Chapter Ten

The Little Book





In chapter ten we continue to progress through history, but we will now see a different approach.  Beginning in chapter six we have progressed from the origins of the Church in the first century A.D. to 1453, when Imperial Rome fell at the hands of the Turks at Constantinople.  Now that Rome has been removed from the political scene we will see our story line turn in a slightly different direction.  This should not come as any great surprise.  Since the last remaining section of the Roman Empire has fallen, our story must move elsewhere.


In chapter nine we found a statement which told us that the first woe was past and that two more were still to come.  At the end of chapter nine we seem to have completed the second woe, but we do not find a statement anywhere near the end of the chapter to tell us that.  In fact we will not see that statement until chapter eleven.  Actually the second woe was over at the end of chapter nine, but we were not told this.  There are several important things that God tells us between the second and third woes which really are not part of either woe.  Since the statement mentions both the end of the second woe and the beginning of the third, regardless of where it was placed we would still have material behind or in front of it that did not belong to either woe.  If this statement had been located in the beginning of chapter ten we would have thought all of the material immediately following it was part of the third woe, when in fact, it was not.  It would have been harder to make a distinction that way, than the way it actually appears.  As we progress it will become quite evident from the context that the second woe was over at the end of chapter nine.  The reason it is written this way is that since we are shifting story lines, God must pause to fill us in on the background of what we are about to discuss.  In other words, this material is not part of either woe, but it is very necessary for us to know these things in order to understand the third woe.



10:1 And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire:


The description of the angel in this passage is one denoting beauty and majesty.  It lets us know that we are seeing an angel of God.  We see that this angel was clothed with a cloud.  In the Bible clouds have often been used to denote the presence of God.  God led the Children of Israel in the wilderness by appearing as a “pillar of a cloud” (Exodus 13:21).  At the transfiguration of Christ, God spoke from a cloud (Matthew 17:5).  When Christ ascended back up into Heaven “he was taken up; and a CLOUD received him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).  Someday man will “See the Son of man coming in the CLOUDS of heaven” (Matthew 24:30).  In the resurrection “We which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the CLOUDS, to meet the Lord in the air” (I Thessalonians 4:17).  So the fact that this angel was wearing a cloud shows that he had come from the presence of God, and was doing God’s will.


The rainbow was used in chapter four in the description of God.  But just because the same symbol is used to represent both God and this angel, we should not make the assumption that the angel’s appearance is as beautiful and glorious as God’s.  In Genesis 1:27 we find that man is created in God’s image; which of course refers to our spirit.  Man is created in His image, but is not exactly like Him.  If someone wished to describe God and man (the spirit) some parts of the description would certainly be the same.  This would not mean that God and man were the same, but would reflect the fact that man was created in God’s image.  We have no statement in the Bible which says the angels were created in God’s image, but it is very likely they were.  So descriptions of both would yield some similar characteristics, even though they are not exactly the same.  When the rainbow is used here to describe the angel it simply means that the angel possesses a quality of beauty similar to that of God, but certainly less in quantity.


The brightness of his face, which was like the sun, denotes his glory and power, just as the sun appears this way to the inhabitants of the earth.  His glory was further illustrated by his feet which appeared like pillars of fire.  This angel’s pathway would always be well lit by his own glory as he traveled.



10:2 And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth,


From the description of the angel in the last verse we can see that he possesses great power and authority from God.  He now comes to the earth and places one foot on the land and the other on the sea.  This tells us that whatever he is about to do will have a widespread effect.  Were he to stand only on some portion of land, we might deduce that this land was to be the focus of his mission.  However, since he stands on the land and the sea we must conclude that his impact is to be felt, not only within the land upon which one of his feet rests, but also upon all land which is readily accessible from the sea that his other foot rests upon.  Taking this one step further, since we already know the area of the world we are dealing with, I believe we can conclude that one of his feet rests on the European continent, and the other upon the Mediterranean Sea.


This angel had in his hand a little book.  This little book is the Bible.  Christ had warned the apostate Church in His letter to Pergamos (A.D. 313-532) that if they did not repent He would come and fight against them with the sword of his mouth (Revelation 2:16).  This is exactly what is about to happen.  They did not heed His call to repent, but rather continued to drift further into apostasy.  The sword of Christ, which is the word of God, will prove to be the downfall of spiritual Rome.


