Thursday, January 16, 2014

Revelations: Chapters 9 to 15

Click here for the start of Revelations.



CHAPTER 9

Now the fifth trumpet blows.  A star falls from the sky to the earth (again?  It’s comet-crazy here in Revelations!) and opens up an abyss when it lands.  Out of the abyss comes all kinds of smoke, like a huge furnace.  And I think I just found the Bible passage that forms our view of hell.  There is virtually nothing on hell in the Bible. Eternal life is for the believers in Christ, not for the bad people.  But we have an underworld with smoke and fire – yeah, that’s hell.

And out of this hell comes locusts.  But not your normal locusts.  They have the power as scorpions and they had faces like humans.  Weird.  This is like Ezekiel on a bad acid trip.  They locust-scorpion-human-whatever sting people, but don’t kill them.  People are seeking death because their torment is so bad, but death doesn’t find them.  This goes on for five months.  Man, that sucks.  The only ones they can’t/don’t attack are the 144,000 with the mark of the Lord on them.

And there are still two more trumpets left to sound.

The sixth angel blows his horn and four angels, “who were prepared for this hour, day, month, and year to kill a third of the human race” come out with their armies. (Again – John has a nice way of phrasing his horrible visions.  You get a real sense of these angels counting the seconds until they can slaughter tons of people).  Their army is huge: 200,000,000 people.  Holy smokes!  Folks, the world’s population isn’t even going to reach a billion until 1800ish.  Doing some basic checking, the world’s population was about 300 million, and since they’re only going to kill a third of humanity, there will be one dead for every two troops.  It would be like now an army of 3.5 billion came out.

Actually, this army doesn’t kill in the normal ways.  Their horses (the army is all cavalry) have smoke and sulfur come out of their mouths.  That’s what kills so many people – smoke inhalation and lack of oxygen. 

Well, at least the dead are free of the scourge of those scorpion-locusts whatevers.

CHAPTER 10

So far, John has been proceeding with a steady pace towards the end of the world.  Now, his vision takes a bit of a detour of a few chapters.  It does build suspense – what will happen when that seventh and final trumpet blows? – but it doesn’t flow as well as what came before. 

An angel comes forward with a small scroll.  In his vision, John is commanded to eat the scroll in order to remember what it says.  Again, this happened in the Old Testament – I’m pretty sure it was Ezekiel.  (That’s my default guess for all odd sounding visionary things).  I’m too lazy to look it up, but this visionary John seems to have a definite influence from the Old Testament visionaries like Ezekiel. 

CHAPTER 11

We’re still in this little detour.  John is commanded to measure the temple of God.  Yeah, that was eight or nine chapters in Ezekiel. 

A great earthquake happens, and we’re told 7,000 die.  Really?  That’s it?  I don’t mean to make light of a calamity that kills 7,000 people, but we just had 200,000,000 riders wipe out a third of humanity.  7,000?  Hell, Haiti wishes their earthquake killed that few people.  In a book filled with so many impossibly horrible events, you get a calamity that would make page 4 of the newspaper.  Bit of a letdown, really.

But wait – because after this awkward and unsatisfying detour, the seventh angel finally blows the seventh trumpet.  The 24 elders in their mini-Ditka thrones now bow down and say now is time for God’s wrath to come (yeah, all that early stuff was just getting warmed up).  It’s time for the dead to be judged.  Here it is – judgment day. 

God’s temple in heaven opens up and the ark of his covenant could be seen.  I find myself thinking of the altar to Zuul at the end of Ghostbusters.

CHAPTER 12

Before things get even worse for earth, though, we get another segue.  There is a woman – no name given – who is with child.  She gives birth, and at first I assumed she was giving birth to the anti-Christ.  That makes sense, given how bad things are.

I guess not, though.  For there is also a dragon and the dragon is clearly the bad guy.  (The give away is when the dragon is called, “the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan.”  Yeah, that would be bad.  Oh, and while the Old Testament never identifies the serpent as Satan, here the Book of Revelations does just that.  Interesting).  Anyhow, this dragon wants to kill the newborn baby and the mother.  Ah, so it’s not the anti-Christ then that’s been born – but the second coming of Christ.  Thus the unnamed woman must be the second Mary. 

She is saved by God’s angels and kept in the desert protection.  Instead, the dragon goes off “to wage war against the rest of her offspring, those who keep God’s commandments and bear witness to Jesus.”  So the 144,000 are his target.  Yeah, this dragon is definitely bad news.

CHAPTER 13

Enter the beasts.  A beast with 10 horns and seven heads crawls out of the seas.  The dragon gives it his power.  So the beast is now proxy for the dragon.  (Oh, a proxy war during Judgment Day).  One of the heads appears to be mortally wounded, but this mortal wound was helped.  The footnotes tell me this is an apparent reference to a belief/fable about Emperor Nero.  The legend held it that Nero, the first emperor to persecute Christians, could come back to life after death and rule again.

Well, the world sees the dragon and its beast, and decides to worship the dragon because its so powerful.  The beast rules for 42 months and promotes all kinds of evil activities. 

Then comes a second beast: “it had two horns like a lamb’s but spoke like a dragon.”  Wait – lambs had horns?  I’m not questioning that fact, I just didn’t know that.  I’m assuming John has more experience with lambs than I do.  Also – how does a dragon speak exactly?  (With a smoky voice, I’d wager!  - Cue rimshot). 

This is getting a little awkward, with all the weird beasts and the dragon.  Apparently this second beast now has the authority previously given to the first one.   Uh, OK.  Why do we need a second beast again?  Ah, never mind.  Forget it – John’s rolling. 

Oh, and I almost missed a famous line at the end of the chapter.  The last verse: “Wisdom is needed here, one who understands can calculate the number of the beast, for it is a number that stands for a person.  His number is six hundred and sixty-six.”  Because the Bible spelled it out, I nearly missed it – but there it is. 

More importantly, the footnote informs me that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet (as well as in Greek) has a numerical value.  Many possible combinations of letter will add up to 666, and so many people have been called the beast.  The best guess, though, is Nero.  Elsewhere this book seems to take shots at Nero, so there you go. 

CHAPTER 14

Well, all life sucks on earth now, so let’s check out on heaven again.  With the lamb are angles, and there is a sound “like that of harpists playing their harps.”  Oh, so this is where we get our image of harp-playing angels up in the heavens.  A song is sung, but only pure of heart virgins can learn it.  Meanwhile, all who worship the beast are doomed, though.  We’re told the harvest is finally ripe.  I assume that’s meant metaphorically that it is time for God to unleash his final vengeance. It sure would be weird if we left the whole apocalypse narrative for a discussion of farm practices.

CHAPTER 15

This is a short chapter that introduces us to the seven plagues.  Man, John sure did love his sevens, didn’t he?  Seven seals, seven trumpets, and now seven plagues.  By this point, we’ve lost the wonderful momentum of earlier, though. The seven seals and seven horns section was masterfully done.  This is starting to read like a bunch of random bad events piled on top of each other without much sense of overall narrative thrust.

Anyhow, we’re introduced to the plagues here, but they don’t strike until the next chapter.

Oh, and there is a line about “God’s harps” here as well.  Yeah, Revelations is totally where we get our notions of heaven having harps.

Click here for the final chapters of the book - and of the entire Bible.

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