Free Grace Bible Study

I knew a man who believed he was a prophet, and he talked a lot of people into believing it with him. End times took over his life. He set dates for when God would tear evil out of the world, more than once. He wrote brutal letters to family, and at a few gatherings he stood up and pronounced judgment on the people right there in the room. He never claimed to be one of the two witnesses, but he seemed determined to live like them. He went to Israel, ended up wandering the desert with his family, and police picked them up and sent them home. He called himself a mouthpiece of God, the one here to announce the end. That man’s story is a shadow. The real ones show up later, at a set moment God chooses, not a date a man picks.

When I was fourteen, my dad had a birthday coming up, and my mom decided to throw him a surprise party with his childhood friends. It was a strict secret. My brothers and I were not supposed to say a word, and in our house, we were not very good at keeping secrets. I remember standing in the laundry room when I casually asked Dad, “When are the Bakers coming?” The Bakers were the family of his childhood friend, and they had kids our age. I was looking forward to seeing them. But that was the secret, and Dad didn’t know. Dad gave me a cockeyed look and said, “What are you talking about?” I knew right away I had just let a secret loose into the wild. So I babbled some nonsense, pretending I was confused about something I’d overheard. Dad looked at me even more cockeyed and said simply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” As far as I know, I didn’t spoil the surprise, but I came close. In this chapter of Revelation, John receives a secret. It’s sealed up, and we’re not allowed to know what it is. But one day, it will be revealed.

When I was about nine years old, I was digging in the yard. My brother saw me with the shovel and said, “If you keep going, you’ll reach China.” He probably meant this as a joke, though I wouldn’t put much confidence in either of our understanding of geography or plate tectonics at the time. I abruptly stopped, finding it disturbing to imagine people from another part of the world crawling up out of my favorite hole project. At various times throughout childhood, I would return to the dream of digging a really deep hole. When we were eleven or twelve, we attempted to dig a hole big enough to be a boy’s bunker. For the uninitiated, this is like a clubhouse, but just way more subterranean. We never got deep enough to make the bunker, but we had one fantastic mud day, when my younger brother had the idea of filling our in-progress hole via the garden hose. The deepest hole I have ever seen was actually a cavern, one of those where you can pay a little money and they will take you down into the dark. Although this one was rigged with lights, the tour guide turned them off at one point and let us just experience the dark silence. Later in the tour, he turned the lights off again and said, “If you were to walk ten steps in the direction of my voice, you would fall forever. Or at least that’s what the first explorers down here thought.” He went on to explain that there was an underground overlook that the previous century’s spelunkers had discovered. When they had thrown a rock over the edge to gauge the depth, they never heard the crash. They wondered if they had truly found a bottomless pit. It turned out that they didn’t hear the crash because the not-so-bottomless hole was lined, a few hundred feet below, with a deep layer of guano. That’s bat poop. Centuries’ worth of it. The rock had landed with a soft, silent plop. It certainly wasn’t bottomless, but it wasn’t the kind of bottom you’d want to find either. In this chapter of Revelation, we discover a pit so unfathomable that the author calls it the abyss, or in some translations, the bottomless pit.

When I was about twelve, my brother Lance and I were turned loose in the woods while Dad helped a friend build a house. We had matches in our fanny packs—tough-guy gear, somehow still in a fanny pack. We came to a field of tall, crispy, late-season grass. Lance lit a match, dropped it, and we stamped it out. Then another. Then another, waiting a little longer each time. It was fun—until it wasn't. The burn stopped being a little circle and started spreading. One of the other boys wanted to run. We had a moment of indecision that almost divided our group. Fire does that. We turned back, dipped our turtlenecks in a nearby pond, and beat the flames until we were choking and covered in ash. We got it out. When we got back, Dad joked that we looked like we'd been playing in a fire. That night Mom got a call: the burn was the size of three school buses. Our punishment was no fireworks at the church lock-in. We never played that game again. I tell that story because Jesus talks about fire in this passage, and it is jarring.

1998 was a huge year for life-ending meteor strikes to the earth, at least according to Hollywood. I was a freshman in high school when two major movies with the same premise came out only a few months from each other: Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, and Deep Impact, starring Elijah Wood and Morgan Freeman. These two movies depicted extinction-level events where something from space came to Earth with cataclysmic effects. The fear of space rock impacts was not just in the movies. The late 90s were already flooded with existential dread. As Y2K (Year 2000) was approaching, there was talk of the end of the world as we knew it. In ’94, astronomers watched in awe as pieces of a giant comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, smashed into Jupiter. In early ’98, just months before these two movies debuted, the discovery of a mile-wide asteroid, hypothetically on a collision course with Earth, was announced to the public. It splashed across newspapers and outlets worldwide and terrified everyone. The same year that the public panic was peaking, and the movies were released, the US government announced a NASA program called the Spaceguard Survey, a kind of planetary defense that was supposed to chart near-Earth objects that pose a threat. These were my high school years, years we lived in the notion that the end of the world was possibly at hand. It was in that time that my youth group took up the study of Revelation. As we worked our way through the verses on Sunday nights, I was astonished. Especially in chapter eight, where the content, specifically Wormwood, sounded a lot like the two movies I had just seen in the theater. I was both amazed and not a little scared. As the years have passed, the meteor hysteria has decreased, but one day, it will return with a fiery resolve. That’s one thing we will discover in this chapter.