Climax of Prophecy – Review and Commentary

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Richard Bauckham says he has been fascinated by the Book of Revelation and has studied it for twenty years. In Climax of Prophecy, he offers a way to understand Revelation as rooted in early Jewish Christianity yet applicable for all times, places, and peoples.

Bauckham examines the book’s literary composition, use of Old Testament scriptures, place within the Jewish and Christian apocalypse traditions, and its contextuality then, now, and in the future. To this last point, he writes this about Revelation’s true character,

…As a prophetic critique of the political idolatry and economic oppression intrinsic to Roman power in the late first century, and as a call to its readers to bear witness to the truth and righteousness of God in the specific circumstances — religious, political, social, and economic — in which they lived in the cities of the Roman province of Asia. p. xiii

However, Bauckham writes that Revelation cannot be reduced to only a sociological commentary, but instead,

Justice must be done to its character as a sophisticated literary work of individual genius, embodying a highly reflective vision of the impact of the divine purpose on the contemporary world. Its social strategy — a call to radical dissociation from structural evil — is based on a perception of the Roman Empire as an oppressive system, characterized by political idolatry and economic exploitation. p. xiv

Climax of Prophecy is composed of eleven essays, many of which have been published previously. Bauckham has tied the essays together by inline cross-references and updated them. The essay titles are,

  1. Structure and Composition
  2. The Use of Apocalyptic Traditions
  3. Synoptic Parousia Parables and the Apocalypse
  4. The Worship of Jesus
  5. The Role of the Spirit
  6. The Lion, the Lamb, and the Dragon
  7. The Eschatological Earthquake
  8. The Apocalypse as a Christian War Scroll
  9. The Conversion of the Nations
  10. The Economic Critique of Rome in Revelation
  11. Nero and the Beast

This is a technical book, not a reader’s commentary. Bauckham studies and analyzes Early Greek. He references and critiques many authors. However, there are nuggets of insight to be had for lay people like me.

The following materials are based on my note taking while reading Bauckham’s commentary. I believe his interpretation is closest to a right understanding of Revelation though I reserve the possibility of limited historical correlation, yet not in a way that violates the scripture,

But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. Mark 13:32-33 (English Standard Version)

But, instead, in a way that affirms the scripture,

From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Matthew 24:32-33 (ESV)

And we must not forget, the end, our end, is always near (Rom. 13:11.)

Pictures of the Apocalypse (1933,) Great Babylon (Rev. 17:3,) Gebhard Fugel (1863-1939)

Bauckham offers the following simplified section division of Revelation in chapter one, “Structure and Composition,” page 25:

VersesDivision Title
1:1–8Prologue
1:9–3:22Inaugural vision of Christ and the churches including seven messages to the churches
4:1–5:14Inaugural vision of heaven leading to three series of sevens and two intercalations:
 6:1–8:1; 8:3–5Seven seals, numbered 4 + 1 + (1 + intercalation) + 1
 8:2; 8:6 – 11:19Seven trumpets, numbered 4 + 1 + (1 + intercalation) + 1
12:1–14:20; 15:2–4The story of God’s people in conflict with evil
15:1; 15:5 – 16:21Seven bowls, numbered (4 + 3) without intercalation
17:1–19:10Babylon the harlot
19:11–21:8Transition from Babylon to the New Jerusalem
21:9–22:5The New Jerusalem the bride
22:6–21Epilogue

In chapter seven, “The Eschatological Earthquake,” Bauckham writes that “John’s method of expanding earlier images in later visions” likely is an overarching principle controlling the structure of the book. An interesting conjecture he makes under this assumption is that Revelation, verses 19:11 – 21:8, are a recapitulation of prior visions which serve as a transition from John’s description of Babylon the Harlot in chapters 17-18 to New Jerusalem the Bride in chapter 21. Revelation 20:1-10 is likely not an added interval before the Last Judgment but rather a different way of seeing the Last Days between the Crucifixion and Parousia.

Returning to chapter one, “Structure and Composition,” Bauckham contends that John, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, used the technique of verbal coincidences between scriptural texts (gezera šāwâ) to not only study the Old Testament, like they did, but to construct his Revelation. He observes,

Texts containing the same words or phrases could be used to interpret each other. In effect, Scripture was treated as containing the same kind of network of internal cross-reference by repetition of phrases (often, of course, in somewhat varying form) as John has created in his own work. Since John certainly understood himself to be writing the same kind of inspired, prophetic work as the prophetic scriptures he studied, the parallel is surely not accidental. John wrote a work to which he expected the technique of gezera šāwâ to be applied, a work which would yield much of its meaning only to the application of this exegetical technique. p. 30

Bauckham also identifies numerical symbolism and coincidences as important to the structure of the book. For example, he writes,

Corresponding to the 7 times 4 occurrences of the Lamb, are the seven occurrences of the fourfold phrase by which Revelation designates the nations of the world (‘peoples and tribes and languages and nations’: the phrase varies each time it occurs but is always fourfold: 5:9; 7:9; 10:11; 11:9; 13:7; 14:6; 17:15. It designates all the nations of the world, who, despite their present allegiance to Babylon and the beast, [are] the object of the Lamb’s conquest to bring into God’s kingdom. p. 37

Additionally, Bauckham cites common myths, zodiacal signs, and recent history with which John’s readers would be familiar as raw materials for John to freely use to inform and challenge his readers to patient endurance, gospel witness, and moral obedience.

In chapter two, Bauckham discusses the uses of apocalyptic traditions in Revelation. He points out that the contrast between hearing the number of God’s servants who were sealed and seeing the great multitude no one could number before the throne and the Lamb conveys a new message for God’s people. He writes,

Thus, John has made use of the tradition about the completion of the number of the martyrs and integrated it into the sequence of seven seal-openings in order to raise, for the first time, a major theme of his prophecy: that the remaining interval before the coming of God’s kingdom is the period in which God’s faithful people must bear witness to the point of suffering and death. p. 57

The third chapter, titled, “Synoptic Parousia Parables and the Apocalypse,” is mostly technical, citing correspondence between verses in the synoptic gospels and Revelation. I refer you to an earlier blog post for an outlined correlation.

In chapter four, titled “The Worship of Jesus,” Bauckham says that “the theme of his whole prophecy is the distinction between true worship and idolatry.” He writes,

The ‘eternal Gospel’ is summarized in the words ‘Fear God and give him glory… and worship him’ (14:7), and the conflict between God and Satan takes historical form in the conflict of human allegiances manifest in worship. The Apocalypse divides mankind into the worshippers of the dragon and the beast (13:4, 8,12,15; 14:9, 11; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4; cf. the emphasis on idolatry in 2:14, 20; 9:20) and those who will worship God in the heavenly Jerusalem (7:15; 14:3; 15:3-4; 22:3; cf. 11:1). p. 135

He says the contrast between beast worship and God’s worship is epitomized by the visions of Babylon the harlot in 17:1-19:10 (cf. also 2:20-22,) and New Jerusalem the bride in 21:9-22:9. Bauckham writes,

The message of these two visions is emphasized by their parallel conclusions (19:10; 22:8-9), which enable John to end both with the injunction ‘Worship God!’ The angel’s refusal of worship reinforces the point: Do not worship the beast, do not even worship God’s servants the angels, worship God! p. 135

Chapter five describes the role of the Spirit of God in Revelation. According to Bauckham, the Holy Spirit’s purpose, through John’s Revelation, is not to foretell future events but to enable the Christians in the seven churches (representative of whole Church in the last days) to be Christ’s witnesses to the world, seeing their present circumstances from the perspective of the future. Bauckham writes,

…This could only be done by directing their sight and their lives toward the coming of the Lord. The point was not so much to enable them to foresee the future as to enable them to see their present from the perspective of the future. p. 172

The prayer for the Parousia is at the heart of Christian living according to the Apocalypse. Christian life must be lived under the Spirit’s direction towards the eschatological future out of which the Lord is coming. p. 172

He then challenges us by stating,

The story of the witnesses [(Revelation 11:3-13)] is to be read neither as simple prediction (history written in advance) nor as allegory (history or future history written in code symbols). Rather it is a story through which the churches are to perceive imaginatively, through the perspective granted them by the Spirit, their vocation, and their destiny. Like 22:17, the story functions as a summons towards the eschatological future. It is not so much a story which predicts the future as a story which creates the future. P. 172

In a theme Bauckham returns to several times in Climax of Prophecy, he writes,

Bearing the witness of Jesus is a matter of sharing ‘in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance’ (1:9): it leads to suffering, rejection, and death. p. 172

The eschatological perspective alone creates the paradox in which the invitation to new life is also, so it must have seemed in the churches of Asia in the nineties, a summons to death. p. 173

He says that this view should not lead to nihilism and a meaningless life. Rather, our present takes meaning from Christ’s finished work (1:5-6; 5:9,) His everlasting life (1:18,) and His imminent return (22:12.) His sacrifice for us, “provides the model for positively living towards the Parousia.” Bauckham writes,

The followers of the Lamb must follow His way through death to life (cf. 14:4), and in so doing they may know that it is the way through death to life primarily because it was so for Him. p. 173

He then says something startling about the witnesses of Revelation 11.

