VV#60 - ANNIHILATION - The "Second Coming in the Clouds" above Jerusalem
The ocean of blood and the lake of fire at AD 70
“Every man’s sword will be against his brother. I will execute judgment on him with plague and bloodshed; I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him. And so I will show my greatness and my holiness, and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations.
Then they will know that I am the LORD.”
Ezekiel 38:21-23
“The LORD examines the righteous,
but the wicked, those who love violence,
he hates with a passion.
On the wicked he will rain
fiery coals and burning sulfur;
a scorching wind will be their lot.
For the LORD is righteous,
he loves justice;
the upright will see his face.”
Psalms 11:5-7
“Every stroke the LORD lays on them
with his punishing club
will be to the music of timbrels and harps,
as he fights them in battle with the blows of his arm.
Topheth has long been prepared;
it has been made ready for the king.
Its fire pit has been made deep and wide,
with an abundance of fire and wood;
the breath of the LORD,
like a stream of burning sulfur,
sets it ablaze.”
Isaiah 30:32-33
As the prophet Daniel had seen in his vision hundreds of years prior, the apostle John had also famously written about “someone like a son of man” with similar poetic symbolism and imagery in his vision in Revelation:
“…among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire.” (Revelation 1:13-14)
This description of the son of man with “eyes like blazing fire” was very reminiscent of Yahweh’s previous description of himself as a “consuming fire”. And as John would later explain, this “consuming fire” was finally coming home as a grand reckoning:
“The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath.” (Revelation 14:19)
This is frightening imagery indeed, and portended of a scale of destruction and death that certainly no one would have ever known before. But it had been long-brewing, this comeuppance of recompense; it most certainly did not come out of nowhere.
Indeed, even besides the previously mentioned two different Jesus’s warnings and also the general feeling of foreboding that many in Jerusalem could never entirely put out of their minds, so also had a different figure previously warned of this conflagration now at the very door… and it was the very person who had helped arrange the construction of the stunningly glorious temple to begin with—that most could never even conceive of ever being destroyed.
The Warnings of a Diplomat
Marcus Julius Aggripa was the great-grandson of Herod the Great, Judaea’s most celebrated king. Historian Tom Holland explains how this king had been a master of walking the diplomatic line of maintaining good relations between Rome and the Israelites, and even rebuilding the very temple that the Israelites were so proud of (and of which Jesus warned would be destroyed if they persisted in their political rebellion at the cost of not returning to the heart of their covenant):
“Seventy years after his death, Judaea remained stamped by his relish for showy building projects. Herod it was who had rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, a decades long programme of construction designed to showcase his piety, rally Judaean support for his regime, and immortalise his name. Simultaneously, he had displayed a rare talent for collaboration…No reach of Judaea was so lonely that it might not bear the mark of his genius for reconciling the Judaean with the Roman.” (PAX, page 135)
And it was this grandson Agrippa that had appealed also to the Israelite political rebels to try to see reason, only to receive outright hostility in return:
“Agrippa…had also sought to reconcile his countryment to the continuance of Roman rule; but they had only stoned him and proclaimed his banishment. Leaving the city for the last time, Agrippa had done so in tears.” (ibid, page 136)
And so just as Jesus son of Ananias had (albeit much more manically) tried to warn Jerusalem, so also this Agrippa had warned them sternly:
“Only with the help of God could you possibly hope to win—and that will never come, since it is evident, from the sheer scale of their empire, that He is already on the side of the Romans.” (Josephus, The Judaean War, 3.516)
But despite all these warnings, it must have been the most intimidating and foreboding sight for all those rebels and zealouts still yet inside the city gates of Jerusalem to see before those fateful events of 70AD. Although Rome itself had been suffering through the most extreme internal strife and distress itself—and indeed because of that struggle had managed to actually come close to the very brink of ruin as a nation—it had finally managed to re-stabilize, and thereafter to mobilize the most fierce (and now, quite angry) fighting force that the world had ever known against the city of Jerusalem that was now firmly in the hands of the Jewish/Judaean rebels.
And like Christ had done in Matthew chapter 24, so also St. John had warned about this development in his Revelation. With the appropriate mixture of Old Testament imagery of the wrath of God and the imagery of the colors/symbols and geography of Rome and it’s armies and inhabitants, John could see clearly what was coming to Jerusalem while far away from it on his island of exile: Patmos.
And contrary to what many believe, the weight of historical evidence actually points to an early date for John writing his Revelation. Yes, it most likely was not written after the fall of Jerusalem—70AD—but rather many years before. As it turns out, the majority of the events of Revelation (up to chapter 20) were actually fulfilled in the shocking and horrendous conflagration of the overflowing rage bursting out in the attempt of the Jewish zealouts and rebels to take back their city from their increasingly blasphemous self-deifying Roman overlords.
Yes, it was Caesar Nero who took the Roman ethos of pursuing divinity to morbidly indecent levels (even to Roman standards). As mentioned before, great men like Julius Caesar, although being deified in their death, were always reluctant to identify themselves as a god while alive. But with Nero Caesar, this basic decency was thrown out the window. And the displays of this megalomaniacal hubris would help set a spark to long-fomenting fires of resentment that the Israelites had for many years prior, and had previously shown itself more subtley when they questioned Jesus of Nazareth (pressuring him to pick a side) about paying taxes to those very blasphemous overlords.
