Blog
Revelation 19:1-10 (Part 3)
By Joe Haynes
May 27, 2022
In our last session, we ended with a mystery. If it is correct that the Amen, Hallelujah! of the twenty-four elders and four living creatures in verse 4 predicts the end of all Gospel preaching, and marks the day when the fullness of the Gentiles will finally have been brought into the Kingdom of God (as Paul predicted in Romans 11:25), then what are we to make of another group crying out “Hallelujah!” and praising God in verses 6-10? If all the elect from the nations, the Gentiles, will have, by this time, been saved, who is left?
Let’s remember how the Book of Revelation paints this scene. In short, the scene before us is all of God’s people, poised on the edge of the Promised Land, ready at last to enter. But it’s not quite that simple. In Revelation 15 we also saw a picture of the entire Christian Church, having passed through Revelation’s equivalent of the Red Sea, standing on dry land in safety, singing the Song of Moses and the Song of the Lamb. Immediately after that, we were introduced to the seven angels with the final seven plagues that took up all of chapter 16. Those seven last plagues were predictions that were fulfilled over the course of about 4 centuries so far, from around 1600 to the present day! And the seventh plague is still not fulfilled, or at least, only in part. But there was a scene of all Christians from all time, having been saved through the equivalent of the Red Sea, delivered from Christ’s enemies, and ready to enter the Promised Land. Isn’t that fitting? All true believers in Jesus are always ready to enter the Promised Land one of two ways: either we live to see the return of Jesus and the resurrection and the coming of His Kingdom to earth, or we die before He comes and are raised to see the return of Jesus and the resurrection and the coming of His Kingdom to earth. Whether we remain alive until Jesus comes, or die before He comes, for any true follower of Christ, we are always on the verge, on the brink, of entering the Promised Land when Jesus comes again. Revelation 12 pictured this as the woman, the Church, fleeing into the wilderness where she was nourished by God until that day comes. But Revelation 14, and 17 introduced the other woman.
The Great Prostitute, Babylon the Great, tells the story of the people who claim to follow Jesus but do not really know Him. For them, their punishment, like the Exodus generation of Israelites, is to die in the wilderness without every being allowed to enter the Promised Land. The Kingdom of God does not belong to them. Theirs is the Kingdom of this World and its doom was predicted by the seven last plagues of chapter 16. Chapter 17 finds her in the wilderness, and finally judged and destroyed by the very people she used to rule. Chapter 18 witnesses the reaction of unbelievers to her destruction. The true people of God celebrate and praise God for judging that false church, that Prostitute, in the opening verses of chapter 19, as they see the smoke of her burning. So you see, we have two stories of two women: the true Church, saved, and standing ready to enter the Promised Land, and the false church, the Roman Catholic Church, condemned, and about to be destroyed without ever reaching that Land of Promise. Revelation 19:1-4 brings us right up to the final moment, when the Church of Jesus Christ is about to cross the Jordan River and inherit the world.
In this prophecy, that’s the precise moment when the voice of God Himself speaks from His throne in verse 5. “And from the throne came a voice saying, ‘Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, small and great,’” (Rev. 19:5 ESV). I think a lot of people are confused by this because on the one hand, the voice comes from the throne, suggesting the speaker must be God, but on the other hand, what the voice says is, “Praise our God…” which doesn’t sound like something God would say.[i] But the fact that the setting is the people of God poised to enter the Promised Land, helps us recognize what those words are alluding to, the words, “from the throne there came a voice…” Like so many other elements of these prophecies of the last days, of the end of the age here in these chapters of Revelation, the voice from the throne points us back, to discover what it means from the accounts of Israel’s exodus, from the ministry of Moses, and the expectation of entering the Promised Land. So we need now to learn about the significance of a) the voice from the throne itself, and what that refers to, and b) what the voice says in verse 5, and what that implies for this prophecy in Revelation 19.
The voice from the throne. The throne in question alludes to the mercy seat on the top of the Ark of the Covenant, and the voice is the voice Moses heard come from that mercy seat in Numbers 7:89. “And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with the LORD, he heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was on the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim; and it spoke to him." The significance of the direct voice from the throne in Numbers is illustrated by the incident with Aaron and Miriam when they became jealous of Moses. In Numbers 12, God called the three of them to the Tent of Meeting and rebuked Aaron and Miriam for presuming that they were prophets in the same sense that Moses was:
And the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud and stood at the entrance of the tent and called Aaron and Miriam, and they both came forward. And he said, “Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the LORD make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the LORD. [Numbers 12:5–9]
Look back now at Revelation 19:5 and take that in: this verse predicts a coming day when this last group who praise God in verses 6-10, whoever they are, will experience something ancient Israel never did, something none of Israel’s prophets ever did except Moses: God will speak directly to these people like God spoke to Moses. It implies an unusual, direct address, by God to people, and might even hint that, like Numbers 12:9 says, they will “behold the form of the LORD.”
