Five Are Fallen, One Is

Late in the first century, on a barren rock in the Aegean Sea about thirty miles off the western coast of Asia Minor, the last of the original Twelve Apostles was alive and in exile. His name was John. His brother James had been beheaded by Herod sixty years before. Peter had been crucified upside down in Rome under Nero. Paul had been beheaded outside the same city. Andrew had been crucified in Achaia. Thomas had been killed with a spear in India. Of the eleven who had stood with Christ at the Mount of Olives and watched him ascend, only John remained, and the empire that had crucified Christ had sent him to Patmos to die there.

He did not die there. He outlived even his exile. The empire that banished him would be ruled, by the time he returned to Ephesus, by a different Caesar, and within three centuries that empire would profess as its state religion the gospel of the One it had crucified. But none of that was visible from Patmos. What was visible from Patmos was the stone, the sea, the wind, and a great deal of time.

On the Lord's Day, in the Spirit, John heard a voice behind him like a trumpet. He turned, and he saw. What he saw, and what was given him to write, was the consummation of all things.

Twenty-two chapters of vision followed. Most of it is symbolic, often densely so — seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, a woman clothed with the sun, a dragon, two witnesses, a bride. But in chapter 17, at a particular moment, an angel breaks into the vision and does something he does almost nowhere else in the book. He pauses to interpret. He says to John, here is the mind which hath wisdom, and then he gives the apostle an explicit count.

This article is about that count.

John is inside one of the empires the angel is naming. He is alive, on Patmos, in the year — whichever year it is — that the angel calls one is. Behind him are five empires that have come and gone, several of them centuries before his birth, two of them empires the prophet Daniel had also seen. Around him is the Rome that has exiled him. Ahead of him, in territory none of his readers has yet entered, are a seventh empire and a final figure called the Beast.

The article walks the count from John's vantage. It looks backward where John looks backward, and then forward to the consummation, where John saw the Lamb defeat the Beast and the kingdom that has no end take its final form.

It is worth registering what the angel does in Revelation 17, because it does not happen often. Most of Revelation is delivered without commentary. The four horsemen ride out without an angel pausing to identify them by name. The two witnesses prophesy and are killed without an angel telling John exactly who they are. The seventh trumpet sounds and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord without an angel explaining that kingdom here is meant in some technical sense. The book trusts the reader to listen carefully, to compare Scripture with Scripture, to see what is meant.

But at chapter 17, with the great harlot riding the beast with seven heads and ten horns, the angel intervenes. He says here is the mind which hath wisdom, which is the prophetic equivalent of asking the reader to put down whatever else he is doing and attend, and then he gives a numbered list. Five fallen. One is. One not yet come. An eighth. Four facts.

The angel does this because the count is load-bearing. If the count is wrong, the rest of the vision collapses. The woman rides seven empires; the empires are named; the beast carries her; the beast is the eighth, of the seven, going to perdition. The entire architecture rests on the identification of the heads. So the angel pauses, in a chapter dense with imagery, to identify them clearly.

Gabriel had done something similar for Daniel. In the third vision of Daniel 8, the prophet sees a ram with two horns and a he-goat with one great horn that breaks into four, and Gabriel comes and tells him in plain language: The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king. Two empires named outright, then the other empires of Daniel's vision fixed by parallel. The same kind of interpretive moment is repeated here. The angel does the count, and the count fixes the rest.

What the angel counts are kings — but in the ancient prophetic idiom, king and kingdom are interchangeable when one is naming powers in succession. Daniel had used the same idiom: And the rough goat is the king of Grecia meant Greece itself, not a specific Greek monarch; the kings of Media and Persia meant the empire of Medo-Persia. So with the angel here. The seven kings are seven empires. Five have come and gone. One is the empire of John's own day. One has not yet arrived. And after them comes the eighth, the Beast.

What the angel does not do is name the seven. He gives John the structure and trusts that John — and John's readers — will be able to work out the identifications, because the identifications are not a mystery. The empires that have come against the covenant people across history are not anonymous. They are named, dated, and described across the rest of Scripture.