Yes, it was not for no reason that the apostle John had identified “the number of the beast” as “the number of a man”, which is “666”, or in some translations, “616”, which amazingly corresponds with Nero, who overtly made himself out to be a god. In Judaea, the Israelites (unlike the rest of Rome) had always been free to use currency that did not have “graven images” of Caesar on their coins (it was forbidden by the laws given by Moses). But in keeping with Nero’s god-complex (and in part also eventual retaliation to Israelite rebellion), a time was coming when no one would “be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast” (Revelation 13:17)—which was, at least in it’s physical manifestation, the currency of Rome with it’s mandatory graven images.
What before had just been resentment and frustration among the Israelites about taxation, had now, under Nero, escalated into outright rebellion against his megalomania. And these zealouts and rebels—who had now managed to very impressively clear out all the Roman soldiers/garissons and their power/influence from their city in their own war against the heinous and blasphemous State—were now staring at a vicious and determined army on the horizon now looking for the most severe of recompense, and to recapture the Jersualem they had just forcibly been removed from.
This was to be a protracted and vicious hell-scape of a confrontation that the whole world would remember forever. Indeed, some would later consider it a “great tribulation period”.
Annihilation - An “Ocean” of Blood
John the apostle had anticipated ahead of time a sea of blood and absolute carnage outside Jerusalem as it was under siege:
“They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles…” (Revelation 14:20a)
And Jospehus, who had witnessed the annihilation of the city of Jerusalem first-hand, confirmed the prescience of John when he described what finally came to pass:
“The heights on which the Temple stood, enveloped in one great blaze of fire as they were, appeared to be boiling up from their very foundations. And yet the sea of flame was nothing to the ocean of blood, nor the death-squads of legionaries to the legions of the dead.” (The Judaean War, 7.118)
Tom Holland writes in PAX about the conflagration:
“The flames were out of control. Black smoke, billowing up from the blaze, was already pluming high above the Temple, drifting over Jerusalem, proclaiming to Judaeans across the starving city the news of a horror almost too great for them to compute: the ruin of the sanctuary they held to be the holiest place on earth.” (page 186)
Up until this very point, where now their whole world seemed to be literally ablaze—and with it their most holiest shrine that they had previously been sure would be protected (if even only at the last moment by their God, as was the case in the Exodus from Egypt)—things had become excruciatingly horrific, as Holland again describes in PAX:
“The starving, their bellies grotesquely extended, haunted open spaces like shadows, and when they fell lay untended, piling up in the streets. The rebel commanders, revolted by the stench, first sought to have them buried, and then, when all the available space in the city had been exhuasted, flung from the city walls.” (page 183)
Even Titus, the Roman general who had led the siege against the rebellion in the city of Jerusalem, felt the need to respond to the ordeal of the littered dead bodies with a display of disgust for the gods, so as to assure them that he did not delight in the trampling of the laws of the gods and of men that was on display all around them to grotesque degree.
Yes, the apostle John had warned about this time when some would be:
“…thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.” (Revelation 19:20-21)
A lake of fire indeed… all throughout and around the city of Jerusalem that had now fallen to the most blood-thirsty and retributive fighting force that the world had ever seen.
Literally seen in the clouds?
Right before the Jewish historian Josephus’s description of the story of the son of Ananias, he had recounted something being seen in the clouds that was so remarkable, that he anticipated that most would consider it to be a fable:
“…a few days after that feast, on the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, [Jyar,] a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities.
Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the temple,] as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, ‘Let us remove hence.’” (The Judean Wars, 6.288)
Could it be possible that the words of Jesus of Nazareth, on top of having very symbolic meaning of vindication and glorification, also have been fulfilled literally? Could “chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor” actually have been seen “running about among the clouds and surrounding cities”?
Well, regardless of whether or not this sighting literally occured in the way Josephus claimed, or if it was just a fantastical projection rooted (understandably) in a widely felt omen of the now arrived total destruction of Jerusalem, the words of the man from Nazareth, and the son of Ananias, and also of Agrippa, had now—in the literal and deathly siege of the city and Temple—found it’s undeniable fulfillment.
Yes, the “second coming” of Christ had been made undeniably manifest. The “Son of Man” had shown the world that he was indeed “coming on the clouds of heaven” and “approaching the Ancient of Days”. And indeed, as promised, the whole world “mourned because of him”:
“‘Look, he is coming with the clouds,’
and ‘every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him’;
and all peoples on earth ‘will mourn because of him.’
So shall it be!” Amen.” (Revelation 1:7)
This was the vindication of the previously ritually humiliated (crucified) and rejected Jesus of Nazareth and all those who were persecuted and humiliated for believing in him, when he had previously anticipated what was now coming to pass:
“At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” (Luke 21:27-28)
Yes, everyone who had been politically shrewd in the old world would indeed mourn bitterly because they had thought that, by relying on political and rebellion means alone (and thus they could simply arrange for their perceived political opponents like Jesus to be humiliated and eliminated), they could still in the long-run preserve their great Temple.
But as mentioned above, this very Temple had been greatly helped to be re-built by the very State that they were now in open war with. This had always been a very difficult tight-rope trying to keep in good relations with each other two different groups that had wildly different values and assumptions; the Romans and the Israelites. And as Jesus had warned, Yahweh would not come to the Israelite’s defense this time (as he had in the distant past), and thus the bitter regret would now be extreme:
“There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.” (Luke 13:28)
Yes, the very Temple that they had thought they were preserving by having this Jesus of Nazareth crucified, was now—to the absolute shock and horror of everyone—up in flames.