560. Armageddon

Armageddon

Rev_16:16 : ’93And he gathered them together in a place called in the Hebrew tongue, Armageddon.’94

Megiddo is the name of a mountain that looks down upon Esdraelon, the greatest battlefield that the world has ever seen. There Barak fought the Canaanites; there Gideon fought the Midianites; there Josiah fought the invading Egyptians. The whole region stands for battle, and the Armageddon of my text borrows its name from it, and is here used, not geographically, but figuratively, while setting forth the idea that there is to be a world’92s closing battle, the greatest of all battles, compared with which the conflicts of this century and all other centuries were insignificant, because of the greater number of combatants engaged, the greater victory, and the greater defeat. The exact date of that battle we do not know, and the exact locality is uncertain. It may be in Asia, Europe, Africa, or America; but the fact that such a battle will take place is as certain as God’92s eternal truth. When I use the superlative degree in regard to that coming conflict, I do not forget that there have been wars all along on stupendous scale. As when, at Marathon, Miltiades brought on his men, not in ordinary march, but in full run, upon the horsemen of Persia and the black archers of Ethiopia, and scattered them, and crying, ’93Bring fire! Bring fire!’94 set into flame the ships of the invaders. As when Pizarro overcame Peru. As when Philip II. triumphed over Portugal. As when the Huns met the Goths. As when three hundred Spartans sacrificed themselves at Thermo-pyl’e6. As when the Carthaginians took Agrigentum. As when Alexander headed the Macedonian phalanx. As when Hannibal invaded Italy. Battle of Hastings! Battle of Valmy! Battle of Pultowa! Battle of Arbela! Battle of Tours! Battle of Borodino! Battle of Lucknow! Battle of Solferino! Battle of Fontenoy where one hundred thousand were slain! Battle of Chalons where three hundred thousand were massacred! Battle of Herat where Genghis Khan destroyed one million six hundred thousand lives! Battle of Neishar where one million seven hundred and forty-seven thousand went down to death! One million eight hundred sixteen thousand slain at Troy! And battles of our own wars still too near us to allow us to appreciate their awful grandeur and significance. But all the battles I have named put together will not equal in numbers enlisted or fierceness or grandeur or triumph or rout the coming Armageddon contest. Whether it shall be fought with printers’92 type or keen steel, whether by brain or muscle, whether by pen or carbine, whether by booming cannon or thunders of Christian eloquence, I do not know, and you may take what I say as figurative or literal, but take as certain what St. John, in his vision on the rocks of the Grecian archipelago, is pleased to call ’93Armageddon.’94

My sermon will first mention the regiments that will be engaged in the conflict; then will say something of the commanders on both sides; and then speak of the battle itself and the stupendous issues. Beginning with those who will fight on the wrong side, I first mention the Regiments Diabolic. In this very chapter from which my text is taken we are told that the spirits of devils will be there. How many millions of them no one can tell, for the statistics of the satanic dominions have never been reported and the roll of that host has never on earth been called; but from the direful and continental and planetary work they have already done, and the fact that every man and woman and child on earth has a tempter, there must be at least sixteen hundred millions of evil spirits familiar with our world. Perhaps as many more are engaged on especial enterprises of abomination among the nations and empires of the earth. Beside that there must be an inconceivable number of inhabitants in realms pandemoniac, staying there to keep the great capitals of sin going from age to age. Many of them once lived in heaven, but engaging in conspiracy to put Satan on the throne, they were hurled out and down, and they are now among the worst thugs of the universe. Having been in three worlds’97heaven, earth, and hell’97they have all the advantages of great experience. Their power, their speed, their cunning, their hostility wonderful beyond all statement! In the Armageddon they will, I doubt not, be present in full array. They will have no reserve corps, but all will be at the front. There will not only be soldiers in that battle who can be seen and aimed at, but troops intangible and without corporeity, and weapons may strike clear through them without giving them hurt. With what shout of defiance will they climb up the ladders of fire and leap from the battlements of asbestos into the last campaign of hell! Paul, the bravest of men, was impressed with their might for evil when he said, ’93We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and against powers and against the rulers of the darkness in this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’94 Oh, what an agitating moment, when the ranks diabolic move up and take their places for conflict in the Armageddon!

