What is really going in the world, behind the scenes?
That is the question John addresses in this third major section of the book of Revelation. In the vision given in ch. 12 he has already outlined the answer to it. There is a dimension of evil in the "heavenly places", to use Paul's phrase ... in the spiritual dimension behind the appearance of things. There is in fact both a demonic and an angelic background to the life of this world of which we are largely ignorant and with which we rarely reckon. The Bible speaks of it often. Take three examples.
Example 1:
The episode
of Elisha in Dothan - II Kings 6:15. The King of Aram had sent an
army to capture him. "When the servant of the man of God got up and
went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had
surrounded the city. "Oh, my lord, what shall we do?" the servant
asked.
"Don't be afraid," the prophet answered. "Those who are with us are
more than those who are with them."
And Elisha prayed, "O Lord, open his eyes so he may see." Then the
Lord opened the young man's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills
full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
Example
2: The case
of Job, whose troubles were of more than merely earthly origin.
Job 1:8 - The Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant
Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright,
a man who fears God and shuns evil."
"Does Job fear God for nothing?" Satan replied. "Have you not put a
hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have
blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are
spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike
everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face." The
Lord said to Satan, "Very well then, everything he has is in your
hands; but on the man himself do not lay a finger." Then Satan went
out from the presence of the Lord" ... and we know the story of what
followed.
Example
3: The Lord's
own words in John 14:30 - "I will not speak with you much longer, for
the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold on me." Later He
said to His human captors, "This is your hour ... and the power of
darkness."
Behind the Lord's human enemies lay the powers of darkness,
marshalling them unawares to serve their ends.
So John would have us understand that behind the conflicts we see in the life of this world there lie conflicts in the spiritual realm: "War arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon." (12:7) And out of that conflict in the background, the devil, flung down to earth, pursues first the Christ of God and then His followers.
The Bible sometimes speaks of a dimension of evil which is an alien intruder, as though outside the "order" God created, there lies a threatening "disorder" - "outside", that is, not in any spatial sense but rather in the sense that it is outside human understanding and human reckoning. The sovereignty of God includes His sovereignty over that evil too, but whilst that holds out to us a very great hope, it does not bring that "mystery of iniquity" within our control.
It manifests itself in many forms, and we have to contend against each form as it appears, fully realising that no victory we may win over it is final. Satan may fall as lightning from heaven, but it is not his last fall! (D. T. Niles, "As Seeing the Invisible" S.C.M. p. 155)
Now John moves into the first of seven teaching segments, each of them a vision introduced with repeating phrases like "And I saw ..." or "Then I saw ..." or "I looked, and behold ..."
So the teaching too is conveyed by means of visions. They are:
1. The Beast from the Sea
13:1-10 2. The Beast from the Earth
13:11-18 3. The Lamb on Mt Zion and with him 144,000
14:1-5 4. Three Angels in mid-heaven
14:6-13 5. A Man on a White Cloud, Crowned, with a Sickle
14:14-20 6. Seven Angels with Seven Plagues
15:1 7. A Triumphant Throng beside a Sea of Glass
15:2-4
Across the span of those seven visions, the focus shifts - from the two beasts whose power blights the life of this world, to the Lamb and His followers whose testimony calls the peoples of the world away from them to faith, and back again to the judgment that brews over the whole of life because men will not pay heed.
I'd like us to keep this overall balance in mind as we work our way through these chapters. We shall spend two mornings on the visions of the two beasts, and it will be grisly stuff. Don't lose sight of the fact that they will be followed by a more cheerful vision before the announcement of final judgment is uttered.
So to the first vision, the Beast from the Sea. We shall look at its features in turn.
i. By the Sea
That he stands in a close alliance with the Dragon is clear from the last verse of ch. 12 and the first of ch. 13 - "And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea ... And I saw a beast coming out of the sea." It is the dragon who summons him up, and John does not mean us to forget that he stands there menacingly on the shores of the world all the while, unseen behind the action.
