Sermon from December 19, 1999
During the mid-1980s, our friend, Dr. Bob Cook, now professor emeritus of Western Seminary in Portland, OR went behind the Iron Curtain to teach Bible and theology to men and (sometimes) women, who hungered and thirsted for such knowledge and who made great sacrifices to get it. Dr. Cook  came back and told us how they held classes. He was taken to the "classroom" at night, rather late at night. It was unsafe to hold class by day. When he arrived, he found giant, concrete sewer pipes waiting to be used in some water management project. They were big enough for a grown man to stand up in. His hosts led him inside the pipes.

There to his astonishment he found his students, armed with Bible, pen, paper, and flashlight, prepared to study the Word of God. For the next two hours Dr. Cook taught them the faith that God has entrusted to the Church. For two weeks, night after night, he returned to find his students eager and willing to learn, willing (eager?) to run the risks of being caught and punished by the communist regime they lived under.

For much of the 20th century more than half the human race has lived under political conditions that opposed and often actively repressed all religions, but especially Christianity. The Church of the 20th century has looked into the teeth of the beast. It seemed good to me to take a few minutes today and pay tribute to those who overcame the beast in our bloody century. To prevent us from indulging purely personal whims, I want to root this tribute in the scripture that teaches us about the beast – Revelation 13.

Chapter 13:1-2 starts us off. And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.

John used the exact language in Revelation 12:3 to describe the devil. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. John did that, because he believed the legitimate government of Rome had to some degree become demonic. We should never come to that conclusion about any government casually. The normal Christian doctrine about every government authority teaches that God established it, and it is God's servant in the governance of the world. But Christian doctrine also teaches that government can become demonic. We are going to see why John believed that had happened to Rome.

Verse 3 says, One of the heads of the beast seemed to have a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The Roman Empire under Nero had a bad moment when Nero committed suicide. His death left a power vacuum in which four different pretenders vied for the throne within one year. It was a period of near chaos (Climax, 443), when the empire came near disintegration. Some historians refer to it as "the year of the four emperors." Then, the empire, under Vespasian, righted itself, put down all rebellion and ruled once again, unchallenged from the Atlantic to India. The fatal wound had been healed.

No wonder that John wrote the rest of verse 3 and verse 4, and in these verses we can begin to see why John (and others) believed that the demonic had taken hold of Rome. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast. Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?"

With these words John begins to build a major criticism of the Roman Empire, and this criticism holds a central place in Revelation. It comes to its climax in chapters 17-19. Here the beast who seemed to have received a fatal wound and then been healed is the first stroke of John's portrait of Rome as a false Christ. He sees the empire as imitating Jesus' death and resurrection. The result in both cases is worship. Men worshiped the dragon ... and they also worshiped the beast.

This claim to total human allegiance constitutes all totalitarian government. It will increasingly fill the pages of Revelation, and it would finally bring down on Rome the wrath of God. I want you to remember this claim to ultimate human allegiance, because it will mark a government that has begun to take on characteristics of the beast of the Book of Revelation.

I got a feeling for how this arrogant claim works in a visit to the First Baptist Church of Kluj Napoca, Romania in 1982. We met the pastor of the church in his office, and he told us how the ministry was going, where he had been educated theologically (Switzerland), what his family was like, and so forth.

Our interpreter had cautioned us not to ask sensitive political questions. The reason for that was right across the hall, and he was not exactly an associate pastor. He was a communist bureaucrat, assigned an office in the church, and charged to keep an eye on affairs of the church and to inform the authorities of anything that happened that was contrary to the interests of the state.

A second characteristic of the beast emerges clearly in verses 5-6. The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. John saw in the Roman imperium an open, defiant challenge to the Lord of heaven and earth.

But how does one challenge God Himself, except to challenge and defy God's earthly representatives? That means moving with force against the Church. Verse 7 describes that force. He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them.

Verse 7 goes on to say, And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. The same langauge occurs earlier in 5:10. There heaven sang of the Lamb of God, "...with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation." Once again the empire challenged heaven. The beast imitates the Lamb in the claim to authority over all the earth.

Actually, what is breath-taking about this claim to authority over all the earth is not Rome's claim to authority over all the earth. Rome already had that authority. The breath-taking part of Revelation is Christ's claim to authority over all the earth. Revelation does not so much reflect a challenge of Rome to the Church, but of the Church to Rome. These little bands of Christians called churches had found a home in most of the towns and cities of the empire, but they were a small and persecuted minority. How dare they say that the Lamb had authority over all the earth? Today, we know where the Church is. But just for the record I ask you: Where have all the Caesars gone?

