The seals have been broken, one by one. The comma of the psalm has begun its closing clause.
Six trumpets have sounded. Hail and fire, mingled with blood; a burning mountain that plunges into the sea; a star called Wormwood that makes the rivers bitter; darkened lights; smoke out of the pit and locusts that leave the grass standing and the people not; and from the Euphrates a cavalry of twice ten thousand times ten thousand. Whoever lives in it calls it disasters. A prophet has given the grammar of it, centuries before: "when Your judgments are on the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness." Seals, trumpets and bowls are sentences. God has not stopped speaking; this is the language that remains when all the others have been jeered away. The clock of the sister books calls these days the seventieth week, the last of the seventy; how that timepiece runs is explained there and is not opened up again here.
Then the seventh angel lifts the trumpet, and what follows happens above. Loud voices in heaven, and they proclaim a transfer of ownership:
"The kingdom of the world has become our Lord's and His Anointed's, and He will reign as king unto all the ages."
The twenty-four elders come down from their thrones and fall on their faces, and their thanksgiving is psalm text: "the nations have become angry, and Your wrath has come — and the time to judge the dead, and to give the reward to Your servants, and to destroy those who destroy the earth." The nations that rage: that is the first verse of the song, the thronging, raging nations. The wrath that has come: that is the fifth, the speaking in wrath that the song already announced. A threatened house-congregation in Jerusalem once prayed these verses, with the doors shut. Here they are reported, as an accomplished fact: the hour has come.
And in the cry at the trumpet lies a reversal, small enough to read past. The Greek psalm sets down the assembly with the same preposition twice: the kings of the earth gathered against the Lord and against His Anointed. The cry in heaven names the same two, in the same order, with the same possessive pronoun — "our Lord's and His Anointed's" — and only the preposition has moved. Where against stood, stands of. The whole of world history, from the plain of Shinar to the last session, fits between those two little words.
For the hall where the assembly never adjourned is still in session — for the last time, and for the first time in full. Out of the mouth of the dragon, the beast and the false prophet go three unclean spirits, like frogs, with signs, to the kings of the whole inhabited world, to gather them for the war of the great day. For centuries the hall did it with delegations: a Shinar here, a Pharaoh there, a governor with a washed pair of hands. Now the summons go out worldwide; the closing session becomes plenary. And while below the convocations circulate, above the assembly the agenda item has already been declared void with a blast of the trumpet. The kingdom has been transferred.
II. The Male Child
Then the vision does something no chronicle would dare: it turns the time back to before the trumpets, to before the cross, and shows the whole war once more, in three figures.
A great sign in heaven: a woman, clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, on her head a crown of twelve stars. She is pregnant, and she cries out in her birth pangs. A second sign: a great, fiery-red dragon, seven heads, ten horns, and his tail drags a third of the stars of heaven along and throws them onto the earth. And then the image that stands still: the dragon stands before the woman who is about to give birth — so that, as soon as she has given birth, he may devour her child.
A beast of prey at a childbed, the jaws turned toward the womb. That one posture sums up the whole history of the council chamber, and the vision shows who has presided over it all those centuries. Pharaoh, who instructed the midwives at the birthstool; Athaliah, who murdered off the royal seed until one infant remained, hidden in a linen room; the swords in the streets of Bethlehem. Each time the same jaws, at the same womb. The assembly has never had any agenda item other than this child.
And she gives birth to a son, a male child. The vision gives him no name and no genealogy; it gives him one description, and it is a psalm line: "who will shepherd all the nations with an iron rod." By that he is to be recognized. The reward the song promised the Son hangs here as destiny above a newborn: the rod above the manger. And then the vision skips everything. No Nazareth, no years of wandering about, no cross and no open grave; between the birth and the throne stands one verb: "and her child was caught up to God and to His throne." The jaws snap shut on emptiness. A human life of world history, compressed into one snatch upward — for this vision tells the war from the dragon's side, and for the dragon the life of Jesus was that: a prey that escaped him, upward, into the hall where he cannot reach.
The woman flees into the wilderness, to a place God has prepared for her, and is fed there, twelve hundred and sixty days — the days of the week that passes by here. And of the dragon, thrown down onto the earth, the vision notes the state of mind: "he has great fury, because he knows that he has little time." The thronging of the nations has in these days an engine, and that engine is panic.
