Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does Evil Ever Win? | New Testament | Revelation 9

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Does reading Revelation make you a little bit nervous for the future? Is it a foretelling of what's to come? Patrick demystifies Revelation 9 in today's episode to share some encouragement: you must never give up hope. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Revelation 9

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. The Book of Revelation has spawned some bizarre interpretations, but today you get to hear one of my all-time favorites. What happens if you read the Book of Revelation as though it's only describing future events, at least future to John, the guy who saw all of these visions? What happens if you imagine that John was put into a prophetic time machine and shot into the future

where he could see things that he simply couldn't comprehend. Well, I'll show you exactly what happens in just a moment. But after that, I want to do something more important. I want to show you how reading Revelation in John's historic context, the time in which he actually lived, how that can actually give us a radical piece of truth from this passage that changes how you think about sin and evil in your everyday life. If you listen yesterday, you'll know that we are reading about the angels playing

seven different trumpets. And those trumpets represent God's justice coming to earth. They recall old stories about the Israelites marching around the city of Jericho, blowing trumpets until the city wall fell down. They also recall the story of the Exodus because each trumpet releases a plague, and they remind you of the plagues that God sent on Egypt for holding the Israelites as slaves. So today we get to the fifth trumpet. We'll pick up in Revelation 9 verse 1. The 5th angel, sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the abyss. When he opened the abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun's sky were darkened by the smoke of the abyss, and out of the smoke

locust came on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who didn't have the seal of God on their foreheads. They weren't allowed to kill them, but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. During those days, people will seek death but will not find it. They will long to die, but death will elude them. The locust look like horses prepared for battle. On their heads, they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. Their hair was like woman's hair and their teeth like lion's teeth. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron,

and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. They had tails with stingers like scorpions, and in their tails they had the power to torment people for five months. They had as king over them the angel of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abadon, and in Greek Apollion, that is the destroyer. Now after this happens, another trumpet sounds and angels are released to destroy one third of all of humanity that aren't marked with God's special sign. But I want to go backwards and ask a question, I'm sure you're asking right now, what are these weird, locust scorpion things, or as I like to call them, lochorpions? Now, I know that might sound like a menu item at Taco Bell, but that's not what they are,

which takes us to one of my favorite bizarre readings of Revelation. Some modern interpreters have suggested that John was transported to our present and that the lococorpians he saw were actually Apache helicopters shooting missiles. You see, John didn't know what they were, but the sound of their propellers reminded him of horses rushing into battle. And he saw people in the cockpits, which is why he said that these locorpians had faces. And when he saw them shoot missiles, it reminded him of scorpions, which is why he compares them to scorpions.

Now, this bizarre interpretation is exactly what happens when we read Revelation as a prediction of John's future and rather uncritically assume that it must be describing our present. The problem is that the image doesn't even work. The locorpians don't actually kill anyone in these passages. All they do is cause people torturous discomfort. Apache helicopters kill and destroy, but they don't really torture people. But the bigger problem is that there's actually a far more sensible, explanation for this passage. And we find that explanation by paying attention to the imagery and connecting

it to the Old Testament. So first, the locust actually recall the plagues in the book of Exodus. This is back when God was setting his people free from slavery in Egypt, when God was bringing justice against Pharaoh for brutally enslaving them. And so the imagery has a clear, obvious meeting. These locorpians, they are God's liberating justice for his enslaved people. The second thing, The Le Corpians are released by Abidon. Now, that's just the Hebrew word for destruction. In this plague, God is effectively unmaking creation. If people don't want to worship him, the creator of all things, who holds all things together,

then they will just have to experience decreation. Everything he holds together will come apart. The world will fall into disorder. These strange, chimeric creatures break God's order and cause destruction. But here's the third thing. Abidon is given a second name, Apollyon, and this name sounds very similar to the Greek god Apollo. And again, this makes sense in John's original context because the Roman Emperor Nero used to love to cosplay as Apollo.

And so John is saying that his modern-day Pharaoh, the emperor Nero, is the one whose evil actions unleashed decreation and destruction upon the world. And to underline this, he actually mentions that a third. of humanity dies. And for someone in his day, this would have been a hyperlinked to an event in Nero's life. You see, he intentionally burnt down a third of Rome and killed about a third of its inhabitants. Why? So that he could build his own little pleasure garden in the wreckage. Nero blamed that destruction on the early Christians, and he used it to justify killing Peter and Paul and many others. Nero, the emperor, the Roman Empire. He is the angel of the abyss. He is

Abidon. He is Apollyon. Okay, but what's the point of all of this? God is saying that evil always redounds on itself. He's saying that when it looks like evil is winning, when Nero is burning down Rome and blaming the Christians, it never actually wins. Evil always falls into the pit it dug for the righteous. John is saying that Rome can do its worse, but rather than giving Rome what it wants, Rome will release a plague upon itself. When Nero destroyed a third of the city and he blamed the Christians, he thought that he had won. People often think they win when they do the most evil thing. But in the end, he actually caused his own destruction, which is historically true. Nero's actions ended up causing a rebellion, and he himself had to flee Rome and ultimately committed suicide.

The Roman emperor unleashed a plague of Roman locusts upon himself. So what does this mean for all of us? Well, first it means that we must never forget that evil never gets the last word. In this world, there is so much violence, death, and destruction. And it seems like whoever is willing to be the most wicked, the most vile, the most evil always wins. But that's not true. God has designed the world such that evil always ends up destroying itself. So you, you must never give up hope. God will set every small and great injustice right.

You may not actually see it in your lifetime, but nonetheless, God will do this. Here's the second thing you can learn. It means that you and me, we have to assess our own acts carefully. Are we like Nero? Are we doing things that are wrong, evil, vile, unjust? When we do those things, we set ourselves against God and welcome decreation into our own lives.

Don't unmake yourself, friend. Our calling is to be like the church in this passage. We should be marked by the Lamb, set apart from evildoers, neither unleashing evil nor even being the locust that are punishing the evil itself. Instead, we are called to care for a hurting world by witnessing to Jesus and following him. We'll see that more clearly in Chapter 11, but for now, I think we should all let this passage sober us. Jesus didn't rescue us from sins so that we could give ourselves over to it, not in the least. He rescued us from sin and gave us his spirit so that we could grow in righteousness and self-sacrificial love.

His gracious power is at work in you right now. So give your body to him, not evil. Give it to him as an act of worship.