However, in John's day things looked very different. Verse 8 captured the political reality. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast – all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world. And John was very realistic about the short-term prospects for the Church.

Verses 9-10.   He who has an ear, let him hear.
                          If anyone is to go into captivity,
                             into captivity he will go.
                          If anyone is to be killed with the sword,
                             with the sword he will be killed.

This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints.

Have we seen the pattern of Revelation 13 in our lifetime? Allow three names to evoke the 20th century for you: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. We call them totalitarian dictators. They all claimed for their regimes absolute control over the people under them, including the Church under them. Hitler and Stalin had ambitions for world domination. They all sneered at the Chuch. You may remember Stalin's famous response to the pope when the pope called for greater human rights in Russia. "How many divisions does the pope have?" And when you remember how many pastors and theologians supported Hitler, perhaps you can appreciate the power of the beast.

                                              ...man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority
Most ignorant of what he's most assured –
His glassy essence – like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep. (Measure for Measure)

Do we see anyone in this country at the end of the millennium who fits the profile of the beast? I raise that question for two reasons. First, I raise it as a caution. The primary Christian doctrine is that the government in power is there because God established it, and it is God's servant in the governance of the world. No one person, acting alone or in haste, should charge that government has been co-opted by the demonic. I will not bring such a charge.

That brings me to the second reason why I raised the question. I raised it in order to answer it. My answer is, "No, I do not believe that we see anyone who fits the profile of the beast, because I do not see any coercive efforts being made by the government against the Church." But we have seen all too many of them in the past 100 years. How has the Church done when menaced by the beast?

The Church's response, not surprisingly, has been mixed. I mentioned the German pastors who supported Hitler. There were indeed capitulations and denials. That is only what we might expect. What we might not expect, what the great tyrants did not expect, was the tenacity of those who did not "bow the knee to" the beast.

320 elders and preachers and 167 lay people from German churches met in Barmen, German, on January 3-4, 1934 and issued a document called The Barmen Declaration. It declared the Church's first loyalty to be to Jesus Christ, not to the Third Reich. It cost some prominent people their jobs and put all at risk. Here are two excerpts from the delcaration. It may sound tame to us, but theological professors who agreed lost their positions, and the Gestapo arrested hundreds of Protestant pastors who agreed.

The Declaration said, "We reject the false teaching, that the church is free to abandon the form of its proclamation ... in response to prevailing ideological beliefs." It said later on, "We reject the false teaching, that the state, over and beyond its special (God-given) commission, should or could become the sole and supreme authority in human life, thus fulfilling the vocation of the church," (Readings, 278-279).

And what shall we say of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, lying on the rotting bedstraw of the Gulag, returning to the Christian faith of his childhood, and sounding for all the world like an Old Testament prophet, when he came to this conclusion:

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is restrained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil... .

"And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destory only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more." (ibid., 615-616).

Most of all, what shall we say about millions of ordinary people, who defied the beast and paid dearly? There is Vladimir Okhotin, a Russian Baptist, who only wanted to teach church choirs how to sing, and who was put into prison for more than two years above stinking factory fumes, which nearly ruined his beautiful baritone voice. But while there he sang while he worked the songs of the faith, and other men came to him for prayer and counsel and demanded that the authorities allow him to sing and counsel.

There are the young Christian men in Uganda, who were put to death because they refused to be the homosexual lovers of powerful men in the government of President Idi Amin. There are the believers of southern Sudan, whose wives and children have been kidnapped into forced slavery by Muslims in the north. There are millions of Chinese and Vietnamese who worship and pray and suffer and receive theological education in hiding but very little international attention or help.

But I ask you again: Where is Hitler? Where is Stalin? Where is Idi Amin? All the great tyrants of the 20th century are, in every sense of the word, history. The regimes they founded are history, but before they passed away more than 100,000,000 people died under those regimes just in Europe. And now rumors of change are heard in those that remain, especially China, Vietnam, and Cuba. And in the congregations of Jesus for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see there is a perdurable hope and inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade (1 Peter 1:5).

In the language of the Book of Revelation the Church overcame the beast by the blood of the Lamb. As the Lord told the truth about Himself before the authorities even though it cost Him His life, His followers in the 20th century have told the truth about Him, even though it cost them dearly too. The Resurrection vindicated the Lord; the passing of the great tyrants and the spread of the Church has vindicated the martyrs. Great hope gripped hearts and held them through the darkness. The real flowering of the suffering will come to fruition in the next 100 years.