III. The Rod That Breaks or Shepherds
The psalm line of the description stands in the decree that the Son Himself was allowed to read aloud, and it is a promise with a weapon in it:
"Ask of Me, and I will give nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession. You shall shatter them with an iron rod; like potter's ware you shall dash them to pieces."
So reads the Hebrew text. But the word that there reads "shatter" carries a secret in its letters. Hebrew was for centuries written with consonants only; the vowels came later, as dots and strokes under the line. And the consonants of this one verb allow two stems: the stem of breaking — shattering — and the stem of shepherding, the verb of the shepherd. The same letters; the vowels decide. The Masoretes, the keepers of the Hebrew text, pointed the breaking. The Greek translators, centuries before them, read the shepherd: "you shall shepherd them with an iron rod." Two readings, one written word — and when Revelation took up the line three times, it chose the shepherd all three times.
Those two readings lie less far apart than they sound, for a shepherd's staff is no ornamental stick. With it one counts, animal by animal under the staff into the fold; with it one retrieves what hangs in a cleft of rock; and with it one beats to death. A shepherd boy from Bethlehem once explained that to a king, matter-of-factly, as work experience: if a lion or a bear came and took a lamb out of the flock, "then I went after him and struck him down, and rescued it out of his jaws; and if he rose up against me, I seized him by his beard and struck him down and killed him." That is shepherding. The hand that takes the lamb out of the jaws and the hand that breaks the jaws open are the same hand, and the staff that leads the flock is the weapon with which what tears it apart is finished off.
Revelation therefore sets the two readings once side by side, in one breath: "he will shepherd them with an iron rod — like potter's vessels they are shattered." Shepherding and shattering, shepherd and breaker. The sentence does not choose between the vowels, because in the hand of this Shepherd there is nothing to choose: for the flock the staff is guidance, and for what tears the flock apart the same staff is death.
ExpertFour letters, two stems
The consonants of תְּרֹעֵם in Psalm 2:9 allow two verb stems: רעע, "to shatter," and רעה, "to shepherd." The Masoretes vocalized the form of רעע; the Septuagint translated ποιμανεῖς αὐτοὺς ἐν ῥάβδῳ σιδηρᾷ — "you shall shepherd them with an iron rod," from רעה. Revelation takes up the line three times, each time with the root of shepherding — but none of the three places takes over the Greek form. The Greek psalm has ποιμανεῖς, second person: God speaks to the King. Revelation 2:27 and 19:15 read ποιμανεῖ, third person, and 12:5 the infinitive ποιμαίνειν — because there it is spoken about Him. The seam thus runs by way of the root, not by way of the form: the vision reads the shepherding reading against the later Masoretic vocalization and conjugates it independently, sentence by sentence. At Revelation 2:27 all consulted editions — critical, Byzantine, Textus Receptus — agree about this verb; the only variant lies in the second verb (συντρίβεται/συντριβήσεται). Thus both readings of the psalm have been canonically preserved: the breaking in the Hebrew tradition, the shepherding in the Greek — and Revelation 2:27 joins them together in one verse. The working translations of this book follow that trail: in the psalm text itself the Masoretic reading sounds — shatter — and where Revelation speaks, the shepherding; the seam is translated as it has been transmitted, on both sides. Note: well documented; the full apparatus is in Appendix B.
IV. The Jar That Is Made Whole No More
The vessel with which the psalm threatens has a prehistory, and it begins in a workshop.
"Arise and go down to the house of the potter; there I will let you hear My words." Jeremiah goes down and finds the man at work on the double wheel. The vessel he is forming fails in his hand — the clay sags askew, the wall gives way — and the potter begins again and makes it into another vessel, as it is good in his eyes. No temper at the wheel, no lump flung away; the hands fold the failure back into a ball and set it up anew. The explanation comes from above, and it is all room: "As clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand, house of Israel." As long as the clay is wet, no form is final. Nor any failure either.
One chapter further the same prophet receives a different commission, and the difference lies in the first verb: to buy. "Go and buy a jar from a potter" — no clay from the wheel: a jar, turned, fired, finished. He must take elders along, of the people and of the priests — witnesses, men whose word counts in the gate — and with them out of the city, into the valley of Ben-Hinnom, the place where Jerusalem has burned its own sons for the gods; the gate through which they go out is called the Potsherd Gate. There he reads out the indictment. And then he lifts the jar above his head and smashes it to pieces before their eyes, and the Word says with it what that sound means: "so will I break this people and this city — as one breaks the vessel of the potter, which can no more be made whole."
