Revelation: Chapter 6, Verses 9 to 17
The martyred and suffering cry out for justice, but God tells them to wait. How frustrating!
What is God waiting for anyway when WWII and pandemics were not evil enough?
Returning to N.T. Wright’s study guide and chapter 6, and cherry picking the questions. I’ll focus on question 8, the one that percolated thoughts:
“There is a long tradition, going back through the Psalms and the prophecies to the children of Israel in Egypt, crying out to their God to do something at last (Exodus 2:23). The cry (‘How long, O Lord, how long?’) echoes down through the centuries, and is heard again as the fith seal is opened. How is this cry echoed in our own day—in our families, churches and the world around us?”
For the first time in Revelation, John mentions an altar. Murdered souls huddle under it, shouting, yelling, demanding of God, “How much longer are you going to put off judging and avenging our blood on the earth-dwellers?”
Note: I’m following N.T. Wright’s Revelation: 22 Studies for Individuals and Groups and his newest book 20th Anniversary Edition with Study Guide, Revelation for Everyone. See my post Prepare for Revelation for suggested materials.
Earth-dwellers. That’s an interesting term for alive human beings who haven’t yet come face-to-face with the ending of their mortality. For it’s when death leers in our faces, that our choices vividly reveal their consequences.
Is that what the fabled life review is about, the one people relate as having when they return from (near-)death? I included life reviews in The Soul’s Awakening, likening it to unfolding postcards sucking Charlotte Elisabeth into their scenes.
Injustice Reigns On Our Streets
When people talk about God not doing anything about the awful things that happen on our streets, cities, countries, continents, and world, they usually mean population-level events. You know, wars, crime, famine, injustice, but not the little things we, our friends, neighbours, and family do. Let’s take a massive injustice as an example: car crashes.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. Yet governments and drivers treat it as a right. Once you have a licence, no one should have the right to test your skills again, is the common attitude. Nor punish you for an oopsie that happened to kill someone—or disable them for life. Unless you were drunk.
Societal changes made drunk driving verboten. Personally, I think the few who still drive drunk are alcoholics, binge drinkers, and the occasional entitled person who arrogantly believes one or two or a few won’t affect their driving. But you can’t do much about alcoholics or heavy drinkers driving drunk unless you treat their disease. Are we doing that as part of the campaign against impaired driving?
No law, fine, or comment is going to make addicts stop driving their cars. Aren’t their bodies pretty much soaked in booze (or other persistent drug) all the time? Since only “they” drive drunk, it’s easy to judge them and jail them for years for killing. (I’m not sure if they get jailed for disabling people, which is a death sentence given the kind of pseudo-compassionate attitude of Canadians towards the disabled.)
But it’s not so easy to levy the same judgements on sober drivers. After all, sober drivers are no different from you. They’re responsible, like you are, right? Sober drivers only killed another because they made a mistake. If we were to crack down on sober drivers who kill and disable, then everyone could end up in jail or fined and lose their licence. And since a driver’s licence is considered a right, even if it isn’t legally a right, we can’t have that, right?
Road carnage continues every day because we don’t want to face how our choices create it.
The awful thing that happens on our streets every day continues because we see injustice as happening on a large scale, not out of choices “everyone does” like speeding when there’s no traffic and why can’t we; like closing in on a slow driver in the passing lane to force him out of the way; like not stopping at a stop sign because who has the time; like parking on the sidewalk because other drivers shouldn’t have to slow down to pass; like buying a car too big for the front yard drive because all the popular kids are buying the cool SUVs; like buying a bigger and bigger pickup because strong men buy big trucks, who cares they’re better at killing humans when hit; like driving too close to cyclists because the road belongs to cars not bikes…
Get the picture?
What’s that saying? When a butterfly flaps its wings, an earthquake shakes the land on the other side of the world. Jesus said faith as small as a mustard seed can move a mountain.
Seeds and Wings
Wars, famines, richer and richer few and more and more poor, human carnage on roads and sidewalks are conceived in the wings and seeds of individual thoughts.
It isn’t only the Psalmist and prophets who called out, “How long God?”
