Revelation 17:7-18 (The Angel's Riddle & the Lamb's Victory)

In Revelation 17, an angel asks John a piercing question: Why do you marvel? This challenges us to examine where we place our awe and wonder in a world dazzled by false displays of power. The beast represents Satan-empowered human authority that appears permanent but is already destined for destruction. While worldly powers may unite against Christ, the Lamb conquers through His death and resurrection. Christians are called to refuse being dazzled by temporary earthly systems and instead hold fast to the truth that Jesus is Lord of lords. We must live as the called, chosen, and faithful, maintaining confidence in Christ's ultimate victory over all opposition.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Turn with me to Revelation chapter 17. We're going to finish the chapter. We're going to be in verses 7 through 18. And this morning, I asked Kent if our closing benediction song could be A mighty fortress is our God. That's my argument to you this morning. A mighty fortress is our God. Every other appearing fortress is a mirage. It has no shelter. It has no protection. It offers you nothing. The only one that offers you a mighty fortress is God. We could stop now and get camped back up here and we can just sing, get to the song. I'm excited to get there, and I hope that our study this morning gets us to that point where in just a moment where when we sing, that it's that it's just bellows out from the depths of your soul, a mighty fortress is our God, because you have nowhere else that you can turn. Okay? So Revelation chapter 17, beginning in verse 7. But the angel said to me, Why do you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast with the seven heads and the ten horns that carries her. The beast that you saw was and is not, and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth, whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come. This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated. They are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen. One is, the other has not yet come. And when he does come, he must remain only a little while. As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eight, but it belongs to the seven, and it goes to destruction. And the ten horns that you saw are ten kings who have not yet received royal power, but they are to receive authority as kings for one hour, together with the beast. These are of one mind, and they hand over their power and authority to the beast. They will make war on the lamb, and the lamb will conquer them, for he is Lord of Lords and King of Kings, and those with him are called and chosen and faithful. And the angel said to me, The waters that you saw where the prostitute is seated, are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages, and the ten horns that you saw, they are the beast, uh they and the beast will hate the prostitute, they will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh, and burn her up with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and handing over their royal power to the beast until the words of God are fulfilled, and the woman that you saw is the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth. So what we have in this chapter, we did one verses one through six, is we have a question from the angel that demands an answer. The angel looks at John's astonishment and asks a very pointed question of John. Why do you marvel? It's a question that cuts across the centuries and lands in your own lap this morning. Why do we marvel? Why do we stand in awe at the spectacle of earthly power? Why are we seduced by the glitter of the empire? Why are we intimidated by the machinery of the world? The angel did not scold John for his wonder, he just redirected it. He said, In effect, I will tell you and I will show you the mystery of what you see here. Now, when we come here in Revelation 17, this is perhaps one of the most visually arresting chapters in all of Scripture. Last week we saw the great prostitute arrayed in her scarlet and purple, drunk with the blood of the saints, riding the beast with seven heads and ten horns. Now the angel pulls back the curtain. What looked terrifying, what looked invincible, what looked like it was a permanent fixture in the universe. Turns out it's something that has an expiration date stamped on it. The beast that was and is not and is about to rise from the bottomless pit is already headed for destruction. And the Lamb, crucified, mocked, and buried, will conquer. The entire book of Revelation was a book written for pastoral care of persecuted believers to comfort them about a sovereign God who's over all history. So these visions are not disconnected apocalyptic puzzles, but it is a message from John to the church of a coherent theology of history designed to produce faithful endurance and perseverance. And something that we often and easily fail to acknowledge is just how audacious this letter was when it first arrived to the seven churches in Asia Minor, where the Roman Empire was not some distant abstraction, but that the daily air that all these believers and church members breathed. To call Rome a harlot riding a beast was to court execution. To insist that the Lamb would conquer the Caesars required something from the text itself proclaims to teach: faithfulness, endurance, perseverance. This letter in its day was not a safe letter to be found in your possession under the shadow of the Roman Empire. There is a scene near the end of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe that demonstrates misdirected awe that we see John doing here. The white witch arrives at Aslan's camp with her full regalia. She's got her escort, she's got her wolves, her retinue, and even Peter, the leader of the children, who knows who Aslan is, he feels the cold grip of her apparent power. She looks inevitable, she looks permanent, but the truth