Between chapter eighteen and chapter nineteen lies the kiln. Wet clay can go back on the wheel; what has gone through the fire has its form for good — and with it also its breaking. Earthenware knows no second chance and no half damage: it is whole, or it is shards, and shards stay shards. When the psalm wrote out the reward of the Son, it seized precisely this image — dashed to pieces like potter's ware. The song reckons that by that day there will be vessels that can no longer be formed: hardened into the shape of their refusal, kiln after kiln, century after century, until the form and the man could no longer be separated.
That is why the kiss that this same song offers, three verses after the rod, is no pious final chord but an urgent dispatch. The offer applies to clay. It applies to what is still formable, what can still go back on the wheel — and no one has ever been told how long the wheel keeps turning for him. It says only that a day is coming on which the turning stops and the breaking begins. And that that day is not today.
V. The Footstool
At the seventh trumpet, after the voices, the temple of God opens in heaven, and in His temple the ark of His covenant is seen — and then flashes of lightning, voices, thunderclaps, an earthquake, great hail. The ark. Lost for centuries, vanished from every inventory; and at the hour the kingdom is proclaimed, it stands in view — the oldest piece of furniture of the covenant, in the heart of the sanctuary that is not made with hands.
David gave that piece of furniture a name, at the end of his life, standing before the assembled princes of Israel: he had wanted to build a house "as a resting place for the ark of the covenant of YHWH, and for the footstool of the feet of our God." The footstool: the little bench under the feet of a seated king. So Israel spoke about the ark — the place where the feet of the Enthroned One rest — and so Scripture speaks about that place, six times in all, and five of the six times it is holy ground. The ark. The earth: "heaven is My throne, and the earth is the footstool of My feet." Twice a call to the people: "bow down at the footstool of His feet." And once, in the darkest book of the canon, the bewilderment that even that place was not spared: "He did not remember the footstool of His feet, on the day of His anger."
And then there is the sixth place, and it stands in the command to which this book owes its title: "sit at My right hand, until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet." Five times the footstool is something at which one kneels. Here someone becomes the footstool. There is only one place under those feet, and there are two postures: you bow there — or you become it.
The letter describes the waiting for that verse in the present tense: one sacrifice for sins, and then He sat down, "henceforth waiting, until His enemies are made a footstool for His feet." Fourteen verses further in that same chapter stands a second waiting, with a word of the same stem: for the one who tramples the blood by which he was sanctified, no sacrifice remains, "but a fearful expecting of judgment, and a fiery glow that will consume the adversaries." Twice in that chapter there is waiting. The Son waits on the footstool; what else still waits is fire. And the letter has also said when the waiting ends: "once more I will make to tremble — not only the earth, but also heaven." In the days of the trumpets that "once more" stands no longer in the future tense. The trembling has begun; everything that can be shaken is shaken out, until only the unshakable remains — "for our God is a consuming fire."
DossierThe six footstools
הֲדֹם, "footstool," occurs in the Hebrew Bible six times, each time connected with "feet": 1 Chronicles 28:2 (the ark — "the footstool of the feet of our God"), Isaiah 66:1 (the earth — "heaven is My throne, and the earth is the footstool of My feet"), Psalm 99:5 and Psalm 132:7 (twice the call to bow down at the footstool of His feet), Lamentations 2:1 (the footstool "not remembered on the day of His anger") and Psalm 110:1. Five of the six are a place of worship or of God's rest; only in Psalm 110:1 is the enemy himself made a footstool. Within the series Lamentations 2:1 is the hinge: the only other verse that connects the footstool with "the day of anger" — there the place of worship is given up to judgment, here the enemy is made into furniture of the rest. The two meanings thus touch each other precisely on the day of anger, and that is the day this part is about. In Greek this footstool is called ὑποπόδιον, and Hebrews preserves that word exactly where it cites Psalm 110:1 (1:13; 10:13); the apparatus of the citation forms is in Appendix B. Note: well documented; exhaustively counted.