The sea in the Hebrew mind was associated with the idea of chaos. It was out of the watery chaos that God first fashioned the earth. Who knew what lurked in its mysterious depths? With its restlessness it well symbolised "the seething cauldron of national and social life out of which the great movements of history arise." (Swete)
As the beast takes shape before our eyes, we instinctively recoil from his ugliness. What would John's first hearers have made of it, when this was read to them in church there in Ephesus? Without doubt they would at once recall the visions Daniel had had. Daniel had symbolised great empires with just such beasts as this. John's beast, however, is more horrible than they, for he combines in himself all the horrors which in Daniel were distributed among four.
ii. Horns and Heads
The beast's ten horns and seven heads indicate that power and durability are of his very essence. (That he has ten diadems on his horns, where you would expect to see them on his heads, is just one of the clues we should pick up to the fact that John does not really intend us to visualise this beast literally. Though he has seven heads he has only one mouth too, you observe - which would be curious, to say the least, if we were intended to envisage him literally! Strange, too, if he was a creature from the sea, that he should be likened to a leopard with bear's feet and a lion's mouth! I shan't labour these points any further ... I call attention to them now only so we grasp the point that it is ideas John is communicating, not images.) That crowns are on his horns simply means that he exercises sovereignty with great power.
iii. Animal likenesses v.2
That he is likened to a leopard with bear's feet and a lion's mouth. means that he is a swift destroyer, tearing his enemies savagely in pieces. These are in fact a combination of the creatures who symbolised Daniel's four empires - the Seleucid, the Persian, the Median and the Babylonian. It is the power of the worldly state the beast represents, the evil aspect worn by "the powers that be" ... their violation of human rights when it suits their advantage, their will to power no matter how greatly they prosper. The beast is everything a corrupt and evil worldly power has the potential to be.
The power it exerts is not its own, you notice. It is derived from the dragon. Behind the evils done by the great powers stands Satan.
iv. The Mortal Wound vs.3 - 4
"One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder." What does John mean by that?
It is a powerful way of expressing a disturbing truth - that evil powers seem to be indestructible.
It is one of the facts of life that has always dismayed the righteous. Why is the power of evil so indestructible? You destroy one of its heads, and it rears another. Slavery - as an institution - is abolished, but the exploitation of men and women remains and takes many forms. Woman is liberated from the humiliation of being a mere chattel, but men's lack of respect for women persists in social conventions and pornography. We wage war on evil in its many forms, but it persists and reappears in other forms.
The Communist sees the failure or defeat of his political ideal in one place, and then in another place he sees it rise up and conquer again, and he is confirmed in his belief that it is the truth. Its mortal wound is healed.
"John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on." Politicians are survivors! It is alarming. This is why the masses revolt against bad government only rarely - "What can a man do against the Mafia? Even if you put it down in one place, it will break out in another. There is nothing you can do. Better to join it - you can't win."
So it comes about that the whole earth follows the beast with wonder - bows to it, saying, "Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?"
What John is saying here is a penetrating insight into the truth of the human situation. If your hope is not in the Lamb whose blood was shed, then the only hope to which you may cling is some human system, to which, either expressly or by implication, you give the blasphemous name of God. As Michael Wilcock observes, "Even in the residually Christian West, it is the democratic ideal and the innate goodness of man rather than the One Who created both which is "worshipped." It is democracy, common sense and decency we believe in, not their Creator.
And John says bluntly that when you do that you worship the devil. You don't have to join a witches' coven or a Satanist group to worship the devil. Respectable citizens whom you find in a church pew every Sunday morning are doing it everywhere. They take off their hat to God on Sunday morning, but on Monday morning it's the "party" or the "market" or the "all ordinaries index" they worship and serve. John says they worship the devil when they do that, because it is he who has lured their faith away from God to these other things.
What does it mean to worship God in the world - in politics, in the market, in business?
"The church may expect to suffer when it takes leave to question all the worldly assumptions on which the state rests and criticise the society in which it lives. If they don't say the right things and keep the right company, they are vilified for "rocking the boat." (Michael Wilcock, "I Saw Heaven Opened" I.V.P., p.125)
The prophets of Baal said all the right things and kept all the right company - they ate at the Queen's table; Elijah said all the wrong things and kept the wrong company and was driven into exile in the desert. But it was Elijah and not the "establishment" who won a new day for Israel." It is those like Naboth, who found the courage of his convictions to defy the King, who were the "followers of the Lamb" in their day.
And how long is all this to go on, this evil oppression?
v. The Period of Perfidy v.5
"And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise its authority for forty-two months."
The forty-two months, as we have seen, is the period during which God's city is trodden underfoot by the nations while the church survives hostility and continues to proclaim the Gospel.
