Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Beast Taken
Revelation 19:17-21
17 I saw an angel standing in the sun. He cried with a loud voice, saying to all the birds that fly in the sky, “Come! Be gathered together to the great supper of God, · WEB
Two suppers stand against each other, the beast and false prophet are taken alive into the lake, and the rest fall to a spoken sword.
I saw an angel standing in the sun. He cried with a loud voice, saying to all the birds that fly in the sky, "Come! Be gathered together to the great supper of God, that you may eat the flesh of kings... and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, small and great."
The book sets two suppers side by side with terrible deliberateness: the wedding supper of the Lamb Revelation 19:9, and the great supper of God — the carrion feast of Ezekiel's Gog-oracle, birds summoned to the sacrifice of princes and mighty men Ezekiel 39:17–20. Every human being in the book's last hour is at one of the two tables — guest at the marriage, or menu at the other; invited to eat, or gathered to be eaten. The six classes of the carrion-list Revelation 19:18 mirror the six classes the mark coerced Revelation 13:16: the economy of compulsion, served.
I saw the beast, the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him who sat on the horse and against his army Revelation 19:19.
Armageddon's muster Revelation 16:14–16 stands at last in line of battle — beast, kings, armies, the frog-spirits' whole harvest — against the Rider and the linen-clothed. And then the book does its most eloquent thing: it records no battle. No exchange, no struggle, no contest of arms — the next verb is simply was taken.
The beast was taken, and with him the false prophet who worked the signs in his sight, with which he deceived those who had received the mark... These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur Revelation 19:20.
The two agents — sea beast and lamb-horned deceiver Revelation 13:1 Revelation 13:11, the dragon's whole apparatus of coercion and fraud — are taken: arrested, the courtroom verb; and the false prophet is identified by his method one last time, deceived, the war's real weapon named in its epitaph. The pair go alive into the lake — the institutions of the rebellion, church-state coercion and miracle-working falsehood, ended without remainder at the epoch's edge; their master's turn waits a thousand years Revelation 20:10.
The rest were killed with the sword of him who sat on the horse, the sword which came out of his mouth Revelation 19:21.
The rest — the deceived armies — fall to the mouth-sword: the word that made the worlds unmakes the rebellion; the breath of his lips slays the wicked exactly as Isaiah wrote of the Root Isaiah 11:4 2 Thessalonians 2:8. The last battle of history is a sentence spoken — and with earth's armies fallen, its kings taken, and its deceiver alone, the field stands empty for the strangest millennium in Scripture Revelation 20:1–3.
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