KING OF SAINTS

The setting of these verses is one that is inexpressibly sombre in relation to the unregenerate, but of tremendous encouragement to those who know the Lord. The final and most devastating series of divine judgments, the seven vials, is about to be poured out on the earth, bringing to awful conclusion the seven-year tribulation period. Once this series of judgments is complete, the earth will hardly be able to sustain life. Finally, every city that ever stood as a monument of man’s achievement and desire to be independent of God will be levelled by the most destructive earthquake the world has ever known, Rev. 16. 17-20. In our reading today, the angels who will administer these judgments are poised with their separate bowls of wrath, and ‘in them is filled up the wrath of God’, v. 1.

Before these cataclysmic judgments are poured out, John sees a temple scene in which the saints who have been martyred for Christ during the tribulation period are extolling, in a great anthem of praise, the power of the ‘Lord God Almighty …thou King of saints’, v. 3. They sing ‘the song of Moses the servant of God’, recalling the glorious triumph of God’s deliverance of Israel from the thraldom of Egypt. Then Moses sang, ‘Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy. And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble’, Exod. 15. 6-7. But they also sing’the song of the Lamb’, v. 3, who has wrought a mightier victory, delivered His own from a worse thraldom, and totally crushed a more implacable foe. The rampantly godless nations of the earth are about to be utterly subdued, and the ‘King of nations’, as the title ‘King of saints’ should be rendered, is acclaimed as the one whose ways are ‘just and true’, v. 3. Many a nation in history has been subdued by a victor mightier than they but whose conquest was unrighteous and cruel. The King of nations will exercise just and true judgment on rebellious, godless men in a day to come, and none shall withstand Him. ‘Who would not fear thee, O King of nations?’, Jer. 10. 7.