So John walks the count. We will walk it with him.

Behind John, the deepest into the past, is the empire that ruled the world before Israel was a nation. Egypt is the oldest of the great civilizations the Bible knows by name. Its pyramids were already a thousand years old when Abraham first crossed its border to escape a famine. Its dynasties stretched back into the third millennium BC. When Joseph was sold into slavery and rose to vizier under a Pharaoh whose name the Bible does not give, Egypt was already the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean and would be for another seven hundred years.

It is also the first empire to oppress the covenant people. God had foretold it to Abraham in Genesis 15: Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years. The land was Egypt. The affliction was the slavery that began under a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph and continued through generations until Israel cried out under the weight of its bricks. The deliverance was the Exodus — the ten plagues, the slaughter of the firstborn, the Passover lamb, the Red Sea opening before the children of Israel and closing over Pharaoh's army. Egypt was broken at the Red Sea in the spring of 1446 BC, on the twenty-fourth of Nisan — Day 10 of the journey from Rameses, after Israel had passed through Succoth, Etham, and Pi Hahiroth.

It is the founding act of Israel's national memory. The Exodus is the redemption to which every subsequent redemption in the Hebrew Scriptures is compared. The Passover is the type that Christ fulfilled on Nisan 14 in the spring of 32 AD, when he was offered as the Lamb of God, taking away the sin of the world on the precise day of the Passover slaughter, fifteen hundred years after Egypt fell.

Egypt did not cease as a political entity at the Red Sea, of course. It continued for another fourteen centuries — Shishak invaded Judah and looted Solomon's Temple in 925 BC; Necho killed Josiah at Megiddo in 609 BC; Hophra was the Pharaoh who failed to relieve Jerusalem from Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC; the Ptolemies ruled Egypt as a Hellenistic kingdom from Alexandria after Alexander; Cleopatra was the last of them, dying by her own hand in 30 BC when Octavian annexed Egypt as a Roman province. Egypt was a fact on the map long after the Exodus.

But the empire Revelation 17 counts as the first fallen is not Egypt the geographical entity. It is Egypt as the first world power to come against the covenant people — and that Egypt fell on a single day, in a single hour, in the surf of the Red Sea fifteen centuries before John was born.

Centuries passed. Israel entered the land, divided into twelve tribes, fought through the period of the Judges, became a monarchy under Saul and David and Solomon, then split into two kingdoms after Solomon's death in 930 BC. The northern kingdom of Israel went its own way under Jeroboam; the southern kingdom of Judah continued the line of David in Jerusalem. For two and a half centuries the two kingdoms lived alongside one another, sometimes at war, sometimes at peace, dealing with smaller surrounding nations — Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Aram.

Then, in the second half of the ninth century, a new power began to consolidate in the upper Tigris. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, under a series of vigorous kings, expanded outward from its heartland and within a century was the dominant force in the ancient Near East. Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BC) introduced the policy of mass deportation that would define the empire's character: a conquered population would be uprooted from its land and resettled hundreds of miles away, while populations from elsewhere were imported in its place. The technique destroyed national identities. It was, for its day, an extraordinarily effective instrument of imperial rule.

Israel — the northern kingdom — fell under this policy. Shalmaneser V besieged Samaria for three years. Sargon II completed its destruction in 722 BC and deported the ten tribes across the empire, where they were resettled in places from which they would never coherently return. The phrase the lost ten tribes dates from that deportation. The northern kingdom ceased to exist as a political body.

Sennacherib, the next king, invaded the southern kingdom in 701 BC. He captured forty-six of Judah's walled cities, deported their populations, exacted a tribute of three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold from Hezekiah, and surrounded Jerusalem itself. He left his own account on a six-sided clay prism — the Taylor Prism, now in the British Museum — and his court artists carved the siege of Lachish in monumental detail on the walls of his palace at Nineveh. He intended to take Jerusalem.

