Fr. Stephen De Young: So now, verse ten: “Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven: Now salvation and strength and the kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God, day and night, has been cast down.” So you can see how that’s factoring into St. Andrew’s interpretation. So this clearly is— Whatever he was doing has been replaced by the reign of Christ. That has to do with his ascension. And now he’s no longer able to accuse.

Verse eleven: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” The “they” here is the brethren. So first it’s he can’t accuse the brethren, but now, talking about the brethren, Christ’s brethren, the ones whom he went after because he couldn’t get to Christ, they overcame him—they overcame the devil—by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” So there’s two pieces there. There’s what Christ did for them with his blood, purifying them from their sin; and then, on their part, the testimony they gave, the witness they gave—martyr, the martyreia that they gave. And that’s why that comes, that martyreia: “they did not love their lives to the death,” meaning when it came down to it, they chose death for Christ rather than living without him. They were martyred. That’s a weird turn of phrase in English, “they did not love their lives to the death.” And so, because of that, they were victorious over the devil.

This also frames, then, in reverse, how it is that the devil attacked them. The blood of the Lamb purifies them from sin, so sin is the way he had tried to attack them, to get his claws into him, to continue the dragon metaphor; and the love of the things of this world, up to and including their own life in this world: those are the things he tried to use to snare them.

Verse twelve: “Therefore, rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.” The devil—we won’t get into the whole argument of whether he could repent, but doesn’t. We can at least say that. So he knows now the clock is ticking on him being condemned to the bad place. And so he responds to that by just becoming more angry and ferocious and destructive.

Q1: Is that referring to the persecution of the Church?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because he knows he only has— His days are numbered, and he wants to do as much damage as he possibly can.

Q2: What happens to him when the time he’s afraid of comes? He’s already been cast out; he’s already in hell. Does he just—?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to see in chapter 20.

Q2: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Spoilers! It involves a lake of fire! He’s not going to get to rule any place—we’ll put it that way—contra Milton. So now we’re going to move into the zoom-in on earth, and remember: these are not discrete things that come one after the other; these are kind of overlapping images in his vision. We’re now sort of moving our focus to what’s going on on earth.

Verse 13:

Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child. But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent.

So we’ve got “serpent” and “dragon” being used interchangeably now, because we’ve already tipped. And that “time, times, and half a time,” remember 1,260 days: three and a half years, so: a year, two years, and then half a year.

“So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood.” That seems weird. [Laughter] Because, you know, we’re used to fire-breathing dragons, not water-breathing dragons. But the idea here is that, remember, in the ancient world, pretty much universally, water, particularly the sea, was associated with chaos and destruction. That’s what the devil sort of has to offer: chaos and destruction. He can’t make anything; he can’t create anything. And so he just sort of spews, like bile, all of the chaos and evil and anger and destruction he has at the brethren, at the Church, at the body of Christ.

Verse 16: “But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth.” The image here, of the earth helping the woman, is that the rest of creation helps, because the dragon is not just the enemy of the Church or even of humans, but of all of God’s creation. This is picking up on a bunch of imagery of the Old Testament prophets that talk about God coming to visit his people. And as we’ve said before, that’s not Grandpa coming over for tea; when God visits his people, he sorts things out.

And when he does that, over and over again it talks about him—the forces of nature, the elements of creation, sort of joining him in attacking the evil. Probably the most famous one is “A mighty wind shall blow them away,” at least if you’re into ‘60s folk music. But there’s a lot of that imagery: the stars, the sun, the moon—everything joins God into trying to sort of expunge the evil from creation. There’s the imagery in the Torah of certain evil causing the land to vomit them out, because it can’t take it any more. Or St. Paul in Romans talking about the earth groaning because of the death and the sin that’s in it, wanting to be set free from it by God. It’s the same kind of imagery here, so the rest of creation is sort of on our side, not his.

Verse 17: “And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” He all-out makes war with us. Notice here the two things that mark out the people of God: keeping the commandments of God and having the testimony, the testimony that they referred to, martyreia, of Christ, that we love him more than the things of this world.

That image of creation being on our side, though, is important in understanding St. John’s sort of balanced view of the creation, because— I mean, we just mentioned Puritans, but— There has always been a pernicious idea—it flowers in Gnosticism; it flowers in other places, or weeds, I guess, like dandelions, in other places—that the good things of creation or enjoying the things of creation is somehow evil in and of itself, that sort of— This comes out of having too much Plato-brain, too, like Plato the philosopher, where— For Plato, distinction implies opposition. So if I love one thing… Or if I love two things, I have to love one less, and the more I love one thing, the more I will love another. When you have that in your head, then any kind of enjoyment in life or the world or the good things of the world, that’s somehow opposed to your love of God and to your enjoyment of God. Puritanism is sort of a more recent Exhibit A of this, but it’s been around a long time, this idea that those things are in conflict.

