Revelation 6:3 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Revelation 6:3

Comments

There are two interpretations of these verses. They both start on same track. One says that this is about the removal of peace resulting in the persecution of the people of God, and the other says that it is peace taken away from people in general resulting in about war and bloodshed among the nations. Neither view teaches that God causes the people to kill each other or act violently towards each other. He simply takes his hand of restraint away, and they do it because of the evil and the hatred that is within them, and their rebelliousness against God’s law. According to the first view this is about the church; those being killed are believers. Support for this comes from the context, because a little later we read of the souls of those who have been slain, who are under, or at the foot of the altar, and the same root word is used. Support also comes from two words which John chooses to use. Some translations say, ‘That they should slay one another’, and the Greek uses a particular word that often refers to the slaying of animals both for food and for sacrifice. In the usage of the Bible, it is actually a very religious word. The idea then is that by their faithfulness, God’s people lay down their lives as a sacrifice. Another word in this verse is noted: ‘And there was given unto him a great sword.’ The Greek word for the sword there is makhaira. It is said that this denotes a knife such as is used to slaughter animals, but the word is often used in its ordinary sense to describe a weapon of war. The verse says that they killed ‘one another’, and it is difficult to apply this to the idea of religious sacrifice. It has not been the practice of persecuted Christians to take revenge on their persecutors with the sword.According to the second view it is as though God by his power holds warlike man in a measure of peace. He keeps turbulent, violent, angry, hateful people from constantly fighting each other. The world would be an impossible place to live in, if God did not restrain the warlike tendencies of man. No one could be saved; there would be nothing but anarchy, squalor, and bloodshed, so the kind restraint of God is upon mankind. Nevertheless from time to time, whether to punish, or to bring us to our senses, or to show us our true nature without him as fallen creatures, God removes his hand of restraint and things boil over into bloodshed and war, and the nature of man prevails. If he restrained war all the time, we would take the credit and be even more puffed up than we are. So God exposes man to what is in him and the optimism is knocked out of him. He administers some of the judgement even now.

Application

With God’s restraining hand operating, people tend to become proud. Each war people like to think will be the last. ‘God – who is he? I hate the notion. I believe an essential goodness of human nature.’ In the 1960s we saw a campaign to do away with God, to promote wickedness – we can have peace permanently. So he says at times, enough.

Even though the second view of the passage is taken, it is true that the church faces persecution in every age, and some of the lives taken belong to believers. Sometimes persecution is physical and violence, even to death. Sometimes as in our country right now, it’s intellectual: the hostility of atheism and unbelief, the great attack on spiritual things, upon God, upon the Bible. There are all the militant atheistic books, and hundreds of videos that the youngsters see constantly, attacking the very being of God, and the faith. Then there are the great theological attacks. All universities have been taken over by theological cynics, who don’t even believe the things their make a living from, and they spend all their lectures attacking the inspiration and authority of the Bible. They do their utmost to belittle it and undermine it, and their scholarship, actually, is dreadful in many ways. Then there is the cultural attack: the whole rock movement. What is it from the permissive society in the 60s onwards? A tremendous cultural attack upon God and the faith, to get all the young people influenced so very much by the beat drug and the rhythm drug, to believe in an alternative morality, and to believe that biblical morality is an offence and an outrage, and should even be criminalised, and there should be a new society in which anything goes. There is the takeover of all educational institutions coming in now, and you can see it entering into the schools.

Questions

Can the devil set up war in a county? No, only by permission. Raises a problem. Power given – all in the book God permits or initiates. Does this make God the author of War? Killing? No. To take peace. Let me explain. Human beings are sinful and quarrel the time, take offence, indicative. War would be non-stop if not for God imposing peace. Why is there peace? Because we are kind? No, but God imposes it. We may take credit for it. We have advanced. God has restrained our worst tendencies is the real explanation.

Let men not ask – why does a good God allow wars in this world? He does not merely allow them; by removing his restraint he sends them, for he has the right to judge man at any time.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Revelation 6:3 Commentary and Bible Study