He did not take Jerusalem. The angel of the LORD went out that night and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and eighty-five thousand soldiers. When the morning came, Sennacherib's army was a field of corpses. He returned to Nineveh, and a few years later was assassinated by his own sons while worshipping in the temple of Nisroch his god (2 Kings 19:35–37). Assyria's grip on Judah was broken.

The empire itself endured another century, but it was diminishing. The book of Nahum, written in the second half of the seventh century, is one long oracle of doom against Nineveh. The Medes and the Babylonians took the city in 612 BC. The last Assyrian king died defending Harran in 609 BC. The empire ended.

Isaiah's frame for Assyria is one of the most theologically dense in the prophets. Assyria was the rod of God's anger, the instrument used to chastise an unfaithful Israel — and then judged in turn for the cruelty with which it carried out the task it had been given. The same God who used the empire to discipline his people destroyed the empire when its work was done. The lion that broke the Northern Kingdom was hunted into its lair and killed.

Two of the seven empires are now behind us in the count. Egypt fell at the Red Sea in 1446 BC. Assyria fell at Harran in 609 BC. John on Patmos, looking backward, sees both as ancient history — antiquity itself, the deep past, the empires before the empires Daniel saw.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire was founded by Nabopolassar in 626 BC, the year he revolted against Assyrian rule. His son, Nebuchadnezzar II, became co-regent in 605 BC and within months of his accession defeated the Egyptians at Carchemish, taking the eastern Mediterranean and ending Egyptian influence in the Levant for a generation. The same year, he deported the first wave of Jewish exiles to Babylon. Among them was a young man named Daniel.

Twenty years later, in 586 BC, after several revolts by Zedekiah of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar's general Nebuzaradan entered Jerusalem and burned the Temple of Solomon to the ground. The walls were breached on the ninth of Tammuz; the Temple was set on fire on the seventh of Av. The Davidic monarchy ended after four hundred years. The vessels of gold and silver from the Temple were carried back to Babylon. The seventy-year exile of Jeremiah's prophecy began.

It was Babylon under whose rule Daniel had his three great visions — the statue, the four beasts, the ram and the goat. And it was Babylon that Daniel had named, standing before Nebuchadnezzar, as the head of gold. Babylon is the first empire in Daniel's count and the third in Revelation's. The two prophecies meet here.

Babylon's fall is one of the most narratively dense moments in the Old Testament, and it is also one of the most precisely datable. On the night of the sixteenth of Tishri in the year 539 BC, Belshazzar — son and co-regent of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon — was holding a great feast for a thousand of his lords. He had ordered the vessels of the Jerusalem Temple, the ones his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar had taken half a century earlier, to be brought up and used to serve wine. As the king and his courtiers drank from the holy vessels and praised the gods of gold and silver and brass and iron and wood and stone, a hand appeared in the air and wrote on the wall opposite the lampstand. The king's countenance changed. His thoughts troubled him. The joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.

None of his wise men could read the writing. The queen mother came in and told the king to send for the old prophet Daniel, who had served in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel was brought. He refused the rewards. He read the writing. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

That same night, Cyrus's general Gobryas entered Babylon without resistance. The Nabonidus Chronicle — a clay tablet recovered from the ruins of Babylon and now in the British Museum — records the same event in administrative cuneiform: the troops of Cyrus entered Babylon without battle, in the month of Tishri, in the seventeenth year of Nabonidus. The empire that had crushed Jerusalem was conquered in a night by the empire that would release the exiles. The hammer of the whole earth, as Jeremiah had called it, was broken.

Three of the seven are now fallen. Egypt at the Red Sea. Assyria at Harran. Babylon on the night of Belshazzar's feast.

Medo-Persia is the strange empire in the sequence. The other six come against the covenant people in some posture of hostility or oppression. Egypt enslaves. Assyria deports. Babylon destroys the Temple. Greece desecrates. Rome crucifies. The seventh and the eighth carry the same character forward. But Medo-Persia, alone of the seven, is the empire God uses for deliverance.