Any and every city, in whose streets the corpses of the witnesses lie, is thereby identified, its character seen in the Spirit, as Sodom and Egypt. The value of this identification as part of the Spirit’s message to the churches is that it enables them to characterize situations of conflict in their true perspective, to distinguish appearances from underlying reality, to see through the apparent success of the hostile world and the apparent failure of faithful witness. p. 173

In the chapter titled, “The Lion, the Lamb, and the Dragon,” Bauckham says that John’s visions were meant to, “promote spiritual insight. They were to manifest that most important characteristic of symbols, namely their power to direct our thinking and our orientation towards life.” p. 176

As an example, he says John hears that,

Jesus Christ is the Lion of Judah and the Root of David [(5:5,)] but John ‘sees’ him as the Lamb [(5:6)]. Precisely by juxtaposing these contrasting images, John forges a symbol of conquest by sacrificial death, which is essentially a new symbol. p. 183

The fact that Christ is the Lamb of God was well known (John 1:29,36; Acts 8:32; 1 Cor 5:7; 1 Pet 1:19). So was His victory through death (Col 2:15). The novelty, Bauckham writes, of,

John’s symbol lies in its representation of the sacrificial death of Christ as the fulfilment of Jewish hopes of the messianic conqueror. p. 184

He goes on to say that this perspective becomes the way to understand the Old Testament war visions and symbols in the new light of Revelation.

Bauckham calls attention to “The Eschatological Earthquake” in chapter seven. He defines it as both a shaking of the heavens and the earth, naming the former a “cosmic quake.” Also, it is a symbol of divine intervention, judgment, God’s presence, and vindication of the people of God. He writes,

Both 6:12-17 and 20:11 are explicitly passages in which the earthquake accompanies the theophany of God the Judge. Moreover, in these two cases John employs the tradition of the cosmic quake, in which the heavens as well as the earth flee from God’s presence. p. 209

Delving deeper into these verses, he writes,

The first passage echoes several Old Testament descriptions of the Day of the Lord. The second seems to include the notion of the destruction of the old cosmos to be replaced by the new (cf. 21:1). The first passage refers, and is the first reference in Revelation, to the same final earthquake to which 8:5; 11:13,19; 16:18 also refer. In the case of 20:11, however, the earthquake is located on the far side of the millennium [(20:1-10)]. p. 209

Bauckham notes that, like “the bride adorned for the eschatological marriage” and “the gathering of the nations to battle,” John uses the cosmic quake image twice, on either side of the millennium (20:1-10.) He then conjectures,

…It may be that the whole sequence 19:11-20:15 should be seen as another instance of John’s method of expanding earlier images in later visions. Just as the seven last plagues are summed up in 11:19, so perhaps 19:11-20:15 does not take us on beyond the earlier images of the End but expands them. The clearest indication of this would be the echo in 20:11 of earlier earthquake descriptions in 6:14 and 16:20. The vision of the sixth seal may then be intended already to point forward as far as the Last Judgment. p. 209

Provocatively, Bauckham examines “The Apocalypse as a Christian War Scroll” in chapter eight. He writes, “John reinterprets the holy war traditions and makes the warfare metaphorical rather than literal.” p. 213 As he wrote in, “The Lion, the Lamb, and the Dragon,” here he writes,

Jesus the Messiah has already defeated evil by sacrificial death. He…won a victory, but by sacrifice, not military conflict, and he has delivered God’s people, but they are from all nations, not only Jews. The continuing and ultimate victory of God over evil which the rest of John’s prophecy describes is the outworking of His decisive victory won on the cross. p. 215

Bauckham also interprets 7:14, against most other commentators, as,

…Those whom the Lamb’s sacrificial death has ransomed from all nations (5:9) share in His victory through martyrdom. Against most of the commentators, this must be the meaning of 7:14. p. 228

The messianic army is an army of martyrs who triumph through their martyrdom because they are followers of the Lamb who participate in His victory by following His path to death. p. 230

The consequence, he says, is not setting aside Israel’s hopes for eschatological triumph, but, instead,

The Lamb really does conquer, though not by force of arms, and His followers really do share His victory, though not by violence. The combination of the Lamb and the 144,000 conveys the sense that there is a holy war to be fought, but to be fought and won by sacrificial death. p. 230

Not only is this response operative for the first century but for us and our children. Bauckham writes, “The message is not, ‘Do not resist!,’ so much as, ‘Resist—but by witness and suffering, not by violence.’” p. 236.

It becomes clear that the change of perspective from earth to heaven and present circumstances to the Parousia that Bauckham explains in chapter five, “The Spirit of God in Revelation,” is the way to understand victory in this holy war. He writes,

From the earthly perspective it is obvious that the beast has defeated the martyrs (11:7; 13:7). To ‘those who dwell on earth’ — people who see things from an earthly perspective — the power of the beast seems supreme and irresistible, and this is why they worship him. ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?’ (13:4). p. 236

…From a heavenly perspective, things look quite different. From this perspective the martyrs are the real victors. To be faithful in bearing the witness of Jesus even to the point of death is not to become a helpless victim of the beast, but to take the field against him and win. p. 236

He sums it up as,

The martyrs conquer not by their suffering and death as such, but by their faithful witness to the point of death (cf. 12:11). Their witness to the truth prevails over the lies and deceit of the devil and the beast. For those who reject this witness, it becomes legal testimony against them, securing their condemnation. This negative function of witness is present in Revelation. But it entails also a positive possibility: that people may be won from illusion to truth. p. 237

In chapter nine, “The Conversion of the Nations,” Bauckham relates his insight into the opened scroll,

…The distinctive new message of the scroll: the divine intention that ‘the shattering of the power of the holy people’ (Dan. 12:7) will prove salvific for the nations. p. 301

He calls the story of the two witnesses (11:3-13,) which immediately follows John’s eating the scroll, a kind of parable. He says,

[The] two individual prophets represent the prophetic witness to which the whole church is called in the final period of world history, the 1260 days (11:3) p. 301

Bauckham explains his thesis this way,

The church’s role of witness is appropriately portrayed by a story about two prophets. Just as it would be a mistake to take the story literally, so it would also be a mistake to take it in too strictly allegorical a way, as though, for example, the sequence of events in the career of the two witnesses were intended to correspond to a sequence of events in the history of the church. The story is more like a parable, which dramatizes the nature and result of the church’s prophetic witness to the nations. Because it is a parable, it can be taken less as a straightforward prediction than as a call to the churches to play the role which God intends for them. p. 301

He says that the witnesses call to repentance proves more effective than judgments alone (p. 301.) However, he says, “it does so only as a result of the martyrdom and vindication of the witnesses.” p. 301

This, Bauckham says, is the way to understand Daniel’s prophecies. He writes,

Daniel’s prophecies of ‘the shattering of the power of the holy people’ (12:7), the giving over of the holy place to be trampled (8:13; cf. Rev 11:2), and the defeat of the saints by the beast (Dan 7:21; cf. Rev 11:7) are understood as indicating the way in which other Old Testament prophecies of the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God are to be fulfilled. p. 303

However, he writes, “This is intelligible only as the way in which the followers of the Lamb participate in [Christ’s] victory, won by His faithful witness, death, and vindication, and so [gives] that victory universal effect.” p. 303 Bauckham writes, “the role which the church’s suffering witness is to play in the conversion of the nations is the content of the scroll which the Lamb’s victory qualified him to open.” p. 303

If we accept Bauckham’s view, then,

The eternal gospel is therefore the call which Psalm 96 itself contains, the call to all nations to worship the one true God who is coming to judge the world and to establish His universal rule. p. 305

He sums up his view by writing,

The immediate effect of the Lamb’s own victory was that His bloody sacrifice redeemed a people for God. But the intended ultimate effect is that this people’s participation in His sacrifice, through martyrdom, wins all the peoples for God. This is how God’s universal kingdom comes and the concluding verse of the song of Moses is fulfilled: ‘The Lord will reign forever and ever’ (Exod. 15:18). p. 307

The rest of Revelation expands on this theme of the church’s witness, setting it in a broader context and elaborating on its results. p. 303

Before closing out the chapter, Bauckham addresses the problem of universal salvation implied by God’s universal kingdom. He writes,

Revelation seems to offer only two possibilities for the nations: repentance, fear of God, genuine worship of God (11:13; 14:6; 15:4) or persistence in worshipping the beast, refusal to repent, refusal to worship, cursing of God, final opposition to God’s rule, leading to final judgment (14:9-11; 16:9, 11, 21; 17:14; 19:17-21). p. 310

Therefore, the same judgments, modelled on the plagues of Egypt and culminating in an earthquake, characterize the witness and vindication of the two witnesses (11:6, 13) and the seven last plagues (16:2-21). In the first case, they lead to the worship of God, in the second the response is cursing of God. p. 310

He then spotlights the apparently contradictory dichotomy posed by the two witnesses and seven last plagues,

We do not take the images seriously if we allow either to qualify the other. The picture of universal judgment does not mean that the picture of the universal worship of God is not to be taken fully seriously, nor does the picture of the universal worship of God mean that the picture of universal judgment is not to be taken fully seriously. Because Revelation deals in images, it does not make the kind of statements which have to be logically compatible in order to be valid. p. 310

It is no part of the purpose of John’s prophecy to preempt this choice by predicting the degree of success the witness of the martyrs will have. One thing is certain: God’s kingdom will come. p. 310

Driving home the consequences for rejecting the church’s faithful witness and God’s call to repentance, he writes,

[Verses] 15:5-19:21 show how the refusal to heed the church’s witness hardens the world’s opposition to God into a final climactic attempt to oppose the coming of God’s kingdom. They also show how witness to the truth becomes evidence against those who reject it, the evidence which judges them. This is why the martyrs form the Lamb’s army (17:14; 19:14) when he wages war with sword of His mouth (19:15), i.e., the evidence of His own faithful witness, continued by His followers, becomes His word of judgment on those who finally reject it. p. 310

