Grain Gathered, Grapes Trampled

14:14-16One like a son of man

"I looked, and behold, a white cloud; and on the cloud one sitting like a son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle" (WEB). The phrase "like a son of man" goes back to Daniel 7:13, where one like a son of man comes with the clouds and receives everlasting dominion, and to 1:13, where John saw him among the lamp stands. A white cloud and a crown suggest victory. Most readers take this figure to be Christ, since an angel would hardly wear that crown or take that title.

Another angel comes "out of the temple" and cries out: "Send your sickle, and reap; for the hour to reap has come; for the harvest of the earth is ripe!" Why would an angel instruct the Son? Many readers note that Jesus himself said that nobody knows the day or hour "but only the Father" (Mark 13:32), and the angel from the temple, the place of God's presence, is simply the messenger carrying the Father's word that the time has come. The timing is not the Son's to guess and not the dragon's to hasten.

The Son then "thrust his sickle on the earth, and the earth was reaped." No details follow. Does this describe the gathering of the righteous, the grain brought into the barn as in Jesus's parables (Matthew 13:30; Mark 4:29)? Or does it describe judgment, since Joel 3:13 says, "Put in the sickle; for the harvest is ripe"? Readers differ. Some see both harvests as judgment. Others see grain as gathering and grapes as judgment. John does not decide for us, and the main point stands: the harvest is not left to chance.

14:17-19The vine of the earth

A second angel comes out of the temple with another sharp sickle, and a third comes "from the altar, he who has power over fire." The altar has been a place of prayer since chapter 6, where the souls underneath it cried, "How long, Master, the holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood?" (6:10), and in chapter 8, where the prayers of the saints went up with incense. Many see the angel from the altar as heaven's answer to those prayers. Evil has not been forgotten.

His command is: "Send your sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for the earth's grapes are fully ripe!" Notice again the word ripe. In Scripture, wickedness has a measure. God told Abraham that his descendants would return to the land only after four generations, because "the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full" (Genesis 15:16). God does not judge on a whim or in a rush. He waits, sometimes for centuries, and only when evil is full does he act.

The vintage is thrown into "the great wine press of the wrath of God." Grapes in a winepress are trampled until their juice runs out. Two Old Testament passages stand behind this. In Joel 3:13 the sickle and the winepress come in one verse: "Come, tread, for the wine press is full." And in Isaiah 63:3 a warrior from Edom has garments stained red: "I have trodden the wine press alone." Revelation 19:15 returns to the picture and says the rider on the white horse "treads the wine press of the fierceness of the wrath of God, the Almighty." This is the wrath of a king who finally ends oppression, violence, and the beasts. It is not the temper of a tyrant.

14:20Outside the city

"The wine press was trodden outside of the city, and blood came out of the wine press, even to the bridles of the horses, as far as one thousand six hundred stadia."

Start with "outside of the city." In Joel the nations are gathered in the valley of Jehoshaphat to be judged, outside Jerusalem. Here the city is God's people, secure in his presence, and the destruction takes place beyond its walls. The city is not touched by it.

Then the figures. A stadion was about 600 feet, so 1,600 of them is roughly 180 miles or 300 kilometres. Many scholars take the number as symbolic rather than a literal measurement. It is forty times forty, with four for the earth's four corners and ten for completeness, each squared, a way of saying that the judgment is total. A flood of blood up to a horse's bridle is a deliberately overwhelming picture, not a reporter's estimate. John is telling us that evil's end is not a small thing.

Do not rush to a quick answer here. Readers throughout history have felt the weight of this image, and some of the best of them have simply trembled before it. It is right to tremble. If we ever read the winepress with a smile, we have not understood it.

But we should also not read it alone. There is another outside-the-city event in the Bible, and it is the key to everything else in this passage.

14:14-20Who drank first?

Jesus "suffered outside of the gate" (Hebrews 13:12). He was taken beyond Jerusalem's walls to a place called the Skull. If the winepress of God's wrath stands outside the city, we have to ask what happened at the other place outside the city.

Scripture speaks of a cup of wrath. To Jerusalem Isaiah says, "you who have drunk from Yahweh's hand the cup of his wrath" (Isaiah 51:17), and then comes the astonishing promise: "Behold, I have taken out of your hand the cup of staggering... You will not drink it any more" (51:22). Who took it? In the garden Jesus prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from me; nevertheless, not what I desire, but what you desire" (Matthew 26:39). The prophet had said of him, "he was pierced for our transgressions," and "Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:5-6). Paul explains that God sent him "to be an atoning sacrifice, through faith in his blood" so that God might be "just, and the justifier of him who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:25-26).

So in the story of the Bible, the winepress has already been trodden once, by the One who bore it for those who trust him. That does not make the final harvest unreal. It means there is a refuge from it, and the refuge is a person.

And that is why the Good News flies before the harvest comes. The angels' invitation in 14:6-7, God's patience, and the cross all say the same thing: the harvest waits while mercy is still being offered.