When St. John is making these points about loving the things of the world more than Christ, you could read it that way, and so it’s importance that he gives the balance of creation actually being on our side, with God and against the devil. And so there is nothing in the view of the Scriptures that would give us Plato’s idea that distinction is opposition: if there’s two things, one must be better, one must be worse. If you love two things— So it is not only permissible but kind of necessary to love both God and your neighbor. If you love your family and you enjoy having a good meal with them, that doesn’t make you a bad Christian. [Laughter]

Now, if it comes down to it and you have to make a choice between following Christ and your family, following Christ and losing your life, following Christ and eating food you enjoy, anything like that—when they come into actual conflict then, part one, that martyreia, Christ: you choose Christ over against all those things. But not every moment of every day is that kind of crisis. Should I eat this bowl of cereal or should I spend another 15 minutes in prayer? [Laughter] That’s not— It’s not a massive existential crisis—or shouldn’t be. It is for some people, but it shouldn’t be.

There’s a balance here. There’s a balance here of an appropriate enjoyment of the things of this world, without ever replacing Christ with them. I mean, this is really what’s behind the whole problem of modern, especially our Protestant friends, with the idea of the saints: you venerate the saints, you must be taking that veneration away from God. The idea that the saints lead us to God, the fact that eating a good meal with my family might produce thankfulness toward God in me, in the same way that God could be honored through and in the things of this world and the things of life gets messed up when that Puritan either-or or that Platonic either-or or that Gnostic either-or gets into the picture. That’s not St. John’s view, and he sort of—

Q1: [Inaudible] [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’ll do it to you. It’ll do a number on you. Calvinism, man. It’ll mess with your head! [Laughter] So we’ll go on a little bit. We’ll go on a little bit more. We might not do all of chapter 13, but we’ll get into chapter 13 here.

Chapter 13, verse one: “Then I stood on the sand of the sea, and I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns, ten crowns, and on his heads, a blasphemous name.”

Q1: [Are we still Peter after the—?]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Q1: When he stands out of the sea that was made by the— [Inaudible]?

Fr. Stephen: No, no, he’s just standing on the shore of the sea, but on earth, because he’s looking at the sea: earth, sea. And so this beast is coming up out of the sea. This is your first trouble sign, because what were we just saying about the sea?

Q1: Chaos.

Fr. Stephen: Yam is the ancient— Yam in Hebrew is the word for the sea; it’s also the name of the ancient primordial chaos-god that the various gods in Ancient Near Eastern myths killed. So the fact that it’s coming up out of the sea: already, shall we say, problematic. It’s from the abyss.

And you notice in the description, he kind of sounds a lot like the dragon: the seven heads and the ten horns. He’s got even more crowns, and he’s got blasphemous names on his heads. So there’s another piece here… Well, I’ll wait on that piece, because we’ll get to that in a second. I want to read a few more verses before we get to it. So what is with the blas— Well, I’ll wait on that, too. Okay, let me read a couple more verses. Then I’ll get into this.

Verse two: “Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard. His feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority.” Now we can go into this. So we get this weirdo description. We’ve got leopard, bear… It’s like man-bear-pig, except it’s like leopard-bear-lion. [Laughter] But where he’s picking those pieces up is— Remember, I mentioned in Daniel, right before the enthronement of the Son of Man, he saw those four beasts. So he’s picking up the beasts from his vision and sort of smushing them all together into one big super-beast. Probably not the one that you wanted, but he’s Superbeast: all the beast pieces put together.

So what were the beasts in Daniel’s vision? They were the succession of world empires. It’s explicitly stated in Daniel that this is the Babylonians, and then the Medes and the Persians were the bear, then the leopard was Greece. Then there’s this weird, hideous beast that’s Rome. So these world empires are all sort of smushed together in this one super-beast. We’ve already talked about that we’re not talking about this linear succession of events, so don’t jump to, as many modern folks are prone to, saying, “Oh, this is going to be some last, great empire, or a revived Roman Empire or the EU or whatever.” [Laughter] Rather, this is representing Empire. This is representing Empire.

Q1: As a concept?

Fr. Stephen: As a concept. That starts with Babylon and the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, so all the way back in Genesis, the Babylonian Empire, the first one, that rose and fell. And the Babylon imagery, as I said, is going to come up again in a little bit—not tonight, but soon, directly.

This is just Empire. That’s why it’s got features of sort of all of them put together. And so what happened—? What unites—? There are certain things that unite all these empires. One of them is that they go out and they conquer and unite the different kings and kingdoms of the world, sort of under one person. That’s what it’s getting at when it talks about the dragon giving him his throne. Remember when Satan comes and tempts Christ in the desert, what one of the temptations is.

