The Book of Revelation and the Global Conflict In the Middle East "The Beast From The Bottomless Pit" By William E. Hull, Research Professor
Samford University, Birmingham, AL

Note: This three-part sermon series was preached at the Mountain Brook Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in April/May/June, 2003. Dr. Hull notes that “he was driven by the thrust of the book’s message to wrestle with major ethical issues: national hubris in the first sermon, systemic evil in the second sermon, and religious pacifism in the third sermon.”

Sermon Two: The Beast From The Bottomless Pit

     One of the most fascinating yet frightening features of the Book of Revelation is its use of grotesque symbolism to describe supernatural evil. Here we meet a beast coming up from the sea (13:1) and a great red dragon (12:3) coming down from the sky, each of them with ten horns and seven heads, reminiscent of the sea monster Leviathan and the earth monster Behemoth. They are joined by the great harlot of Babylon with whom the kings of earth have committed fornication until they and their subjects have become drunk on debauchery (17:1-2). The imagery is deliberately repulsive, never more so than today when we have ripped our Halloween masks off the face of evil and eliminated the word Satan from our vocabulary as “a medieval term that should probably be banished from civilized discourse in a multicultural world."(1)

     But before we repudiate the last book of the Bible for its scare tactics, consider the enormous impact of contemporary efforts to portray evil in monstrous terms. Think of Darth Vader’s sinister minions in the “Star Wars” epic. Or of the hideous subterranean creatures that abound in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. In the second installment, “The Two Towers,” for example, the defining battle of Helm’s Deep depicts the beastly warriors of Saruman marching in vast phalanxes on the final outpost of Rohan in a manner reminiscent of Hitler’s ferocious onslaughts in World War II. Revelation has dared to construct a symbolic world adequate to depict the magnitude of evil that its readers were being called upon to oppose. Gazing into the crater that was once the World Trade Center, we dare not do less. So let us explore why John has chosen to depict the reality of evil in all of its horrid ugliness.

Cosmic Evil

What does it mean to portray evil as a kingdom ruled by a tyrant more sinister than anything human? Is John saying that we are up against a foe mightier than our human strength to withstand? Unfortunately, that troubling question must be answered in the affirmative. As if that were not bad enough, even worse is the realization that we have created the monster ourselves! For John does not posit an absolute metaphysical dualism that would divide the universe into two eternal domains, one ruled by goodness and the other by evil. In place of this Zoroastrian/Manichean heresy, what John is saying is that there is an abyss, a “dark hole” as it were, at the heart of life which acts as a vast reservoir of accumulated evil to which we have all contributed. Nazism, for example, was not the work of Adolf Hitler alone, but was the result of innumerable compromises by thousands, even millions, of people willing to embrace the lie of a Master Race. People willing to deify a deranged paper-hanger as absolute leader, willing to erect a superstructure of “principalities and powers” that perpetrated a Holocaust that snuffed out millions of lives in an orgy of gratuitous violence.

But why do such senseless things happen again and again with numbing regularity? It is because evil wears an endless number of disguises. It dresses up in immaculate uniforms, it holds impressive parades, it plays spine-tingling music, it appeals to idealistic motives, it exploits ancient resentments. And once it gains legitimacy, it begins to build its bureaucracy of horror until it becomes a totalitarian juggernaut out of control. The task of John was to unmask this monster, to strip the seductive whore called Babylon of her allurements (17:4) so that all could see her for what she really was. Irony of ironies, even though evil is like a devouring beast (13:2; cf. 1 Pet. 5:8), its strategy is not to intimidate but to fascinate, for it does not merely want to be feared but to be “worshiped” and “followed with wonder” (13:3-4). Beware, Revelation is saying, the pomp and circumstance that parades itself in surface splendor to win your allegiance, for underneath its seductive camouflage is a disgusting brute bent on your destruction.