The beast, in other words, will be active till the end of the age. The satanically manipulated state will be with us to the last.
vi. The War on the Saints v.7 - 10
Now John says a thing Christians find it hard to swallow: "It was allowed to make war on the saints and conquer them."
Some of the ancient manuscripts are missing that verse! There were scribes, apparently, who rebelled against even the sense of sacred calling that held them to their profession when they came to copy that, and left it out. Did God give authority to the beast to make war on the saints? ... and conquer them? It ought not to be ... it couldn't be
It will not do to say that the one who did this 'allowing' was the Devil because in v. 2 he is said to have given to the beast his power and his throne and his great authority. If it was said only that the beast was given authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation, it might be possible to argue for that, since the devil could claim, even to the Lord's own face, that "all these have been delivered to me and I give them to whom I will." But the devil cannot say that of the saints. The only One Who can allow them to be touched is God Himself. So it is God Who does the allowing.
The word 'allowed' is repeated in fact three times. The beast is allowed ...
i. to utter loud and blasphemous vaunts,
ii. to exert authority for forty-two months,
iii. to make war on the saints and conquer them.
The beast rules by divine permission.
Why? one asks.
The answer has already been given to Christians - in the Lord's suffering at the hands of the "principalities and powers," temporal and spiritual, at the Cross, and His apparent defeat there.
There too, both the dragon and the beast, both Satan and the earthly "powers" of religion and state, were "allowed" to make war on the Son of God and conquer Him. Christians know, as we have said so very many times from this pulpit, that in an evil world suffering is love's only pathway to victory.
If you conquer evil by any other means, the means you use are not of God. You can't defend good ends by wrong means, for what you achieve by wrong means is the establishment of the wrong in those means. Resort to unchristian ways to defend the faith or yourself, and you betray God's cause and go over to the enemy. By your very choice of weapons you yield the day before a single blow is struck.
There is no way the Christian can avoid suffering if he is to take up His Saviour's cross. Let believers hear and understand this, John says in verse 9: "If anyone has an ear, let him hear." The Lord said that, often; always He meant by it, "Understand what it will cost you to follow Me."
This is why John says in v.10: "If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes ..." there will be no last minute celestial rescue party appearing magically out of the skies to whisk the beleaguered believer away ... any more than there was a last minute celestial rescue for the Son of God at the Cross. "It was according to the determinate foreknowledge and plan of God that He went to the Cross" (Acts 2:23) ... "He was for captivity, and to captivity He went."
And it may be that way for us. It may be according to the determinate foreknowledge and plan of God that some of us should be called upon to suffer captivity for Christ's sake and the Gospel's.
If you seek to avoid the suffering to which your testimony exposes you by taking up the sword - if you think to make attack your defence -you will have no protection at all: by the very sword you take up you will yourself perish. To take up the sword at all is not to defend the faith but to deny the faith: the truth of Christ cannot be defended by violence! (This is not to say that Christians should be conscientious objectors in time of war. The point we are making is simply that it is wrong to take up arms in defence of the faith; to take up arms in defence of the realm is another issue altogether.)
Those who suffer persecution for the faith know that the last word does not lie with the persecutors, and in that conviction he will be ready to "love not their own lives unto death." Small wonder John says (v.10), "Here is a call for the faith and endurance of the saints. If anyone is for captivity, to captivity he goes."
How serious are we, in the light of all John here faithfully and relentlessly presents to our minds, about being Christians?
What John commends here is not an attitude of fatalism - "qui sera sera", whatever will be will be - but the conviction that God is sovereign, and that He will work out His good and perfect will, to whose final triumph our own suffering vitally contributes. In the day of persecution it is a strong consolation.
"The problems of the existence of evil, of human freedom, and of divine righteousness, love and power, all combine to generate a seething cauldron of conflict in which there is no escape from hurt. At its height God suffers, His saints suffer, evil is rampant and the world goes mad. But in it all the believer knows with Martin Luther that the devil, even when he works his worst "is God's Devil", and he may not go one millimetre beyond the limit God places on him. At no time in history was this clearer than in the hour when the Son of God was crucified by the hands of lawless men; is there not something fitting in the thought that in the last hour, when the truth of history is finally laid bare, the Church of God should suffer its passion?" (G. R. Beasley-Murray, "Revelation" Eerdmans, p. 213)
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