They called to the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!" - Revelation 6.16

C. S. Lewis dismisses Isaiah's vision of the Peaceable Kingdom as "eastern hyperbole" because, he complains, lying down by the lion "would be rather impertinent of the lamb." Even a vegan lion, Lewis explains, would continue to be "awful," though it had ceased to be "dangerous."

John answers Lewis' objection when he presents the churches with a wrathful lamb and smuggles in overtones of both Isaiah 2, with its images of judgement, and Isaiah 65, where the coming of God's perfect kingdom reconciles former foes. "People will flee to the caves in the rocks and to holes in the ground from the fearful presence of the Lord and the splendor of his majesty, when he rises to shake the earth" (Isa 2.19). "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox" (Isa 65.25). In Revelation, God accomplishes this miracle, not just by making the predator less predatory, but by making the lamb more fearsome. John has invited us to rejoice in a Lamb that stands slain (Rev 5.6), but he now reminds us that it is this very Lamb who has unleashed upon the earth the seven-sealed scroll of God's fierce wrath.

In this day, when popular theology posits a Christ whose love differs little from the cuddly patience of a child's stuffed toy, one does well to remember that before Isaiah envisions the Peaceable Kingdom, he posts a roster of those included and those excluded (Isa 65.8-16), and that before John sees the sixth seal broken, the fifth seal separates the souls of the martyrs in Heaven from the earth-dwellers who face domination, war, famine, and death (Rev 6.1-11). 

It is not eastern hyperbole but prophetic poetry which manages to see that love without wrath is indulgence, and softness without fear mere sentiment. For whosoever will, the Lamb stands slain to appease his own righteous wrath; for whosoever won't, that same wrath awaits. Mary had a little Lamb; his fleece is as white as the robes of the martyrs, but his wrath is as black as goat's hair and as red as blood shed in unrighteous anger. The Lamb, or the Lamb: Take your pick.