is that she's neither. Now, Lewis understood the great temptation of every age is not atheism. That's not the greatest temptation, that there is no God. The greatest temptation is idolatry. It is standing before the wrong throne with the wrong kind of wonder. The children in Narnia had to learn slowly and painfully that what looked like an unconquerable winter was already melting at its edges. Wrong will be right when Aslan comes in sight. The angel here is saying the same message to John. Why are you marveling at the witch? Let me show you the lion. And we have three movements in this text that we're going to uncover together this morning: the mystery of the beast, the mystery of the kings, and the certainty of the lamb's conquest. So the mystery of the beast we see in verses 7 through 11. Now, the first thing that the angel does is describe the beast with a phrase that is not accidental by any means whatsoever. The beast that was and is not and is to come. Now, any reader of Revelation feels an immediate chill of recognition. We've seen this language before, but this language is now counterfeit. In Revelation 1.4 and in 5.8, God Himself is described as who was, who is, and who is to come, the eternally self-existing one, the great I am, the living God of Israel. The beast wears a costume. He imitates the divine formula, but with a crucial hollowness at its center, that he is not. Where God is, the beast in its ultimate reality is not. And this is not a minor point that we pass over. The entire seductive power of empire in every age that the church has ever faced rests on its apparent permanence. The idea that this will go on forever. The Romans built in stone and concrete. I've walked the original Roman Forum where Peter and Paul both walked. I actually have a piece of brick from the Roman Forum somewhere in my house. The stones still exist. The roads that they engineered, the aqueducts that they built two millennia ago, they're still there. They've survived. They stamped the emperor's faces on every coin in the circulation so that every single daily action, this mundane act of commerce, buying bread, paying a toll, the average citizen was always reminded of who holds the world together. The imperial cult of Rome gripped the entire empire and was particularly intense in the province of Asia Minor where the original seven churches were. Temples to Roma, the divine spirit of Rome, and to various emperors dotted the landscape of the cities like Pergamum, Ephesus, Smyrna. The churches worshipped under these shadows. Emperor worship was not merely tolerated, it was expected, institutionalized, and regularly enforced. To refuse to pinch a little bit of incense before the emperor's image was not simply a religious eccentricity, it was a civic problem, an act of disloyalty bordering on treason. And not only did it bring the disdain of the empire, it brought with it the repulsion of their fellow citizens for not falling in line. We want our city to look good to Rome, church, just fall in line. You can worship your Jesus, we don't care, but you got to worship the emperor too. To follow Christ for these people who read this letter usually had a very high cost because of the unyielding grip of the beast. And yet, this is the angel's point. The beast that's gripping you so tightly, it seems so solid, so permanent, so inescapable, is already described in the past tense of its own doom. It was and it is not. The beast represents not just Rome specifically, but the principle of Satan-empowered human powers and all its hostility to God and his people. There is an already and not yet to the beast's defeat. In one sense, Satan was already decisively defeated at the cross and at the resurrection. Death could not hold the Lamb of God. He's the one that has the keys to death in Hades, as we saw in chapter 1, verse 18. He's already broken the back of the enemy's ultimate weapon, which is death. And yet the beast still rages. He is, as the text says, about to rise from the bottomless pit. He still has plays left in his desperate game. He still has tools in his toolbox. But notice where he is going. He's going to destruction. The final destination is already fixed. Verse 8 tells us that the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast. When we see this, this is the great divide. The difference between, as we've talked about several times in Revelation, and we talked about it in the first through 3rd John as well. This is the difference between God's people and not God's people. There's a great divide between us and the world. Those outside of grace, those who are not God's people, will be endlessly dazzled by worldly power. They will marvel at the beast, his apparent resurrection in verse 11. It may refer to the way empires collapse and seem to resurrect themselves in new forms, or to the Nero net revivis myth that was circulating in John's day, the eerie rumor that the mad and murderous Emperor Nero had not actually died, but would return and he'd be the head of a Parthian army and would destroy the church. History is full of beast imitations. Each age produces its own spectacle of power that demands worship and promises security. But the people of God are not marveling at the beast because we see what the angel has shown John. The beast's nature, his origin in the pit, and his final destination and destruction. The book of life, written before the foundation of the world, is the ground of persevering faith. God's elect are kept not by their own grip to Christ, but by Christ's grip on them. Let me say that again. God's elect are not kept by our grip of Christ. We are kept by Christ's grip of us. That's why Scripture describes us as being in his hands. Not our hands holding on to him, but him holding on to us. When the world's power structures seem invincible, the Christians' eyes are opened to what those structures really are. All of them. They're temporary, they're doomed, they're