The popes have led Rome farther and farther from the truth, so that anyone who respects the authority of the Bible must, of necessity, take a stand against Rome.  Of course there had always been those who opposed Rome, but violent oppression had kept most of them from going public with their beliefs.  However, around 1400, history tells us that men like John Wiclif and John Hus began to make serious waves which were never calmed.  Although both of these men were killed because of their opposition to Rome, the ideas that they espoused, namely that the Bible is the sole authority on all spiritual matters, did not die with them.  Other men continued to arise like John Calvin and Martin Luther who also openly opposed the Catholic doctrine.  The waves continued to swell until finally, in 1793, the Catholic ship was sunk for good.  Yes, the pope is still around, but he no longer possesses the great political clout he once had.  This idea will become much clearer in subsequent chapters.


What we are shown in this verse is that the Bible is about to be returned to the people.  For centuries the only copies of the Bible which existed were in the hands of the Catholic clergy.  For one thing, before the printing press, each copy had to be made by hand.  This greatly limited the number of copies that were available.  But the Catholics also conspired to keep the Bible out of the hands of the laity.  Since their doctrines and practices were so different from what the Bible taught, they had a great need to keep the people in ignorance.  But their advantage is about to come to an end.  And as soon as ordinary people did begin to have access to the Bible, the Reformation began.

 

There is one event, although not directly mentioned here in Revelation, that must be mentioned at this point.  There has been no war, revolution, natural disaster or other calamity that has had such a tremendous impact on the European continent.  This event served to destabilize every European country economically, politically, socially and religiously.  For every four people in Europe one died.  Its per capita death toll makes it the worst disaster in recorded history.  It occurred just fifty years before the Reformation began, its destabilizing effects paving the way for monumental changes to begin sweeping Europe.

 

“The plagues and famines that struck European society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries profoundly affected economic life.  Initially, they disrupted the established patterns of pro­ducing and exchanging goods and led directly to what some scholars now call "the economic depression of the Renaissance.!'  But the effects of this disruption were not entirely negative; in reorganizing the economy under greatly changed demographic conditions, Europeans were able to make certain significant advances in the efficiency of economic production. To understand this paradox we must first examine how these disasters affected the population of Europe.

 

Demographic Catastrophe

 

Scholars have uncovered some censuses and other statistical records that for the first time give an insight into the size and structure of the European population.  Nearly all of these rec­ords were drawn up for purposes of taxation and they therefore usually survey only limited geographical areas—a city or a province—and are rarely complete. But although they give us no reliable figures for total population, they still enable us to discern with considerable con­fidence how it was changing.

 

Almost every region of Europe from which we possess such records shows an appalling decline of population between approximately 1300 and 1450.  For example, the population of Provence in southern France seems to have been between 350,000 and 400,000 at about 1310; a century later it had shrunk to something between one-third and one-half its earlier size, and only after 1470 did it again begin to in­crease.  The population of the city and country-side of Pistoia, near Florence, fell from about 43,000 in the middle of the thirteenth century to 14,000 by the early fifteenth.  The neighbor­ing city and countryside of San Gimignano had approximately 13,000 residents in 1332 and only 3,100 in 1428; the region still has not regained its maximum medieval size.

 

For the larger kingdoms of Europe the fig­ures are less reliable, but they cannot be too far from the mark.  England had a population of about 3.7 million in 1347 and 2.2 million by 1377.1 By 1550 it was no larger a nation than it had been in the thirteenth century.  France by 1328 may have reached 15 million; it too was not again to attain its peak medieval size for several hundred years. In Germany, of some 170,000 inhabited localities named in sources antedating 1300, about 40,000 disappeared dur­ing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Since many of the surviving towns were simultane­ously shrinking in size, the population loss could only have been greater.

 

Certain favored regions of Europe, how­ever—the fertile lands surrounding Paris or the Po valley—continually attracted settlers and maintained fairly stable populations, but they owed their good fortune more to immigration than to high birth rates or immunity from dis­ease.  It can safely be estimated that all of Eu­rope in 1450 had no more than one-half, and probably only one-third, of the population it had had in the thirteenth century.

 

Pestilence

 

The great plague of the fourteenth century pro­vides the most evident, although perhaps not the most satisfactory, explanation for these huge human losses.  In 1347 a merchant ship sailing from Tana in the Crimea to Messina in Sicily seems to have carried infected rats.  A plague broke out at Messina and from there it spread throughout Europe.