This was foreseen. Two centuries before Cyrus the Great was born, Isaiah had spoken the LORD's word about him by name:

Isaiah wrote in the mid-eighth century BC. Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC. The interval is about two hundred years. The prophet not only named a foreign king he could not have known of, but named him in a particular role — the LORD's shepherd, the LORD's anointed — and described, two centuries in advance, what he would do: rebuild Jerusalem and lay the Temple's foundation.

Cyrus did exactly that. In his first year as king of Babylon, which is to say 538 BC, he issued the decree authorizing the Jewish exiles to return to Judah and rebuild the Temple. The Cyrus Cylinder, found at Babylon in 1879 and now in the British Museum, records the broader Persian policy of repatriating displaced populations and restoring their cult objects. For Israel the application was specific: the gold and silver vessels of the Jerusalem Temple — taken by Nebuchadnezzar half a century earlier and still in the Babylonian treasury — were counted out by inventory and returned to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah (Ezra 1:7–11). Approximately fifty thousand exiles returned under Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest. The Temple's foundation was laid the following year. The Second Temple was completed in 516 BC — seventy years to the year after the first had been burned, fulfilling Jeremiah's prophecy to the precise interval he had named.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire endured for two centuries. It was the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from the Indus to the Aegean, from Aswan in southern Egypt to the steppes north of the Caspian. Its kings recur through the postexilic books. Darius I (522–486 BC) confirmed the rebuilding of the Temple in his second year (Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra 6). Xerxes I — the Ahasuerus of Esther — was the king of Persia when the great threat to the Jewish people inside the empire was averted through a queen who had been an orphan and was now a sovereign's wife. Artaxerxes I (465–424 BC) sent both Ezra and Nehemiah. In his twentieth year, in the month of Nisan, his cupbearer Nehemiah appeared sad before him and was asked the question that became the decree that began the seventy weeks: from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks. 173,880 days. The count begins in 445 BC.

Persia fell to Alexander the Great at Gaugamela in 331 BC. Darius III, the last Achaemenid, was murdered the following year. The fourth empire of John's count was finished, but unlike the other fallings, this one ended an empire that had been the friend of the covenant people. The shepherd's work was done; the next instrument was a goat.

The reign of Alexander the Great is one of the most remarkable in ancient history, both for what was accomplished and for the speed at which it was accomplished. He inherited the Macedonian throne at twenty when his father Philip II was assassinated. He crossed the Hellespont at twenty-two. He took Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Persia in the span of his twenties. He was thirty when he reached the Indus, considered an invasion of India, and turned back only because his army would go no further. He died in Babylon at thirty-two of fever, or perhaps poison, with no clear heir.

Daniel had seen him centuries before, and the image is exact. A he-goat from the west, coming on the face of the whole earth, touching not the ground — and Alexander's army moved with a speed that astonished its contemporaries and still astonishes military historians. From Macedon to the Indus is approximately three thousand miles. He covered it in twelve years.

His empire did not survive him. The dying king is said to have answered the question of succession with a single word: kratistos, to the strongest. The forty-year struggle that followed — the Wars of the Diadochi — eventually stabilized into four major successor kingdoms. The four horns from the broken great horn that Daniel had seen in vision: Cassander in Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus in Thrace, Seleucus in Syria and the East, Ptolemy in Egypt. Daniel 11 tracks the wars of the two southernmost of these — the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria — across nearly two centuries, with such specificity that someone reading the chapter in 200 BC and again in 100 BC would have seen the prophecy unfolding in real time.

For the covenant people in Judah, Hellenistic rule meant first the relatively benign Ptolemaic period — Egypt-based, Greek-speaking, willing to support the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek that we now call the Septuagint, completed around 280 BC. Then in 198 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus III seized Palestine from the Ptolemies at the Battle of Panion, and Judah came under Seleucid rule. After Antiochus III came his son Seleucus IV, and after Seleucus IV came his brother — the vile person of Daniel 11:21, the one whom Daniel describes as obtaining the kingdom by flatteries: Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

In December of 167 BC, Antiochus IV erected an altar to Olympian Zeus on the altar of burnt offering in the Temple at Jerusalem, sacrificed a pig on it, and outlawed the observance of the Sabbath and the practice of circumcision on pain of death. The abomination of desolation that Daniel had foretold three and a half centuries earlier was set up. It triggered the Maccabean revolt under the priest Mattathias and his five sons. After three years of guerrilla warfare against the Seleucid army, Judas Maccabeus retook Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple on the twenty-fifth of Kislev, 164 BC. The festival of Hanukkah, still kept, commemorates that rededication.

