14:13
We now get a promise, and it comes from a voice from heaven. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on”. So it is not a “nice” promise. Revelation, along with the rest of the New Testament, does nothing to minimise the nature nor intensity of the battle. Some would die for the Lord. Some would die because they refused to worship the beast. But those who die for the faith are blessed. They are living in God’s favour. This is consistent with Jesus’ words on the beatitudes that we are blessed when we are persecuted. “They will rest from their labour”. Revelation calls on us to have a very different attitude than the world encourages us to have. We need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. In fact what we have here is Romans 12:1,2 in action. We offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, we do not conform to the ways of the world.
14:14
We now see someone seated on a white cloud who was like a “son of man”. Now there are issues here on how we interpret “son of man”. “Son of Man” was the term that Jesus often used to refer to Himself, with some reference to the figure in Daniel 7. However, “son of man” can be used in the sense of referring to the humanity of someone, as was the case in Ezekiel where he is frequently addressed as “son of man”. Then the “son of man” here is given a command by an angel, which doesn’t seem to quite fit with the “son of man” being Jesus. So we will go with the “son of man” here being a term addressed to the church, though being aware that we cannot be absolutely certain about this.
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