VI. "As I Also Have Received"
The rod stands in one more place in Revelation, and it is the strangest of the three. No vision; a letter. Before all the seals and trumpets the Son of Man between the lampstands dictates seven letters to seven congregations, and in the fourth, to Thyatira, stands a promise that makes one dizzy:
"And he who overcomes and keeps My works to the end — to him I will give power over the nations, and he will shepherd them with an iron rod; like potter's vessels they are shattered — as I also have received from My Father. And I will give him the morning star."
The reward of the Son, passed on. Power over the nations, the iron rod, the shepherding and the shattering in one breath: everything that the decree of the psalm promised to the King is here held out in prospect to an overcomer. And then the closing formula, and it is the statement of origin of the whole promise: "as I also have received from My Father." Received — where? In the decree itself: "ask of Me, and I will give nations as your inheritance." The Son never seized the nations; He asked for them and received them. And what He has received, He passes on as it came to Him: as a gift, along the line of asking. The Father gives to the Son; the Son gives to the one who overcomes. In that whole chain no grasping hand occurs — that is the difference between this chain and every assembly that ever convened over the nations.
With that the boundary is also drawn, and it runs through that one little word "as." Whoever receives the staff shepherds with the Shepherd, under the Shepherd; he does not shepherd in imitation of Him and does not relieve Him. What he bears is derived authority — power of the Conqueror, as the Conqueror has power of the Father — and derived authority is real authority, but it is no shared place: the oracle of the decree is spoken to One and is not redistributed but handed out. And who precisely fall under "he who overcomes" — that question has been weighed in "The Wise" and deliberately not decided, and this book does not decide it either. What stands at every reading: the staff is and remains His. Hands are added, not owners.
Then that last thing, added almost casually: "and I will give him the morning star." The book waits until its final page to say what that is. There the Speaker introduces Himself, for the last time: "I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star." The highest thing the Conqueror has to give away — after the nations, after the staff, after the throne — is Himself.
ExcursusTwo witnesses, two directions of gaze
From this part of the book onward, of the four royal psalms virtually only Psalm 2 still travels along textually. In Revelation it is demonstrable in six places: the rod three times (2:27 · 12:5 · 19:15), the kingship at the seventh trumpet (11:15), the gathered kings of the earth (19:19) — where the verb to gather coincides lexically with the Greek psalm — and the raging nations and the wrath of 11:18 (weighed). Psalm 110 is in the vision at most a faint echo — the sitting-along on the throne of 3:21 — and Psalm 8 and Psalm 45 have not a single acknowledged citation there; Melchizedek too does not occur in the whole book. That fact is told openly here, for it says something about the direction of gaze of the two great witnesses. Hebrews looks upward, into the throne room, and crowns the Head: there all four of the psalms sound, in one liturgy. Revelation looks ahead, into history, and clothes the body: on that road, of the four, only the scepter carries through, because the scepter is the only part of the script that still has to be carried out. The letter sings what has happened; the vision shows what is coming — and what is coming is precisely the part of Psalm 2 that stayed open at the ascension. The measure of that difference can be read off from one fact: Psalm 110:1 is the most cited and alluded-to verse of the whole New Testament, and precisely this psalm falls almost silent in the vision — what the letter has performed to completion, the vision need not repeat. That is why this book nowhere promises that Revelation performs the four psalms; it says what is true, and that turns out to be enough. The full reception chart is in Appendix C.
HeartThe Shepherd with the staff
He bears one staff, and it has two sides, and both are love. Under this staff His own go into the fold, animal by animal, counted and known; with the same staff the jaws are broken open that have closed around a lamb. His wrath is a shepherd's fury — the glow of Someone who comes to take His lamb out of the jaws and for that seizes the lion by the beard if He must. The staff is of iron, and in all of Scripture there is not a line in which it comes down on a sheep. What it shatters is what tears apart; what it shepherds is what has been given Him — asked of His Father, and received. And He does not shepherd as a hireling, at a distance, with an eye to the evening. What He has received, He hands out: the staff to the one who overcomes, and above that the morning star, which is Himself. This description hung already above His manger: iron for the wolf, and Himself as reward.
The assembly is in full. Heaven is still shut.
Source-text footnotes. All translations are the author's own concordant working translations; in the typeset edition the notes stand at the foot of the page.