Other regiments who will march into the fight will be the Regiments Alcoholic. They will be made up of the brewers’92 companies, distillery owners, and liquor-dealers’92 associations, and the hundreds of millions of their patrons. They will move into the ranks with what the Bible calls the ’93Song of the drunkard.’94 And what a bloated and soaked and bleared and blasted and hiccoughing and nauseating host! If now, according to a scientist, in England there are fifty thousand deaths annually from strong drink, and in the United States, according to another estimate, ninety-eight thousand deaths annually from strong drink, what an army of living drunkards that implies, coming up from the whole earth to take their places in the last battle, especially as the evil increases, and the millions now staggering on their way may be joined by other millions of reenforcements; brigade after brigade, with drunkards’92 bones drumming on the head of beer barrels the dead march of souls. These millions of victims of alcohol joined by the millions of the victims of arrack, the spirituous liquor of China and India and Arabia and Egypt and Ceylon and Siam!

Other regiments who will march into the fight on the wrong side will be the Regiments Infidel. God gave but one revelation to the human race, and these men have been trying to destroy it. Many of the books, magazines, and newspapers, and some of the universities, through perpetual scoff at Christianity, have become recruiting agencies for those regiments. The greatest brigadier of all those regiments, Voltaire, who closed his life of assault upon Christianity by writing: Happiness is a dream, and only pain is real. I have thought so for eighty-four years, and I know no better plan than to resign myself to the inevitable and to reflect that flies are born to be devoured by spiders and man to be consumed by care. I wish I had never been born.’94 Oh, the God-defying regiments of infidels, who, after having spent their life in antagonizing the only influence that could make the earth better, gather with their low wit and their vile sneer and their learned idiocy and their horrible blasphemy, to take part against God and righteousness in the great Armageddon!

Other regiments who will march in on the wrong side in the battle will be the Regiments Mohammedan. At the present time there are about one hundred and seventy-five million Moslems. Their plain mission is to kill Christians, demean womanhood, and take possession of the earth in the interest of ignorance, superstition, and moral filth. The massacre of fifty thousand Armenians in the last few years is only one chapter in their effort to extirpate from the earth everything but themselves. So determined are they in their bad work that all the nations of the earth put together dare not say to them, ’93Stop! or we will make you stop.’94 My hope is that long before that last battle of which I speak, the Turkish Government, and with it Mohammedanism, may be wiped out of existence. The Turkish power for the last four hundred years has been the mightiest hindrance on earth to religious liberty and moral improvement. Her extermination is prophesied in the Book of Revelations in the figure of the drying up of the River Euphrates, and she is going rapidly, thank God! In 1820, by the Greek insurrection, she received the first destructive blow. In 1823, the Turkoman army of thirty thousand was destroyed and the cause of liberty advanced. In 1827, England, France, and Russia, not so cautious as they have since been, at Navarino humiliated the Turkish fleets, and Greece was free. Weaker and weaker the Turkish power has become, and it has lost Algiers and Wallachia and Roumania and Roumelia and Bulgaria and, more than all, during the past decade, through her cruelty, has lost the sympathy of every good man and woman in all the earth, and if William E. Gladstone had been prime minister of England during the Armenian outrages, the Turkish Government would have been compelled either to quit her outrages or go down under bombardment. But if the Bible prophecy concerning the drying up of the Euphrates is not fulfilled before the battle mentioned in my text, Mohammedanism will march in with sword and poison and torch, to take her part in the great Armageddon.

Yea! to show the magnitude of the forces on the wrong side, I have to tell you that what is left of heathenism at that time will march into the conflict. There are one hundred and fifty million fetish idolaters, one hundred and ninety million Hindus, one hundred and forty-seven million Buddhists, three hundred and thirteen million Chinese heathen. Through the sublimest movement of this century, the missionary movement, all the time gathering in momentum, I believe all or nearly all of that eight hundred millions of heathendom will be converted to God. But that which is not converted will come into the Armageddon on the wrong side.

Other regiments on that wrong side will be made up of offenders of all sorts’97the defrauders, the libertines, the dynamiters, the anarchists, the oppressors and the foes of society, the criminals of all nations, by whatever name they are now called, or may then be called. They may not before that have openly taken sides, but then they will be compelled to take sides. With what venom, with what violence, with what desperation they will fall into line at the great Armageddon! Is it not appalling, these uncounted regiments of the earth, to be joined by the uncounted regiments from perdition? Can any power cope with them? Especially when I tell you who their commander is, for so much in all wars depends upon the chieftain. Their leader will not be a political accident or a military ’93happen so.’94 By talent and adroitness and courage and unceasing industries he has come to the bad eminence. He disputed the throne of heaven with the Almighty, but no one has ever disputed the throne of eternal night with this monarch who will in the last battle take the field in person. Milton calls him Lucifer, Goethe calls him Mephistopheles, the Hebrew calls him Abaddon, the Greek calls’97him Apollyon. He is the impersonation of all malevolence, of all oppression, of all cruelty, the summing up of all falsehood. In his make-up nothing bad was left out and nothing good was put in, and he is to be the general, the commander-in-chief of all the forces on the wrong side in the great Armageddon. He has been in more battles than you have ever read about, and he has gained more victories than have ever been celebrated in this world. But this old warrior of Pandemonium will not have an undisputed field. There will be an army to dispute with his forces. I have mentioned the supremacy of this world. Our troops will not have to run when, on the day mentioned in my text, all the infernal batteries shall be unlimbered. We have been reviewing the troops diabolic. We have been measuring the caliber of their guns. We have been examining their ammunition wagons. Now let us look at the forces to be marshaled in the Armageddon on the right side.

