The nations are flung into the press, as ripe grapes. The picture is
plainly a figure of some tremendous judgment in which the powers that
oppose the majestic march of the triumphant Messiah will be crushed and
trampled to ruin. They are trodden 'in Mine anger, and their life-blood
is sprinkled on My garments.' It is He who crushes, not He who is
crushed. The winepress which He treads is the 'winepress of the wrath
of Almighty God,' and His treading of it is His executing of God's
judgments on those whose antagonism to Him and to His 'redeemed' has
brought them within their sweep. The prophetic imagination kindles and
casts its thought into that terrible picture, which some fastidious
people would think coarse, of a peasant standing up to his knees in a
vat heaped with purple clusters, and fiercely trampling them down,
while the red juice splashes upon his girt-up clothes.
The prophet does not date his vision. It has been realised many a time,
and will be many a time still. Wherever opposition to Christ and His
kingdom has reached ripeness, wherever antagonistic tendencies have
borne fruit which has matured, the winepress is set up and the treading
begins. 'Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered
together.' 'Immediately he putteth in the sickle because the harvest is
done.' The judgments tarry long, and Christ's servants, oppressed or
hard pressed, get impatient, and cry 'How long, O Lord, dost Thou not
judge? It is time for Thee to work.' But long patience precedes the
divine awaking, for it is not God's way nor Christ's to cut down even a
cumbering tree, until the possibility of its bearing fruit is plainly
ended, and the last use that He makes of anything is to burn it. The
repeated settings up of Christ's winepress have all been one in
principle, and they all point onwards to a final one. There have been
many 'days of the Lord,' and if men were wise and 'observed these
things,'--which most of them are not,--they would see that these lesser
'days' made a 'final great and terrible day of the Lord' supremely
probable, and in perfect analogy with all that experience and history
have testified as to the method of the divine government.
Surely it is strange that the groundless expectation of the unbroken
continuance of the present order should be so strong that many should
utterly ignore the truth taught by such teachers as these, and
reiterated by science, which declares that the physical universe had a
beginning and will have an end, and confirmed by Jesus Himself. There
will come a to-morrow when the sun will _not_ rise. There will come a
to-morrow which will be '_the_ day of the Lord,' of which all these
earlier and partial epochs of judgment were but precursors and prophets.