I. The Seventh Trumpet
The seals have been broken, one by one. The comma of the psalm has begun its closing clause.
Six trumpets have sounded. Hail and fire, mingled with blood; a burning mountain that plunges into the sea; a star called Wormwood that makes the rivers bitter; darkened lights; smoke out of the pit and locusts that leave the grass standing and the people not; and from the Euphrates a cavalry of twice ten thousand times ten thousand. Whoever lives in it calls it disasters. A prophet has given the grammar of it, centuries before: "when Your judgments are on the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness." Seals, trumpets and bowls are sentences. God has not stopped speaking; this is the language that remains when all the others have been jeered away. The clock of the sister books calls these days the seventieth week, the last of the seventy; how that timepiece runs is explained there and is not opened up again here.
Then the seventh angel lifts the trumpet, and what follows happens above. Loud voices in heaven, and they proclaim a transfer of ownership:
"The kingdom of the world has become our Lord's and His Anointed's, and He will reign as king unto all the ages."
The twenty-four elders come down from their thrones and fall on their faces, and their thanksgiving is psalm text: "the nations have become angry, and Your wrath has come — and the time to judge the dead, and to give the reward to Your servants, and to destroy those who destroy the earth." The nations that rage: that is the first verse of the song, the thronging, raging nations. The wrath that has come: that is the fifth, the speaking in wrath that the song already announced. A threatened house-congregation in Jerusalem once prayed these verses, with the doors shut. Here they are reported, as an accomplished fact: the hour has come.
And in the cry at the trumpet lies a reversal, small enough to read past. The Greek psalm sets down the assembly with the same preposition twice: the kings of the earth gathered against the Lord and against His Anointed. The cry in heaven names the same two, in the same order, with the same possessive pronoun — "our Lord's and His Anointed's" — and only the preposition has moved. Where against stood, stands of. The whole of world history, from the plain of Shinar to the last session, fits between those two little words.
For the hall where the assembly never adjourned is still in session — for the last time, and for the first time in full. Out of the mouth of the dragon, the beast and the false prophet go three unclean spirits, like frogs, with signs, to the kings of the whole inhabited world, to gather them for the war of the great day. For centuries the hall did it with delegations: a Shinar here, a Pharaoh there, a governor with a washed pair of hands. Now the summons go out worldwide; the closing session becomes plenary. And while below the convocations circulate, above the assembly the agenda item has already been declared void with a blast of the trumpet. The kingdom has been transferred.
II. The Male Child
Then the vision does something no chronicle would dare: it turns the time back to before the trumpets, to before the cross, and shows the whole war once more, in three figures.
A great sign in heaven: a woman, clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, on her head a crown of twelve stars. She is pregnant, and she cries out in her birth pangs. A second sign: a great, fiery-red dragon, seven heads, ten horns, and his tail drags a third of the stars of heaven along and throws them onto the earth. And then the image that stands still: the dragon stands before the woman who is about to give birth — so that, as soon as she has given birth, he may devour her child.
A beast of prey at a childbed, the jaws turned toward the womb. That one posture sums up the whole history of the council chamber, and the vision shows who has presided over it all those centuries. Pharaoh, who instructed the midwives at the birthstool; Athaliah, who murdered off the royal seed until one infant remained, hidden in a linen room; the swords in the streets of Bethlehem. Each time the same jaws, at the same womb. The assembly has never had any agenda item other than this child.
And she gives birth to a son, a male child. The vision gives him no name and no genealogy; it gives him one description, and it is a psalm line: "who will shepherd all the nations with an iron rod." By that he is to be recognized. The reward the song promised the Son hangs here as destiny above a newborn: the rod above the manger. And then the vision skips everything. No Nazareth, no years of wandering about, no cross and no open grave; between the birth and the throne stands one verb: "and her child was caught up to God and to His throne." The jaws snap shut on emptiness. A human life of world history, compressed into one snatch upward — for this vision tells the war from the dragon's side, and for the dragon the life of Jesus was that: a prey that escaped him, upward, into the hall where he cannot reach.
The woman flees into the wilderness, to a place God has prepared for her, and is fed there, twelve hundred and sixty days — the days of the week that passes by here. And of the dragon, thrown down onto the earth, the vision notes the state of mind: "he has great fury, because he knows that he has little time." The thronging of the nations has in these days an engine, and that engine is panic.