First of all, I mention the Regiments Angelic, Alas! that the subject of demonology seems better understood than the subject of angelology. But the glorious spirits around the throne and all the bright immortals that fill the galleries and levels of the universe are to take part in that last great fight, and the regiments angelic are the only regiments capable of meeting the regiments plutonic. To show you something of an angel’92s power, I ask you to consider that just one of them slew one hundred and eighty-five thousand of Sennacherib’92s hosts in a night, and it is not a tough arithmetical question to solve, if one angel can slay one hundred and eighty-five thousand troops in a night, how many can five hundred millions of them slay? The old Book says that ’93They excel in strength.’94 It is not a celestial mob, but a disciplined host, and they know their rank. Cherubim, seraphim, thrones, principalities, and powers! And the leader of those regiments is Michael the Archangel. David saw just one group of angels sweep past, and they were twenty thousand charioted. Paul, who in the Gamalian college had his faculties so wonderfully developed, confesses his incapacity to count them by saying, ’93Ye are come to Mount Zion and an innumerable company of angels.’94 If each soul on earth has a guardian angel, then there must be sixteen hundred million angels on earth today. Besides that, heaven must be full of angels, those who stay there; not only the twelve angels who, we are told, guard the twelve gates, but those angels who help in the worship and go on mission from mansion to mansion in heaven and help to build the hosannas and enthrone the hallelujahs and roll the doxologies of the service that never ends. But they all, if required, will be in the last fight between holiness and sin. Heaven could afford to adjourn just one day, and empty all its temples and mansions and palaces and boulevards into that one battle. I think all the angels of God will join in it. The one that stood with sword of flame at the gate of Paradise. The one that pointed Hagar to the fountain in the wilderness. The one that halted Balaam on the highway. The two that warned Lot to flee the doomed city. The one that took part with Joshua against the Canaanites. The one that informed Mary of the approach of the Nativity. The one that wrestled with Jacob at the brook Jabbok. The one that swung open the gate for the incarcerated apostle Peter. The one that strengthened Christ in his last paroxysm. All, I think, will be there’97their velocities inconceivable, so that when Daniel was in prayer, Gabriel, we are told, came from heaven to speak to him, and if heaven be at the center of the universe, that angel must have traveled thousands of millions of miles in a few hours. Daniel speaks of his arriving in the evening. Talk of earthly regiments on double-quick march! What will be the speed of the regiments angelic, when, at the command of the archangel, ’93Down to earth! Forward into the battle!’94 those regiments angelic, lightning-winged, rainbow-girdled, fire-footed, shall sweep into the great Armageddon!

The next regiments that I see marching into the fight will be the Regiments Ecclesiastic. According to the last account, and practically only in the beginning of the great Gospel movement which proposes to take the whole earth for God, there are eighteen million six hundred thousand Methodists, nine million two hundred and twenty-five thousand Baptists, twelve million two hundred and fifty thousand Presbyterians, two million eight hundred thousand Lutherans, and twenty-nine million two hundred thousand Episcopalians. But the present statistics of churches will be utterly swamped when, after all the great denominations have done their best work, the slowest of all the sects will have more numbers than the present enrolment of all denominations throughout Christendom. You see, by that time an atheist or an infidel will be a curiosity, and he will be looked at as we look at a man with long hair reaching below his shoulders and long finger-nails that are never cut and a stare in the eyes indicating incipient lunacy’97not to be argued with, but to be pitied; while it will not be any unusual thing to see men as much devoted to their religion as Francis Xavier was devoted to his religion, when he went through the streets asking all to come to hear his faith expounded, in ten years planting the Gospel in fifty nations and baptizing over a million souls. And the great hosts of believers will fill the earth, making the two million three hundred and seventeen thousand combatants that Xerxes reviewed a corporal’92s guard in comparison. I see them, the regiments ecclesiastic, moving into that last battle. The Lutherans headed by some great Martin Luther yet to be born. The Methodists headed by some John Wesley yet to come. The Presbyterians headed by some John Knox yet to arise. The Episcopalians headed by some Bishop Charnock yet to be enrobed. The Baptists headed by some Missionary Carey yet to bless the world. The Congregational Church headed by some Doctor Kirk of pentecostal power yet to take tongue of fire. I see them moving into the ranks, carrying a standard striped and starred; striped as suggesting him by whose stripes we are healed, and starred as with the promise that those who turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars, forever and ever. Into that battle on our side will roll those mighty engines of power, the printing-presses of Christendom. Into that battle will also move the mightiest telescopes, that shall bring the stars in their courses to fight for our God.

