10 Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. 2 He had a little scroll open in his hand. And he set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, 3 and called out with a loud voice, like a lion roaring. When he called out, the seven thunders sounded. 4 And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down.” 5 And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven 6 and swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there would be no more delay, 7 but that in the days of the trumpet call to be sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God would be fulfilled, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.
In this chapter we have a subsidiary section interposed between the sixth and seventh trumpets. This, as we before suggested, corresponds to the subsidiary vision between the sixth and seventh seals, and represents the witness and work of the Church of God in this world. This earlier interposition in fact, recorded in ch 7, is the key to an understanding of what we read here. There, we had the picture of the Church militant on earth being used of God to call out from all peoples and nations a people for His Name, and secondly the vision of the Church triumphant in glory, the great multitude that no man could number. It was the work and witness of the Church of God in its final gathering up to be with the Lord forever, that work taking place during the whole dispensation, alongside and in face of the oppositions and persecutions of the powers of evil. Now in chapter 10 we have precisely the same kind of pattern. Here is a picture of the Church's testimony, set over against the grim spectacle of world-disturbance and the increasing tensions of evil. In the first part of the vision in chapter 7, the emphasis was upon the believers in the Word of God; here, however, it is upon the Word of God itself.
This, then, is a message about the Word of God. In the vision of the mighty angel astride land and sea, we have the spectacle of the Word of God towering above the life of the world and dominating the ages. This is the first meaning we must place upon the vision of the mighty angel and the little book, but it by no means exhausts the possibilities of interpreta- tion, as we shall see in subsequent Notes.