Finally, summing up the chapter, Bauckham writes,

…The sacrificial death of the Lamb and the prophetic witness of His followers are God’s strategy for winning all the nations of the world from the dominion of the beast to His own kingdom. p. 337

In chapter ten, “The Economic Critique of Rome in Revelation,” Bauckham explains Rev. 17:3 as the Roman civilization riding on the back of Roman military power. He writes,

From John’s Jewish Christian perspective, the political religion of Rome was the worst kind of false religion since it absolutized Rome’s claim on her subjects and cloaked her exploitation of them in the garb of religious loyalty. Thus, for John, Rome’s economic exploitation and the corrupting influence of her state religion go hand in hand. p. 348

Bauckham frames Rome’s indictment as all-encompassing and highlights John’s portrayal of evil Roman society. He writes,

The accusation recurs, this time with a judicial image, in 18:24: ‘in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slain on earth.’ Here the prophets and saints are the Christian martyrs, and many commentators understand ‘all who have been slain on earth’ also as Christian martyrs, but this is not the natural sense, and it robs the verse of its climax. Rome is indicted not only for the martyrdom of Christians, but also for the slaughter of all the innocent victims of its murderous policies. The verse expresses a sense of solidarity between the Christian martyrs and all whose lives were the price of Rome’s acquisition and maintenance of power. p. 349

Like every society which absolutizes its own power and prosperity, the Roman empire could not exist without victims. Thus, John sees a connection between Rome’s economic affluence, Rome’s idolatrous self-deification, and Rome’s military and political brutality. The power of his critique of Rome — perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique from the period of the early empire—lies in the connection it portrays between these various facets of Rome’s evil. p. 349

This critique is obviously applicable to every world empire including ours and the next one on the horizon.

Then, Bauckham makes a significant observation on Rome’s fall. He writes,

Revelation most often portrays the fall of Rome as vengeance for the death of the Christian martyrs (16:6; 18:24; 19:2; cf. 18:6). But this is certainly not the whole story: God’s judgment of Rome is also attributed to her slaughter of the innocent in general (18:24; cf. 18:6), her idolatrous arrogance (18:8), and her self-indulgent luxury at the expense of her empire (18:7). p. 350

Subsequently, he makes a wry and convicting observation concerning John’s readers. Bauckham writes,

…It is not unlikely that John’s readers would include merchants and others whose business or livelihood was closely involved with the Roman political and economic system. For such readers John has set a kind of hermeneutical trap.

Any reader who finds himself sharing the perspective of Rome’s mourners—viewing the prospect of the fall of Rome with dismay — should thereby discover, with a shock, where he stands, and the peril in which he stands.

And for such readers, it is of the utmost significance that, prior to the picture of the mourners, comes the command: ‘Come out of her my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues’ (18:4). p. 376

Reinvoking the themes of, “a call to radical dissociation from structural evil” (introduction) and “sharing ‘in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance’ (1:9) [leading] to suffering, rejection, and death” (chapter 5,) Bauckham notes,

John’s critique of Rome therefore did more than voice the protest of groups exploited, oppressed, and persecuted by Rome. It also required those who could share in her profits to side with her victims and become victims themselves.

But those who, from the perspective of the earth and the sea were Rome’s victims, John saw from the perspective of heaven to be the real victors. Hence his account of the fall of Babylon climaxes not in the laments of the kings, the merchants, and the mariners, but in the joyful praises of the servants of God in heaven (19: 1-8). p. 378

In the final chapter, “Nero and the Beast,” Bauckham says that Revelation says nothing explicitly about Nero, but likely alludes to his persecution (Rev 17:6; 18:24; 19:2; cf. 6:9-10.) He conjectures,

We can well imagine that John would have seen the historical Nero as the figure in whom the imperial power had so far shown most clearly its antichristian tendency: as self-deifying absolutism which sets itself against God and murders His witnesses (cf. 11:7; 13:5-7). The impending confrontation between the beast and the followers of the Lamb would appear to John as an apocalyptic extension and intensification of the Neronian persecution. p. 421

Again, against prevailing opinion, Bauckham separates the accounts in chapters 13 and 17 from each other. He writes,

John has constructed a history for the beast which parallels that of Christ. The beast, like Christ, has his death, his resurrection, and his parousia. This has not hitherto been recognized, because exegetes who recognize the influence of the Nero legend on chapters 13 and 17 have supposed that the healing of the beast’s mortal wound in chapter 13 must be the same event as the beast’s coming up from the abyss in chapter 17. They have supposed this because they have assumed that the Nero legend controls John’s thinking…On any showing it is clear that John has reworked the Nero legend freely for his own purposes. p. 444

…In chapter 13 the beast’s recovery from his mortal wound consolidates the imperial power of Rome, whereas in chapter 17 the beast’s return from the abyss is a threat to the empire which leads to the destruction of its capital. p. 444

…John’s account of the beast is not just an imaginative creation. It is a theological reading of the history and future of the Roman Empire of his day. He was not simply projecting the theme of Christological parody onto the empire. He saw certain definite features of the empire as constituting a divine and messianic claim that rivalled Christ’s. p. 446

…The most natural way to read 13:3, 12, 14 is to understand that the mortal wound sustained by Nero (the head) was also a mortal wound to the imperial power as such (the beast) and that it was the imperial power, not Nero himself, which recovered. p. 446

Summing up both his final chapter and his commentary, Bauckham writes,

…As we have seen, the Christological parody corresponds to real features of the history of the empire, to the character of the imperial cult, and to contemporary expectations of the future of the empire. It is a profound prophetic interpretation of the contemporary religio-political image of the empire, both in Rome’s own propaganda and in its subjects’ profoundest responses to Roman rule.

This religio-political ideology, which John sees as a parody of the Christian claims about Christ, was no mere cover for the hard political realities: it entered deeply into the contemporary dynamics of power as they affected the lives of John’s contemporaries. He sees it as a deification of power. The empire’s success is founded on military might and people’s adulation of military might.

By these standards Christ and the martyrs are the unsuccessful victims of the empire. Instead of worshipping the risen Christ who has won His victory by suffering witness to the truth, the world worships the beast whose ‘resurrection’ is the proof that this military might is invincible.

The parallel between the ’death’ and ‘resurrection’ of the beast and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ poses the issue of what is truly divine. Is it the beast’s apparent success which is worthy of religious trust and worship? Or is the apparent failure of Christ and the martyrs the true witness to the God who can be ultimately trusted and may alone be worshipped? p. 452

Dear reader, I trust you know who is victorious and is worthy of worship. I urge you to see our times as similar to those of first century Rome and act accordingly.

In light of Bauckham’s message, I continue to be amazed at the bravery of Pastor Wang Yi, who prepared his flock for persecution, challenged the society he lived in, and now suffers for the Gospel in prison (release date set for 2028.) He demonstrates foresight, planning, and integrity. He has posted ninety-five theses to call the China house churches and the global churches “to have courage, perseverance, humility, and wisdom in the days ahead.” Please read the subtitles of this video. Very challenging and life changing.

Die! – Pastor Wang Yi, 6:42, YouTube, Preached on November 26, 2017, Wang Yi Sermon Clips 王怡牧师讲道短

American Empire Disaggregated

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We’ve taken our post, ‘Revolution Within the Form – Review and Commentary’ and disaggregated it. It was too long and tortuous as extracted from the source material, so we took it apart into more cohesive modules. However, as with all blog posts, these modules were posted in reverse order so that they would be in order when read later. This post links these posts for those who saw them issued in reverse order.

  1. Do Not Look for a Revolution – Garet Garrett and his views on our loss of the American Republic to empire, his so-called ‘revolution within the form.’
  2. Our Government’s Erosion – Garet Garrett’s synecdoche, centered on the Constitution’s phrase, “The Congress shall have power to declare war,” for the erosion of the American republic and transformation into empire.
  3. What Has Become of Our Government? – Garet Garrett’s description of the American Empire.
  4. The Bureaucratic State – Garet Garrett’s description of the growth of executive power and nature of the administrative state.
  5. What Should We Do About the American Empire? – Garet Garrett’s thoughts for reconstituting the American republic and a suggested scriptural alternative.

We also attempted to get these published in a national blog, but they weren’t appropriate to their needs. Hopefully these smaller articles will get wider distribution and reading. Garrett foresaw what many did not seventy years ago. Some, however, did. The difference of course is that he said something about it. He was forgotten.

Signing the U.S. Constitution
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Howard Chandler Christy (January 10, 1873 – March 3, 1952), Public Domain in the US

Do Not Look for a Revolution

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Seventy years ago, Garet Garrett, a journalist and novelist, maintained,

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road.  But they are gazing in the wrong direction.  The revolution is behind them.  It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

He quotes Aristotle’s Politics, “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.”

In a Mises Institute condensation, titled, “The American Empire,” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) from his book, The People’s Pottage, he quotes Aristotle’s Politics again,

People do not easily change but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes the place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state.

Garrett charges this subversion, which he terms a ‘revolution within the form,’ against the Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman administrations.

Garrett sums up his thesis this way,

The extent to which the original precepts and intentions of constitutional, representative, limited government, in the republican form, have been eroded away by argument and dialectic is a separate subject, long and ominous, and belongs to a treatise on political science.

