Revelation 9: Are We Heading Into the Abyss?
by David Robertson, Christian Today:
Muhammed Ali, Prince, Harper Lee, Fidel Castro, David Bowie, John Glenn, Nancy Reagan, Arnold Palmer, Terry Wogan, Paul Daniels, Ronnie Corbett, Victoria Wood, Caroline Aherne, Shimon Peres, the King of Thailand, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Gene Wilder, Robert Vaughan, Andrew Sachs, AA Gill, Ian McCaskill, Leonard Cohen, Merle Haggard, Glenn Frey, Elie Wiesel, Alan Rickman, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rick Parfitt, Liz Smith, George Michael, Carrie Fisher. The list of celebrity deaths last year seems endless, so much so that people called it the ‘curse of 2016’. But why?
These are just a handful of the 56 million people that die each year. Away from the spotlight of the media, each of the 56 million (including the celebs) is a human being with the special value of having been made in the image of God. But the immediacy of the death of celebrities caused by Twitter and Facebook means that it almost feels as though everyone we grew up with is dying. Not exactly the most cheerful thought to begin the New Year with!
So far it seems to me that the atheistic secularist response is, “Let’s get rid of 2016 and hope 2017 is better.” But 2016 has done nothing to us and 2017 won’t either. It is an arbitrary number drawn up to help us measure the passing of time. In and of itself the year does nothing. But this week’s passage in Revelation (chapter 9) gives us a far better and more holistic and hopeful – if at first scarier – picture of what is going on.
It begins with a star falling from heaven and being given the key to the Abyss. There are those today who use this kind of apocalyptic language when they speak about what they fear. Those who are freaked out about what Brexit or Donald Trump might bring talk about ‘staring into the Abyss’. In the culture of John’s day, the Abyss was considered to be the place of the dead and the demonic.
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