Again, the regiments elemental will come into that battle on the right side. The winds! God showed what he could do with them when the splintered timbers of the ships of the Spanish Armada were strewn on the rocks of Scotland, Norway, and the Hebrides. The waters! He showed what he could do with them when he put the whole earth under them, leaving it subaqueous one hundred and fifty days. The earthquakes! He showed what he could do with them when he let Caracas drop into the open mouth of horror and the islands of the sea went into entombment. The lightnings! He showed what he could do with them when he wrapped Mount Sinai in flame, and we have all seen their flashing lanterns moving with the chariots of the midnight hurricane. All the regiments elemental will come in on our side in the great Armageddon. Come and let us mount and ride along the line, and review the troops of Immanuel, and find that the regiments terrestrial and celestial that come into that battle on the right side are, as compared with those on the wrong side, two to one, a hundred to one, a thousand to one.

But who is the commander-in-chief on this side? Splendid armies have been ruined, caught in traps, flung over precipices, and annihilated through the incompetence or treachery of their general. Who commands on our side? Jehovah-Jireh! so-called in one place. ’93Captain of Salvation,’94 so-called in another place. King of kings. Lord of lords. Conqueror of conquerors. His eye omniscient. His arm omnipotent. He will take the lead. He will draw the sword. He will give the command. And when he plants his foot for the combat, the foundations of the earth will quake, and when he shall give the battle-shout, all the gates of hell will tremble.

But do not let us shout until after we have seen the two armies clash in the last struggle. The battle all time and all eternity opens. ’93Forward!’94 ’93Forward!’94 is the command on both sides given. The long lines of both armies waver and swing to and fro. Swords of truth against engines infernal. Black-horse cavalry of perdition against white-horse cavalry of heaven. The redemption of this world and the honor of the Throne of God to vindicate, how great is the battle! The army of righteousness seems giving way; but no! It is only a part of the maneuver of the infinite fight. It is a deploy of the host celestial. What a meeting in this field of splendor and wrath, of the angelic and of the diabolic, of hosanna and blasphemy, of song and curse, of the divine and the satanic. The thunderbolts of the Almighty burst and blaze upon the foe. Boom! Boom! By the torches of lightning that illumine the scene, I see that the crisis of the Armageddon has come. It is the turning-point of this last battle. The next moment will decide all. Ay! the forces of Apollyon are breaking ranks. See! See! They fly. Some on foot, some on wing; they fly. Back over the battlements of perdition they go down with infinite crash, all the regiments diabolic! Back to the mountains and caves the armed hosts of earth, crying as they retreat to the rocks and mountains, ’93Fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of his wrath has come, and who shall be able to stand.’94 And while Apollyon, the prisoner of war, is being dragged in chains to his dungeon, and our Conqueror is remounting his throne, I look off upon the battlefield, and among the slain I find the carcasses of Mohammedanism and paganism and atheism and infidelity and dissipation and fraud and multitudinous wrong, strewing the plain, and I hear the angel that standeth in the sun crying in the words of Revelation, to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven’97the eagles and the vultures and the hawks and the albatrosses: ’93Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God, that ye may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of them that sit on them.’94

The prophesied Armageddon of the text has been fought, and Christ and his followers have won the day. The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ. All the Christian workers of our time and you, and all the Christian workers of all the ages, have helped on the magnificent result, and the victory is ours as much as theirs.

Inviting all outsiders, through the ransomed blood of the everlasting Covenant, to get into the ranks of the conquerors, and under the banner of our Leader, I shall now give out the Moravian Hymn, by James Montgomery, appropriate when written in 1819, but more appropriate today, and ask you, with full voices, as well as with grateful hearts, to chant it:

See Jehovah’92s banner furl’92d,

Sheathed his sword: he speaks,’97’92t is done

And the kingdoms of this world

Are the kingdoms of his Son.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage