Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2498
“He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and His countenance was as the sun shines in its strength.” Revelation 1:16.
WHILE reading this description given by John of what he saw in the isle called Patmos, I think you must have noticed that it would be quite impossible for any painter to depict it upon canvas and, equally impossible for any sculptor to embody it in stone or marble. Those who have attempted to copy the lines here given have signally failed—they may paint a picture of the garment down to the feet and the golden girdle—but the rest, if it is viewed from an artist’s aspect, would be found to be incongruous. “His head and His hairs were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes were as a flame of fire.” No great painter would ever venture to give us a portrait of our Lord with His head and His hair, “white like wool, as white as snow.” If he did, it would be quite impossible to depict eyes that were “as a flame of fire.” How would it be possible to make us realize, with the aid of any pen or pencil, that His feet were “like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace”? The task would have to be given over as quite hopeless when it reached this point—“He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and His countenance was as the sun shines in its strength.”
I believe that this difficulty of giving a truthful representation of the Lord Jesus Christ is according to the Divine purpose. Nothing, it seems to me, can be more detestable to the Lord’s heart and mind than the worship of His image in any shape or form. If any are determined to break the Law of God about making graven images and bowing down before them, then let the idol be the image of something that is beneath the earth, or in the water under the earth, but, O, you idolaters, pray do not, as it were, make the Lord Jesus Christ accessory to your idolatry! That, He never really can be, for He abhors it! “Get you behind Me, Satan,” would be His answer to every proposal that His image should be worshipped, for He could not endure it! It is a dreadful thing that men should ever dare attempt to make any likeness of the Son of God, Himself, to be the occasion of sin. If you must make an image, make it, if you will, of a serpent, or of an ox, but not of the Son of God who came on purpose to redeem us from this, among other sins! Let us not degrade His sacred Personage by making even itto be an image before which we prostrate ourselves!
I know it is said that idolaters do not worship the image and that they worship God through the image, but that is expressly forbidden. The First Commandment is, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Then the Second Commandment forbids the worshipping of God by or through any symbol or image whatever—“You shall not make unto you any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them.” The worship of the image of Christ appears to me to be not the more excusable form of idolatry, if there is any that is less evil than others, but it seems to me to be the more intensely wicked form of it since it is making even the glorious Personage of the Lord Jesus subsidiary to an act of transgression against the Commandments of His Father. If we cannot say concerning the Divine and human Personage of our Lord, “You saw no similitude,” yet we can say, “You saw no similitude such as can be engraved in any way whatever.”
The fact is that we have, in this apocalyptic vision, very extraordinary hieroglyphics put together. Hieroglyphic language does not aim at the artistic and the poetic—a hieroglyph has a higher objective than the mere gratification of taste. It is intended to give us mental ideas—not ideas for the eyes, but ideas for the heart—not what we shall see, but that which we shall feel and understand. Hence, these figurative representations of different parts of our Lord’s Person, though they cannot be put together so as to form a picture, are, nevertheless, deeply instructive to every loving and reverent heart.
So I want you, dear Friends, without wishing to make a complete portrait of your Lord, to try to follow the teaching in this verse. There are three things here. First, the stars in Christ’s hand—“He had in His right hand seven stars.” Then, secondly, there is the sword in His mouth—“Out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword.” And then, thirdly, there is the glory of His face—“His countenance was as the sun shines in its strength.”
I. First, then, when John saw our Lord Jesus Christ, he naturally looked to His hands and, therefore, he saw THE STARS IN HIS HAND.
Note, dear Friends, that our Lord Jesus has a hand. He is not, as some fancy, an abstract idea of a personage without life. He has a hand and that hand is a working hand. The hand that was pierced by the nail is not paralyzed—it has strength to hold in itself seven stars. The hands that worked out our redemption have not ceased to work for us. Christ holds in His hands that which He bought with the blood of His heart. John saw that His Lord held in His right hand seven stars. Let us always think of our Lord Jesus Christ as full of power and actively using it. Let us think of Him at this moment as having a deft, skilled and mighty right hand which He will lift up on the behalf of all those who put their trust in Him. On the right hand of the Majesty on high there sits a right-handed Christ, still carrying on, according to His own good pleasure, the work of the Lord which always prospers in His hand.