an ancient winepress and trampled with the feet of justice while their blood flows freely and overcomes the surrounding area. That is a frightening picture, isn’t it!
God’s wrath on those who refuse His gracious message will be a horrible thing to see. But will He really send messengers to trample those who refuse to believe? Or is this an apocalyptic image, one common to this type of literature from that period in history, used to emphasize a point?
It think that the author is writing in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets about what he is seeing and experiencing as he encounters theses visions that are presented to him. He is doing his best to convey a message he is being given in that moment, and his reflections on the meaning of that moment. He wants the message to not get overwhelmed with way it is presented. He wants clarity, not ambiguity.
So if we are hearing ambiguity, perhaps we are missing the message. Perhaps we need to stand back and allow the scenery to pass by, take time to reflect, and then draw the lesson from the text. Just as the author did, we need to take time to process what the Word says, and then allow the Holy Spirit to help us make application to our lives.
The Arnold Journey 