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Eureka

AN EXPOSITION OF THE APOCALYPSE
Sixth Edition, 1915
By Dr. John Thomas (first edition written 1861)

 

 

Chapter 8

Section 8 Subsection 1

ACT III -- THIRD WIND-TRUMPET


 
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The poisoning of the third of the rivers and fountains of waters with a deadly bitterness, by the Great Blazing Star APSINTHOS falling from the heaven into them, and causing the death of many.

A.D. 450, and onwards.

 

"And the third angel sounded, and a great star blazing as it were a torch fell out of the heavens: and it fell upon the third of the rivers, and upon the foundations of waters. 11. And the name of the star is called Apsinthian; and the third of the waters became undrinkable; and many of the men died out of the waters, because they were made bitter."

Apoc. viii. 10,11

1. Symbols Explained

 

On account of the luminaries in the natural heaven governing the day and the night (Gen. i. 14-18), all luminaries in the symbolical language signify ruling powers; and the light itself is well employed to signify the edicts, laws, rules, or directions that proceed from them for the good of their subjects. Thus of the Great King, styled the "Day Star," and "the Sun of Righteousness," it is said in Psa. cxix. 105, "Thy word is a light unto my path;" and in Hos. vi. 5, "Thy judgments are as the light."

"I am," saith the Lord Jesus, "the bright and the Morning Star" (Apoc. xxii. 16); the Star which the Spirit compelled Balaam to predict would "come out of Jacob" (Num. xxiv. 17). By this star is evidently intended a ruler, a conqueror, a great potentate; for, as the Sceptre of Israel, he is to "smite the princes of Moab, and to destroy all the children of Sheth."

A Star, therefore, sometimes signifies a destroying power. The word is also put for that which is inconstant, or meteoric in its motions. Hence, in Jude, such stars are styled "wandering" or shooting stars. In this third trumpet prophecy, the star seen was of this species. It shot forth out of the heaven. John did not see it there, shining as a fixed star of great and sparkling, but steady light; its motion was erratic, wandering or shooting out of the starry sphere into regions below the ruling heaven. It fell from its position where it was "a Great Star" in the heaven. It fell, or descended, not because it was expelled as those stars of the heaven which the Little Horn of the Goat cast down to the ground, and stamped upon (Dan. viii. 9,10) by a superior power; but by its own precipitancy, derived from the motive power of Deity, whose agent it was for judgment upon the Laodicean Apostasy.

In symbolic style, "a great star blazing as it were a torch" signifies no good to those upon whom it is said to fall. Its effects must be conflagrating and deadly. An ordinary, or literal, blazing torch would be extinguished by falling into water; but we know that certain bodies cast into that fluid will set it on fire, and convert it into a solution that would be fatal to the drinker. There is therefore a decorum, or fitness, in the language of the vision, which is now known to be founded in the nature of things. Mr. Cunninghame has therefore well remarked that "the language of symbols is not of arbitrary or uncertain signification, but is interpretable on fixed principles, to ascertain and define which, is the first duty of a commentator, as the judicious application of that language to the events of history is the second."

"A shooting star was, in antiquity, the appropriate image of a powerful and successful invader from a distant country." "The more I read this wonderful book" (the Apocalypse), says Bishop Horsley, "the more I am convinced that the precision of the phraseology is little short of mathematical accuracy. The language seems highly adorned, but the ornaments are not redundancies: they are not of that sort that the proposition would remain the same if the epithets were expunged. And in passages which may seem similar, there never is the smallest variation of style, but it points to something of diversity, either in the subject or the predicate. With this notion of the style of the Apocalypse, I think it of importance to remark that the falling stars of the third and fifth trumpets fall ‘from heaven,’ or ‘out of the sky,’ but are not said to be of ‘the stars of heaven,’ which are seen to fall in ch. vi. But, further, that which falls ‘from heaven,’ or ‘out of the sky,’ upon the sounding of the third trumpet, is a great star, burning as it were a lamp.

"Lampas, in the Greek language, is the name of a meteor of a particular sort. From Pliny’s description, it is evident that lampas was one sort of those meteors which are commonly called ‘shooting stars.’ It was of that sort, in which a large ball, appearing first in time, and foremost in the direction of the motion, draws a long train of bright sparks after it. Such exactly was the meteor in the vision of the third trumpet.

"The most remarkable circumstances in these shooting stars are these: 1. They have no appropriate place in the starry heavens, but are engendered in the lower regions of the earth’s atmosphere. 2. They shine by a native light; but third, are visible only while they fall. 4. The motion is rapid. 5. The duration brief. 6. The brightness, while it lasts, intense. 7. The extinction instantaneous. 8. And when the light is extinguished, nothing remains: the body which emitted the light is nowhere to be found."

The falling of a great star blazing like a torch out of the heaven, then, was symbolical of a great destroying power, issuing forth from a lower region of the political aerial, progressing by its native force with rapid, but brief, yet intense motion, coming suddenly to the end of its career, and leaving nothing but a smoking desolation as the memorial of its presence.