 

This Black Death was not so much an epi­demic as a pandemic, striking an entire conti­nent.  It was not the first pandemic in European history.  One had raged across Europe in 542, during the reign of Justinian.  But it was the first in perhaps eight hundred years, and it struck repeatedly during the century.  A city was lucky if more than ten years went by without an onslaught; in some part of Europe, in almost every year, the plague was raging.  Barcelona and its province of Catalonia, for example, lived through this record of misery in the fourteenth century: famine, 1333; plague, 1347 and 1351; famine, 1358 and 1359; plague, 1362, 1363, 1371, and 1397.

 

Some of the horror of the plague can be glimpsed in this account by an anonymous cleric who visited the French city of Avignon in 1348:

 

To put the matter shortly, one-half, or more than a half, of the people at Avignon are already dead.  Within the walls of the city there are now more than 7,000 houses shut up; in these no one is living, and all who have inhabited them are departed; the suburbs hardly contain any people at all. ...

 

The like account I can give of all the cities and towns of Provence.  Already the sickness has crossed the Rhone, and ravaged many cities and villages as far as Toulouse, and it ever increases in violence as it proceeds.  On account of this great mortality there is such a fear of death that people do not dare even to speak with anyone whose relative has died, because it is frequently remarked that in a family where one dies nearly all the relations follow him, and this is commonly believed among the people.

 

Most historians identify the Black Death as the bubonic plague, but they find it difficult to explain how this disease could have spread so rapidly and killed so many, since bubonic plague is more truly a disease of rats and small mammals than of human beings. If bubonic plague is to spread to a human, a flea must bite an infected rat, pick up the infection, and carry it to a human host through a bite. The infection causes the lymphatic glands to swell, but re­covery is not uncommon. Only if the infection travels through the bloodstream to the lungs, causing pneumonia, can the disease be spread directly from person to person. The real killer in the fourteenth century seems to have been a pneumonic plague, which infects the lungs directly; it probably was spread through cough­ing and was almost always fatal.

 

In spite of the virulence of pneumonic plague it is hard to believe that medical factors alone can explain the awesome mortalities. Af­ter all, Europeans had maintained close contact with the East, where the plague had been en­demic, since the eleventh century, but not until 1347 and 1348 did it make serious inroads in Europe. In addition, pneumonic plague itself is a disease of the winter months, but the plagues of the fourteenth century characteristically raged during the summer and dissipated with the cooler weather of autumn. Some scholars consider that the weather of the age—it seems to have been unusually cool and humid—some­how favored the disease. Others argue that acute, widespread malnutrition had severely debilitated the population and lowered resis­tance to all kinds of infections.

 

Hunger

 

A second cause of the dramatic fall of popula­tion was hunger. Famines frequently scourged the land; and even if they were less lethal than the plague in their initial onslaught, they were likely to persist for several years. In 1315, 1316, and 1317 a severe famine raged in the north of Europe; in 1339 and 1340 another struck the south. The starving people ate not only their reserves of grain but most of the seed set aside for planting. Only a remarkably good harvest could compensate for the loss of grain by pro­viding both immediate sustenance and seed for future planting in satisfactory quantities.

 

Why was hunger so rampant in the early fourteenth century? Some historians now locate the root of trouble in the sheer number of peo­ple the lands had to support by 1300. The me­dieval population, they say, had been growing rapidly since about 1000, and by 1300 Europe was becoming the victim of its own success. Parts of the Continent were crowded, even glutted, with people. The county of Beaumont-le-Roger in Normandy, for example, had a population in the early fourteenth century not much below the number it was supporting in the early twentieth century. Thousands, mil­lions even, had to be fed without the aid of chemical fertilizers, power tools, and fast trans­port. Masses of people had come to depend for their livelihood upon unrewarding soils. Even in good years they were surviving on the slim and uncertain margins of existence; a slightly reduced harvest during any one year took on the dimensions of a major famine. Through hunger, malnutrition, and plague the hand of death was correcting the ledgers of life, balanc­ing the numbers of people and the resources that supported them.”[1]

 

In some areas three-fourths or more of the population died, other areas were more fortunate.  No area of Europe, however, was spared the ravages of this plague.  One thing that is not mentioned in the above reference is how the whole event was viewed religiously.  As people died by the millions where was God?  And more importantly, where was the one who supposedly represented God here on earth?  If the pope was so powerful why couldn’t he do something to stop this?  The prayers of millions who were dying and their family members seemingly went unanswered.  The Black Death, more than anything else could have, shook the foundation of Catholic faith in Europe.  It also devastated the ranks of the priesthood.  Many people, the rest of their family already dead, found their way to monasteries and churches seeking to be cared for.  Others wound up there because they were ostracized by their families at the first sign of illness.  And in most cases of death the priest would be called to come and administer the last rites, thereby being exposed to the disease.