III. The Rod That Breaks or Shepherds
The psalm line of the description stands in the decree that the Son Himself was allowed to read aloud, and it is a promise with a weapon in it:
"Ask of Me, and I will give nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession. You shall shatter them with an iron rod; like potter's ware you shall dash them to pieces."
So reads the Hebrew text. But the word that there reads "shatter" carries a secret in its letters. Hebrew was for centuries written with consonants only; the vowels came later, as dots and strokes under the line. And the consonants of this one verb allow two stems: the stem of breaking — shattering — and the stem of shepherding, the verb of the shepherd. The same letters; the vowels decide. The Masoretes, the keepers of the Hebrew text, pointed the breaking. The Greek translators, centuries before them, read the shepherd: "you shall shepherd them with an iron rod." Two readings, one written word — and when Revelation took up the line three times, it chose the shepherd all three times.
Those two readings lie less far apart than they sound, for a shepherd's staff is no ornamental stick. With it one counts, animal by animal under the staff into the fold; with it one retrieves what hangs in a cleft of rock; and with it one beats to death. A shepherd boy from Bethlehem once explained that to a king, matter-of-factly, as work experience: if a lion or a bear came and took a lamb out of the flock, "then I went after him and struck him down, and rescued it out of his jaws; and if he rose up against me, I seized him by his beard and struck him down and killed him." That is shepherding. The hand that takes the lamb out of the jaws and the hand that breaks the jaws open are the same hand, and the staff that leads the flock is the weapon with which what tears it apart is finished off.
Revelation therefore sets the two readings once side by side, in one breath: "he will shepherd them with an iron rod — like potter's vessels they are shattered." Shepherding and shattering, shepherd and breaker. The sentence does not choose between the vowels, because in the hand of this Shepherd there is nothing to choose: for the flock the staff is guidance, and for what tears the flock apart the same staff is death.
ExpertFour letters, two stems
The consonants of תְּרֹעֵם in Psalm 2:9 allow two verb stems: רעע, "to shatter," and רעה, "to shepherd." The Masoretes vocalized the form of רעע; the Septuagint translated ποιμανεῖς αὐτοὺς ἐν ῥάβδῳ σιδηρᾷ — "you shall shepherd them with an iron rod," from רעה. Revelation takes up the line three times, each time with the root of shepherding — but none of the three places takes over the Greek form. The Greek psalm has ποιμανεῖς, second person: God speaks to the King. Revelation 2:27 and 19:15 read ποιμανεῖ, third person, and 12:5 the infinitive ποιμαίνειν — because there it is spoken about Him. The seam thus runs by way of the root, not by way of the form: the vision reads the shepherding reading against the later Masoretic vocalization and conjugates it independently, sentence by sentence. At Revelation 2:27 all consulted editions — critical, Byzantine, Textus Receptus — agree about this verb; the only variant lies in the second verb (συντρίβεται/συντριβήσεται). Thus both readings of the psalm have been canonically preserved: the breaking in the Hebrew tradition, the shepherding in the Greek — and Revelation 2:27 joins them together in one verse. The working translations of this book follow that trail: in the psalm text itself the Masoretic reading sounds — shatter — and where Revelation speaks, the shepherding; the seam is translated as it has been transmitted, on both sides. Note: well documented; the full apparatus is in Appendix B.
IV. The Jar That Is Made Whole No More
The vessel with which the psalm threatens has a prehistory, and it begins in a workshop.
"Arise and go down to the house of the potter; there I will let you hear My words." Jeremiah goes down and finds the man at work on the double wheel. The vessel he is forming fails in his hand — the clay sags askew, the wall gives way — and the potter begins again and makes it into another vessel, as it is good in his eyes. No temper at the wheel, no lump flung away; the hands fold the failure back into a ball and set it up anew. The explanation comes from above, and it is all room: "As clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand, house of Israel." As long as the clay is wet, no form is final. Nor any failure either.
One chapter further the same prophet receives a different commission, and the difference lies in the first verb: to buy. "Go and buy a jar from a potter" — no clay from the wheel: a jar, turned, fired, finished. He must take elders along, of the people and of the priests — witnesses, men whose word counts in the gate — and with them out of the city, into the valley of Ben-Hinnom, the place where Jerusalem has burned its own sons for the gods; the gate through which they go out is called the Potsherd Gate. There he reads out the indictment. And then he lifts the jar above his head and smashes it to pieces before their eyes, and the Word says with it what that sound means: "so will I break this people and this city — as one breaks the vessel of the potter, which can no more be made whole."