By that time, Rome was already beginning to absorb the Greek successor states. Rome had broken the Macedonian kingdom of Cassander's successors at Pydna in 168 BC. Rome would humiliate Antiochus IV himself, that same year, with the famous circle in the sand drawn by the ambassador Gaius Popillius Laenas. Rome would inherit Pergamum by bequest in 133 BC, take Syria from the last Seleucid in 63 BC, and annex Egypt from the last Ptolemy in 30 BC. The fifth empire fell, not in a single decisive battle, but by piecemeal absorption into the sixth.

John on Patmos puts down the count for a moment and looks up. He looks around. He is inside the sixth empire. The angel's word — one is — is not a description of an empire he has read about in a book. It is the empire whose exile order he is currently under. The stone walls of Patmos belong to Rome. The garrison that watches the island belongs to Rome. The Caesar whose decree banished him to this place is in Rome. The Christian churches in Asia Minor to whom he will send his vision live under Roman rule. The Temple where he as a young man had heard Christ teach has been rubble for a quarter-century, destroyed by Roman legions under Titus in the summer of the year 70.

Rome has been the dominant power over the region for a century and a half. Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BC. Augustus consolidated the empire in 27 BC. Tiberius reigned when Christ was crucified — Nisan 14, in the spring of the year that the Enoch calendar reckons as Anno Mundi 3957 and the Gregorian calendar as 32 AD. The seventy weeks of Daniel 9 closed on that day. The decree to Nehemiah, in the spring of 445 BC, was the start point; 173,880 days later, the prophecy landed on the Passover, and Christ was offered as the Lamb of God.

For John, Rome is not abstract. Rome killed Christ. Rome killed Peter, James, Paul, Andrew. Rome exiled him. Rome is the empire of the cross — and the cross is what makes Rome, for John, both the cruelest of the empires and the empire in which God has done his deepest work. The same empire that crucified Christ is the empire through which the Gospel has now reached every major city of the Mediterranean world. The same Roman roads that carried legions to Jerusalem in 70 AD carried apostles to Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, Spain. Paul appealed his case to Caesar. Paul wrote his letters from Roman prisons. Paul argued before Roman governors. The empire that broke the covenant people is the empire that has now received the message that the covenant people were sent to deliver.

This is the unique moment in the whole prophetic literature. A prophet is inside one of the empires he is being shown. He is not looking forward to it, as Daniel did. He is not looking backward at it, as he is now looking backward at the first five. He is in it. The vision of the empires comes to him from inside the sixth empire, on an island that the sixth empire controls, given by the One whom the sixth empire crucified.

And the angel calls it one is. That is all. Just one is. Two words. The empire that ruled the world when John wrote — the empire that had made every preceding one look small, the empire that had given the world its language of law, its system of roads, its lingua franca of commerce — is in the angel's count just one of seven. It is reigning today. It will fall like the others. The count goes on.

Rome did fall. Not in John's lifetime, but in time. The Western Empire collapsed in 476 AD, four centuries after John was on Patmos, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus. The Eastern Empire, ruled from Constantinople, endured until 1453 AD. The fall was not by a single decisive battle but by a long unraveling — civil wars, plagues, currency debasement, invasions from the north and the east, the gradual fragmentation of imperial authority into regional kingdoms. The iron of Daniel 2 broke into pieces, mixed with clay, and became the configuration of post-Roman Europe.

