The prophetic messages recorded in Rev. 14:6–11 , and there represented as being proclaimed by three angels flying in midheaven. In their context these messages constitute God’s last appeal to the world to accept salvation in Christ and to prepare for His imminent advent, which is pictured symbolically in the verses that follow.
The first angel’s message ( Rev. 14:6 , 7 ) is basically a proclamation of “the everlasting gospel” of salvation in Jesus Christ at the time “the hour of his judgment is come.” It is a last-day appeal to “fear God, and give glory to him” and to “worship him,” in order to avoid condemnation in the impending judgment. A corollary reason is given for worshiping God—He “made heaven and earth,” including human beings. God thus has a twofold jurisdiction over humanity—as Creator and, by virtue of that fact, as Judge.
The second angel’s message ( Rev. 14:8 ) consists of a solemn announcement that mystical “Babylon is fallen.” Babylon’s fall is said to consist in the fact that “she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” She seduced the nations of the earth. In Rev. 17 mystical Babylon is cast in the symbolic role of a harlot who oppresses the people and makes them “drunk with the wine of her fornication” ( vs. 1 , 2 ). She collaborates with the “scarlet coloured beast” and “the kings of the earth” in destroying the saints. She makes war against “the Lamb,” but “the Lamb” defeats Babylon and “the kings of the earth,” and Babylon is judged and annihilated.
The announcement of Babylon’s fall is repeated in Rev. 18 , where her fall is said to be the result of her “sins” and “iniquities”—her illicit relations with the kings of the earth and her causing all nations to drink of “the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” Because of this fall, God summons His people to “come out of her” in order to avoid complicity in her sins and a share in the judgments, or “plagues,” to be meted out to her ( vs. 1–4 ). The “judgment of the great whore” because of her fall ( Rev. 17 and 18 ) closely links the fall of Babylon, announced by the second angel, with the arrival of the hour of God’s judgment, announced by the first angel: Mystical Babylon has fallen, and God announces that the hour of her judgment has come as a warning to those of His people still in Babylon to come out and separate themselves from her sins and thus escape her judgment.
The third angel ( Rev. 14:9–11 ) announces the outpouring of unmitigated divine wrath-that is, wrath not tempered with mercy-upon those who worship the beast and its image and who receive its mark. This wrath is said to consist of torment “with fire and brimstone.” Those who heed the three messages and refuse to worship the beast and its image and to accept its mark are referred to as “saints”; those who reject these messages, worship the beast and the image, and accept the mark suffer the seven last plagues ( Rev. 14:12 ; 15:2 ; 16:2 ); they are said to be “drunk with the wine” of Babylon’s “fornication” ( Rev. 17:2 ).
The three angels are represented as flying in midheaven and proclaiming their message to every nation and tongue ( Rev. 14:6 ). These three messages constitute God’s last invitation to all to accept the everlasting gospel and His final warning against the wine of Babylon and the judgments soon to be visited upon Babylon. Immediately following the proclamation of these messages, the judgments of God fall upon Babylon and upon all who have identified their fortunes with hers, and Christ comes in the clouds of heaven.
In post-Reformation times these three angels were occasionally interpreted as representing certain Reformers or pre- or post-Reformation preachers, but in the “Advent awakening”-the great surge of interest in the Second Advent in the early nineteenth century-there was widespread contemporary application of these symbols. Many of the British expositors of prophecy saw the first angel fulfilled in the new movements for the worldwide spread of the gospel (Bible and mission societies), and especially in their own proclamation of the nearness of the Advent—the “hour of his judgment.” Some included the second and third messages, but others considered these still future.
In America the people who called themselves Adventists, and who were called Millerites by others, regarded themselves as giving the message of the first angel—“The hour of his judgment is come.” Some of them declared that they were sounding the second message, “Babylon is fallen,” in 1844, at the time when many of them left or were expelled from the churches that were denouncing them. The Adventist pioneers believed that the Millerites and others had given the first two angels’ messages, but that they themselves were giving the third.
James White summarized the three stages thus: The first angel’s message was the proclamation, to the church and to the world, to gather out a people prepared for the near Second Advent. When the churches in general shut their doors to this message, the way was prepared for the second—Babylon is fallen—and the call to “come out.” (Most of the Millerite leaders did not approve this; but even Himes, who opposed it, came to the point of writing that whatever might be the disagreement about what constituted Babylon, the believers should separate from churches that rejected the message of the Advent.) White noted that the agitation concerning the Sabbath came immediately after this second message, which “called us out . . . where we are now free to think and act for ourselves in the fear of God” ( Present Truth 1:68, April 1850; see pp. 65–69).
With the third angel’s warning against the worship of the beast and his image, and the characterization of the last-day “saints” as those who “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” ( Rev. 14:12 ) as opposed to the mark of the beast, the SDA pioneers linked the fourth commandment, the Sabbath. Joseph Bates, in the 1847 edition of his booklet The Seventh Day Sabbath ( p. 59), made this identification of the third angel’s message, the final message. James White urged that “we must seek a full and free pardon of all our transgressions and errors, through the atonement of Jesus Christ, now while he pleads his blood before the Father” ( Present Truth 1:69, April 1850).
As the Seventh-day Adventist teaching developed, the third angel’s message came to be taught as not only climaxing but also including the threefold message. The SDA mission to the world is to give the everlasting gospel to “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,” calling them to worship God as the Creator, for the hour of His judgment is come (now, in the sense of the investigative judgment); to come out of the Babylon of confusion and false systems; and, in the final test, to stand firm against the worship of the beast and on the full Christian platform of “the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus” ( Rev. 14:12 ). See also Babylon, Symbolic ; Investigative Judgment ; Judgment ; Latter Rain ; Little Time of Trouble ; Loud Cry ; Mark of the Beast ; One Hundred and Forty-four Thousand ; Plagues, Seven Last ; Probation ; Seal of God ; “Shaking Time” ; Sunday Laws .