Between chapter eighteen and chapter nineteen lies the kiln. Wet clay can go back on the wheel; what has gone through the fire has its form for good — and with it also its breaking. Earthenware knows no second chance and no half damage: it is whole, or it is shards, and shards stay shards. When the psalm wrote out the reward of the Son, it seized precisely this image — dashed to pieces like potter's ware. The song reckons that by that day there will be vessels that can no longer be formed: hardened into the shape of their refusal, kiln after kiln, century after century, until the form and the man could no longer be separated.
That is why the kiss that this same song offers, three verses after the rod, is no pious final chord but an urgent dispatch. The offer applies to clay. It applies to what is still formable, what can still go back on the wheel — and no one has ever been told how long the wheel keeps turning for him. It says only that a day is coming on which the turning stops and the breaking begins. And that that day is not today.
V. The Footstool
At the seventh trumpet, after the voices, the temple of God opens in heaven, and in His temple the ark of His covenant is seen — and then flashes of lightning, voices, thunderclaps, an earthquake, great hail. The ark. Lost for centuries, vanished from every inventory; and at the hour the kingdom is proclaimed, it stands in view — the oldest piece of furniture of the covenant, in the heart of the sanctuary that is not made with hands.
David gave that piece of furniture a name, at the end of his life, standing before the assembled princes of Israel: he had wanted to build a house "as a resting place for the ark of the covenant of YHWH, and for the footstool of the feet of our God." The footstool: the little bench under the feet of a seated king. So Israel spoke about the ark — the place where the feet of the Enthroned One rest — and so Scripture speaks about that place, six times in all, and five of the six times it is holy ground. The ark. The earth: "heaven is My throne, and the earth is the footstool of My feet." Twice a call to the people: "bow down at the footstool of His feet." And once, in the darkest book of the canon, the bewilderment that even that place was not spared: "He did not remember the footstool of His feet, on the day of His anger."
And then there is the sixth place, and it stands in the command to which this book owes its title: "sit at My right hand, until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet." Five times the footstool is something at which one kneels. Here someone becomes the footstool. There is only one place under those feet, and there are two postures: you bow there — or you become it.
The letter describes the waiting for that verse in the present tense: one sacrifice for sins, and then He sat down, "henceforth waiting, until His enemies are made a footstool for His feet." Fourteen verses further in that same chapter stands a second waiting, with a word of the same stem: for the one who tramples the blood by which he was sanctified, no sacrifice remains, "but a fearful expecting of judgment, and a fiery glow that will consume the adversaries." Twice in that chapter there is waiting. The Son waits on the footstool; what else still waits is fire. And the letter has also said when the waiting ends: "once more I will make to tremble — not only the earth, but also heaven." In the days of the trumpets that "once more" stands no longer in the future tense. The trembling has begun; everything that can be shaken is shaken out, until only the unshakable remains — "for our God is a consuming fire."
DossierThe six footstools
הֲדֹם, "footstool," occurs in the Hebrew Bible six times, each time connected with "feet": 1 Chronicles 28:2 (the ark — "the footstool of the feet of our God"), Isaiah 66:1 (the earth — "heaven is My throne, and the earth is the footstool of My feet"), Psalm 99:5 and Psalm 132:7 (twice the call to bow down at the footstool of His feet), Lamentations 2:1 (the footstool "not remembered on the day of His anger") and Psalm 110:1. Five of the six are a place of worship or of God's rest; only in Psalm 110:1 is the enemy himself made a footstool. Within the series Lamentations 2:1 is the hinge: the only other verse that connects the footstool with "the day of anger" — there the place of worship is given up to judgment, here the enemy is made into furniture of the rest. The two meanings thus touch each other precisely on the day of anger, and that is the day this part is about. In Greek this footstool is called ὑποπόδιον, and Hebrews preserves that word exactly where it cites Psalm 110:1 (1:13; 10:13); the apparatus of the citation forms is in Appendix B. Note: well documented; exhaustively counted.