But that is past, from any reading. From John's vantage in the first century, it was future. The empire he was in was at its zenith. One is, the angel said, and meant it. The empire was reigning when the count was given. It was going to fall, but it had not fallen yet.

The angel tells John there is a seventh. He gives him very little to work with. The position in the sequence: after Rome. The duration: he must continue a short space. That is the whole description. No name, no symbol, no defining act, no characteristic detail. The seventh is in the count but it is largely uncharacterized.

This is a kind of prophetic restraint that the rest of Revelation does not exercise. The seven seals are described. The seven trumpets are described. The seven bowls are described. But the seventh head of the beast is named only by its position and its brevity. Whatever the seventh empire is, the text does not want the reader to spend much time on it.

The Christian interpretive tradition has offered several identifications. Some have read the seventh as the configuration of Christian European kingdoms that emerged from the wreckage of the Western Empire — the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval Christendom that ruled the post-Roman West and held Jerusalem briefly during the Crusades. Some have read it as the Islamic Caliphates that took the eastern Mediterranean from the seventh century onward, holding Jerusalem from 638 AD to 1099 AD and again from 1187 AD to 1917 AD — and producing, in the Ottoman Empire of the later medieval and early modern periods, the largest sustained Islamic empire in history. Some have read it as a future political configuration that will emerge before the eschaton — a final reconstitution of imperial power before the Beast arises. Each reading has its proponents and its arguments. None of them is the text's; the text gives the position and the duration and is silent on the rest.

What the text does emphasize is what comes next. The seventh is not the consummation. The seventh holds the stage briefly, then yields to the eighth, who is of the seven and goes to perdition. The angel's count was always reaching toward the Beast. The seventh is the bridge.

The eighth king is not a separate empire on the model of the seven. He is described in a way that sets him apart from them and yet weaves him into them. The beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. An eighth in his own right, but of the seven — sharing their character, gathering their nature, made up of what they were.

This is exactly what Revelation 13 shows John when the Beast rises from the sea. The body of the Beast is a composite of Daniel 7's four beasts: leopard's body, bear's feet, lion's mouth, ten horns. The leopard was Greece. The bear was Medo-Persia. The lion was Babylon. The ten horns belong to the fourth beast — Rome — in its final divided phase. The Beast of Revelation 13 is what the empires of Daniel collectively were, gathered into a single final figure.

His characteristics, gathered from across the prophecies, form a coherent picture. He arises among the ten horns — ten kings who receive authority for an hour with the Beast (Rev 17:12). He uproots three of them as he rises. He speaks great things and blasphemies against the Most High. He makes war on the saints and overcomes them for a defined period: forty-two months in Revelation 13:5, equivalent to the "time, times, and the dividing of time" that Daniel 7:25 gave for the little horn. He demands universal worship. He marks his followers, both small and great, on the right hand or the forehead. No man can buy or sell save he that has the mark. He has authority over every tribe and tongue and nation.

He is not a vague figure. He is described with specific features, specific duration, specific actions. Three and a half prophetic years. A mark. A demand for worship. A war against the saints. A defeat by the One who returns from heaven.

What makes the Beast theologically remarkable is that he is the concentration of everything the seven empires were. Egypt's enslavement. Assyria's deportation. Babylon's idolatry. Greece's blasphemy in the Temple. Rome's persecution of the saints. The seventh's bridging structure. All of it, gathered. The eighth is the final and most fully developed form of what every prior head of the beast has been in its turn. He is of the seven because the seven made him possible.

The vision John was given does not end with the Beast in power. It ends with the Beast defeated.

Two chapters after the count, the heavens open. John sees a rider on a white horse, called Faithful and True. His eyes are as a flame of fire. On his head are many crowns. He is clothed with a vesture dipped in blood. His name is The Word of God. The armies of heaven follow him on white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth goes a sharp sword that he may smite the nations. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

He is the Lamb. The One who was slain. The One the sixth empire crucified, who has now returned in the glory the sixth empire could not see when it had him in its court.