 

With the faith of so many already weakened, Europe was ripe for revolution, a spiritual revolution.  It was in the aftermath of this that the seeds of the Reformation took root and grew.  Its seems very obvious that the Plague was used by God the prepare the battlefield for the struggle to come.

 


10:3 And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.


The angel, once he had positioned himself upon the land and the sea, spoke something with a loud voice, similar to a lion when he roars.  Lions are famous for their ferocious roars.  Many brave men have had chills run down their spine upon hearing a nearby lion roar unexpectedly.  The comparison with a lion shows the power and majesty of the voice, qualities usually attributed to a lion.


We are not told what the angel said nor to whom he was speaking.  But the context of this situation should give us a good idea.  He is coming to give the Bible back to the common people, and his message was likely a statement of his intentions.  He probably said something like, “The Bible is now open for all to read and understand.  Let all who will, come, and partake freely of the words of life.”


As soon as this angel had spoken, John also heard another very loud and powerful voice.  As with the angel, we are not told what this voice said nor to whom it was addressed.  And this time we do not even know its source.  But once again, by seeing what is going on here, we can deduce who was the source of the thunders and what they said.  This will be addressed more closely in the next verse where we are given a little more information.



10:4 And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.


After the tremendous voice, which was likened to seven thunders, had spoken, John was about to write the message down.  After all, John had been instructed to “write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter” (Revelation 1:19).  So he was only following the directions he had been given.  But before John was able to do this, he was interrupted by another voice which told him not to write these particular words.  The obvious question is why?  John was in Heaven for the purpose of seeing and hearing things, and then writing them down, so why would he be forbidden to record this?


John heard something that was not meant to be part of the record of the events he was witnessing, that much is clear.  There are two possible ways this could have happened.  Either one of God’s servants accidentally said something that John was not supposed to hear, or someone who did not speak with the authority of God was the source of this message.


Examining the former possibility, are we to believe that one of the angels, or another of God’s servants, made a mistake here?  Does not all that we have seen to this point show that they knew exactly what they were doing?  Everything has been in such perfect harmony thus far, but did someone slip up here?  No, I do not believe this was an accident.


Then we are left with the other alternative of someone who was not intended to speak at all, interjecting his comments into the proceedings.  But who would do such a thing?  The angel which spoke first was described in a way which lets us know he was righteous and holy, but no such description was given of the one who spoke like seven thunders.  It could have been anyone, and we have no clue as to their character or their motive.


Who would have the strongest reason to speak up when the angel proclaimed that the Bible should now be opened to all people?  Certainly Satan, and all those who side with him, would like nothing better than to see every last copy of the Bible destroyed.  They certainly do not want it to become widely distributed; this applies particularly to the Catholics.  They had fought the Lord’s Church for centuries trying to keep the people ignorant to the contents of the Bible.


The illustration of thunder has been used before in Revelation to show power and might.  The voice of God was described as sounding like thunder in chapter four.  A similar description is made of the voice of one of the four creatures in chapter six.  In chapter eight, thunders are heard from the earth when the angel threw his censer full of fire from the altar into the earth.  So clearly thunder does not denote anything good or bad in and of itself, it simply denotes power.  Whether or not that power is righteous or evil must be determined by other means.


Here I feel that the term “thunders” is used in order to bring to our minds the picture of a very powerful and destructive force.  It is also important to note that the number of thunders was seven.  We have mentioned several times that this number symbolizes completeness.  So if thunder represents something evil here, and since there were seven thunders, we have a picture of everything that is evil and ungodly.  And certainly everything evil would cry out with pain and displeasure when the source of all goodness, the Bible, was made more readily available to man.


Therefore we can see that the seven thunders were the voices of Satan and all his evil minions, especially the Catholics, who vehemently opposed the opening of the Bible to the general public.  Satan and his followers stand against all things that are pure and good and righteous and holy, which is exactly what the Bible is.  With the Bible more available, Satan’s power and influence will be reduced.  His ability to deceive men through the agency of the Catholic Church will be drastically curtailed.


