Bible Commentaries
Revelation 11

Verses 1-19

XI:1 ff. The ’measuring’ of the Temple, its Altar and Worshippers —1. Modelled on Ez 40; 43:13-17, and Zach 2 where the ’new’ all-holy Jerusalem is measured for preservation and purification.

2a. The ’outer court’ and the City at large are to be given up to pagan desecration. (The essential Church shall not perish even during world-persecution.) 2b. This desecration lasts, in apocalyptic language, ’a time, times and half a time’ (see Daniel 7:25, etc.), i.e. 3? years, 42 months, or 1,260 days—’persecution-time’, stereotyped since the original 3? years ( June 168Dec. 165 b.c.) during which the Jews were subjugated by the would-be imperialist paganizer Antiochus Epiphanes.

3. But God keeps two penitentially garbed Witnesses there. Why two? First, because two witnesses were the necessary minimum in Jewish law for witness to be valid. Then, John’s recollection of Zacharias’s ’measuring’ makes him think also of that prophet’s figure of the People as the ’lamp’ fed by the oil from two olive-trees, doubtless Josue and Zorobabel, heads of the priesthood and of the royal house. 4. Here the remaining witnesses are both lamp and oil;

5, 6; finally, because of the firm expectation of at least one pre-Messianic witness— always Elias (cf.Malachi 3:1-3; Malachi 4:5; and Matthew 11:10); or indeed two witnesses, Elias and e.g. Enoch, Moses or Esdras who should arrive before the End. Elias could ’shut up the heavens’ (3 Kg 17:1; in Luke 4:25 that drought lasts 3? years), and Moses brought plagues on Egypt.

7. What is ’the’ Wild Beast from the Abyss who fights and slays them? He was not mentioned in ch 9! John’s mind is already haunted by his next section where the Beast is a protagonist: there is a dawning of that vision within this one.

8-10. Their corpses lie exposed 3? days—brief triumphhour for their enemies who had been tortured (10) by their preaching for 3? years. This occurs in the ’great city’, ’symbolically called ’Sodom’ and ’ Egypt’, where their Lord, too, was crucified’

(8). But if Rome, actual or mystical, is the focus of persecution, as the forthcoming sections make clear, why not use here ’Babylon’, the recognized cipher-name for Rome? Because the ’measurement’ visions had inevitably ’set the scene’, so far, in Jerusalem: because Jerusalem was, for John, the Great Apostate: and because the sack of the city ( a.d. 70) was vivid in his memory.

11-13. But the Witnesses are resuscitated, assumed into heaven, ’ and their enemies are either converted, or perish. This is the end of the ’interlude vision’ but not of John’s prophecy. So far, he has seen the world, which should have been all HolyCity, Holy-Land, turned into the wickedest of cities, Sodom, and of lands, Egypt—nay, into one vast Calvary; and the Church shrinking till she seems to have no more even a minimum witness-voice (but she preserves her Altar): yet her witnesses revive, as they always will, are glorified, and—await the recurrence of even fiercer persecution. But first, John closes this scheme of visions by the (d )

15-18 Sounding of the Seventh Trumpet —All Nature and SuperNature acclaim—whom? ’The Art, the Wast’: but ’who is to come’ is omitted, for he is come: the consummation is complete: John sees no new vision (cf. the Seventh Seal), but does, this time, hear the final Triumph-cry.

Summary of Part A —So far the Apoc has taught us nothing new. But it has reinforced in dramatic imagery the lesson inculcated ever since Genesis—that God exists, is the paramount Lord, Eternal and AllPerfect, of all the world—that world in which are men. And that men, by sin, have tried to make chaos of that cosmos—and what is sin, and what has it always been? The desire of man to ’be as God’, selfsufficient; to create man’s own kingdom here on earth. ’I will not serve.’ Hence wars; hence every evil peace. But always there have been ’servants of God’, and always God has spoken to them through his prophets, and supremely and definitely through his Son. Those who believe and obey shall be everlastingly saved: those who are obdurate in rebellion shall be for ever lost. These general truths have been several times repeated, yet not merely repeated the waves retreat, only to crash farther forward; and now they will fall full on to the times of John himself, and the world in which those to whom he is immediately writing have to live.

XI:19 A Prefatory Vision to Part B —As Heaven was opened to John before the first part of his visions, so it is here too, but with a specially ’incarnational’ colouring: the Ark of God is no longer hidden, but displayed and actually opened: ’the Word spread his tent amongst us’: the Shekinah (true to its significance) dwells amongst us. Only here and in his Gospel (1:14) does John use the word ?s????se?, though see Apoc 21:3; 13:6; God’s ’tent’,