…When the process of erosion has gone on until there is no saying what the supreme law of the land is at a given time, then the Constitution begins to be flouted by executive will, with something like impunity.  The instances may not be crucial at first and all the more dangerous for that reason.  As one is condoned another follows and they become progressive…

As we see every day, the revolution is not over.  However, Garrett’s point is that the revolution started in the early Twentieth Century.  Keep in mind that the original source article was published in 1952, seventy years ago.

Our Government’s Erosion

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In a Mises Institute condensation, titled, “The American Empire,” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) from Garet Garrett’s book, The People’s Pottage, he wrote,

The extent to which the original precepts and intentions of constitutional, representative, limited government, in the republican form, have been eroded away by argument and dialectic is a separate subject, long and ominous, and belongs to a treatise on political science.

…When the process of erosion has gone on until there is no saying what the supreme law of the land is at a given time, then the Constitution begins to be flouted by executive will, with something like impunity.  The instances may not be crucial at first and all the more dangerous for that reason.  As one is condoned another follows and they become progressive…

Garrett describes a representative instance of the whole erosive process,

…There was one thing a President could never do.  There was one sentence of the Constitution that could not fall, so long as the Republic lived.

The Constitution says: “The Congress shall have power to declare war.”

…Congress could be trusted never to do it but by will of the people.  And that was the innermost safeguard of the republic.  The decision whether or not to go to war was in the hands of the people – or so they believed.  No man could make it for them…

He writes that this constitutional principle was circumvented, an example of the progressive ‘revolution within the form,’

President Truman, alone and without either the consent or knowledge of Congress, had declared war on the Korean aggressor, seven thousand miles away, Congress condoned his usurpation of its exclusive constitutional power.  More than that, his political supporters in Congress argued that in the modern case that sentence in the Constitution conferring upon Congress the sole power to declare war was obsolete.

Mark you, the words had not been erased; they still existed in form.  Only, they had become obsolete.  And why obsolete?  Because war may now begin suddenly, with bombs falling out of the sky, and we might perish while waiting for Congress to declare war.

The reasoning is puerile.  [Firstly,] the Korean War, which made the precedent, did not begin that way; secondly, Congress was in session at the time, so that the delay could not have been more than a few hours, provided Congress had been willing to declare war; and, thirdly, the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the Republic may in a legal manner act defensively before a declaration of war has been made.  It is bound to be made if the nation has been attacked…

A few months later Mr. Truman sent American troops to Europe to join an international army, and did it not only without a law, without even consulting Congress, but challenged the power of Congress to stop him.  Congress made all of the necessary sounds of anger and then poulticed its dignity with a resolution saying it was all right for that one time, since anyhow it had been done, but that hereafter it would expect to be consulted.

But the damage had been done.  The congress no longer held this constitutional power, de facto.  All that was left was for the executive branch to declare it de jure.  Garrett writes,

At that time the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate asked the State Department to set forth in writing what might be called the position of Executive Government.

The State Department obligingly responded with a document entitled, “Powers of the President to Send Troops Outside of the United States, February 28, 1951.” For the information of the United States Senate, it said: “As this discussion of the respective powers of the President and Congress has made clear, constitutional doctrine has been largely molded by practical necessities.  Use of the congressional power to declare war, for example, has fallen into abeyance because wars are no longer declared in advance.”

…If constitutional doctrine is molded by necessity, what is a written Constitution for?

Garrett states that the modus operandi for every revolutionary act undertaken by the Wilson, FDR, and Truman administrations, in the context of his example,

Thus, an argument that seemed at first to rest upon puerile reasoning turned out to be deep and cunning.  The immediate use of it was to defend the unconstitutional Korean precedent, namely, the declaration of war as an act of the President’s own will.  Yet it was not invented for that purpose alone.  It stands as a forecast of executive intentions, a manifestation of the executive mind, a mortal challenge to the parliamentary principle…

If you think about recent history, this method of operation is used to this day at all levels of government.  Imagine teaching these things in civics class.

What Has Become of Our Government?

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Summarized in a Mises Institute condensation, titled, “The American Empire,” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) from Garet Garrett’s book, The People’s Pottage, we read,

If you may have Empire with or without a constitution, even within the form of a republican constitution, and if also you may have Empire with or without an emperor, then how may the true marks of Empire be distinguished with certainty?  What are they?

Garrett lists six of these marks,

1) The executive power of government shall be dominant.  – What Empire needs above all in government is an executive power that can make immediate decisions, such as a decision in the middle of the night by the President to declare war on the aggressor…  The Federal income-tax law of 1914 gave the government unlimited access to wealth…not for revenue only but…for redistribution of the national wealth.  Congress…principal function was to enact and [fund] them.  The part of the Supreme Court was to make everything square with the Constitution by a liberal reinterpretation of its language…  For all the years before when you spoke of the executive power of government you meant only the power to execute and administer the laws.  Henceforth it would mean the power to [rule].

No longer did the Congress of the United States speak for the people, but the President did, as head of the Executive Government.  Garrett writes, “Thus the man who happens to be the embodiment of the executive principle stands between the Congress and the people and assumes the right to express [the people’s] will.”

Examining the second mark of empire, Garrett writes,

2) Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.  – It needs hardly to be argued that as we convert the nation into a garrison state to build the most terrible war machine that has ever been imagined on earth, every domestic policy is bound to be conditioned by our foreign policy…  We are no longer able to choose between peace and war.  We have embraced perpetual war…

The third mark of empire is this,

3) Ascendancy of the military mind, to such a point…that the civilian mind is intimidated.  – War becomes an instrument of domestic policy.  Among the control mechanisms on the government’s panel board now is a dial marked War.  It may be set to increase or decrease the tempo of military expenditures, as the planners decide that what the economy needs is a little more inflation or a little less – but of course never any deflation.  And whereas it was foreseen that when Executive Government is resolved to control the economy it will come to have a vested interest in the power of inflation, so now we perceive that it will come also to have a kind of proprietary interest in the institution of perpetual war…

He then identifies a historic structural aspect of empire,

4) [It acquires] a system of satellite nations.  – We speak of our own satellites as allies and friends or as freedom loving nations.  Nevertheless, satellite is the right word.  The meaning of it is the hired guard…  For any one of them to involve us in war it is necessary only for the Executive Power at Washington to decide that its defense is somehow essential to the security of the United States…

…Any candidate for office who trifles with its basic conviction will be scourged.  The basic conviction is simple.  We cannot stand alone.  A capitalistic economy, though it possesses half the industrial power of the whole world, cannot defend its own hemisphere.  It may be able to save the world; alone it cannot save itself.  It must have allies.  Fortunately, it is able to buy them, bribe them, arm them, feed and clothe them; it may cost us more than we can afford, yet we must have them or perish.  This voice of fear is the voice of government.

This hired guard becomes a source of both boasting and fear for empire.  Garrett says,

5) [It is in thrall to a combination] of [boasting] and fear.  – As we assume unlimited political liabilities all over the world…there is only scorn for the one who says: “We are not infinite.  Let us calculate our utmost power of performance, weigh it against what we are proposing to do, and see if the scales will balance.”  The [boastful] answer is: “We do not know what our utmost is.  What we will to do, that we can do.  Let us resolve to do what is necessary.  Necessity will create the means.”

Conversely, the fear.  Fear of the barbarian.  Fear of standing alone.  A time comes when the guard itself, that is, your system of satellites, is a source of fear.  Satellites are often willful and the more you rely upon them the more willful and demanding they are…  How will they behave when the test comes?  …If they falter or fail, what will become of the weapons with which we have supplied them?  What if they were surrendered or captured and turned against us?  The possibility of having to face its own weapons on a foreign field is one of the nightmares of Empire…

The last mark of empire, Garrett writes, is that the time comes when,

6) [It] finds itself a prisoner of history.  – …A Republic is not obliged to act upon the world, either to change or instruct it.  Empire, on the other hand, must put forth its power…  It is our turn: to assume the responsibilities of moral leadership in the world; to maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil everywhere – in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, by air and by sea…; to keep the peace of the world; to save civilization; and to serve mankind.

…Always the banners of Empire proclaim that the ends in view sanctify the means.  The ironies, sublime and pathetic, are two.  The first one is that Empire believes what it says on its banner; the second is that the word for the ultimate end is invariably Peace.  Peace by grace of force.  One must see that on the road to Empire there is soon a point from which there is no turning back…

Summing up his description of empire, Garrett writes,

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire, on the other hand, there is mortal enmity.  Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other.  That we know.  Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.

The country has been committed to the course of Empire by Executive Government, one step at a time, with slogans, concealments, equivocations, a propaganda of fear, and in every crisis an appeal for unity, lest we present to the world the aspect of a divided nation, until at last it may be proclaimed that events have made the decision and it is irrevocable.  Thus, now to alter the course is impossible.

Who says it is impossible?  The President says it; the State Department says it; all globalists and one-worlders are saying it.

Garrett wrote these things seventy years ago.  Having had a brief respite from new perpetual wars, we are right back at it.  What comes to my mind is the scripture, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”  Jeremiah 6:14, English Standard Version.

The Bureaucratic State

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Before the administrative state was named, it was called the bureau government.  Garet Garrett defined it in his book, The People’s Pottage.  From a Mises Institute condensation, titled, “The American Empire,” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), we read,

What Empire needs above all in government is an executive power that can make immediate decisions, such as a decision in the middle of the night by the President to declare war on the aggressor…

The Federal income-tax law of 1914 gave the government unlimited access to wealth and, moreover, power for the first time to levy taxes not for revenue only but for social purposes, …for redistribution of the national wealth.

