Canter Bridge

This morning’s newspaper chronicles, in a manner of speaking, the movements of kings, princes, and their armies. Such human jockeying for power and the ‘outcry in the streets’, the end of which the psalmist longs to see, sound a constant beat in the rhythm of human affairs.

Yet there is, in the newsprint of a dying print medium, no similar register of dark, demonic forces. One is left to understand that powerful men and women make the world, plowing deep, bloody furrows by their unrelenting ambition.

The Bible’s apocalyptic language—to be sure, a minority voice in the biblical anthology—speaks a different truth. In anticipation of a climatic spasm of rebellion against the God of heaven by the nations, the Seer of the book of Revelation sees not so much human strategy as demonic deception.

And I saw three foul spirits like frogs coming from the mouth of the dragon, from the mouth of the beast, and from the mouth of the false prophet. These are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty.

For a book so deeply conscious that reality most real endures in that sphere from which we distract ourselves by labeling it ‘spiritual’, the Bible is reticent to indulge in this way of speaking. If it peels back the curtain to allow us a glimpse at needy intervals, it does so only infrequently. Perhaps we are not capable of managing such stuff undiluted. Just as unmediated joy might break us to pieces, so might frequent glimpses of unveiled beauty snuff out our souls.

Yet in a passage that dares to proclaim a reality that has not yet been proven beyond dispute in our human, our cosmic drama—‘Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, your judgments are true and just!’—the Seer considers it necessary that we understand that human decisiveness is not the half of it. Those who shape the world most energetically by the force of their arrogant wills are, from this angle of vision, the most pathetically deceived.

Trouble is, they carry us with them.

We are left to hope that the altar’s confident proclamation of YHWH’s true and just judgments is the final word. If it is not, we are doomed. If the altar speaks truth, we can wait a while longer. The night is not yet too dark.