The seal of God on their foreheads
Sun, 18 December, 2005: Today’s Bible readings.
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. 2 He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. 3 Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. 4 They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. 5 They were allowed to torment them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it stings someone. 6 And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.
7 In appearance the locusts were like horses prepared for battle: on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, 8 their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; 9 they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. 10 They have tails and stings like scorpions, and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails. 11 They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
12 The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.
In these chapters of Revelation, we see that God is judging the earth for the rebellion of the people. In the previous chapter, we saw God send four angels to bring great suffering. In today’s chapter, we see the next two angels.
At the end of the chapter, we see that the people didn’t learn the lesson they should have learned from the visitation of the destroying angels:
20 The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, 21 nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
What do we learn from this?
Whenever there is a great tragedy like the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, or the recent hurricanes that devastated the Gulf coast, you will hear people in the media ask theologians, “Where was God when this happened? Why would He allow such a thing?” Unfortunately, many Evangelicals will give the bad answer that God didn’t cause or allow these disasters. He has given up control of such things, but He is there to help us in these times of difficulty.
But we see a completely different story in the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ. God is completely in control. We need to realize that even when bad things are happening around us, God is in control.
Here we see God sends the angels with the destruction, and the events He causes on the earth have a purpose. The suffering that He causes is both punitive and (in a sense) redemptive. The suffering due to the angels in our text is deserved punishment because of the sins of the people, but we learn something about this for ourselves. Since we have all sinned, we all deserve eternal damnation. Therefore due to our own sins, there is no calamity that can happen to us on earth that we don’t deserve. On the contrary, God deals with us far more graciously than we deserve as we spend most of our days in comfort and pleasure. We have no right to shake our fist at God and demand to know how He could allow such things to happen to us, when due to our sin we have rebelled against Him. As sinners, we don’t deserve anything better than to suffer.
In addition to being punitive, the suffering God brings is also redemptive, in the sense that suffering is an opportunity for people to repent and turn to God. It is an opportunity to consider our own lives, and how we have offended God. Not all suffering is a direct result of our own personal sin. Nevertheless, God still uses it to drive us to Him. Therefore, we should use the difficulties that come into our lives as times to hear God calling us to repent of our sins and flee to Him.
To bring this punitive and redemptive suffering, in our text listed above, God releases the demons and gives them limited rein to bring the suffering. The demons are limited in the scope of the suffering they can inflict (they can only torment those without the mark of God’s protection), in the amount of the suffering they can inflict (they are not allowed to kill), and in the length of the suffering they can inflict (they can only torment for five months). God maintains tight control, even when giving people over to the torment of demons.
As we see from this text, the events that happen on earth are not outside God’s control, as asserted by some mistaken Evangelicals. Rather, they are under His control and serve His purposes.
Where is Christ in this passage?
We see in the case of the fifth angel, there is distinction between those who are to suffer, and those who are spared. The demons were kept from harming those who were marked by the seal of God upon their foreheads. This is not always the case in the situations we face on earth. In many tragedies, there isn’t a distinction between those who belong to God and those who don’t. The rising flood engulfs the home of the believer and the non-believer. But in this case, God chooses to make the distinction, like on the night of the Passover, as the angel of death passed over the homes of the Israelites that were marked by the blood of the lamb.
So what does it mean to have the seal of God upon their foreheads?
God has marked as His own all those who have come to Him in faith, trusting only in His Son, Jesus Christ for their salvation. They have repented of their sins, and are trusting in the Person and work of Jesus Christ to save them from all their sins. As they come to Him in faith, they are justified (declared to be in right standing with God based upon the work of Jesus applied to them) and adopted into His family. They are then legally His children and are marked as His own. He protects them because Jesus Christ has saved them. Sometimes, but not always, that protection is seen here on earth.
But ultimately there is a great distinction between the believer and the non-believer in the realm of suffering. Although often they will suffer together here on earth, in eternity, the non-believer will suffer the torments of hell while the believer will enjoy the felicity of heaven. Because believers belong to God, through Jesus Christ they are accepted into eternal joy. Their sins are paid for in Jesus Christ, and they have His righteousness applied to them, and so are acceptable to God. But the non-believers are still in their sins and must pay the penalty for those sins for all eternity.
