An amazing characteristic of the Book of Revelation is its combination of joys and terrors. The book is full of this. This combination is strange to our minds. Yet thus it is. Seals are broken and judgments take their course. Trumpets are blown, vials are emptied of their terrible contents, and horrors are only thereby aggravated. Yet joys and songs with shouts of congratulation abound, and the sound of harpers with their harps are heard throughout, from the beginning to the end. All along the line of these visitations of judgment, we are called to listen to the voices of joy and praise.
From the doxology of chapter 1 to the repeated exultations of chapter 19, we hear these voices throughout the book. Here also, we see God furnishing the heavens above, and the earth beneath, as they are yet to be, in millennial and eternal times.
Of old, heaven was the dwelling place of angels. Jacob’s vision of the ladder (Gen. 28:12; John 1:51), and other scenes, let us know this. But after the Lord Jesus had risen and ascended, heaven became the abode of a glorified Man (Acts 3:13), as well as of angels. Stephen saw heaven in this condition (Acts 7:55). And when we reach Revelation, we learn that this same heaven has become the habitation of translated saints. The living creatures and the enthroned elders are there, and all through the book they are seen to continue there. Then in chapter 14, we find other companies of redeemed saints joining them there, and playing their harps around the living creatures and the elders, as well as around the throne. This surely shows us heaven in new and wondrous conditions, with hosts of angels, who “excel in strength,” in company with redeemed sinners from earth, the witnesses of God’s present saving grace. Then, after this, we learn that earth is to be furnished with guests as well as heaven.
The opening of chapter 14, shows us the beginning of this new work of God. There we see the first-fruits of that people who are to furnish the cleansed earth in the time of the Kingdom. These are learners of the song that is sung in heaven. They know the joy of listening, if others know the higher joy of singing. And not only do they listen, they learn that song. They know what is harped on “the harps of God” on high. And with such a people as this, the earth begins to be furnished for its millennial condition (Isa. 66:1; Ps. 99:5).
There will be a link between these millennial heavens and the millennial earth. The Lamb Himself forms it. And as there will be a place on earth for the eye to feast itself in sight of the heavenly glory, so we learn here there will be a place for the ear to hear and delight itself, in the heavenly music of that day.
The nations of the saved on earth are to walk in the light of the Holy Jerusalem. They stand with the Lamb on Mount Zion, listening to the harps of the harpers around the heavenly throne. These form a new company in heaven, being (as I judge) the saints martyred before the fifth seal–to whom white robes had been given (chap. 6:9-11). They are now raised, glorified, and translated to heaven (Rev. 14:2), and their harps, like the living creatures and elders, have been given them to help them sing the “new song.”
In chapter 4, a sea of glass, then unoccupied, is seen before the heavenly throne. Now it is seen filled (chap. 15:1-4) with a company who have been put to death under the Beast. The sea of glass, as is seen here by John, is “mingled with fire,” for those who stand on it are not only conquerors, but martyrs–conquerors who had resisted his claims unto blood, refusing to bear his mark in the great crisis of the world’s history. Now here they are seen and heard, singing the Song of Moses–the song of a great victory over Egypt–and also “of the Lamb”–of a greater triumph at Calvary. Now they stand with the “harps of God”–made for their joy. As the Lord God had made with His own hand “coats of skin” to cover Adam and Eve in the day of their fall, so now He has also provided those redeemed sinners with “the harps of God,” those instruments of joy to gladden His own courts of glory. It is in anticipation of such joys, yet to be the lot of the heavenly saints, that even now some sing:
“Lord, I believe, Thou hast prepared,
Unworthy though I be,
For me a blood-bought, free reward,
A harp of God for me!
‘Tis strung and tuned for endless years
And formed by power Divine
To sound in God the Father’s ears
No other Name but Thine.”