Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. (Revelation 22.12)
A prayer for God’s world today
Christ with us, You made a revolutionary difference; You were the true Revelation.
In the total chaos of a fallen world and our own sin of inherent indifference, touch our hearts to examine our souls so that we will Come Alive and engage and be changed through the indwelling of your Holy Spirit released by the sacrificial gift of Your death and resurrection. AMEN
Is the Revelation of Evil happening now?
Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. (Matthew, 24:7)
People are likening Matthew’s prophetic vision to what is happening now, the downward trajectory into a world we wouldn’t have recognised only a few years ago.
The first transatlantic telephone cable went live in 1956 but many people still thought the telephone would never overtake the letter as the preferred means of communication. Email and the Internet didn’t become widely used until the current millennium. The rise in digital communication has become meteoric since then and, with AI as a very recent addition, the capacity to communicate illusion and falsehood has become seriously problematic.
Some people see a link between the world of Revelation in John and our real world of environmental depredation, increased international tension, and spiritual decay where money rules and people reject the need for a loving and faithful master. Technological advancements that could have brought a prosperous world for all have been infected with social media that spawns the worst forms of pornography and spreads untruth with a frightening capacity to influence, manipulate, indoctrinate, and to gift evil with an additional tool to keep morals and ethics in the margins of an archaic and rigid legal system.
What does our sick world look like? Figures can only ever be estimates but Sources suggest that nearly 700 million people live in extreme poverty, 50 million are in slavery and 120 million are displaced from their homes. Approximately two billion people, or one-quarter of the world’s population, live in conflict-affected areas.
It is easy to see how people are sucked into this world of hedonism and self-interest. Pope Francis called it the “globalisation of indifference”, and in a world of indifference the Devil reaps his reward easily, watching us as we do nothing to combat it. Doing nothing is the real evil of today; we are the Devil’s workforce. Churches still proclaim the ten commandments as the route map of a good life but each commandment has a tacit subset and all come under the overarching commands to love God and neighbour. Jesus also told us to go out and preach to the world to live as he did. How many of us can claim to truly follow his path, live His way, every day.
All this seems far away, even the evil on our doorsteps hidden in plain sight. When we listen to discussions on the effect of the war in Syria, we hear about the price of oil and the cost of living, little if anything on the humanitarian disaster for the ones profoundly affected. Few think that this “revelation of evil” bodes a biblical end to the world but Revelation is about more than that, it is also about Hope, a hope that comes through Jesus Christ if only we can acknowledge our complicity, repent our inaction and strive to turn our churches into communions of love and advocacy, reaching out and speaking out, sharing not just with those near and known to us, but to those we will never see and who need what we have much more than we do.
Together we can change this wicked world and put it back on the right path, the path that Jesus showed us. With that thought comes the Hope of Revelation.