In The Gathas, Gaush Urva, the living soul of the Bull Ahura Mazda created before humans, cried out:
“In whose hands have You trusted the care of Your creatures now that ruin has penetrated the Earth, plants withered and the waters troubled?” (Page 66.)
On page 26, Piloo Nanavutty wrote:
“This legend is also found in the tenth century Hindu text the Bhagvata Purana, which is a commentary on the Gita. Mother Earth, ‘wearing the shape of Cow’ goes before Indra, chief of the gods, and in the very words of Gaush Urva complains that she is oppressed and begs for a saviour.”
Human beings all have the same desire, all have the same cry to God: to save us from the misery we inflict upon each other.
God says, “Not yet.”
Why?
It’s a question that has no answer, yet I need to come up with one to end novel 2 and begin novel 3 of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy.
What is God waiting for?
The end of Revelation Chapter 6 indicates a cataclysmic event will send the rich, the powerful, fawning politicians, military elite scurrying for cover, fearing both God and the lamb’s anger. Free and slave will also join them. Although Wright focuses on the rich and powerful, verses 15 to 17 makes it clear that everyone will fear God and the lion-lamb’s anger.
“They realize they are entirely at the mercy of the God who rules the world. Their own schemes have come to nothing; what is now to become of them?” Wright writes.
What event could be so life-altering on a global level? The planet has experienced a few life-extinguishing events. The human population dropped during the Black Death a millennium ago. Human beings killed millions of their neighbours during two world wars and many littler wars in the 20th century alone. And right now, humans support governments that treat fatal and disabling infectious disease worse than Florence Nightingale who threw open the windows of her wards to prevent the spread of the deadly flu, despite having much greater understanding of how to prevent and more powerful tools to control it.
Yet God does not act.
The four horses of the apocalypse have already charged out around the Earth, their riders urging them on, conquering, slaying, enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor, and killing through war and famine and illness and wild animals. Yet the havoc they wreak has not silenced the dead souls underneath the altar. They shout, are given white robes, signifying purity and victory, and told to wait.
God still waits for evil to reach its apogee with more and more souls joining the ones under the altar. What do you think that apogee would look like?
Adjusting Our Gaze
Perhaps we should adjust our gaze from apocalyptic events down to the tiny seeds and fragile wings of individual thoughts. Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount to love your neighbour as yourself. Either we really hate ourselves (this comment has merit) or we pretend we do.
If we loved our neighbours who walk, drive, and bike on our streets, we’d tell governments:
to put photo radar on our highways to catch speeders;
to require regular retesting for drivers’ licences;
to have red light cameras at every intersection;
to connect those “your speed is” signs to authorities for automatic ticket issuing;
that once a person kills (drunk or sober) another by car, they don’t get to have a licence anymore ever;
to require ignition safety devices so no one can start a car under the influence of alcohol, prescription medications that impair driving, and drugs;
to require vehicle registrations for front yard permits, proving the vehicle can be parked with 30-cm space between its butt and the sidewalk, otherwise forfeit the permit permanently;
to require manufacturers to install sensors that can tell when a vehicle’s wheels are not at the same height aka when two are on a sidewalk and two on a road, and will beep incessantly like a car alarm until the jerk gets back on the road;
to make penalties for sober drivers the same as for drunk drivers who maim and kill—after all sober drivers knew far more than drunk drivers what they were doing!
Insurance companies would also lean on governments to tighten highway/road safety laws to reduce their claims. Instead, they save money by not paying out claims and defrauding claimants. It’s easier and feeds the inherent greed of capitalism’s current form (which is about enriching people, not providing quality goods and services like it was up until about the 1980s).
The seeds of greed, ostrich denial, wanting to do what one wants to do, lead to daily death and disability. The fragile wings of condescencion and pity-sympathy towards the disabled, subconsciously or consciously labelling them as lazy or incapable of working (“not like me!” healthy feel), leads to sub-poverty disability benefits and denying their greater health care needs.
How long is God waiting? Perhaps God is waiting until every human understands and teaches the next generation that their thoughts matter, that they can’t do it alone, and that no human has the capacity to see the big picture of how their thoughts flutter into other people’s thoughts, changing them, changing their community, changing the world.