The Beast and the kings of the earth gather to make war against him. They have, until this moment, gone through every empire on the count: the chariots of Pharaoh, the iron of Sennacherib, the gold of Nebuchadnezzar, the silver of Cyrus, the brass of Alexander, the legions of Caesar, the configurations of the seventh, and the final massed armies of the Beast. They have ruled the world. They have crushed the saints. They have set up images and demanded worship and marked their followers and shed the blood of the prophets.

The battle is over before it begins.

The Beast is taken. The false prophet who served him is taken. They are cast alive into the lake of fire. The remnant of their armies is slain by the sword that comes out of the mouth of the rider on the white horse. The fowls of the air are filled with their flesh.

And then the dragon — Satan himself, the one who gave the Beast his authority — is bound in the abyss for a thousand years.

The sixth empire had crucified the Lamb. The eighth, which is of all the empires, had made war on the Lamb a final time. The Lamb who was slain returns, undoes the Beast, defeats the dragon, and ends the sequence.

This is the climax the seven empires have been moving toward from the beginning. Egypt did not end the count; it began it. Assyria did not end it; Babylon did not; Medo-Persia did not; Greece did not; Rome did not; the seventh does not. The Beast does not end it either; the Beast is ended by the Lamb. The empires of the world rise and fall in their turns, but the One who returns to defeat them all is the One they crucified, and the sequence that began with Pharaoh ends in the lake of fire and the binding of the dragon. The count was always going to end here.

After the Beast, after the dragon, after the thousand years and the final judgment and the books opened before the great white throne, John sees one final thing. A new heaven and a new earth. The first heaven and the first earth are passed away. The holy city, new Jerusalem, comes down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And he hears a great voice out of heaven saying:

This is the kingdom Daniel had been shown given to the Son of Man. The stone cut without hands that struck the image on its feet and ground the whole figure to dust, then became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. The kingdom in the days of these kings, set up by the God of heaven, which shall never be destroyed. John is now seeing it from the other end — not promised, not prophesied, not described in symbols, but arrived. The kingdom has come.

There is no eighth empire after this. The sequence does not continue. The seven kings are done; the seventh has finished its short space; the eighth has gone to perdition. The angel's count had a number, because the angel was counting kingdoms that would rise and fall. The kingdom that succeeds them has no number, because it has no end.

John on Patmos had been given the vision so that he could see how it all comes out. He saw the five fallen — Egypt back to the Red Sea, Assyria at Harran, Babylon under Belshazzar, Medo-Persia at Gaugamela, Greece into Roman absorption. He saw the one that is — the Rome that had crucified Christ and now exiled him. He saw the seventh that was not yet come, brief, bridging. He saw the eighth, the Beast, the gathering of all the empires into one final figure. And he saw the Lamb defeat the Beast at his return and the kingdom that comes after — the new heavens, the new earth, the holy city, the absence of tears and death and pain forever.

The seven empires had been about the question of who would rule. They had each, in their turn, given an answer. Pharaoh had answered with whips. Sennacherib had answered with deportation. Nebuchadnezzar had answered with the burning of the Temple. Cyrus had answered with the decree of return. Alexander had answered with the speed of conquest. Caesar had answered with the cross. The seventh would give its own answer. The Beast would give the final and most extreme version of all the prior answers.

The Lamb's answer is the kingdom. Not an empire that subdues other empires by force, but a kingdom that ends the need for empire at all. And the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. The empires of the count were all kingdoms of this world. The kingdom that succeeds them is the kingdom of the Lamb. The seven empires were stages on the way to it. The eighth was its inverse and its last great enemy. The Lamb has overcome it.

John finished the vision and was sent back. The book of Revelation closes with the apostle saying, twice in the last chapter, Even so, come, Lord Jesus. He was old; he did not have many years left; the kingdoms of his world had killed every other apostle he had known; and the answer he had been given — the only adequate answer to the empires that had crucified Christ and exiled him to Patmos — was the kingdom that has no end. He went back to Ephesus, by tradition, and lived out his days there, and died at last not as a martyr but as an old man, and waited for the kingdom he had been shown.

He waits still.