already conquered in principle by the Lamb who was slain. In 303 A.D., the Emperor Diocletian launched what historians call the Great Persecution, the most systematic attempt in Roman history to destroy the Christian church. Imperial edicts ordered churches demolished, scriptures were burned, and Christians were stripped of civic rights. Diocletian had a column erected in North Africa bearing the inscription, Diocletian Emperor, for having extinguished the name of Christians who brought the republic to ruin. He declared victory over the church. He stamped it on stone. He was so certain that the beast had won that he erected a monument to celebrate it. Within 10 years, Diocletian had abdicated an illness and despair. His co-emperor Galerius was dying painfully of disease and issued an edict of toleration on his deathbed, and Constantine was on his way to the throne. Within a generation, the empire that had burned the scriptures was printing them. From 303 to 323, in a matter of 20 years, the most powerful empire in the world went from burning the scriptures to printing them. The beast that seemed to have conquered was no more. It was not. It was, and then it was not. That column today still stands, partially preserved, a monument not to the church's defeat, but to the foolishness of anyone who confuses the beast's roar with the final word. Secondly, the mystery of the kings. So we have the seven heads on the beast are explained in verse 9 as seven mountains, which you may not know, you may know, but almost certainly a reference to Rome that would be recognized immediately as a city, a famous seven hills upon which the eternal city was built. The association between Rome and its seven hills was very commonplace in the first century culture. Roman poets celebrated it. Roman coins depicted it. The angels not being cryptic for the sake of mystification. He is being diplomatically subversive, identifying Rome without directly identifying Rome. He's showing his hearers that what Rome calls eternal, God calls temporary. The seven heads are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and one is yet to come. Now, scholars have debated endlessly about which emperors fit this sequence, and reasonable interpreters have disagreement on this. But what we should not miss, however, is the theological weight being carried by the math. History is not random. The rise and fall of kings is numbered. God is counting. Even the one hour that the ten kings reign with the beast is bounded. One hour, not an eternity. This is the Bible's way of saying that human authority, however concentrated and terrible it may seem in any given moment, operates within the parentheses of divine permission and sovereign purpose. Let me say that again. Human authority, however concentrated and terrible it may seem at any given moment, operates within the parentheses of divine permission and God's sovereign purpose. The Ten Kings of verses 12 to 13 present a sobering picture to us as the church of the way worldly powers will consolidate around opposition to God. They may not agree on many things, but they'll agree on opposition to Christ. They are of one mind. Whatever their individual ambitions may be, whatever their rivalries and their competitions, they unite around a single agenda to wage war against the Lamb. And this has been true in every generation. The Herods and the Pilates, who could not agree on anything, found common ground in putting Jesus to death. The Roman Empire, which otherwise welcomed the gods of conquered peoples into their generous religious pantheon. You know, we're going to conquer you. Keep your gods if you want to, but you got to worship Caesar as a god. They drew the line at the exclusivity and the claims of Christianity. You may worship your God in addition to Caesar, but not instead of Caesar. That's always the demand of the beast. In the church in our own day, we are not immune from this pressure. We live in a culture that is increasingly willing to tolerate Christianity as one option among many. A lifestyle preference for those who find it meaningful, but it is increasingly impatient with any Christianity that makes exclusive truth claims, that speaks in categories of sin and repentance, that insists that Jesus is not merely a spiritual resource, but he is the Lord of all lords. The beast in every age presents the same ultimatum as so many in the church are even falling victim to. Domesticate your faith or face the consequences. A few years ago, a study by the Barna group found that the single most common reason young adults give for leaving the church is that it feels too exclusive. Specifically, that its claims about Jesus as the only way feel out of step with a pluralistic culture. Now I want to be careful here because sometimes the church has been needlessly offensive and culturally tone-deaf, and this is a real failure that we should be mindful of. But notice what is happening at a deeper level. The pressure is not primarily aesthetic, it is at its heart theological. The world is not asking the church to be friendlier. It is asking the church to stop saying that Jesus is the Lord of Lords. It's asking us to add Caesar back into the equation, to say that Jesus is a Lord among lords. Way among ways, a resource among resources. That's the beast demand in every single generation just wearing a new suit. And here is what our passage says to that pressure. The ten kings are of one mind. The coalition has always existed and it will always exist until Christ returns. The question is not whether we will face it, the question is whether we will be found among the called and chosen and faithful when we do face it. Do we speak boldly? Do we live fervently in a manner that shows that we believe that Jesus Christ is the only way, the only truth, the only life, and that he is the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords. But then we come to verse 14, one of the most compact