Q1: Giving all the kingdoms.

Fr. Stephen: “I’ll give you all the kingdoms of this world—because they’re all pagan, they’re all worshiping me anyway. I can toss them your way.” So that’s the idea here. The idea is that they’ve sort of enslaved— And at this point, when St. John is writing, it’s Rome who’s done that. As Livy said, they made a wasteland and called it peace, of the world.

And what’s another feature they all have? They all deified the emperor. They all said that whoever the emperor was who had so united the world was a god, and they worshiped him. This is one of the things that got Alexander into a lot of trouble back in Greece, because he did that, too. Because when they got to Egypt and stuff, and they declared him a god, he was like: “I kind of like this. I can deal with this.” [Laughter]

So that’s what’s going on with the blasphemous names. If you look at, for example, the titles taken by just the Seleucids, who followed Alexander, the Greek imperial dynasty in Syria that oppressed the Judean people, they had titles like Soter, Savior. Antiochus Epiphanes: he’s the manifestation of a god on earth. They took these titles, and Caesar, at the point that this is being written, was the Savior of the World; that was one of his titles. He was the Lord. Almost all of the titles that are ascribed to Christ in St. Paul’s letters were officially titles of Caesar. So from the perspective of the time, most of what St. Paul wrote is treason, and that’s why, one of the reasons, he ended up being beheaded when he got to Rome, because that was considered a crime to use these titles of anyone else. So those are the blasphemous names, that this is all sort of entailed in this concept of empire, conquest, exploitation of people and natural resources, enslavement of peoples.

And so the reason it looks so much like the dragon is that these imperial powers are the image of the dragon on earth. In the way that we’re called to be the image of God and the image of Christ on earth, they are the images of the evil one on earth.

Verse three: “And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and its deadly wound was healed, and all the world marveled and followed the beast.” I’m going to press pause on that or put a pin in that, because I don’t think we’re going to get to the end of this chapter tonight. When we do get to the end of this chapter and we get to the number of the beast—which won’t be tonight, unfortunately—this is going to be related to that, this wound that gets healed. So I’m putting a pin in that. I do get back to my pins! I got back to one after a month. This shouldn’t be— I should get back to this one next time, next week, Lord willing.

But then verse four: “So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying: Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” Sounds like something you would say about Rome at that time, or any of those previous empires. But so, by worshiping the beast, by worshiping the empire or the emperor, that worship is going to the devil, the evil one.

Verse five: “And he was given a mouth, speaking great things and blasphemies, and he was given authority to continue for 42 months.” So there it is again, 42: six sevens. If you have six sevens, that’s lead up to a seventh seven. So there’s something coming; there’s some purpose in mind why he’s allowed to do this for this period of time.

“Then he opened his mouth and blasphemed against God—to blaspheme his name, his tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven. It was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation.”

Q1: Sounds like Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, except this isn’t Christ! [Laughter]

Q1: I mean, that would be [Inaudible].

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yeah, that’s exactly it. So who’s the ruler of the world? Well, Caesar claims it’s him. What St. John’s doing here is actually inverting the way Caesar would have approached Christians. For Caesar, it’s treason for these Christians to be claiming that a crucified Jew is a king, he’s the actual Savior of the world, is actually the Lord, and Caesar isn’t. And St. John is saying the opposite. St. John is saying it’s blasphemy for Caesar to use any of those titles, that really belong to Christ. And God is allowing him, for this period of time that is not without end, to get away with it, for his own purposes.

Verse eight: “All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” So this isn’t just: “Hey, there’s going to be some dummies who fall for this.” St. John is saying everyone is going to fall for this except for those whose names are written in the book of life from the foundation of the world.

Now, what is this book of life that’s being talked about here? We’ve talked about it before, I know, but this is something that I think was mentioned back in the letters to the churches, and we talked about it very briefly there, but this is I think one of the first major places in Revelation that it shows up, and it’s going to become important later on when we get to the very end of the book.

So the book of life is referred to in Scripture all the way back in the Torah. Moses refers to it, to having his name blotted out rather than the Israelites’. And that was taken by ancient interpreters and by the Church Fathers to show the level of Moses’ love for his people. They were rebelling against him and wanted to kill Moses and go back to Egypt, and God says to Moses, “You know, I’m just going to wipe them out. I’ll start over with you. Like I did with Abraham, we’ll just do a new nation of Israel with your children.” [Laughter] And Moses says no. Not only says no and tries to plead with God not to do that, but says, “Hey, you can blot me out of the book of life, but don’t curse them”—people who were hating him and trying to kill him. And that’s taken as an image of Christ’s love.