Congress received from the White House laws that were marked “must.”  Its principal function was to enact and [fund] them.  The part of the Supreme Court was to make everything square with the Constitution by a liberal reinterpretation of its language.

The word executive came to have its new connotation.  For all the years before when you spoke of the executive power of government you meant only the power to execute and administer the laws.  Henceforth it would mean the power to [rule].

Garrett concludes, “The result is Bureau Government, administered by bureaucrats who are not elected by the people…”  He then examines the ways that executive power expands.

(1) By delegation.  That is when the Congress delegates one or more of its constitutional powers to the President and authorizes him to exercise them.

(2) By reinterpretation of the language of the Constitution.  That is done by a sympathetic Supreme Court.

(3) By innovation.  That is when, in this changing world, the President does things that are not specifically forbidden by the Constitution because the founders never thought of them.

(4) By the appearance in the sphere of Executive Government of what are called administrative agencies, with power to issue rules and regulations that have the force of law.

(5) By usurpation.  That is when the President willfully confronts Congress with what in statecraft is called the fait accompli – a thing already done – which Congress cannot repudiate without exposing the American government to the ridicule of nations…

(6) Lastly, the powers of Executive Government are bound to increase as the country becomes more and more involved in foreign affairs.  This is true because, both traditionally and by the terms of the Constitution, the province of foreign affairs is one that belongs in a very special sense to the President.

Examining the administrative state more deeply, Garrett writes,

These [administrative] agencies have built up a large body of administrative law which people are obliged to obey.  And not only do they make their own laws; they enforce their own laws, acting as prosecutor, jury and judge; and appeal from their decisions to the regular courts is difficult because the regular courts are obliged to take their findings of fact as final.  Thus, the constitutional separation of the three governmental powers, namely, the legislative, the executive and the judicial, is entirely lost.

Garret wrote this seventy years ago.  Sadly, generations of conservative opinion makers seem to have made their fortunes from this kind of material.  Garrett was conveniently forgotten.  The administrative state has only grown larger these many years.

What Should We Do About the American Empire?

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Garet Garrett defined the American empire in his book, The People’s Pottage, seventy years ago.  From a Mises Institute condensation, titled, “The American Empire,” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), Garrett says,

Do not ask whether or not it is possible [to alter our course].  Ask yourself this: if it were possible, what would it take?  How could the people restore the Republic if they would?  Or, before that, how could they recover their Constitutional sovereign right to choose for themselves?

When you have put it that way you are bound to turn and look at the lost terrain.  What are the positions, forgotten or surrendered, that would have to be recaptured?

He then lists the hills that must be retaken if the republic is to be reestablished.

The first hill is “a state of mind,”

To recover the habit of decision the people must learn again to think for themselves; and this would require a kind of self-awakening, as from a wee small alarm in the depths.

The second is “renewed public debate of foreign policy.”  Citing a speech given to the National Women’s Democratic Club on November 20, 1951, by President Truman, Garrett quotes,

You remember what happened in 1920.  When the people voted for Harding, that meant a tremendous change in the course the United States was following.  It meant that we turned our backs on the new-born League of Nations…  I think most people now recognize that the country chose the wrong course in 1920…  Since I have been President, I have sought to steer a straight course of handling foreign policy matters on the sole basis of the national interest.  The people I have chosen to fill the major positions concerned with foreign policy have been picked solely on merit, without regard to party labels.  I want to keep it that way.  I want to keep our foreign policy out of domestic politics.

Garrett then analyzes Truman’s remarks,

So far had the American mind been conditioned by the infatuate phrase, bi-partisan foreign policy, that extraordinary statement was vacantly received.  What was the President saying?  He was saying that because, in his opinion, the people once voted wrong on foreign policy, they ought not to vote on it at all anymore.  Let them leave it to the President.  It follows logically that the people have no longer anything to say about war and peace.

On this [hill], where foreign policy once more shall be debated by the people who may have to die for it, let the wind be cold and merciless.  Let those be nakedly exposed to it who have brought the country to this impasse.

The next hill that must be retaken is the “public purse,” once controlled by the people through congress, and now by the unelected Government Executive through (or, sometimes, in spite of) the president.  He writes,

Until the people have recovered [the public purse] they cannot tame Executive Government.  Passing laws to control or restrain it is of no avail whatever.  The only way to reason with it is to cut it off at the pockets…  No matter how badly the people may manage the public purse it cannot control them, whereas, in the hands of the government, control of the purse becomes the single most powerful instrument of executive policy touching the lives of the people.

Finally, the highest hill Garrett identifies, is the cost to save the republic that each citizen must pay, which he names “the Peak of Fortitude.”

What you have to face is that the cost of saving the Republic may be extremely high.  It could be relatively as high as the cost of setting it up in the first place, [two hundred forty-seven] years ago, when love of political liberty was a mighty passion, and people were willing to die for it.

When the economy has for a long time been moving by jet propulsion, the higher the faster, on the fuel of perpetual war and planned inflation, the time comes when you have to choose whether to go on and on and dissolve in the stratosphere or decelerate.  But deceleration will cause a terrific shock.  Who will say, “Now!”?  Who is willing to face the grim and dangerous realities of deflation and depression?

…No doubt the people know they can have their Republic back if they want it enough to fight for it and to pay the price.  The only point is that no leader has yet appeared with the courage to make them choose.

As a defining example of the restoration cost, Garrett cites the scripture, “When Moses had brought his people near to the Promised Land, he sent out scouts to explore it…”  However, he incorrectly concludes that the Israelites would have had to fight for the land themselves in their own strength.  Garrett neglected to mention that the Lord God promised that He would fight for them.  In this, Garrett is grievously mistaken.  Actions of mere men will never overturn powers, principalities, and rulers of the darkness…

Remarkably, though, all of Garrett’s remarks were written seventy years ago; they sound familiar, don’t they?

We must not forget that the principles of the republic are still valid, no changes required.  But, as John Adams reportedly said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

To restore the republic, two things must happen.  First, we must repent of our luxury and moral indifference and function as free and responsible citizens again.  And second, we must pray that the hand of God removes the administrative state with its rules and regulations and installs responsible citizens in reconstituted city, state, and federal governments.

During this time of turmoil and strife, we do well to abide by the command,

“Do not call [confederacy] all that this people calls [confederacy], and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread.  But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy.  Let him be your fear and let him be your dread.  Isaiah 8:12-13 (English Standard Version and Geneva Bible)

Please do not be led astray by those imposters pretending to be the way to peace, safety, and health.  There is only One Who is The Way.

We must rest in the fact that the government of this world is on the Lord Jesus Christ’s shoulders (Isaiah 9:6.)

Remembering always to pass on to the next generation the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

God alone can save us.

Revelation – J. P. M. Sweet — Review and Commentary

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I’ve been reading several commentaries on the Book of Revelation. Many people think it’s a coded message describing world history in detail. But Sweet’s commentary says it’s a broad picture of the Creator God’s plan to save people from the penalty of their sins, destroy evil, and recreate His paradise in which He will dwell with mankind forever.

Revelation, Sweet says, describes the cyclical rise and fall of empires and the beastly nature of those emperors. He uses those emperors (e.g., presidents, prime ministers, etc.) to chasten those who will repent, and He lets them destroy those who will not repent. Those who follow the leaders (beasts and false prophets) don’t realize that they lead them to destruction. Those who reject the leaders’ domination obey God’s moral law to the end and show and tell others of His sacrificial love to those who follow the beast, if perchance, they repent, too.

At a time of His choosing, when all those who will be saved are saved, the Creator God will intervene and call a halt to these cycles of destruction. Then God will mete out rewards and punishments to everyone for deeds they’ve done. Those found in the Book of Life enter His presence forever in the new earth and those who are not found in that book are driven into the outer darkness away from His presence forever. God as the Creator has the right to re-create a new earth in which He will dwell with mankind.

This is a simpler, more straightforward, and even countercultural understanding of a misunderstood and maligned book. Sweet emphasizes that the one whose Christian witness and moral practice endures to the end will be saved. On the flipside, he wrestles with Calvinism, attributing it, at one point, to unwarranted smugness. He also caters to a liberal understanding of the Book of Daniel but that can be overlooked.

Sweet makes some very strong points that organize our understanding of Revelation. First, that the book says it’s meant to be read out loud. Therefore, hearers would be listening to the rhythms and cadences of the book while picking up on verbal markers linking the book together and with Old Testament sources. Just like Jesus’ exclamation, “I thirst,” calls to mind Psalm 69, John’s symbols refer to and sometimes reinterpret Old Testament stories and images. He argues that the book was made to be apprehended by those who hear it, though textual analysis provides further depth.

Numbers also take on significance in the book. As an example, concerning Rev. 7:4, he says, “Twelve is the number of tribes of Israel, a thousand intensifies it (and is itself a military formation), a squared number expresses perfection: twelve times twelve thousands, therefore, means that the sealed are the totality of God’s Israel, brigaded for His service.”

Another organizing principle Sweet advances is that what John says he sees is interpreted by what he hears. He says, “What is heard, the ‘voice’, represents the inner reality, the spirit; what is seen, the ‘appearance’, represents the outward, the flesh.” Sweet is careful to say this is neither a gnostic nor Platonic understanding, but rather, “To the Jew the outward world is the locus of God’s ‘speaking’, His self-revelation and action, so that there is a dialectical relationship between inward and outward, spirit and flesh, hearing and seeing.”

