Banana Spined Dingos.
“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. 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 Revelation 12:17.
The description of the beast in this passage has political overtones. Horns are frequently a symbol of political power in the Old Testament. 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 (Revelation 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 or Israel of the flesh in Gaza. No evil is impossible when demonic power removes all human restraint and amplifies the natural of evil and 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, church members and carpenters. All picked up machetes and hacked to death defenceless men, women, and children. This is merely a sad record of history.
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. I have had on occasion church members hunt me like a pack of banana spined dingos.
The church has a section of violent readers. People who rip passages out of context and cut-n-paste them together to say what they want. You can prove anything from the Bible (or other writers) by this violent exegesis e.g. one verse says, “Judas went and hung himself” another verse says, “Go thou and do likewise.”
Tragically, we find people in the church even, who are judgmentally harsh on diet and character and what is wrong with everything and everybody, and by so doing they are reproducing the character of the devil. The become “accusers of the brethren” as they attack leadership, other members, or what is wrong with the church. Some modern churches even have their spiritual Gestapo. Some people work for the Lord like the devil! In all this they forget that the church, weak and defective as it may be, is the bride of Christ and therefore the object of His supreme regard on earth.
We have already discussed that Revelation is about the ‘revelation’ of God’s character to the world and to the Universe for whom we are the theatre. When the character of Christ is perfectly reproduced in His people then He will come. This means, as the Bible teaches, that God’s church, if it is to manifest the character of Christ, must be a church of lovers, reflecting Him in doing His works of unselfish love. This is love made perfect. Being like Him in character is not teaching sinless perfection but works of love. “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” (John13:34-35)
God wants to make us a church of lovers! He wants us to be the most loving people on the planet. The last revelation given to the world by the church is His character of love. In His famous “sermon on the mount” Jesus said , “But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Matt 5:48 NLT. The context of this passage is loving your enemies – one of the hardest things to do! (read it from v43).