Commentators on the Second Woe

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The Creation Concept


Introduction
Charles D. Alexander
Henry Alford
William Barclay
G. K. Beale
Henry Bechthold
I. T. Beckwith
E. W. Bullinger
William Burkitt
Adam Clarke
Augustus Clissold
Thomas Coke
James B. Coffman
John N. Darby
Austin Farrer
William Fulke
Andrew Fuller
William Brown Galloway
John Gill
James Gray
David Guzik
George Leo Haydock
Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
John Hooper
H. A. Ironside
Franciscus Junius
William Kelly
A. E. Knoch
Paul E. Kretzmann
George Eldon Ladd
John Peter Lange
Clarence Larkin
Joseph Law
John MacArthur
James M. MacDonald
William Marsh
Fredrick Denison Maurice
Heinrich Meyer
J. Ramsey Michaels
William Milligan
Henry M. Morris
William R. Newell
John H. Ogwyn
Ford Cyrinde Ottman
David C. Pack
Jon Paulien
J. Dwight Pentecost
Peter Pett
John A. Pinkston
Matthew Poole
Vern S. Poythress
James Stuart Russell
Ray Stedman
Joseph Augustus Seiss
Justin Almerin Smith
John Trapp
John F. Walvoord
Daniel Whedon
Christopher Wordsworth

Austin Farrer A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John's Apocalypse pp. 235-236.

In the sixth plague St John carries symbolical elaboration to a further point. He will combine two symbols: Aaronic breastplate (gold, hyacinth, purple), and the stench of Gehenna (brimstone, smoke...). The hosts of destruction appear armed with breastplates fiery (for purple), hyacinthine, and sulphurous, riding horses which breathe fire, smoke, and sulphur (brimstone), by which three plagues are killed the destined number of mankind. The astonishing elaboration of imagery, revealed in the otherwise inexplicable use of the word hyacinthine, is not a meaningless vagary. St John wishes to show us how God, represented by the ministers of his wrath, has put on 'righteousness for a breastplate, and garments of vengeance for clothing' in the day when he repays fury to his adversaries (Isa. lix. 17). Even so, why is the breastplate a priestly breastplate? The whole of the 'fire, smoke, and brimstone' of the trumpet-plagues are the expression (as we shewed above) of the 'incense, smoke and fire' of the liturgy in heaven out of which they arise. We saw how carefully St John works out the parallel. The liturgy is the acceptance of the saints' prayers for vindication, and the very stuff of the liturgy becomes the stuff of the vengeance exacted. It is part and parcel of the parallel that the priestly garments of the incense-angel should become the garments of vengeance clothing the destroyers.



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