He cites several examples. Sweet says,

Thus the slain Lamb (which John sees) is interpreted by the Lion of Judah (of which he hears): its death is not weakness and defeat, as it seems to be, but power and victory (cf. 1 Cor 1:23 ff).” Also, he says, “In Rev. 7 John hears (Rev. 7:4) the number of the 144,000 who are ‘sealed’ (i.e., the spiritual truth of Israel’s ‘election’), which interprets what he sees (v. 9), a multitude drawn from all nations: i.e., ‘salvation is of the Jews’. But the outward reality of the church, in which there cannot be distinctions between Jews, Greek, and barbarian (Col. 3:11), reinterprets the traditional theological truth of Israel’s priority.

Sweet says that the letters (Rev. 2, 3), “show that the church’s chief dangers are internal: complacency, somnolence, and compromise with worldly values.” However, Sweet says, there is also danger from external attack: false jews who attack faith in the Messiah and false prophets and Nicolaitans (Niko-laos means Conquer–people) who adulterate it with heathen religion and morals. The false prophets and Nicolaitans are associated with Balaam (Bala‘–’am means Destroy–people,) Balak, and Jezebel. Balaam and Balak, Sweet points out, are one of several Old Testament representatives of the false prophet and beast king of Revelation.

Sweet points out that within his four septets structure (i.e., letters, seals, trumpets, and bowls) there is another feature crucial for understanding the book. He says,

The visions of destruction (Ch. 6–20) are bracketed by the overarching vision of God the Creator and Redeemer (Ch. 4–5,) who makes all things new (21:1 – 22:5): carnage and chaos are within the divine plan and lead through into the fulfilment of man’s destiny in final union with God.

However, Sweet struggles to reinterpret all the destruction of chapter 6 through 20 as sacrificial love instead of vengeance, but ends up concluding rightly, with Farrer, “No other New Testament writing presents such embarrassing pictures…yet to a large extent Revelation merely colors in what was everywhere taken for granted…And as for divine vengeance, no New Testament Christian felt any qualms about it. God’s mercy was outpoured to save as many as would repent; but the triumph of His power over irreconcilable hostility was to have all the splendor of a victory.”

Finally, he analyzes the book and presents the following outline. Others, who agree with the symbolic interpretation, differ with the breakdown for textual reasons.

Revelation Verses

Description

Synoptic Gospel Verses – Matthew 24:

1:1–11

Opening address

 

1:12–end

Vision of the Son of man

 

 

2, 3

THE SEVEN LETTERS

 

Ephesus

Sardis

State of churches: deception, lawlessness

4–5, 9–12

2:1–7

Ephesus: false apostles, Nicolaitans

 

2:8–11

Smyrna: false jews, tribulation

 

2:12-17

Pergamum: witness, idolatry

 

2:18–29

Thyatira: Jezebel, fornication

 

3:1–6

Sardis: sleep, soiled garments

 

3:7–13

Philadelphia: false and true jews

 

3:14–22

Laodicea: affluence, nakedness

 

 

 

 

4:1–8:1

THE SEVEN SEALS

 

Smyrna

Philadelphia

Assurance and endurance

13

4

God the creator – rainbow and sea

 

5

God the Redeemer – Lamb’s conquest unseals book

 

6:1–8

Four horsemen = beginning of birth-pangs

6–8

6:1–2

First seal – conquest (the Gospel?)

 

6:3–4

Second seal – war

 

6:5–6

Third seal – famine

 

6:7–8

Fourth seal – death (pestilence)

 

6:9–11

Fifth seal – comfort for martyrs

13–14

6:12-17

Sixth seal – cosmic demolition

(‘wrath of Lamb’)

29–30

7:1–8

Sealing of true Israel (144,000)

 

7:9–17

Final ingathering from all nations

31

8:1

Seventh seal – silence (birth of New Age)

 

 

8:2 – 14:20

THE SEVEN TRUMPETS (THREE WOES)

 

Pergamum

Laodicea

Idolatry and witness

14–15

8:2–5

Heavenly altar of incense

 

8:6–12

First four trumpets: destruction of nature

29

8:13

Eagle – three woes

 

9:1–12

Fifth trumpet = first woe: locust–scorpions

 

9:13–21

Sixth trumpet = second woe: lion-cavalry

Self–destruction of idolatry; impenitence

 

10

Little scroll (= the gospel)

 

11:1–13

Measuring of temple, two witnesses

Church’s witness; penitence

14

Mark 13:9–13

11:14 – 13:18

Seventh Trumpet = third woe (12:12)

 

11:15–19

Heavenly worship

 

12:1–12

Defeat of dragon in heaven leads to

 

12:13–17

Flight of woman (= church)

16–20

13

Kingdom of beasts on earth

15

13:1–10

Sea beast: war on saints

21–22

13:11–18

Land beast: deception

23–26

14:1–5

144000 – first fruits

 

14:6–11

Eternal gospel; consequence of refusal

 

14:12–20

Coming of the Son of man

Final ingathering: harvest and vintage

30–31

 

15:1 – 22:5

THE SEVEN BOWLS

 

Thyatira

Laodicea

Fornication and purity: Bridegroom comes

30

15:1–4

Song of Moses and the Lamb

 

15:5–8

Heavenly Temple

 

16:1–9

First four bowls of wrath: cf. trumpets

 

16:10–11

Fifth bowl: beast’s kingdom darkened

29

16:12–16

Sixth bowl: Armageddon

 

16:17–22

Seventh bowl: beast’s city destroyed

 

17

Harlot destroyed by the beast

 

18

Doom of the harlot = Babylon = Rome

37–40

19:1–10

Marriage supper of the Lamb

25:1–13

19:11–16

Coming of the Son of man, as Word of God

30

19:17–21

Destruction of beasts

 

20:1–6

Binding of Satan, rule of saints –

Thousand years (millennium)

 

20:7–10

Release and final destruction of Satan

 

20:11–15

Last judgment

 

21:1–8

New Creation, expounded as

 

21:9–21

Adornment of bride – holy city

 

21:22 – 22:5

Ingathering of nations

Tree of life – paradise restored

 

 

22:6 – end

Final attestation

 
Four Horsemen of the Apocalype
Death on a Pale Horse is a version of the traditional subject, Four Horsemen of Revelation, 1796, Benjamin West (1738 – 1820), in the public domain in the US

The Theology of the Book of Revelation – Review and Commentary

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Richard Bauckham’s book, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, presents a different interpretation of the book of Revelation. From the Amazon sales page,

The Book of Revelation is a work of profound theology. But its literary form makes it impenetrable to many modern readers and open to all kinds of misinterpretations. Richard Bauckham explains how the book’s imagery conveyed meaning in its original context and how the book’s theology is inseparable from its literary structure and composition.

Revelation is seen to offer not an esoteric and encoded forecast of historical events but rather a theocentric vision of the coming of God’s universal kingdom, contextualized in the late first-century world dominated by Roman power and ideology. It calls on Christians to confront the political idolatries of [their] time and to participate in God’s purpose of gathering all the nations into his kingdom.

Once Revelation is properly grounded in its original context it is seen to transcend that context and speak to the contemporary church. This study concludes by highlighting Revelation’s continuing relevance for today.

Bauckham summarizes his own thesis on pages 159 – 164. He presents them as eleven “theological directions for contemporary reflection.” The following is a concise restatement of these points,

(1) Revelation reveals that, in every age, world rulers adopt ideologies by which they maintain their power. It directs “the one who hears” to resist and challenge these ideologies. The worldview it presents shows that all earthly powers, structures, and ideals are relative and contingent, only God and his truth is absolute and sure.

(2) Refurbishing the Christian imagination, Revelation uses images that witness to the one true God and His righteousness and grace. Revelation confronts both totalitarian ideologies which claim to be absolute truth while suppressing the gospel and nihilistic ideologies of relativistic despair that disregard the gospel through consumerism.

(3) The worship of the true God confronts and resists the deification of military and political power (i.e., the beast) and economic prosperity (i.e., Babylon.) Both are sources of oppression, injustice, and inhumanity. Confronting these apart from God’s true worship risks deification of resistance itself.

(4) Revelation resists the dominant ideology by proclamation of God’s transcendence and his coming alternative future (i.e., the new creation and the New Jerusalem.) These enable the hearer (or reader) to recognize the earthly ideology’s injustice and oppression and to relativize the seemingly powerful, absolute structures which maintain them.

(5) Revelation speaks from the viewpoint of the victims of history calling for their acknowledgment and solidarity with them. It achieves this by standing for God and his kingdom against the idolatries of the powerful.

(6) Revelation does not promote withdrawal of Christians into sectarian enclaves leaving the world to its judgment while consoling themselves with millennial dreams. This is the opposite of Revelation’s outlook, which is directed toward the coming of God’s kingdom in the whole world and calls Christians to active participation in this coming of the kingdom. Christians are to witness to the truth of God’s coming kingdom in the public, political world. Worship of the true God resists the worlds idolatries and points to the universal worship of the true God for which the whole creation is destined.

(7) Revelation emphasizes future eschatology to point toward God’s universal kingdom. The church is the “first fruit” of the nations as the direct result of Jesus Christ’s conquest on the cross. Though the Messiah’s victory is the decisive eschatological event, its ultimate goal is not realized until all evil is abolished from God’s world and all the nations are gathered into the Messiah’s kingdom. This uniquely Jewish apocalyptic perspective is a necessary counterweight to an already realized eschatology which so spiritualizes the kingdom of God as to forget the unredeemed nature of the world.