statements, one of the most electrifying statements in the entire book of Revelation. There's very few details. I like it like this. They will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them. Full stop. No qualification. Pretty short sentence that just describes a lot. No, unless they outnumber the Lamb's followers, know if the political winds are favorable, the Lamb will conquer because the text immediately adds, he is the Lord of lords and the King of Kings. This title was not casually chosen of Christ. In the ancient Near Eastern world, it belonged to the greatest of emperors. The Persian kings used it. It was applied to Nebuchadnezzar, but in the book of Deuteronomy, it belongs to God Himself. John is saying with absolute clarity, the one who was crucified as a common criminal is the actual Lord of Lords. Every Caesar, every empire, every beast figure in history bows before the one who wore the crown of thorns. And what is particularly striking in verse 14 is the company that the lamb keeps. Who is with the lamb? Those with him are called and chosen and faithful. Three words, three words that together describe the people of God. Called. They are not accidents of grace, but objects of divine purpose and faithful. They have held their confession under pressure. They have not burned the incense to Caesar. They have loved not their lives even unto death. These are the conquerors that John is talking about in chapter 12, verse 11, the ones who conquered by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. And then after that comes the most astonishing political theology in the passage. Verses 16 and 17, we see a turn. It tells us that the very kings who align themselves with the beast will then turn on the prostitute and destroy her. The beast will devour its own rider. Human alliances built on self-interest and lust for power are inherently unstable. Eventually, every empire becomes its own executioner. But more than that, God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and handing over their royal power to the beast until the words of God are fulfilled. Even the beast coalition, even the conspiracy against the Lamb, is working out the will of God. They are pawns, they are pieces in a story that God is the author. This is not fatalism, it's the sovereign freedom of God to write a straight story with crooked lines. The most hostile acts of the enemy become, without the enemy knowing it, instruments of divine providence. Now, put yourself in the early church's shoes. Let's just say you're gathered together this morning and you're in danger because you're here. Let's say you're under threat of persecution, that you've all um that you all have decided you will not burn the incense to Caesar, you will not worship Caesar. Most of you in this room have lost your jobs because of it. You're outcast from the community because you're making us look bad, you're making the city look bad to Rome, and you're under threat of death. And we're talking about this letter from Revelation that those powers out there will fall. This should provide profound comfort to suffering believers. The Roman persecutors, they thought they were eliminating just a rebellious little troublesome sect, but instead they were, without knowing it, producing martyrs whose testimony has strengthened the church every century since we were founded. The blood of the martyrs, Tullian would write, is the seed of the church. God is in the business of turning the enemy's weapons around for the good of the church. The church is in Revelation. Show us what Romans 8, 28 looks like. That God works all things together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. Thirdly, this morning, the certainty of the Lamb's conquest. We see this in verses 14 and 18. The angel closes with a what it might seem is kind of a flat historical note. The woman is the great city. For the original readers, there was little doubt as to what this great city meant. Rome dominated their world. It had an authority that was so total it was just simply called the city, as if there were no other. But we should resist tying the symbolism of Babylon, Rome too tightly to just first century Rome alone. Babylon is a symbol as much as it is a cipher for us to interpret Revelation through. It's the symbol of human civilization organized against God. We have the Babylon, we have the Rome of today across the world. Augustine called it the city of man. And every age has its Babylon, every age has its great city whose cultural products, economic power, and political authority seduce the nations. The question for every generation of the people of God is the same. Will you be dazzled by the beast, or will you see the true beauty of Christ? Now notice carefully what the angel said at the beginning of this passage. Why do you marvel? The problem is not that John looked. The angel's not mad at John for looking. The problem was that he marveled. He stood before the prostitute in something like reverence and something like awe and something like fear. And the angel's corrective is not look away. The corrective from the angel to John is see more clearly. See the whole picture. See the beast for what it really is, and see the Lamb for who he really is. This, in a very real sense, is what Christian worship does for us every single week. Why do you think we gather together every Sunday? Because in six days we so easily forget the gospel. We spend six days in a world subjected to the harlot. And we gather together here not to escape reality, but to see reality more clearly. We read the scripture, we sing the scripture, we pray the scripture, we share in the Lord's communion, and we hear the gospel preached so that our vision of the world is constantly corrected and calibrated. So that things that seem permanent are seen as temporary, and the things that seem weak and foolish, the crucified Lord and Him resurrected, the gathered community of the