"The heaven" out of which it blazed forth was the heaven under which were "the rivers and fountains of waters" into which the great star precipitated itself. "Wherever the scene is laid," says Daubuz, "heaven signifies, symbolically, the ruling power or government; that is, the whole assembly of the ruling powers, which, in respect of the subjects, or earth, are a political heaven, being over and ruling the subjects, as the natural heaven stands over and rules the earth: so that according to the subject is the term to be limited and, therefore, Artemidorus, writing in the times of the Roman emperors, makes the country of Italy to be heaven. As heaven, says he, is the abode of gods, so is Italy of kings."

But after the times of the pagan emperors, and concurrent with those of the scarcely less pagan Constantine and his successors, the Roman Heaven expanded itself into the comprehensiveness of the three seats, or thrones, which ruled over the three thirds, or Imperial Praefectures, into which the dominions of Daniel’s Fourth Beast, civil and ecclesiastical polity, were divided. These heavenly thirds are especially recognized in the vision of the fourth trumpet; and are styled in Dan. vii. 27, "the Whole Heaven." The whole is more than its parts. These thirds of the heaven have relation to the thirds of the earth, or Roman Orb; and may be styled, the Byzantine or Constantinopolitan Heavenly, the Italian Heavenly, and the Illyrian Heavenly, all of them the abode of kings." A shooting star, generally, projects itself obliquely: so, when this "great star blazing as it were a torch" fell, it fell "out of" its own appropriate heavenly, into "the waters" under the neighboring third, whose heavenly bodies were doomed shortly to be eclipsed. It fell from the Illyrian heavenly section of "the whole heaven," into the rivers under the Italian Third.

Yahweh charges Sennacherib with saying by his messengers to Hezekiah: "With the multitude of my chariots, I have digged and drunk strange waters, and with the sole of my feet have I dried up all the rivers of fenced places." These waters and rivers were the foreign nations he had laid waste. And again: "O Jacob, when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee": that is, waters or peoples, and rivers or nations. So they are also explained in Apoc. xvi. 4-7, where "rivers and fountains of waters" are declared to be those who have "shed the blood of saints and prophets"; and in ch. xvii. 15, "the waters" upon whom the Great Harlot sits are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

But we are not to suppose that because "waters" signify these populations of earth, their geography and topography are left undetermined. On the contrary, in the phrase, "upon the third of the rivers, and upon the foundations of waters," is a blending of the literal and the symbolical, which is so frequent in prophecy. There is a striking illustration of this in Apoc. xvii. 9,10, where the seven heads of the beast are symbolical of seven supreme powers, or "kings"; and literally identical with the seven mountains on which they were successively located: so "the rivers" pertaining to "the third" represents symbolically the populations thereof; and their literal chorography in the mountainous and valley, or river, regions of the Catholic West. These "rivers and fountains of waters" had not, previously to the times of the third trumpet, done much in the way of shedding the blood of saints and prophets; they were beginning to approve this remedy for what they were pleased to style "heresy": nevertheless, they had proved themselves bitter persecutors of "the sealed servants of Deity," during the one hundred and twenty-five years their rulers, who were all "pious catholics," exercised dominion over Italy, Africa, Gaul, Spain and Britain. The third trumpet was an especial element of the judgment upon them. Its scorching visitations retaliated upon them bitterness and death for the bitterness they had caused "the sealed."

But after the judgments of the third and fourth trumpets had extinguished the so-called orthodox catholic power of the West, another power arose out of the wreck, which was a perfect novelty in the earth. This has been known for more than a thousand years past as the Papal. It acquired sovereignty over "the rivers and fountains of waters," and energized them "to shed the blood of saints and prophets," to pour it out abundantly; so that they became worthy to receive blood to drink, by one who, under the third Vial, gloried in his resemblance to the Great Star that blazed like a torch in the judicial execution of the third trumpet retribution. ["I will prove," said Napoleon, "an Attila to Venice."]

"And the name of the star is called ho Apsinthos". This I have simply transferred as being the name of the star before the English tongue was written or spoken. As the star-power did not exist in John’s day, the legetai, "is called," must be understood to mean that, in the days of the third trumpet, those who spoke Greek called it ho Apsinthos. It is a proper name; and is to be taken in a like sense as the name of the conqueror, styled by men in the days of the third vial, "the Corsican." This was applied to the first Napoleon as indicative of the country from which he came; so the Great Star was called by the Greeks, "the Apsinthian," to designate the region out of whose heaven he fell blazing upon "the third of the rivers," after he had proved a scourge to them.

I have said that "the Apsinthian" fell upon "the rivers and fountains of waters," out of the Illyrian section of the whole heaven of the Roman orb. My reason for this is that Apsinthos is the name of a river in the Illyrian third of the Roman earth; and is therefore as significative of Illyria, as the Euphrates was of Assyria, or the Nile of Egypt.

But, for what reason, may we conclude, did the Spirit select this river of Illyricum in preference to any other? Because of the signification of the name being appropriate to the nature of the judgments to be executed by THE ILLYRIAN POWER, which had been developed in the preparation of the angels of the trumpets for sounding. The word radically signifies undrinkable from whatever cause. The trumpet mission of the Illyrian Power was to make the rivers of the third undrinkable, by putting many of the men of the waters to the sword, that they might die out from them. This was, as in the Arabic Romance, Antar, it is expressed, Death serving them with a cup of apsinth by the sword.
 
 

 

 


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