But so the book of life idea— Again, we’re thinking of a book that you open with covers and pages, but that’s not— Codices weren’t really a thing yet, so we’re really talking about a scroll, or the way we find it often in ancient literature outside the Bible is as tablets, sort of heavenly tablets, because of course they were writing in cuneiform on clay tablets. And the idea was—and this was kind of one of those universal things: we find it in these other cultures aside from Judaism—that there is, in the presence of God, and it’s usually some kind of angel or spirit or something who’s in charge of this, who records everything that’s going on on earth, sort of what people are up to, that there’s this record of it. And that record then is used to issue judgments and that kind of thing.

The place where you see in the New Testament—and that’s why I said at the end of the book of Revelation, this’ll come up again—you see this in terms of the last judgment, the books being opened. Here’s all the things you did in this life; here’s all the things you said. The idea here with names being there or not being there, or names being sort of blotted out and crossed out, is that this is sort of an anticipation of the judgment. So the idea is this is another way of referring to the brethren whom he was referring to before, and a way of referring to their life kind of holistically. He talked about— One way that he referred to their life holistically was “they keep the commandments of God and they have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” Another way was that they had been “cleansed by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” So those are ways of talking about this that are sort of inclusive. Keeping the commandments of God includes a lot of decisions made over the course of your whole life, and bearing witness to Christ includes a whole lot of things over the course of your whole life. This is the same thing. So the person whose name is recorded in the name of the book of life is the person who has done those things, and the person whose name is not there is the person who has not.

Remember, writing— We take this for granted, even more now in days of the internet, when you can tap out an email in two seconds: you don’t even have to buy a sheet of paper. You go to a bookstore, there’s hundreds of books, and you can find cheap mass-market paperbacks and stuff, or go to a used bookstore. Writing anything down was this incredibly costly process in the ancient world. We’ve talked before, getting a copy of the book of Romans around the time it was written would have been the equivalent of $5,000, which almost nobody had. People didn’t know how to read even if they did have that much money to get a copy.

So when things were written down, they sort of stood then as like a literary monument. The fact that it was written down meant that it was important and meant that it was recorded for the future, that this was now sort of set in stone. That’s part of the force of, when we read that phrase over and over again in the New Testament: “it is written.” That strikes us as: “Oh, you don’t remember where the quote was?” [Laughter] “It was written somewhere?” No, but it is written. This is something that’s been handed down, it’s been preserved, it’s been put in writing at great expense of time and money and effort. The idea of the name being written in heaven in the book of life carries with it that idea of memory, of perpetuity. So it’s connected to the same idea, when we sing “Memory Eternal” for someone who has passed, because if God remembers you—God is eternal; that means that’s eternal.

Then the flip-side of that image that we see in images of judgment in the New Testament is like when Christ says, “On that day he will say: Begone, I never knew you. I don’t know who you are; I don’t know your name.” That’s sort of the flip-side of this imagery.

What St. John is saying here by saying everybody except those people in the book of life, he’s saying everybody except the saints. There’s not going to be a bunch of sort of neutral people or people on the fence. If you’re not following Christ, you’re going to be deceived. You’re going to fall into this; you’re going to fall prey to this.

Verse nine: “If anyone has an ear, let him hear. He who leads into captivity shall go into captivity. He who kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.” These are a couple of ways of saying what goes around comes around. [Laughter] The person who— Who is the person who leads into captivity? Well, first of all, the beast, the emperor is enslaving people, but who’s enslaving people really through the emperor?

Q1: The devil.

Fr. Stephen: The devil is enslaving them spiritually. He who leads into captivity, whether you take that to be the devil or the emperor, both of them are going to end up going into captivity. “He who kills with the sword”: who is that? That’s the emperor. St. Paul says he’s been given the power of the sword. He’s going to end up on the receiving end of this when it comes around. That’s why I said, “Here is the patience and the faith”—that should be “faithfulness”—“of the saints.” We’re suffering now; we’re the ones being put into captivity now, like St. John on Patmos. We’re the ones being killed with the sword now, but we know where this is leading. We know that at the end of the day we’re going to be the ones who are free, and it’s the emperor who’s a captive. We’re going to live; it’s the emperor and the dragon who are going to die.

Yeah, this is probably a good stopping-point, because I think it’ll take a long time to get through. So next time we’ll pick up here in the middle of chapter 13. We just saw the super-beast; we’re going to see another beast! This was the beast out of the sea; now we’re going to get the beast out of the earth. We’re going to talk about who these two beasts are, because they show up in the Old Testament in different places, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And we’re ultimately, at the end of that chapter, going to get to the number of the beast. I’m going to tell you exactly whom that number is referring to—there’s a tease. So, thank you, everybody!