called, the chosen, the faithful. What we do here sees those things as the actual center of history. Consider what this passage tells us that the Lamb will do. He will conquer. And how has he already conquered? Not by gathering an army, not by outmaneuvering his political opponents, but by dying. Like a sheep he was silent. He stood before the crowd and subjected himself to death. The lamb who was slain has conquered. The victory of the cross looks like defeat to every standard of worldly calculation. Rome could not understand it. The wisdom of the age could not comprehend it, and yet it is a central fact of all history. In the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, God defeated sin. He defeated death and the devil once and for all, decisively and permanently. The implications for Christians living in this passage are concrete and demanding. First, we must refuse to be dazzled. When cultural authority, whether political, intellectual, or commercial, presents itself to us as the only viable way forward, as the permanent fixture of the universe that Christians may accommodate themselves to, we must remember it was and is not, and it is going to destruction. Not because we are cynics that despite the common good, but because we have been shown the truth about how history ends. We can love our neighbors, we can work for justice, we can participate in civic life, but we do so without surrendering to the idolatry of treating any human system as ultimate. Secondly, do not be surprised by the coalition against us. We've said this before. Until Christ returns, we will always be outnumbered. The ten kings are of one mind in their hostility to the Lamb. When the culture, the academy, the media, and the state find common cause in marginalizing Christian witness, this should not produce panic in the church. It is not a new development. The beast is gonna beast. He's doing beastly things. The question is not whether if the beast will make war on God's people. He will. He is, he will, and he will keep doing so. The question for you is whether you and my eye, we as the church, will be found in the company of the called, the chosen, and the faithful when that war rages. Thirdly, we must hold fast to the title Lord of Lords and King of Kings. This is not triumphalism, it's not the church flexing political muscle, it's not the church seeking to impose a theocracy by force. We don't want that. It is the quiet, subversive, irrepressible insistence that Jesus actually is Lord, that his resurrection actually happened, that his kingdom actually is coming, that his word actually stands above every decree of every government in the history of the world. And we hold this not with arrogance, but with a kind of deep and settled confidence that allows us and the church of all ages to suffer patiently, to forgive our enemies, to bless those who persecute us, and to look to the sky and eagerly await the return of the king, because we know how the story ends. So as we conclude this morning, I want to ask you the same question that the angel asked John. Why do you marvel? The angel asked John this question in the middle of this vision because John, like all of us, needed his vision corrected. The woman on the beast looked so powerful, so permanent, so inevitable. And the angel said, Let me tell you the mystery. Let me show you what's really going on here. This is what the entire book of Revelation is doing. It's just pulling back the curtain on the true nature of history. Underneath the apparent victory of the empire and of the apparent defeat of the church, the Lamb is reigning. He has seven horns, the fullness of power. He has seven eyes, the fullness of knowledge. Nothing escapes him, nothing surprises him. No coalition of ten kings, no prostitute drunk with the blood of the saints, no beast from the bottomless pit changes the fundamental fact. The lamb who was slain is worthy to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. Paul tells us in Romans 8:37 that we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. The people of God throughout history have had to learn to live in this more than conquerors reality as we have faced persecution for 2,000 years. The called and the chosen and the faithful are not those who escape persecution. The Bible doesn't tell us that we are not going to face the beast hostility. In fact, the Bible tells us all this because we will, and because we are. And the question stands over our comfortable, distracted, easily dazzled lives. Why do you marvel? Decades ago, there was a pastor that served a congregation in Eastern Europe during the height of Soviet rule. Now the secret police came to his church one Sunday morning and arrested him in front of his entire congregation. They told the congregation that the church was finished, that Christianity is a relic of the past, and that the state had one. He spent three years in a labor camp. When he was finally released, he went back to his village, and his congregation was still meeting. Not in the church building, which had been converted into a warehouse. They were meeting in a barn, in a dark barn around a single candle. He said later, when he walked through that door and he saw the faces of his church in the candlelight, he understood the book of Revelation for the very first time. He said, I'd read about the beast all my life. I experienced the beast. I understood the beast. That night I understood the Lamb. Called the chosen faith. That's who the church is. Even in a barn, even in the dark, even with one candle. May God grant us eyes to see the Lamb is upon his throne. May He give us hearts to join the company of our brothers and sisters over 2,000 years that are called and chosen and faithful, and lips to confess, whatever the cost, that He is Lord of Lords and King of Kings, until that day when we are shown to be right, when every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Let's pray together.