Day 218

“And the dragon stood on the sand of the seashore. Then I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns were ten crowns, and on his heads were blasphemous names. 2 And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne, and great authority.” Revelation 13:1-2. NASB.

Revelation 13 introduces 2 new characters into the narrative from chapter 12: A beast from the sea (V:1-7) and a Beast from the earth (V:11.) After their introductions, both beasts play a major role in the war on God’s people that was introduced in Rev 12:17. 
The description of the beast in this passage has political overtones. Horns are frequently a symbol of political power in the OT. The beast wears the royal crowns (diadems) of political authority. The leopard, the bear, and the lion remind the reader of the great empires of the past like Babylon, Persia, and Greece. This is the way they are pictured in Daniel 7. Behind all this political power lurks the dragon, that old devil, the serpent, and Satan (Rev 12:7-9).

One of the horrifying things about this passage is that the devil does not do his work alone, but has the active support of people. Human beings who follow Satan are capable of incredible awfulness. It does not take long to come up with a Hall of Shame that includes Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot; the Arab and Western slave and sex trade; terrorism; and genocide in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Armenian, Turkey and now even Russia in the Ukraine. No evil is impossible when demonic power removes all human restraint and amplifies the natural evil of human sin.

The evils of Rwanda showed that when restraints are removed mass murder does not require pathological killers it can be done by farmers, clerks, school principals, mothers, doctors, mayors, ministers, and carpenters. All picked up machetes and hacked to death defenceless men, women, and children. The person without God is a very scary creature.

We certainly object to evil when it gets out of hand in a quantitative way. But are we as willing to acknowledge that the evil we exhibit each day is not substantively different from that which lives on a large scale? As a teacher, I see the overt unkindness that some students can manifest to each other at times. I have even seen this manifest in churches I have pastored over the last 50 years. But for the grace of God….