(8) Revelation prophetically criticizes the churches as much as it does the world. It identifies false religion not only in the blatant idolatries of power and prosperity, but also in the churches compromise with these idolatries and the betrayal of God’s truth. To resist idolatry in the world by faithful witness to the truth, the church must continually purify its own vision of the utterly Holy One, the sovereign Creator, who shares his throne with the slaughtered Lamb.

(9) Christians participate in the establishment of God’s kingdom through verbal witness to God’s truth that is substantiated by lives which conform to that truth. The Revelation does not envision using Christianized power and influence to change society into God’s kingdom. The essential form of Christian witness, which cannot be replaced by any other, is consistent loyalty to God’s kingdom. In this powerless witness, the power of truth to defeat lies comes into its own. The temptations of power are best resisted by maintaining our faithful witness.

(10) Revelation portrays the linkage of the doctrines of creation, redemption, and eschatology to the realization of God’s universal kingdom. It is God the Creator of all reality who, in faithfulness to his creation, acts in Christ to reclaim and renew his whole creation. It is as Creator that he can renew his creation, taking it beyond the threat of evil and nothingness into the eternity of his own presence. Revelation puts the New Testament’s central theme of salvation in Christ clearly into its total biblical–theological context of the Creator’s purpose for his whole creation. This is a perspective that needs recovering today.

(11) Revelation has the most developed trinitarian theology in the New Testament, apart from the Gospel of John. By placing the Lamb on the throne and the seven Spirits before the throne it gives priority to sacrificial love and witness to truth in the coming of God’s kingdom in the world.

(12) God’s rule does not contradict human freedom, as the coercive tyranny of the beast does, but finds its fulfilment in the participation of people in God’s rule; that is, in the coincidence of theonomy and autonomy. The divine transcendence does not prevent but makes possible the eschatological destiny of creation to exist in immediate relation to God, his immanent presence is its glory and its eternal life.

I urge everyone to read this different, countercultural perspective on a much-studied book. Tracing John’s masterful references to Old Testament imagery is amazing. To discover how he weaves these images together to speak to every church generation is eye opening. Revelation is a book just as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. It speaks to everyone in simple, easy to understand images. I fear we do not like what it says.

The Last Days According to Jesus – R.C. Sproul, YouTube, Ligonier Ministries

Revolution Within the Form – Review and Commentary

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Garet Garrett wrote several essays and books on “the New Deal planning state and the regimentation of national life it brought about.” In a Mises Institute condensation, titled, “The American Empire,” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), from his book, The People’s Pottage, he quotes Aristotle’s Politics,

People do not easily change but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes the place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state.

Garrett charges this subversion, which he terms a ‘revolution within the form,’ against the Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman administrations. Clearly, as we see every day, the revolution is not over. However, Garrett’s point is that the revolution started in the early Twentieth Century. Keep in mind that the original source article was published in 1952, seventy years ago.

Garrett sums up his thesis this way,

The extent to which the original precepts and intentions of constitutional, representative, limited government, in the republican form, have been eroded away by argument and dialectic is a separate subject, long and ominous, and belongs to a treatise on political science.

…When the process of erosion has gone on until there is no saying what the supreme law of the land is at a given time, then the Constitution begins to be flouted by executive will, with something like impunity. The instances may not be crucial at first and all the more dangerous for that reason. As one is condoned another follows and they become progressive…

He then describes a representative instance of the whole erosive process,

…There was one thing a President could never do. There was one sentence of the Constitution that could not fall, so long as the Republic lived.

The Constitution says: “The Congress shall have power to declare war.”

…Congress could be trusted never to do it but by will of the people. And that was the innermost safeguard of the republic. The decision whether or not to go to war was in the hands of the people — or so they believed. No man could make it for them…

Garrett recounts how this constitutional principle was circumvented, an example of the progressive revolution within the form,

President Truman, alone and without either the consent or knowledge of Congress, had declared war on the Korean aggressor, seven thousand miles away, Congress condoned his usurpation of its exclusive constitutional power. More than that, his political supporters in Congress argued that in the modern case that sentence in the Constitution conferring upon Congress the sole power to declare war was obsolete.

Mark you, the words had not been erased; they still existed in form. Only, they had become obsolete. And why obsolete? Because war may now begin suddenly, with bombs falling out of the sky, and we might perish while waiting for Congress to declare war.

The reasoning is puerile. [Firstly,] the Korean War, which made the precedent, did not begin that way; secondly, Congress was in session at the time, so that the delay could not have been more than a few hours, provided Congress had been willing to declare war; and, thirdly, the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the Republic may in a legal manner act defensively before a declaration of war has been made. It is bound to be made if the nation has been attacked…

A few months later Mr. Truman sent American troops to Europe to join an international army, and did it not only without a law, without even consulting Congress, but challenged the power of Congress to stop him. Congress made all of the necessary sounds of anger and then poulticed its dignity with a resolution saying it was all right for that one time, since anyhow it had been done, but that hereafter it would expect to be consulted.

But the damage had been done. The congress no longer held this constitutional power, de facto. All that was left was for the executive branch to declare it de jure. Garrett writes,

At that time the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate asked the State Department to set forth in writing what might be called the position of Executive Government. The State Department obligingly responded with a document entitled, “Powers of the President to Send Troops Outside of the United States, February 28, 1951.” For the information of the United States Senate, it said:

As this discussion of the respective powers of the President and Congress has made clear, constitutional doctrine has been largely molded by practical necessities. Use of the congressional power to declare war, for example, has fallen into abeyance because wars are no longer declared in advance.

…If constitutional doctrine is molded by necessity, what is a written Constitution for?

He then states what was the modus operandi for every revolutionary act undertaken by the Wilson, FDR, and Truman administrations, in the context of his example,

Thus, an argument that seemed at first to rest upon puerile reasoning turned out to be deep and cunning. The immediate use of it was to defend the unconstitutional Korean precedent, namely, the declaration of war as an act of the President’s own will. Yet it was not invented for that purpose alone. It stands as a forecast of executive intentions, a manifestation of the executive mind, a mortal challenge to the parliamentary principle…

If you think about recent history, this method of operation is used to this day at all levels of government.

Garrett then turns to the question of what our government has become. He writes,

If you may have Empire with or without a constitution, even within the form of a republican constitution, and if also you may have Empire with or without an emperor, then how may the true marks of Empire be distinguished with certainty? What are they?

Next, he lays out the requirements of empire,

1) The executive power of government shall be dominant.

2) Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.

3) Ascendancy of the military mind, to such a point …that the civilian mind is intimidated.

4) [It acquires] a system of satellite nations.

5) [It is in thrall to a combination] of [boasting] and fear.

6) [It] finds itself a prisoner of history.

Expanding on each of these at length, Garrett writes,

1) The executive power of government shall be dominant.

What Empire needs above all in government is an executive power that can make immediate decisions, such as a decision in the middle of the night by the President to declare war on the aggressor…

The Federal income-tax law of 1914 gave the government unlimited access to wealth and, moreover, power for the first time to levy taxes not for revenue only but for social purposes, …for redistribution of the national wealth.

Congress received from the White House laws that were marked “must.” Its principal function was to enact and [fund] them. The part of the Supreme Court was to make everything square with the Constitution by a liberal reinterpretation of its language.

The word executive came to have its new connotation. For all the years before when you spoke of the executive power of government you meant only the power to execute and administer the laws. Henceforth it would mean the power to [rule].

No longer did the Congress of the United States speak for the people, but the President did, as head of the Executive Government. Garrett writes, “Thus the man who happens to be the embodiment of the executive principle stands between the Congress and the people and assumes the right to express [the people’s] will.”

Furthermore, he writes,

…The President acts directly upon the emotions and passions of the people to influence their thinking. As he controls Executive Government, so he controls the largest propaganda machine in the world, unless it be the Russian machine; and this machine is the exclusive possession of Executive Government.

The Congress has no propaganda apparatus at all and continually finds itself under pressure from the people who have been moved for or against something by the ideas and thought material broadcast in the land by the administrative bureaus in Washington.

Garrett concludes, “The result is Bureau Government, administered by bureaucrats who are not elected by the people…”

He then examines the ways that executive power expands.

(1) By delegation. That is when the Congress delegates one or more of its constitutional powers to the President and authorizes him to exercise them.

(2) By reinterpretation of the language of the Constitution. That is done by a sympathetic Supreme Court.

(3) By innovation. That is when, in this changing world, the President does things that are not specifically forbidden by the Constitution because the founders never thought of them.

(4) By the appearance in the sphere of Executive Government of what are called administrative agencies, with power to issue rules and regulations that have the force of law.

(5) By usurpation. That is when the President willfully confronts Congress with what in statecraft is called the fait accompli — a thing already done — which Congress cannot repudiate without exposing the American government to the ridicule of nations…

(6) Lastly, the powers of Executive Government are bound to increase as the country becomes more and more involved in foreign affairs. This is true because, both traditionally and by the terms of the Constitution, the province of foreign affairs is one that belongs in a very special sense to the President.

Examining the administrative state more deeply, he writes,

These [administrative] agencies have built up a large body of administrative law which people are obliged to obey. And not only do they make their own laws; they enforce their own laws, acting as prosecutor, jury and judge; and appeal from their decisions to the regular courts is difficult because the regular courts are obliged to take their findings of fact as final. Thus, the constitutional separation of the three governmental powers, namely, the legislative, the executive and the judicial, is entirely lost.

Examining the second mark of empire, Garrett writes,

2) Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.

It needs hardly to be argued that as we convert the nation into a garrison state to build the most terrible war machine that has ever been imagined on earth, every domestic policy is bound to be conditioned by our foreign policy.