Before John was able to record the comments of the evil forces reacting to the opening of the Bible, someone told him that these words should not be included in his book.  Of course John would have otherwise had no idea as to the validity of what he had heard.  But beyond not writing down what the seven thunders had said, John was told to seal the message up.  In other words, he was never to reveal what he had just heard to anyone.


This whole situation shows us one of the major points of contention between God and the Catholic Church.  Here God has sent His angel to proclaim that the Bible should be open and available for all to read and understand.  But just as soon as God says this the Catholic Church says, “No it should not!  Leave it closed!  The people will not be able to understand it.  Let the priests interpret it for them.  And let the pope settle any disputes which arise over its interpretation.”  The magnitude of this blasphemous effrontery is amazing.  The pope stares straight into the face of God and says, “You are wrong!”  But the papacy’s centuries of domination were quickly coming to a close.  The Bible was being opened and no one would ever be able to close it again.



10:5 And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven,

10:6 And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer:


After the matter of the seven thunders was cleared up, the angel who was standing upon the earth and the sea began to speak once more.  He lifted up his hand toward Heaven, which shows that he is speaking to or about someone in Heaven.  The angel is going to, in effect, use God as his reference here.  He is affirming that what he is about to say is true because he is speaking on behalf of the mighty God of Heaven.  It is similar to saying, “As God is my witness, this or that is true.”


He describes God by referring to his eternal nature, and the fact that He is the creator of everything which exists in the entire universe.  The statement which he makes, and affirms by God, is that “there should be time no longer.”  This statement sounds very ominous.  Is he speaking of the end of the world?  By reading further in Revelation we can clearly see that many things happened after this, so he must not be speaking of THE end of time.  But then what is he talking about?


We need to pause and recall what this angel’s purpose is.  He was sent to bring the Bible back to the common people.  He is carrying out the Lord’s promise to fight against the apostate Roman Church with the sword of His mouth.  He did not come to signal the end of creation, but the end of the power and authority of Rome.  So the message of the angel simply means that Rome’s time is up.  It is Rome who has time no longer, not the entire world.  They would not repent, despite the longsuffering of God, therefore He is about to bring judgment against them.



10:7 But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets.


We have finally come to the seventh trumpet.  It is also the third of the three woe trumpets.  In chapter eight we saw that the seventh seal revealed, not another world event as the first six had, but the seven trumpets.  We will find a very similar occurrence here.  The seventh trumpet will not reveal any important event, but will simply reveal seven vials.  This explains the wording here in this verse “when he shall begin to sound.”  The effect of the seventh trumpet was not a single event that can be pinpointed in time.  Much to the contrary, it revealed events that stretched over many centuries of time.


When the seventh trumpet sounds “The mystery of God should be finished.”  But what is the “mystery of God?”  The word “mystery” here is from the Greek “musterion,” which Thayer defines as “mysteries, religious secrets, confided only to the initiated and not to be communicated by them to ordinary mortals.”[2]  The papacy was forced to be secretive because her doctrines were so foreign to the Bible.  They were forced to try to keep ordinary men in ignorance, so that they would accept the domination of the pope.


This same word is also used in chapter seventeen as part of the name of the Roman Church.  “And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” (Revelation 17:5).  The “mystery of God” is the Roman Church, which certainly is not the Lord’s Church, but is more like a mystery where its origins and authority are concerned.  So saying that the “mystery of God should be finished,” simply means that the Roman Church is about to be “finished.”  Finished is from the Greek “teleo,” which Strong’s defines as “to end, i.e. complete, execute, conclude, discharge (a debt):-accomplish, make an end, expire, fill up, finish, go over, pay, perform.”[3]  We can see from this definition that “finish” does not necessarily mean complete destruction.  It can also refer to a completion or conclusion.  The time of power and influence of the Catholic powers is about to be completed by the unfolding of certain world events.  In essence the first vial will be the beginning of the end for Papal Rome.


“As he hath declared to his servants the prophets.”  At least two men prophesied of the downfall of the Pope.  Daniel was given insight to this, as well as Paul.  “I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake: I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame.  But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end” (Daniel 7:11, 26).  “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (II Thessalonians 2:3).  John is now given a much more detailed view of the papacy and her fall than were either of the other two.