John deliberately used the most offensive language possible in order to show that Rome was not the glittering spectacle that it presented to the world but was a loathsome beast intent on ravaging the human spirit. The beast even employed a second beast, symbolizing the imperial cult, as its public relations agent who used dazzling displays and propaganda to glamorize its atrocities, much as Hitler used Goebbels to cover the crimes of the Third Reich (13:11-15). (2) The strategy of evil is always to use deception in offering counterfeit glory. Satan is “the deceiver of the whole world” (12:9) who misleads by telling lies both about God and about himself. The Antichrist is a false messiah who utters blasphemous denials of Christ (2 Jn. 7). If you are sickened by the repulsiveness of evil in the Apocalypse, then John has accomplished his purpose. If only Germany had been sick of Adolf Hitler in 1933 rather than in 1945! Sometimes our only defense against evil is revulsion, which comes when we have seen it for what it really is.

Human Evil

Once evil is allowed to create its own superstructure, then individuals can use, and be used by, this apparatus for diabolical ends. In John’s day, each new Caesar inherited the throne of an empire that had been drunk on its own power for generations. For example, the emperor Nero gladly volunteered to become the human incarnation of the Beast, identified by the number 666 (13:18), and the Empire gladly let him do it because the people wanted their Caesar to function as the unquestioned symbol of Rome’s absolute power.

Once Nero fornicated with the harlot of national hubris, he became the kind of man who could kick his pregnant wife to death, castrate and then “marry” a boy named Sporus, murder his own young mother, and delight in being praised as a god until he was finally declared insane by the Roman Senate. If that seems extreme, think of how we are still being brutalized by pathological narcissists, such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong II. With their subjects starving, lacking the most basic necessities of healthcare, and desperately needing education and economic development, such rulers build multiple palaces and plot nuclear catastrophe. Why? Because the disenfranchised masses are willing to concentrate unlimited power in them so that they may function as reckless agents of revenge and retaliation against a world that they resent. Lord Acton was right: absolute power does corrupt absolutely, turning potentially decent humans into cunning predators.

John was particularly sensitive to the way in which cities could become the stronghold of evil. In Revelation 17:9, he pictured Babylon as a whore seated on seven mountains, a scarcely veiled reference to Rome as the city built on seven hills. The dirge for “the great city” in Revelation 18 is a lament for the way in which urban pride can finally become self-destructive. Cities in our day easily succumb to the empire building of rapacious capitalism, of technological superiority, of cultural elitism, of intoxicating pride. When John wrote, Jerusalem already lay in ruins, but he saw that one day Rome would become “a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every fowl and hateful bird” (18:2). No wonder he closed his book with a vision of the New Jerusalem as a replacement for the Babylon that had sold its soul for power and glory.

The Consequences of Evil

Because John believed in the power of evil both to aggregate and to escalate, with no shortage of earthly agents to do its bidding, he was profoundly realistic about the ability of evil to wreck havoc on planet earth. In the middle chapters of Revelation we find a grim recitation of the horrors that depraved despots can visit on humanity. It begins in Chapter 6 with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who ravage the earth with conquest, warfare, famine, and death (6:2-8). The devastation seems endless: first there are plagues launched by the opening of the seven seals (6:1-8:5), then havoc wrought by the blowing of the seven trumpets (8:6-11:15), then pestilence poured out by the seven bowls (16:1-18:24). Each visitation seems worse than the one before as if the carnage is cumulative. However, these three symbolic series are not so much sequential as they are simultaneous, each ending in the same fashion with a terrible earthquake (8:5; 11:19; 16:17). What John is saying by his repetition for emphasis is that evil relentlessly hammers human life over and over again until the cosmos itself comes unhinged.

Rather than indulging in fantasy to construct this chamber of horrors, John ransacked the Old Testament for lurid depictions of tragedy. (3) When we read about water turning to blood, of darkness, hail, boils, frogs and locusts (8:7-8; 9:3; 16:2-4, 10), we are reminded of the plagues that fell on Egypt (Exod. 7:8-11:10). The picture of people hiding in caves and among rocks (6:15-16) echoed Isaiah’s description of the Day of the Lord (Isa. 2:10, 19). Even such cosmic portents as the rolling up of the sky and the falling of stars (6:12-14; 8:10-11) were widely anticipated by the prophets as symbolic of the overthrow of “principalities and powers” arrayed against God (Isa. 14:12-15; 34:2-4; Joel 2:28-32; Jer. 51:25-26). The massing of great hordes from across the Euphrates to fight at Armageddon (16:12-16) gathered up repeated experiences with invading armies out of the east from the time of the Assyrians to that of the Parthians. In all of this calamitous tale of woe stretching over centuries of biblical history but now reaching its climatic expression in John’s day, the most striking feature was that even catastrophe after catastrophe could not induce humankind to repent! (9:20-21).