The voice of government is saying that if our foreign policy fails, we are ruined. It is all or nothing. Our survival as a free nation is at hazard. That makes it simple, for in that case there is no domestic policy that may not have to be sacrificed to the necessities of foreign policy — even freedom. It is no longer a question of what we can afford to do; it is what we must do to survive.

We are no longer able to choose between peace and war. We have embraced perpetual war. We are so committed by the Truman Doctrine, by examples of our intention, and by such formal engagements as the North Atlantic Treaty and the Pacific Pact.

…What is not so clearly understood, here or abroad, is that these are no temporary measures for a temporary emergency but rather the beginning of a wholly new military status for the United States, which seems certain to be with us for a long time to come.

The third mark of empire is this,

3) Ascendancy of the military mind, to such a point …that the civilian mind is intimidated.

War becomes an instrument of domestic policy. Among the control mechanisms on the government’s panel board now is a dial marked War. It may be set to increase or decrease the tempo of military expenditures, as the planners decide that what the economy needs is a little more inflation or a little less — but of course never any deflation. And whereas it was foreseen that when Executive Government is resolved to control the economy it will come to have a vested interest in the power of inflation, so now we perceive that it will come also to have a kind of proprietary interest in the institution of perpetual war.

Yet in the very nature of Empire, the military mind must keep its secrets. A Republic may put its armor on and off. War is an interlude. When war comes it is a civilian business, conducted under the advice of military experts. Both in peace and war military experts are excluded from civilian decisions. But with Empire it is different; Empire must wear its armor. Its life is in the hands of the General Staff and war is supremely a military business, requiring of the civilian only acquiescence, exertion, and loyalty.

He then identifies a historic structural aspect of empire,

4) [It acquires] a system of satellite nations.

We use that word only for nations that have been captured in the Russian orbit, with some inflection of contempt. We speak of our own satellites as allies and friends or as freedom-loving nations. Nevertheless, satellite is the right word. The meaning of it is the hired guard…

…Satellite traffic in the American orbit is already pretty dense without taking into account client nations, suppliant nations and waif satellites, all looking to the American government for arms and economic aid. These are scattered all over the body of the sick world like festers. For any one of them to involve us in war it is necessary only for the Executive Power at Washington to decide that its defense is somehow essential to the security of the United States. That is how the Korean War started. Korea was a waif satellite…

Fear at last assumes the phase of a patriotic obsession. It is stronger than any political party. Any candidate for office who trifles with its basic conviction will be scourged. The basic conviction is simple. We cannot stand alone. A capitalistic economy, though it possesses half the industrial power of the whole world, cannot defend its own hemisphere. It may be able to save the world; alone it cannot save itself. It must have allies. Fortunately, it is able to buy them, bribe them, arm them, feed and clothe them; it may cost us more than we can afford, yet we must have them or perish. This voice of fear is the voice of government.

This hired guard becomes a source of both boasting and fear for empire. Garrett says,

5) [It is in thrall to a combination] of [boasting] and fear.

As we assume unlimited political liabilities all over the world…there is only scorn for the one who says: “We are not infinite. Let us calculate our utmost power of performance, weigh it against what we are proposing to do, and see if the scales will balance.” The [boastful] answer is: “We do not know what our utmost is. What we will to do, that we can do. Let us resolve to do what is necessary. Necessity will create the means.”

Conversely, the fear. Fear of the barbarian. Fear of standing alone. A time comes when the guard itself, that is, your system of satellites, is a source of fear. Satellites are often willful and the more you rely upon them the more willful and demanding they are.

…How will they behave when the test comes? …If they falter or fail, what will become of the weapons with which we have supplied them? What if they were surrendered or captured and turned against us?

The possibility of having to face its own weapons on a foreign field is one of the nightmares of Empire…

The last mark of empire, Garrett writes, is that the time comes when,

6) [It] finds itself a prisoner of history.

A Republic is not obliged to act upon the world, either to change or instruct it. Empire, on the other hand, must put forth its power… It is our turn:

a) To assume the responsibilities of moral leadership in the world.

b) To maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil everywhere — in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, by air and by sea…

c) To keep the peace of the world.

d) To save civilization.

e) To serve mankind.

…Always the banners of Empire proclaim that the ends in view sanctify the means. The ironies, sublime and pathetic, are two. The first one is that Empire believes what it says on its banner; the second is that the word for the ultimate end is invariably Peace. Peace by grace of force.

One must see that on the road to Empire there is soon a point from which there is no turning back…

Summing up his description of empire, Garrett writes,

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire, on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.

The country has been committed to the course of Empire by Executive Government, one step at a time, with slogans, concealments, equivocations, a propaganda of fear, and in every crisis an appeal for unity, lest we present to the world the aspect of a divided nation, until at last it may be proclaimed that events have made the decision and it is irrevocable. Thus, now to alter the course is impossible.

Who says it is impossible? The President says it; the State Department says it; all globalists and one-worlders are saying it.

Switching gears, Garrett says,

Do not ask whether or not it is possible [to alter our course]. Ask yourself this: if it were possible, what would it take? How could the people restore the Republic if they would? Or, before that, how could they recover their Constitutional sovereign right to choose for themselves?

When you have put it that way you are bound to turn and look at the lost terrain. What are the positions, forgotten or surrendered, that would have to be recaptured?

He then lists the hills that must be retaken if the republic is to be re-established.

The first hill is “a state of mind,”

To recover the habit of decision the people must learn again to think for themselves; and this would require a kind of self-awakening, as from a wee small alarm in the depths.

The second is “renewed public debate of foreign policy.” Citing a speech given to the National Women’s Democratic Club on November 20, 1951, by President Truman, Garrett quotes,

You remember what happened in 1920. When the people voted for Harding, that meant a tremendous change in the course the United States was following. It meant that we turned our backs on the new-born League of Nations. … I think most people now recognize that the country chose the wrong course in 1920. … Since I have been President, I have sought to steer a straight course of handling foreign policy matters on the sole basis of the national interest. The people I have chosen to fill the major positions concerned with foreign policy have been picked solely on merit, without regard to party labels. I want to keep it that way. I want to keep our foreign policy out of domestic politics.

Garrett then analyzes Truman’s remarks,

So far had the American mind been conditioned by the infatuate phrase, bi-partisan foreign policy, that extraordinary statement was vacantly received. What was the President saying? He was saying that because, in his opinion, the people once voted wrong on foreign policy, they ought not to vote on it at all anymore. Let them leave it to the President. It follows logically that the people have no longer anything to say about war and peace.

On this [hill], where foreign policy once more shall be debated by the people who may have to die for it, let the wind be cold and merciless. Let those be nakedly exposed to it who have brought the country to this impasse.

The next hill that must be retaken is the “public purse,” once controlled by the people through congress, and now by the unelected Government Executive through (or, sometimes, in spite of) the president. He writes,

Until the people have recovered [the public purse] they cannot tame Executive Government. Passing laws to control or restrain it is of no avail whatever. The only way to reason with it is to cut it off at the pockets. …No matter how badly the people may manage the public purse it cannot control them, whereas, in the hands of the government, control of the purse becomes the single most powerful instrument of executive policy touching the lives of the people.

Finally, the highest hill Garrett identifies is the cost to save the republic that each citizen must pay, which he names “the Peak of Fortitude.”

What you have to face is that the cost of saving the Republic may be extremely high. It could be relatively as high as the cost of setting it up in the first place, [two hundred forty-seven] years ago, when love of political liberty was a mighty passion, and people were willing to die for it.

When the economy has for a long time been moving by jet propulsion, the higher the faster, on the fuel of perpetual war and planned inflation, the time comes when you have to choose whether to go on and on and dissolve in the stratosphere or decelerate. But deceleration will cause a terrific shock. Who will say, “Now!”? Who is willing to face the grim and dangerous realities of deflation and depression?

…No doubt the people know they can have their Republic back if they want it enough to fight for it and to pay the price. The only point is that no leader has yet appeared with the courage to make them choose.

As a defining example of the restoration cost, Garrett cites the scripture, “When Moses had brought his people near to the Promised Land, he sent out scouts to explore it…” However, he incorrectly concludes that the Israelites would have had to fight for the land themselves in their own strength. Garrett neglected to mention that the Lord God promised that He would fight for them. In this, Garrett is grievously mistaken. Actions of mere men will never overturn powers, principalities, and rulers of the darkness…

Remarkably, though, all of Garrett’s remarks were written seventy years ago; they sound familiar, don’t they? Sadly, many generations of conservative opinion makers seem to have made their fortunes from this material. Garrett was conveniently forgotten.

We must not forget that the principles of the republic are still valid. But, as John Adams reportedly said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” To restore the republic, two things must happen. First, we must repent of our luxury and moral indifference to act as free and responsible citizens again. And second, we must pray that the hand of God removes the administrative state and installs responsible citizens in reconstituted city, state, and federal governments.

During this time of turmoil and strife, we do well to abide by the command,

“Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear and let him be your dread. Isaiah 8:12-13 (English Standard Version)

Please do not be led astray by those imposters pretending to be the way to peace, safety, and health. There is only One Who is The Way.

We must rest in the fact that the government of this world is on our Lord’s shoulders,

For to us a child is born,

    to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

    and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 (ESV)

Remembering always to pass on to the next generation the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

God alone can save us.

Government: Christian Worldview with R.C. Sproul, 28 minutes, January 20, 2021, YouTube, Ligonier Ministries