Saturday, November 22, 2008

And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered to make war with the one sitting on the [white] horse and with his army. And the beast was captured, also the false prophet who performed miraculous signs before him (with these signs he deceived those who received the mark of the beast and worshipped his image). These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. And the rest were killed by the sword that came out of the mouth of the one sitting on the [white] horse. And all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh. Rev. 19:19-21.

When I was a teenage boy, these images fascinated me. I guess I had the youthful ability to disconnect an image from its gruesome reality. As I have gotten older. I have become less comfortable with parts of this passage. the thought of human beings burning in a fire or being impaled with a sword is not pleasant. (I even get wimpy when faced with the dentist's needle!)

We know from literature of New Testament times, however, that the apocalyptic images of Revelation 19 resonated with that generation. Again, God meets people where they are. The message of this violence is that the Lord will one day eliminate sin and evil from the earth. Abuse and torture will end when the beast and the false prophet meet their fate. It is like medicine for a sick world.

For most of human history bacterial infections were like a death sentence. Pneumonia, scarlet fever, syphilis, and festering wounds meant that few people lived beyond middle age. But on September 3, 1928, in London, a Scottish researcher named Alexander Fleming glanced at some petri dished in his laboratory. They were about to be sterilized for reuse.

"That's funny," Fleming commented to himself. He noticed that the bacterial cultures in the petri dishes were dying off. The culprit seemd to be a liquid he called "mold juice," the product of spores that must have wafted in from a lab downstairs. Fleming determined that the spores were Penicillium natatum and renamed the fluid penicillin.

Having seen the horrors of infection during World War I, he was searching for a safe and powerful antibiotic. Up until that day he had found only an extremely weak one, called lysozyme, which he extracted from body fluids. Amazingly, even after the discovery of penicillin, it was still a decade before other scientists took notice of Fleming's work, purified penicillin for mass production, and turned it into a miracle drug. Antibiotics are God's tokens within the natural world that He will one day purify the universe from sin and evil.

Lord, thank You for the promise that suffering, and evil will not last forever. I open myself to Your cleansing spiritual antibiotics today, because I want to be more like You.

It is not because of inherent power that year by year the earth produces her bounties and continues her motion round the sun. The hand of God guides the planets and keeps them in position in their orderly march through the heavens. It is through His power that summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, day and night follow each other in their regular succession. It is by His word that vegetation flourishes, that the leaves appear and the flowers bloom. Every good thing we have, each ray of sunshine and shower of rain, every morsel of food, every moment of life, is a gift of love.(TFMB 75).