"I saw One Angel who had stood in the sun".

In the original text it is not simply angelos, an angel, but emphatically hena angelon one angel. This angel is particularized as one that had stood, hestota, in the sun. The English Version renders this perfect participle by the sign of the present, standing. I have preferred to adhere to the literal, however true that this one angel comes at length to "shine as the sun in the kingdom of the Father". It is doubtless not accidental that the Revelator said to John, that the angel had stood in the sun. This reference to a past position of the angel would afford a clue to his identity, and enable the reader to distinguish him from the many other angels of the Apocalypse.

The only place in the previous chapters where a body of people having a mission are found "in the sun," is in the twelfth chapter. This angel-body is there styled "a woman", who is said to "have been clothed with the sun". A community clothed with the sun is "standing in the sun" so long as it continues so invested. But this angel-woman did not continue to stand in the sun; for "she fled into the wilderness" where she remained 1260 years. It could therefore be said of her that she had stood in the sun; but has never stood there since. It was a great military success that placed her temporarily "in the sun"   the conquest of the pagan Dragon-government by her deliverer Constantine, who, in this particular, was a type of her greater and eternal deliverer, the King of kings and Lord of lords, whose conquest of the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet, will place her in the sun, to enlighten the earth with glory.