Blogging Bible Study - Digging in the Desert: Revelation

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Wow, my friends, we have made it.  This is the last book in the Bible that mentions 'desert'...of course, it also happens to be the last book in the Bible, period.  Revelation, the prophetic visions given to John on the island of Patmos after he survived Nero's attempt to kill him by cooking him alive in a vat of oil.  It is full of imagery and allegory and John's best attempts to describe things he had no vocabulary for.   (Could 'two wings of a great eagle' be his best attempt to describe an airplane?  We just don't know.)  His poetic language does make it difficult for us to interpret what he is trying to say, because we want to make it fit familiar places and known technology (like airplanes). And, he writes of 'what was, what is, and what is to come'...but he doesn't identify which is which, and it is not in chronological order. I kinda think, though, when we get to the kingdom and see what it was he was trying to say, we will all agree that he was correct, even though we gave it wrong meanings.  Because we'll see what he saw and see how it makes sense.  But in the meantime, we do the best we can, knowing full well that we might be way off base. 

I always remind myself, when I see all the folks who have charts and things describing end times, that the best Bible scholars of  the first century were looking just as avidly for his coming...and, because they had already made up their minds what it would be like, they missed it, because the reality didn't match their reasoning.  When trying to work through prophetic writings, there is always the grain of salt that human thinking...is limited. 

So, that being said, there are three verses in Revelation that mention 'desert':

A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.  She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.... She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.  And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.  The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days. -- Rev. 12:1, 5-6 

As a kid, Revelation 12 was a fantastical story to me...the pregnant woman, the baby, and the dragon, who is mentioned in the verses I skipped just because I didn't want to type out the whole chapter.   But verses 3-4 describe the enormous red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns, a tail that pulled 1/3 of the stars from heaven to earth, who stood in front of the woman giving birth so he could devour her child the moment it was born.

Creepy and graphic stuff for a pre-teen.  But it doesn't end there... the woman and her child were both snatched away at once and the dragon ("and his angels") fought against the armies of heaven ("Michael and his angels"), lost the battle and was flung to earth out of the heavenly realm, along with the angels who fought with him.  Verse nine specifically states that the dragon is "that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray."  Most commentators hold that this is all allegory and the woman is figuratively the nation of Israel, and her son is Jesus.  Which makes sense, and could very well be right.

Then we have a bit of poetic declaration, warning the inhabitants of the earth about the fury of the dragon, and the narrative picks up again in verse 13:

When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times, and half a time, out of the serpent's reach....Then the  dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring -- those who obey God's commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.  -- Rev. 13-14, 17

This seems to me to be repetitive; the woman fleeing to the desert is described twice.  The first time it just says she fled there, the second says she was given wings to fly there.  In any case it is a place prepared for her, and it is for 1,260 days...or, a time, times and half a time.  Again, Bible commentators refer to this as half of the Great Tribulation...that 7 year time when the whole world goes absolutely bonkers at the end of the age. 

The other reference to 'desert' also is a wild and creepy reference to a different woman all together...who is referred to in 17: 1 as 'The Great Prostitute':

Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert.  There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns.  The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls.  She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries.  This title was written on her forehead: "MYSTERY  BABYLON THE GREAT  THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH."  I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.  When I saw her, I was greatly astonished. -- Rev. 17:3-6

It's interesting; because I have pulled those two references out owing to the mention of 'desert', I see something I have never seen before.  The description of the beast is almost identical to the description of the dragon in chapter three.  Yet the angel who is explaining this thing to John in the rest of the chapter makes it pretty clear that the beast is not the dragon...the beast seems to represent kingdoms of the earth, while the woman represents some other kind of power associated with Babylon.  I have heard different religious systems interpreted as the woman; I'm not sure if one particular religious system fits the bill or if it applies to all false religious alliances with political kingdoms.  Or if it represents the demonic power that drives those kinds of power grabs, putting men in places that only God should inhabit. I can kind of see that, too.  In any case, the beast will eventually turn on her and humiliate and destroy her, for all that they appear to be allies in the onset.

So...the first two references to desert refer to a place of protection; the last was the trysting place of the beast and the drunken woman.  An attempt by the beast to pawn off the prostitute as the woman who fled to the desert?   That's an idea I have not heard of before...the prostitute proclaimed to be the woman in the desert, the true mother of the followers of God?  That would definitely sound like she represents some kind of religious entity...the beast brought her out of the desert, where the first woman had been known to be in hiding...it does make a sort of weird sense.

Revelation is a fascinating and mysterious word; I really am looking forward to the day when we see it from the other side and all say, "Oh, so THAT'S what that was!  Yes, I see that now!"  When we no longer see through a glass, darkly, so to speak...

I will be out of pocket for the next two Fridays, but I'll be back on Good Friday with a look back over the last 18 months in the desert.  What a trip it's been...