 


10:8 And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.


The voice that spoke to John in verse four now speaks to him again.  In both cases it is simply referred to as a “voice.”  Since John makes no attempt to tell us who the speaker is I must assume that he does not know himself.  But regardless of the source of the voice, we know that it is speaking for God since John is allowed to write down what it says.


The voice tells John to go and take the little book, which we have already identified as the Bible, from the angel’s hand.  It is interesting to notice that the book is open.  For centuries the Bible had been virtually closed to all except the Catholic clergy.  Now it is being opened so that all men who desire it can have access to it, and the wonderful truths it offers to man.



10:9 And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book.  And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

10:10 And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.


Following the instructions of the voice from Heaven, John goes toward the angel which is standing upon the earth and the sea, and asks him for the little book.  The angel complies with John’s request and gives him the book.  But he also gives John some instructions, he tells John to eat this little book.  John does not hesitate to obey, and eats the little book as instructed.  John eats the little book even though he was warned that it will make his belly bitter.


Most people have some food or foods which tend to disagree with them.  It may upset their stomach, or it may give them indigestion or heartburn, or cause some other malady.  And quite often, the foods which cause a person trouble are some of their favorites.  So the person is tempted to eat the food which he so enjoys, even though he knows what the consequences will be.  Here John is placed into a very similar situation.  The angel had told John beforehand that the book would be sweet as honey in his mouth, but would make his belly bitter.


How would eating the Bible cause such diverse reactions in the mouth and the stomach?  We will liken the former to getting a taste of the Bible, and the latter to thoroughly digesting it.  Anyone who gets a small taste of the Bible finds it very sweet indeed.  It speaks of God’s blessings upon those who are faithful to Him.  It speaks of God’s mercy and grace, His love for mankind, and His willingness to sacrifice His own Son for man.  And it promises eternal life in a place grander than any man can imagine.  What could be sweeter than this?  As David said, “How sweet are thy words unto my taste!  Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119:103).


But what happens when people begin to digest the Bible?  When they begin to see beyond the basics?  They soon see that a Christian is expected to sacrifice many things if he is to serve God.  He is expected to bear a cross daily (Luke 9:23).  To place God above all earthly relations (Matthew 10:37).  And to suffer any and all persecutions that arise because of his faith (Philippians 1:29).  He might even be asked to give his life in the Lord’s service (Revelation 2:10).  History is filled with instances of great persecution against the Church, and the accounts of thousands who have been slain in defense of the truth.  As the apostle Paul said, “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (II Timothy 3:12).  All of these things were especially true of the Church shortly before and during the Reformation.  The papacy reacted violently to the increasing pressures of dissension which quickly infected all of Europe.


These are things which most people do not think about at first.  These things often come later as harsh lessons in reality.  I have always heard the saying “It can’t be good for you if it tastes good.”  And for the most part I have found this to be true.  It is also said that medicine can not be any good for you if it does not taste bad.  Well the Bible tastes very good at first, but it upsets your stomach and can make you feel very bad.  But one has to “take his medicine” if he ever wants to get well.  In other words, a person has to bear the sometimes unpleasant “medicine” of Christ in order to be healed from his sins.



10:11 And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.


After he had eaten the little book, the angel told John that he would prophesy again before the entire world, before very diverse audiences; people from many nations and of varying social and economic status.  John was already a very old man when this statement was made.  It is believed that Revelation was written sometime in the A.D. 90’s.  John was a grown man when he was with Christ during his ministry here on the earth.  We know that Christ died in A.D. 30, and that John had been with him for about three years.  Using the very conservative assumption that John was only twenty when he met Christ, he would have been eighty-nine when he received the Revelation; most likely he was even a little older than this.


The reason I have went to the trouble of establishing John’s old age is to show there was no way for him to physically go and prophesy “before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.”  Even beyond his old age, John had been banished to the Island of Patmos, where he received and recorded the Revelation.  Even if he were physically capable, John would not have been allowed to travel around prophesying.  The prophesying that the angel speaks of here was to be done through the book that John was instructed by Christ to write (Revelation 1:11).  Though long dead, John prophesies today every time the words of Revelation are read and studied.

 

 


[1] Chambers, et. al., 1983, pp. 351-6.

[2] Thayer, 1989, s.v. “Μυστήριον.”

 

[3] Strong, 1982, s.v. “Greek #5055.”