H All the universe and its forces are being administered for
REVELATION vii. 17 209
purposes of redemption. The Lamb rules and He rules as the Lamb. How calming to feel this, to look up from the turmoil of this visible, flaring, and lying world — from the shows and shams and the tinted scene of the theatre ; from all in life that startles and appals, to Him who sits above it all. From Him all things proceed, and to Him they return in circular flow. The shadows are all passing ; the reality is behind. Nothing lasts ; our trials are all hasting away to oblivion ; let the wind rave as it will, we look at the Christ who abides. How small all our conflicts and ambitions seem to be, how transient and easily borne our sorrows, when we look up as John looked from the rock and the wild waters to the serene King, against whose changeless purpose all the waves of time and circumstance break in vain.^
2. The first words which St. John ever heard of Jesus were words that described Him as a Lamb. When he was a disciple of the Baptist, drinking in inspiration from that stern teacher, he had heard these words fall from the Baptist's lips, " Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." The Apostle was a young man then, aflame with eager hope, and the words of the Baptist sank deep into his heart — so deep that through all his after years he loved to think of Jesus as the Lamb. What experiences St. John had had, and what a vast deal he had suffered when he came to write this Book of Kevelation ! Life and the world were different to him now from what they had been in the desert with the Baptist. Yet in Eevelation some seven-and-twenty times John repeats the sweet expression " Lamb of God " — the first words he had ever heard of Christ. Christ in heaven to-day is the very Christ who walked by the banks of Jordan. Here it is the Lamb "in the midst of the throne." Here, in the glory, it is the Lamb slain, as in Isaiah it had been a lamb led to the slaughter. And we feel at once that not all the height of heaven, or all the inconceivable grandeurs of God's throne, have changed the nature or the love of Him who was pointed to beside the Jordan. Somehow, we are prone to think that our Saviour in the glory must be different from what He was long ago. We know that He is no longer rejected and despised, and we know that the body of His humiliation has been glorified, until insensibly we transfer these changes from His outward 1 W. R. NicoU, The Lamb of God, 50. REV. — 14
2IO THE LAMB AS A SHEPHERD
nature to His heart, as though death and resurrection had altered that. So do we conceive Christ as far away from us, separated from the beating of the human heart ; glorious, yet not so full of tender brotherhood as in the days of Capernaum and Bethany. That error is combated by the vision of the Lamb in heaven. Purity, gentleness, and sacrifice are there. The wrath of the Lamb grows terrible just as we remember that that wrath is love rejected and despised. And in the last Judgment, when the Lamb shall be our judge, it will not be the majesty of God that will overwhelm us ; it will be that we are face to face, at last, with the love and with the sacrifice of Christ.
^ The wrath of the Lamb must be a wrath that can be justified. It is not, like so much of the anger of this world, unreasonable, hasty, and vindictive. It is the wrath of the Lamb, most gentle, most pitiful, most merciful, most long-suffering. Some have said that the wrath of the Lamb must be terrible because it is love turned to anger. There is no fire, it has been said, like the sheen of a dead affection; no enemy like one that has once been a friend. " To be wroth with one we love doth work like madness in the brain." But while this is true of men, we cannot affirm it in the same way about Christ, because this very excess of resent- ment and passion is often an infirmity and a sin. We may say that in Christ, as the flame of love is purer and stronger, so the flame of anger may be ; but we cannot say that anything in His anger is passionate or vindictive. The truth pressed on us is that we shall have no defender when the Lamb ceases to plead for us. No one is so abundant in the resources of mercy and patience, and when His resources are exhausted, on whose shall we fall back ? 1
j[ Every fibre in Dean Church's frame quivered with righteous passion against the cynical indifference to cruelty and wrong which dominated London " Society " at the time of the Bulgarian agitation. He saw a moral judgment at work, sifting the people. Freedom, righteousness, the honour of England, the belief in the Divine government of the world, all were at stake in the momentous issue. He found himself beset on all sides by a political and social temper which was worldly, godless, im- moral, and he flamed with prophetic wrath. The wrath of one so sensitive, so delicate, so appreciative, so balanced, so wise, was like nothing else that I have ever known. Its heat was so utterly devoid of mere personal interest; it was » W. R. Nicoll, The Lamb of God, 116.