GOD'S NEW WORLD, DAY 27 (unveiling the truth)

 

     If a prescient Christian in Germany in the early 1930’s had wished to write a book to warn her countrymen of the horrors about to be unleashed on both her nation and the world through the actions of the new Chancellor (Hitler), what kind of book might she have written?  Perhaps this concerned citizen would have composed a story imbued with biblical imagery, with references to famous examples of past tyrants and the judgments that these perpetrators of injustice had experienced as a consequence of their pride?  Perhaps such a book – if it had any hope of avoiding being censored – might not name its subject directly, but may rather have described current events in a way both cryptic enough to fly under the radar of the regime and accessible enough to the astute reader to effectively communicate its subversive message.  Perhaps this anti-totalitarian tome would use vivid language which would oblige receptive readers to look at their daily reality in a new (and frightening) way?  The propaganda of every police state seeks to persuade the populace that the regime’s ideologically-driven policies constitute normalcy.  It would be an uphill battle for the resistance to convince people that the opposite was actually the case.  If John of Patmos had been an early 20^th-century German, he may well have written a similar book to Revelation, perhaps something akin to George Orwell’s Animal Farm or 1984. 

     Revelation presents us with a challenge on several levels – the book assumes that we know our Old Testament really well, that we know a good metaphor when we see one, that we can “see” the mischievous twinkle in John’s eye as he uses some of his key terms (letting us know that we have to go beyond the surface and past the obvious to get what he’s saying), and that we’re comfortable with travel between earth and heaven (and hell?).  As we read Revelation, it’s tempting to conclude that the content of John’s visions doesn’t concern our world – the imagery is often so bizarre that we feel that whatever John is talking about, it concerns a reality very different from our own.  Yes, Revelation does reflect a time and place different from ours – it concerns the first-century Roman province of Asia.  No, Revelation actually reflects a world very similar to ours – a world where the powers that be run things, make war and seek to dominate people without reference to the Creator and his justice.  To apprehend the message of Revelation is a matter of “learning John’s language”.

     Indeed, in Revelation, we witness a propaganda war.  What is at stake are the definitions of the following words: truth, justice, power, the value/goal of human life, ultimate reality, to name a few.  The stakes are high, and the answers one gives to the questions posed by this book will determine everything about one’s life and eternal destiny.  Who is God/the gods?  Who is in charge of the world?  Whom must I serve/obey?  What is true/real?  What’s right/wrong?  How should I live my life?  What’s the point of everything?  Using vivid “apocalyptic” language, John seeks to shake his readers out of their imperially-induced drowsiness and to wake them up to what is really going on around them.  John wants to alert his audience to the imperial con-game that seeks to dominate society through false promises and deceptive exploitation.  John is telling his readers that they are being systematically lied to by the civil authorities and that they must continue to resist the imperial propaganda and remain faithful to the truth revealed in Jesus, no matter the cost.

     The cosmos that John depicts in his book is indeed a world at war.  The Creator and the anti-God forces are arrayed against each other, locked in a vicious, winner-take-all struggle to dominate all that exists.  At the head of the forces of darkness is “the Dragon, that old serpent, a.k.a. the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev. 12.9; 20.2).  Fascinatingly, this chief of the enemies of God is called “the deceiver, the divider, the accuser, the slanderer” – in a word, the Liar (cf. Gospel of John 8.44).  The Dragon sets out to deceive the world by endowing “the beast from the sea” with “its power and its throne and great authority” so it can dominate humankind; indeed, the Dragon makes this beast the object of the world’s worship (Rev. 13.1-10).  This is a shameless bid to usurp the prerogatives of God and of the Lamb (compare Rev. 13.7-8 with 7.9-10).  A second “beast from the earth” (a.k.a. the false prophet) serves as propagandist for the first beast and deceives the inhabitants of the earth and works wonders in order to convince the world’s population to worship the beast from the sea and to receive its “mark”, which identifies those who bear it as belonging to the beast, as opposed to those who bear the “mark of God” who are the targets of the beast’s violence (Rev. 13.11-18; cf. 14.1; 7.1-3; 9.4).  A Dragon, a beast from the sea and a beast from the land – this triple-threat to the church has been labeled by some commentators as the demonic “trinity”, a blatant attempt on the part of Satan to imitate the true God and thus deceive humanity into false worship, which in turn leads to self-destructive patterns of both individual and societal behaviour, whose end is death (cf. Rev. 19.20; 20.10).