"And Great Hail as of a talent-weight descended out of
the heaven and upon the men; and the men blasphemed the Deity,
because of the plague of the hail; for the plague of it is
exceedingly great"
It is the Deity in the heaven from whom the hail-plague proceeds.
In the heaven into which He introduced Himself, when He opened
a door therein, and set up His throne. From the political
heaven, into which the Seventh Vial is poured, and in which
the throne of David is One among many, upon all of which it
makes war, the great hail descends upon the men, who worship
the Beast and his Image. Hail from a Political heaven would
not be literally frozen waters; but rather something injurious
set in motion against the enemies of the hailing power.
When a government sends forth its armies to lay waste its
adversaries and their countries with fire and sword, its troops
are a storm, or plague, of hail; and every individual trooper
is a hailstone of a certain weight.
Speaking of the Power that should destroy the kingdom of the
Ten Tribes, Isaiah says, "Behold, Yahweh hath a mighty
and strong one, which as a tempest of hail, a destroying storm,
as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to
the earth with the hand" (ch. 28:2). And again, speaking
of the time when "Yahweh Tz'vaoth shall come down and
fight for Mount Zion," he says, "And Yahweh shall
cause his glorious voice to be heard, and shall show the lighting
down of his arm, with the indignation of his anger, and with
the flame of a devouring fire, with scattering, and tempest,
and hailstones". The hailstones are an element of the
lighting down of the arm of Deity. In Ezek. 13:11, we read, "there
shall be an overflowing shower; and ye, 0 great hailstones,
shall fall; and a stormy wind shall rend the wall, daubed
with untempered mortar". Sirach(*), commenting upon this,
says, "Ezekiel made mention of the enemies under the
figure of the rain". A hail-shower is the enemy of the
men upon whom it descends. When the Saints, in the execution
of their Third Angel mission (ch. 14:9-11), descend like a
tempest upon the men who worship the Beast and his Image,
they become an exceedingly great hail, whose average weight
is respectively, according to tables in Calmet,(t) "a
talent" of one hundred and twenty-five pounds troy. It
is evident from Matt. 25:24, that a talent and an individual
are relative things; and that the one is as fitly represented
by the other, as a passenger by rail is by the ticket he bears.
After the hail of talent-weights ceases the wrath of the Seventh
Vial burns no more. The Beast and the False Prophet are destroyed,
the Dragon is bound and shut down in the abyss, the Ten Horns
are conquered, and nothing remains but the NEW JERUSALEM GOVERNMENT
ruling in righteousness a world of regenerated nations, blessed
in Abraham and his Seed for a thousand years.
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