Revelation 14:14-20 - The harvest of God's wrath

We now come to one of the bloodiest parts of Revelation, the harvesting of the earth and trampling of the winepress. Harvest does not mean that much to us these days, with supermarkets having all sorts of foods from all over the world all year round. Not so long ago strawberries in winter would have been a ridiculous notion! However, in John's day harvest was vital. The harvest was the culmination of the year's work, the essential purpose of it all. There was an awful lot of build up to the harvest, the planting, the tending etc, but there was an end point. 

So part of the harvest metaphor is that everything is coming to a conclusion. Some see the first part of this as being the harvest of the saints, i.e. the in-gathering of the elect. However, the whole tenor of this section, and the use of the sickle, seem much more consistent with judgement.

Verse 14 speaks of the son of man. Some say this is just an angel, and that Son of Man does not always have its messianic connotations. They argue this saying that it would be odd for the Son of Man to receive instructions from an angel. However, the description of the Son of Man here seems much more in keeping with the messianic reading. As to the angel commanding the Son of Man that might be reading too much in to "called out in a loud voice", this may not necessarily imply the angel commanding the Son of Man. Moreover, in the Psalms David calls on God to do various things.

The second part of this section makes it clear that this is all to do with judgement. We might be offended by all the blood. Well there are two things I would say, the first is tough! The second is that it is absolutely consistent with the whole of the rest of the Bible. In the Pentateuch God says that He was waiting for the wickedness of the nations to reach its full level, then they would be ejected from the land. That is what is now happening to the whole earth. The OT refers to the Lord trampling the winepress of judgement (Is 63:3; Lam 1:15; Joel 3:13).

The 1600 stadia might refer to the approximate length of the Holy Land. Or it might be a product of 16 and 100. 16 is four squared, and four is the number of wickedness, and 100 is the square of 10, a number representing completeness. So we have the completeness of God's judgement on the sin of man having reached its fulfilment. No, I'm not particularly convinced either, but that may well be because I don't think about numbers the way they did in John's day.