 

Blogging Bible Study -- Digging in the Desert: The Epistles

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

There are three verses...THREE... that reference 'desert' in all of the Epistles.  All of them are historical references, and they all need a bit of context.

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea....Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert.  Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did.  Do not be idolaters, as some of them were...We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did...We should not test the Lord, as some of them did...And do not grumble, as some of them did....  - 1 Cor 10: 1- 10 (selected).

So, as the Holy Spirit says, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did."  - Heb 3:7- 9, quoting from Ps. 95.

Who were they who heard and rebelled?  Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years?  Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert?  And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest, if not to those who disobeyed?  So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.  -- Heb.3:16-19

I have often heard that one of the compelling arguments for biblical authenticity is that the narratives are often unflattering to the folks who are supposed to be the main characters in the story.  Someone writing with an agenda would certainly portray the leads as more admiral people, with fewer flaws.  But, no, the narratives are unflinching in relating the good, the bad and the ugly of the heroes. 

These things occurred as examples...

We, as believers, are to learn from the experiences of God's people in the Old Testament.   They 'set their hearts on evil'...and four examples are listed of the kinds of evil they allowed themselves to fall into:

1) Idolatry...they worshiped something other than God. Now, we don't hold festivals to golden calves, but...what do we hold as supreme?  What gets our devotion?  An idol doesn't have to be a carved replica of something...it could be an ideal, a person, an institution, a political agenda, a social issue, material possessions, etc etc etc.  ANYTHING that takes precedence in our lives over the simplicity of obedience to God Is. An. Idol.

2) Sexual immorality.  Folks, this is a real thing.  Our society today doesn't even consider that there can be sexual behavior that is outside of the plan and blessing of God.  Anything goes, between consenting adults.  To suggest that there are standards that should not be violated will get you cancelled in a heartbeat. But it's there.  Plain as day.  Over and over in the scripture, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear...or, maybe, for those who don't close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears and sing, 'God loves me and wants me to be happy!' so as not to see the repeated refrain that followers of God are to refrain from sexual immorality.  Which, actually, is a kind of idolatry, as it values sexual pleasure above the simple concept of living in obedience to God.  God did bless human sexuality...but only in the context of heterosexual, covenantal marriage. It takes pretty extreme manipulation and out of context readings to attempt to justify any other sexual expression as legitimate...from serial monogamy to extreme, um, variances.  And manipulating scripture to support an agenda or behavior is a pretty strong indicator of the presence of an idol.

3) Test the Lord.   The reference to the serpents points to the story in Numbers 21, where the people got impatient with Moses and God...again...and accused them of bringing them to the desert to die. 'We detest this miserable food!' they said (Num 21:5)  The Greek word used in 1 Cor 10:9, is ekpeirazo, translated in the NIV 4 as 'Test'...in the KJV as 'Tempt'  and in the NASB as 'Try', means ' 1) to prove, test, thoroughly and 2) to put to proof God's character and power'.  The Blue Letter Bible reference  says 'to prove, test thoroughly [God's] mind and judgment'.  So..we've kind of got two mental pictures here: one, to keep hounding God over and over on the same subject, trying to get him to change or respond differently; the other, to make demands of him to prove who he is. Either attitude shows a lack of respect for who God is and what he's done.

4) Grumble or complain.  We actually hit this pretty hard when we were covering the Exodus, with the side quest of counting the number of times Israel complained/ grumbled against God. Complaining indicates a lack of gratitude...and the whole downward spiral of the last half of the first chapter of Romans shows that great apostasy starts with a lack of thankfulness to God. An entitled attitude, so to speak.  'God owes me [fill in the blank]'.  The Israelites believed God owed them ...a quick trip, comfortable conditions, variety in their diet, etc.  God's intention, though, was to test them to see if they would be faithful.  Most of them...failed the test.  They grumbled and complained. And they were destroyed...by, most translations state, 'the destroyer'; some, 'the destroying angel'.  

These four things happen when we...guess what...'harden our hearts'.  That is, we see the choice before us, know what the right choice would be, and deliberately choose what we want instead.  Eve hardened her heart when she looked at the fruit on the tree, deciding to do what she wanted instead of doing what she had just said God required.  Cain hardened his heart when God told him to resist the sin that was at his door and do what was right.  Pharoah hardened his heart when Moses first asked him to let the people take a three day journey into the desert to worship.  Moses hardened his heart when he struck the rock in anger.  Achan hardened his heart when he took the things he was to give over to God.  Samson hardened his heart when he desired foreign, pagan women.  David hardened his heart when he called Bathsheba to him, and hardened it more when he sent Uriah back to the war with the orders to see to it that he died in battle.  I could go on.  I could also name times and places where I hardened my own heart to get something that I wanted.  I knew better; I chose worse.  Most of the time I pretended to myself that I didn't know better.  Self-deception is a frequent type of heart-hardening.  If we can become alert to the heart-hardening process...and resist it...that's maturity.

The failures of the Israelites in the desert are preserved for us to learn a better way: obedience.