The Pulpit Commentary — Revelation — Section 524

Babylon. The dragon being a kind of anti-God, the wild beast an anli•Christ, the false prophet an anti-Spirit, the Babylon an anti-Church. The minor feature.s in the 81l1De way eorrespond; the true Christ died and rose again; the anti-Christ, the wild beast, was wounded nntodea.th, but his deadly wound was healed. The crucified Chris{ was exalted to be Prince and Saviour, and the outpoured- Spirit upon the Church glorified him by taking of the things of Christ and showing them to the .disciples, and by oonTinoing the world of sin because Christ went to the Father; the second beast, or fal88 prophet, works wonders, causes an image of the first wild beast to be made and worshipped. The followen of the Lamb are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise ; the worshippers of the wild beast receive from the false prophet the mark of the beast (see oh. xiii. throughout), It is desirable to keep those lines of parody and correspondent antagonism in mind. IL THB WILD BEAST, OB ANTI-CHBIST. It is with thewild beastthatweareeoncerned in this Excursus; but we can.not altogether dissociate the first beast from the second, though their work is diverse. 1. ThtJ first wild beast is ckarly to be connected with ~ vision of Dan, vii. 2-7. The identification of the beast described by Daniel with four great empires is unquestionable; it is hardly our purpose to inquire whether the four empires are Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Macedonia, and Rome; or Babylonia, Media; Persia, and Greece; The former, which is the more ancient opinion, appears the more probable; but it ill enough to remember that these four beasts represent four great world-powers. St. John saw rising out of the sea (comp. Dan. vii. 2) not seven diverse beasts, but one seven-headed beast. Now, it is perfectly true that to the early Christians pagan and imperial Rome was the one great world-power whose shadow darkened the earth, and that a seven-headed monster might well depict this pagan Rome, as a four- headed beast had represented to Daniel an earlier empire (Greece or Persia); and the wild beast of oh. xiii. from one aspect undoubtedly represents this great tyrant power; but it seems to the present writer that the genius of the Apocalypse is concentration -that which to earlier prophets was seen in detail is to the Christian seer grouped. Daniel saw four beasts rising one after another; St. John saw one wild beast uniting in himself all the early, present, and future manifestations of that world-empire which has ever been hostile to the spiritual kingdom. Two reasons may be noticed-one from the Book of Daniel, and the other from Revelation. This concentration of di1Terent world- powers into one representative body was not foreign to the thought of the earlier prophet. Daniel relates the vision in which the diverse monarchies of the world were represented as one huge human figure ea.at out of gold, silver, brass, and iron (Dau. ii. 31-49); the diverse powers were thus seen as one, and the little stone, which repre- sented the true spiritual kingdom, in smiting upon one, caused the whole image to falL The world-kingdoms were thus seen in prophetic vision as one great age-long world- power, which m11St be smitten by Christ's kingdom. The Book of Revelation also gives us a hint that the sevenfold aspect of the wild beast must not be given too limited or too local an interpretation. 'l'he wild beast, with seven heads and ten crowns, is in these features reproducing the appearance of the red dragon, who is also represented as having seven heads and ten crowns (comp. eh. xii. 3; xiii. 1). Now, the dragon is surely the type of the great arch-enemy, the devil, the anti-God; the seven heads and ten crowns denote that he is the prince of. this world, who has more or less animated ihe successive great world-powers by hostility to righteousness; the empires of the world have been his in so far as they have been founded on force or fraud, oppression or unholiness. When, then, the seven-headed wild beast rises from the sea, must we not see in the seven heads the counterpart of those which the dragon bore ? 'fhe dragon uarries those seven heads, as he is the great spiritual prince of this world, the one who is practically worshipped in all mere world-made empires. 'fhe wild beast carrl08 these seven heads because he is the great representative of all these world-powers them- selves; and what may give almost certainty to this interpretation is the fact that the wild beast unites in himself the appearances of leopard, bear, and lion, which were the emblems employed by Daniel to represent earlier mcnarohies. Actua.lly at the momeu~ St. John saw the vision, the wild beast was to him Rome, because through Rome the great world-empire was then working. The seven heads might also look like types of successive emperors; but the more important, because age-long, reading of the Vl8ion aets before ua the concentration in one great mon~trous wild beast of all these powar,11, 584 THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. [oH; XXIL 1-21.·