12.  Here is the patience of the saints:  here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.

13.  And I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth:  Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.

Vs. 12, 13.—­The faithful and pointed testimony of the “third angel” of reform against the organized enemies of God in church and state, instead of producing repentance, tends only to provoke them to greater rage against those who thus awaken their consciences and disturb their sinful repose.  The fires of persecution are again kindled, and the witnesses are subjected to the anathemas of the church and the sword of the civil magistrate,—­the cruelty of the two beasts.  It is therefore added,—­“Here is the patience of the saints.”  The events predicted here agree in time with ch. xiii. 10; and the subjects of persecution are the same moral person in their legitimate successors who appeared in ch. xii. 17.  They “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus,” while the multitude “obey unrighteousness, receiving for doctrines the commandments of men.”

To animate these sufferers who are in “jeopardy every hour” and who have the sentence of death as outlaws, pronounced against them by Antichrist, John “heard a voice from heaven,” directing him to write,—­“Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth.”—­To “die in the Lord,”—­means, in the faith and hope of the gospel, relieved by the “witness of the Spirit” from the overwhelming fears of the pains of purgatory.  Both negatively and positively, this angel testifies against the antichristian dogma of purgatory.  He declares that the torments of the wicked continue “for ever and ever,” while the righteous who die in the Lord, “cease from their labours.”—­No stronger testimony can be conceived against the more gross papal heresy, or the more modern and so called philosophical delusions of Universalists, Socinians and others,—­all of whom are the offspring of the “mother of harlots.”  But besides the voice from heaven, and the concurrent witness of the Spirit, against the papal dogma of purgatory, the “rest” here proclaimed for the comfort of martyred saints, may be also understood as a termination to their sharp conflicts with Antichrist. “Henceforth they rest from their labours,”—­they shall never again be called to “resist unto blood, striving against sin,” as heretofore, by the combined opposition of the “beast and false prophet,” organized tyranny and idolatry.  The ministry of the “third angel,” cotemporary with the “seventh trumpet,”—­the third and last “woe,” prepares society throughout Christendom for entering into the millennial rest.

14.  And I looked, and, behold, a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of Man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.