VI. "As I Also Have Received"
The rod stands in one more place in Revelation, and it is the strangest of the three. No vision; a letter. Before all the seals and trumpets the Son of Man between the lampstands dictates seven letters to seven congregations, and in the fourth, to Thyatira, stands a promise that makes one dizzy:
"And he who overcomes and keeps My works to the end — to him I will give power over the nations, and he will shepherd them with an iron rod; like potter's vessels they are shattered — as I also have received from My Father. And I will give him the morning star."
The reward of the Son, passed on. Power over the nations, the iron rod, the shepherding and the shattering in one breath: everything that the decree of the psalm promised to the King is here held out in prospect to an overcomer. And then the closing formula, and it is the statement of origin of the whole promise: "as I also have received from My Father." Received — where? In the decree itself: "ask of Me, and I will give nations as your inheritance." The Son never seized the nations; He asked for them and received them. And what He has received, He passes on as it came to Him: as a gift, along the line of asking. The Father gives to the Son; the Son gives to the one who overcomes. In that whole chain no grasping hand occurs — that is the difference between this chain and every assembly that ever convened over the nations.
With that the boundary is also drawn, and it runs through that one little word "as." Whoever receives the staff shepherds with the Shepherd, under the Shepherd; he does not shepherd in imitation of Him and does not relieve Him. What he bears is derived authority — power of the Conqueror, as the Conqueror has power of the Father — and derived authority is real authority, but it is no shared place: the oracle of the decree is spoken to One and is not redistributed but handed out. And who precisely fall under "he who overcomes" — that question has been weighed in "The Wise" and deliberately not decided, and this book does not decide it either. What stands at every reading: the staff is and remains His. Hands are added, not owners.
Then that last thing, added almost casually: "and I will give him the morning star." The book waits until its final page to say what that is. There the Speaker introduces Himself, for the last time: "I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star." The highest thing the Conqueror has to give away — after the nations, after the staff, after the throne — is Himself.
ExcursusTwo witnesses, two directions of gaze
From this part of the book onward, of the four royal psalms virtually only Psalm 2 still travels along textually. In Revelation it is demonstrable in six places: the rod three times (2:27 · 12:5 · 19:15), the kingship at the seventh trumpet (11:15), the gathered kings of the earth (19:19) — where the verb to gather coincides lexically with the Greek psalm — and the raging nations and the wrath of 11:18 (weighed). Psalm 110 is in the vision at most a faint echo — the sitting-along on the throne of 3:21 — and Psalm 8 and Psalm 45 have not a single acknowledged citation there; Melchizedek too does not occur in the whole book. That fact is told openly here, for it says something about the direction of gaze of the two great witnesses. Hebrews looks upward, into the throne room, and crowns the Head: there all four of the psalms sound, in one liturgy. Revelation looks ahead, into history, and clothes the body: on that road, of the four, only the scepter carries through, because the scepter is the only part of the script that still has to be carried out. The letter sings what has happened; the vision shows what is coming — and what is coming is precisely the part of Psalm 2 that stayed open at the ascension. The measure of that difference can be read off from one fact: Psalm 110:1 is the most cited and alluded-to verse of the whole New Testament, and precisely this psalm falls almost silent in the vision — what the letter has performed to completion, the vision need not repeat. That is why this book nowhere promises that Revelation performs the four psalms; it says what is true, and that turns out to be enough. The full reception chart is in Appendix C.
HeartThe Shepherd with the staff
He bears one staff, and it has two sides, and both are love. Under this staff His own go into the fold, animal by animal, counted and known; with the same staff the jaws are broken open that have closed around a lamb. His wrath is a shepherd's fury — the glow of Someone who comes to take His lamb out of the jaws and for that seizes the lion by the beard if He must. The staff is of iron, and in all of Scripture there is not a line in which it comes down on a sheep. What it shatters is what tears apart; what it shepherds is what has been given Him — asked of His Father, and received. And He does not shepherd as a hireling, at a distance, with an eye to the evening. What He has received, He hands out: the staff to the one who overcomes, and above that the morning star, which is Himself. This description hung already above His manger: iron for the wolf, and Himself as reward.
The assembly is in full. Heaven is still shut.
Source-text footnotes. All translations are the author's own concordant working translations; in the typeset edition the notes stand at the foot of the page.