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"Stand firm, for the future lies with God"
Revelation 17-19
There's a cathedral in Milan. It's Europe's third largest. Imagine for a moment, leaving the glare of the Italian sunshine and passing through its great front doors. The first thing you'd see would be fifty-two marbled columns holding up a lofty, octagonal dome, with over 4,400 turrets and pinnacles. Statues of angels rise all about the room. The effect is an incomparable combination of grace and grandeur, beauty, and vastness.
Up front behind the altar, like a window opening out of heaven, is one of the largest stained-glass windows in the world. Depicted here is not an Old Testament scene, nor the resurrection of Jesus Christ the Lord, nor his crucifixion or ascension. With tremendous imagery the window depicts the triumph of Jesus Christ the Lord, his second coming.
With the afternoon sun the window turns into a sea of glass mingled with fire, revealing the vials of wrath poured out, the trumpets, Michael, and his angels in battle against the dragon, the great angel with the rainbow upon his head and one foot upon the earth and the other upon the heaven, declaring in the name of him who lives forever and ever that time shall be no longer. Bound with a chain, Satan is thrown into the bottomless pit at last. The great white throne glows in the sunlight.
Most impressive of all is the great, white horse. Upon the horse sits a still greater rider with the armies of heaven behind him. He comes to set everything straight at last for every one of us who has hoped in him, and for everyone who has been subjected to the pain and prejudice of living for Jesus Christ in a world seemingly gone mad.
In this stained glass window, we see the general judgments of God, typified by the trumpets and vials of his wrath. We see the specific judgment on "Babylon the Great," (ancient Nineveh), as well as Rome in the time of John. "Babylon" in fact, is a symbol for evil world powers in each generation, leading up to the coming of the greatest of evil world powers led by Satan) pictured as "the great harlot" riding on a beast, a dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, who "sits on many waters" which represent many people, multitudes, nations, and languages.
How are we to interpret these symbols? An angel helps explain the mystery of the woman and the beast with seven heads and ten horns, but he says it still calls for a mind with wisdom. Many symbols have lent themselves to many different interpretations throughout history. Granville Sharp (1735-1813), prominent Greek scholar and anti-slavery activist, "once gained an interview with prominent statesman Charles Fox and proceeded to explain to him why Napoleon should be identified with "the "little horn on Daniel 7." Such historical missteps ought to have warned subsequent generations to exercise greater caution, but alas, most of us rarely study history, and we quickly forget the lessons of the past. Our lives are too brief to learn by experience all the lessons we need to know; it's a faithful saying that warns us that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat its mistakes.
Modern interpreters have had a field day reinterpreting the symbols in Revelation, many without much understanding of the original context or consistency in their interpretive methods. From the time of the Holy Roman Empire, many expected a literal revived Roman Empire. When the European states agreed on a Common Market, prophecy buffs took this as the ten horns of Daniel and Revelation.
But we need a mind with wisdom. That's what the angel told John this vision called for. The Bible requires an examination on its own terms without reading modern events into it. We can, however, apply it to the issues and events of our day, but unless we have a clear biblical indication that our time is somehow special (which only comes in retrospect) we can apply it as we would to the events of every generation and to our own lives.
To what issue or event can we apply it? The issue isn't that Rome is an evil empire; the issue is that its privileged position in international trade made it a prime exporter of immorality. So, while we might want to denounce evil nations that oppress their people by force, this passage allows us to apply Babylon's model closer to home. William Stringfellow epitomizes Babylon as "the essential version of the demonic in triumph in a nation," whether in Nazi Germany or in the United States of America. The United States, he says, is not an evil empire in the sense of totalitarian or politically repressive states like Assyria or Nazi Germany, or like Iran or North Korea today. But we can still apply the text's principles in ways relevant to our world. The truth is we have become one of the world's primary exporters of immorality. Unfortunately, for example, the export of our cherished American democracy to some post-communist countries has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in black market economies and Mafia-type crime.
Although social and entertainment media can also be used for good, they can become agents for propagating destructive values, here and abroad. Many children and some adults have copied crimes witnessed in a movie. Consider a nineteen-year-old man who stabbed to death an eighteen-year-old college woman, then killed himself; police found in his room ninety horror movies, a machete, as well as a goalie mask modeled after those used in the Friday the Thirteenth movies. Thirty-one percent of teenagers say they have copied what they see in movies and 21% of teenage crime is directly copied after what they see on television or in movies right down to the gory details.
By the age of sixteen the average child in the U.S. has witnessed "26,000 overt sex acts and as many as 400,000 sexual references and innuendos, as well as 200,000 portrayals of violence, including 33,000 murders, on television and in movies." Statistical evidence is clear that such entertainment media violence desensitizes us to real violence, helping to produce violence among a generation raised on it.
The American church may not be responsible for the behavior of our culture, but when our buying and television habits differ little from that of the rest of the world, can we deny responsibility for supporting an industry that's killing the world? Early Christians refused to go to the Coliseum to be "entertained" by watching other people suffer. It's said that in the fourth century an Asian monk named Telemachus visited Rome and was horrified by a gladiatorial fight in the Colosseum. Hurling himself between the gladiators he sought to prevent either of them from being killed, until he was killed instead. As he lay still on the ground, one spectator got up in disgust, followed by others, until everyone had gone. This marked the end of gladiatorial contests in Rome's Coliseum. Unfortunately, what early Christians avoided in public, many invite into their living rooms today.
Every empire in history, from the Assyrian to the Soviet Union, has collapsed, usually strangled by its own internal contradictions before being finished off by invaders. We need fear no empire and no repression, because history guarantees that every mere human or demonic empire will fall. We may suffer for now, but God's purposes in history will prevail. May this truth encourage us to stand firm, for the future lies with God, not with the greatest empires on today's horizon.
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Rev. Charles Eldredge is a member of Maitland Church of the Brethren. He has a Facebook page and can be contacted by email: ce1133 @verizon.net.