NOTES for Rev 19:13

Before us stands Christ the warrior. But He is not the kind of man of war anyone can easily imagine, not a cold-blooded, cruel avenger who sweeps away everything in his path. He strikes not with a sword and takes no one’s life. He is the Word, and this is the only weapon that will defeat evil and death. He fights the evil that has imagined itself equal to the Creator and Maker of the universe; He conquers the sin that humanity has chosen for itself. Christ’s battle with death for human life reaches its climax. The Word pierces everything in its path. And “the judgment is this: the Light has come into the world.”

Before this, the completion of earthly history had been revealed to John as those living on earth would see it, for whom it turns above all into a catastrophe, a cosmic cataclysm destroying the order of things familiar to them. Of course, the spiritual meaning of the events taking place should be clear to some even when viewed from earth, but judging by the Book of Revelation, there will be few such people. Now, however, the situation is revealed to the apostle as those who dwell at the Throne see it. Viewed from here, the spiritual meaning of what is happening no longer has to be guessed at; it becomes visible directly. And then John is shown the majestic picture of that final great spiritual battle which the prophets had foreseen. The Church in this battle is headed by the Savior Himself, which is no surprise: after all, the triumph of the Kingdom He brought into the world depends on its outcome (vv. 11-16). He is the incarnate Word, the image of the "living Torah"; His sword is not on His thigh, where earthly warriors who rely on earthly strength carry a sword, but in His mouth, which is the chief weapon of God's witness.

Such a sword becomes the symbol of a spiritual power which now, at the end of time, proves more effective than any power of our world: for nature itself is changing; it becomes fully and completely obedient to every spiritual influence, so that now spiritual action becomes just as effective a way of influencing natural processes as physical action once was. It is no surprise that this change also alters the very structure of the universe. Before this, our world was the place where the Kingdom stood against the forces of darkness. It, of course, was not evil in itself, just as nothing created by God was or could be evil in itself. But, in the Gospel's expression, it "lay in evil"; evil and sin, like poison, permeated all its pores, and the Kingdom, entering the world, had to oppose this evil, neutralizing the poison. The forces of darkness, by contrast, tried to preserve the existing order of things, which benefited them: for a world permeated by evil "worked" for them, its very existence in that condition was their victory, and the transformation of the world became their defeat.

Now, after the transformation, no place for evil remains in the world; the world has become part of the Kingdom, and outside it there remains only that "outer darkness" which the Savior mentions in His parables (Matt 8:12, Matt 22:13, Matt 25:30). It is revealed to John as the "lake of fire burning with sulfur" (v. 20), into which, after the final battle (vv. 17-19), the "beast from the earth" and the false prophet fall (v. 20). The fate of its ordinary participants, those "killed by the sword of the One sitting on the horse" (v. 21), has evidently not yet been determined; it will be decided later. As for the chief actors, they have made their final choice, and now they are reaping its fruits.