What the voice of God says next, in verse 5, comes from a time when God spoke like that, from the throne above the Ark, in the Tent of Meeting—the same tent of Meeting alluded to earlier in chapter 15 as the people saved by God stood ready to enter the Promised Land, and as the seven angels departed the tent of Meeting to go and pour out the final seven plagues on the earth. In other words, the strange words of God in which God commands people to “praise our God,” in verse 5, comes from Deuteronomy 31, just before Moses died and just before Joshua led Israel across the Jordan to conquer the Promised Land.
Deuteronomy 31:14 tells us that God called Moses and Joshua to Him, and they reported to God in the Tent of Meeting. Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land, but Joshua was. So as Moses’ final act and final ministry to prepare the people of Israel, God gave Moses the words of a song to teach to Israel. "19 "Now therefore write this song and teach it to the people of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the people of Israel." (Deut. 31:19 ESV) Then, in verse 22,
So Moses wrote this song the same day and taught it to the people of Israel. 23 And the LORD commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, "Be strong and courageous, for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land that I swore to give them. I will be with you." (Deut. 31:22-23 ESV)
Moses assembled all the people of Israel and their elders (v28), and warned them that they were going to break covenant with God and rebel against God. Then Moses taught them the song God had given Moses to teach—not the “Song of Moses” really but the “Song of God”![ii] So the words of the song were spoken by God’s own voice, in the Tent of Meeting, from above the throne on the Ark of the Covenant, and the words of Revelation 19:5 reflect this scene where God spoke to Moses the words of the song Moses was to teach Israel. It’s wonderfully appropriate, then, that verse 5 describes God’s own voice teaching His people to sing the words, “Praise our God…!”
In the song Moses taught Israel, verse 3 says, "ascribe greatness to our God!" (Deut. 32:3 ESV) In verse 36 of that song, God calls the righteous remnant of Israel His “servants” and vows to show compassion to them (Deut. 32:36 ESV).[iii] Just before God gave Moses this song, Moses instructed all the people to assemble, adults and “little ones” (Deut 31:9), and in the same verse of the song where God calls them His “servants” He included all, “bond or free,” (Deut 32:36). So even that phrase “small and great” fits with the Deuteronomy setting of the Song God gave Moses. But the words in the second line of verse 5, “you who fear him, small and great” are a direct quote from Psalm 115:13, one of the rare “hallelujah” psalms that all these four Hallelujahs in Revelation 19 point back to. The passage in that psalm comes right after a warning to turn from idols and believe in God:
9 O Israel, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield. 10 O house of Aaron, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield. 11 You who fear the LORD, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield. 12 The LORD has remembered us; he will bless us; he will bless the house of Israel; he will bless the house of Aaron; 13 he will bless those who fear the LORD, both the small and the great. (Ps. 115:9-13 ESV)
Psalm 115 is part of the section of the Psalms called “the Hallel of Egypt”, which, according to Dr. Thomas was “…the name given to Psalms 113-118 because of frequent references in them to the redemption from Egypt.”[iv]
What am I saying all of this means? Simply this: that verse 5 connects back to when God gave Moses the words of a song to teach Israel, just before they entered the Promised Land, so that they would remember how He had saved them from Egypt and believe in Him again, and so, like in Psalm 115, would at last sing “Hallelujah!” In Rev 19:6-8, then, that’s exactly what it predicts the people of Israel will one day do. This time, it’s not the Song God gave Moses to teach to Israel; it’s a new song. It’s a song God Himself will teach to Israel by His own voice. Not from the Ark in the Tent of Meeting, but from His Holy Spirit directly to the hearts of the Jewish people. As Paul puts it in Romans 11:26, “…and in this way, all Israel will be saved…”
In conclusion, then, in this session I’ve made the case that this predicts the day when finally the era of Gospel preaching will be fulfilled, when all the elect God has chosen from among the Gentile nations of Earth will be saved, when we will be all poised, as it were, to enter the Promised Land when Jesus returns, but when there will be one last and mighty act of saving grace by which God will glorify His name and keep His promises to Israel: He Himself will teach the people of Israel a new Song, and will put a Hallelujah in their mouths so that they will suddenly, miraculously, believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ and be saved. That’s the group singing the final Hallelujah chorus in these next verses in chapter 19. In our next session, I’ll prove it to you from verses 6-10, that just before the second coming of Jesus Christ, the Jewish people, that is, “all Israel” will be saved. Then, together, Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus Christ, grafted together into one People of God, will enter the Promised Land of our inheritance.