15.  And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations:  and he shall rule them with a rod of iron:  and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

    16.  And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written,
    KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

That the person described in this vision is Christ is questioned by no one.  He is the same one who appeared to John in the beginning.  Then he stood in the midst of the seven golden candle-sticks, the sure defense of the churches, holding the seven stars in his right hand.  Now, however, he appears from the opened heavens on a white horse, his mission “to judge and make war.”  The description of his person, his names, and his attributes, unmistakably proclaim him the Son of God.  He is the “faithful and true,” the name by which he made himself known to the churches of Philadelphia and Laodicea.  “His eyes as a flame of fire” denotes omniscience; and as a searcher of all hearts he made himself known to the church of Thyatira.  “Many crowns” are a symbol of supreme sovereignty and doubtless signify his many victories.  “And he had a name written which no man knew but he himself.”  He had names by which he might be known to mortals; but he had one name that no created intelligence could understand:  it was known only to him.  What that name was, of course, is not given; it could not be.  If the human mind could not conceive it, human language could not convey it.  We can know him as the Faithful and true Witness, as the Word of God, and as King of kings and Lord of lords; but there is one name that we can not know.  His “vesture dipped in blood” refers, not to the blood of atonement, but to the blood of his enemies sprinkled upon his raiment in treading the winepress of God’s wrath, and denotes that he was going forth to the dread work of vengeance.  To this I shall refer more fully hereafter.  His name is also called “the Word of God,” which, when used as a personal appellation in the Scriptures, always signifies Jesus Christ.

Before considering his mission further and the armies that accompanied him, I wish to call special attention to the nature and the chronology of this event.  If the present series of prophetic symbols (which begin with chap. 17) is a narrative of continuous events reaching to the end, then the vision before us is a description of the second coming of Christ, the event which was just previously announced and for which the bride had made herself ready.  The usual interpretation given it is, that it is a sublime description of the servants of Christ going forth under his direction to spread the truth everywhere among the nations—­in short, that it is the triumph of gospel truth over error under the providential government of Christ.  That such a meaning can be derived from the vision by taking it in a figurative sense there can be no doubt, and this is what commentators