It is not easy to read about blood flowing “as high as a horse’s bridle for two hundred miles” (14:20), but is such apocalyptic hyperbole unrealistic? Go to Auschwitz and see the ovens that filled the sky with the human ashes of genocide. Or to Dachau where ministers were horsewhipped until their bodies were a bloody pulp only because they would not salute and say “Heil Hitler.” Or to the Gulag where Stalin slaughtered upward of twenty million merely to eliminate dissent and make his regime a reign of terror. Or to the killing fields of Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge indiscriminately butchered 1,200,000 people, a fifth of the population, all in the name of social engineering driven by ideological fanaticism. Can we really claim that our capacity for cruelty has diminished over the twenty centuries since Revelation was written?

Nor are such atrocities always perpetrated by “the other side.” When our family lived in Göttingen, Germany, one of our dearest friends was Herbert Caspari, a pillar in the local Baptist church. He once told me how he stood on the hills of Göttingen and saw the fires of Kassel nearly fifty miles away. On the night of October 22, 1943, 444 British planes unloaded 1,812 tons of bombs in a span of twenty-two minutes that set the entire city ablaze leaving ten thousand people dead, including two thousand children. This was part of British General “Bomber” Harris’ strategy to incinerate 161 German cities, killing up to 650,000 civilians on the misguided supposition that this carnage would somehow weaken morale and hasten the end of the war. To read these chapters of Revelation in the lurid glare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes John’s symbolism seem almost understated.

The ultimate question, of course, is why God would allow such unimaginable suffering either in the first century or in the twentieth. The first thing to note in Revelation is that these are not capricious acts of a vengeful God upon humanity; rather, they are acts by humanity upon itself, illustrating what people are capable of doing when they turn from God to a ruthless quest for personal power. It is here that we see the terrible cost of human freedom. To be given enough liberty to love deeply, we must also be given enough liberty to hate deeply. Note how easily love can become loathing when a marriage ends in divorce, as if the two attitudes coexist side-by-side. If God kept us on a tight leash, allowing only a modest amount of rebellion, then that same leash would leave us free to give him only a modest amount of devotion. In other words, if evil is freedom misused, then the more freedom we have the more misuse is possible.

In an ultimate sense, therefore, God shares responsibility for the horror of evil because it is he who lets us self-destruct in our sin. Because he wants our freely-chosen loyalty, he permits us to engage in freely-chosen treachery. But there is no hint anywhere in Revelation that God enjoys such folly. Even when we cry to him for revenge against our enemies (6:10), his response is to give up his own Son as “the Lamb who was slain” both to share our suffering and to show us how human waywardness breaks his heart.

What have we learned from this journey into horror? Three things at least.

That evil is not just a spiritual “bad cold” that can be blown away with a box of Kleenex, but it is a deadly epidemic, a virus of the spirit much like the SARS that so quickly has blighted Asia and brought the world’s most populous nation to its knees.

That we would never choose evil if we knew what it is really like, but it always comes disguised as patriotic fervor or religious zeal or personal fulfillment.

That true freedom is costly indeed because it offers us the opportunity for compassion or cruelty, salvation or destruction, God-centeredness or self-centeredness.

The ability to choose such diametrically different options is the most dangerous gift which we possess!

If these contentions be true, confirmed both by Scripture and by contemporary experience, then how can we overcome that hideous strength that insinuates itself into our lives as counterfeit idealism but, when embraced, seeks only to exploit and enslave? Is it enough to be shocked by the lurid symbolism with which the last book of the Bible ends? John knew that many in his day had already capitulated: “they worshiped the beast, saying, ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?’” (13:4).

What is to keep us from doing the same in a day when deception is rampant, when the most flagrant sins can be made to seem innocuous with a little media spin? To ask such questions is our first line of defense against the enticements of evil. But there must be more, for our questions only expose the reality of the beast, they do not defeat it. John dared to lay bare the hideousness of the foe because he knew one who could overcome its malevolent power and in whose strength we can do the same:

And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world . . . And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser . . . has been thrown down . . . and they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb . . .” (12:9-11).

Updated Sunday, November 30, 2003