They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon.

//In this verse, John of Patmos finds a corny play on Greek words to make a point. He describes a fearsome army of locusts the size of horses arising from the smoke of the Abyss. (The Abyss was thought to be a cavern within the underworld.) The job of these locusts is to torment people for five months. John calls the king of this fearsome army the “the angel of the Abyss,” and names him Apollyon, or Abaddon.

Apollyon, like Abaddon, means “destroyer,” and John’s clever play on words seems to be saying that the Greek god Apollo reigns over Sheol. Abaddon is another name for Sheol, the realm of the dead.

In an earlier post about Revelation, I described how the pose of twenty four elders around the throne of God mocked the Greek god Apollo. Now, here is Apollo again, as the angel of Sheol. It’s no coincidence that the locust symbolizes Apollo, the god of pestilence and plague.

Why does John seem to have it in for this particular god? Because Nero Caesar, the Roman emperor who tortured so many Christians and ordered the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, claimed to be Apollo. Coins were minted with Nero’s portrait appearing as Apollo, Nero’s statue was erected in an ancient temple of Apollo, and a building in Athens was dedicated to All powerful Nero Caesar Sebastos, a new Apollo. Meet the original angel of the Abyss: Nero Caesar.

More about Nero Caesar and his dastardly role in the book of Revelation can be found in my book, Revelation: The Way it Happened.

 … there is no other God but one.

★★★★★

I do confess this: You need to know your Bible before reading this one. There’s just too much cram-packed into these 200 pages for Henson to take time to describe the setting of every topic. He assumes you know the Bible stories, and he assumes you’ve had some exposure to Biblical criticism. The result is no wasted words, and I wound up savoring it very slowly.

Henson’s point seems to be that nobody, not even Jesus’ closest followers, measure up to Christ. Given the opportunity to lead on their own, the apostles’ floundering attempts in the book of Acts sometimes seem to steer the boat off course, away from the compassionate message of their founder. Henson relays the stories in Acts with wry insight, and here I should confess something else: Once in a while, Henson’s opinionated directness overshadows his humor. He comes down particularly hard on “Rocky” (Peter) and  Paul (who “loved to give advice” even on non-theological matters, and wasn’t above the occasional “I told you so” afterward.) Hey, turns out these guys were human after all! None of this is cause to despise these early Christians, we just love them all the more in their character flaws, marveling all the more at how Christianity survived its first bumbling attempts. In other words, Henson’s direct approach works.

Definitely worth reading!

Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

//This verse seems pretty clear on the matter. But since scientific study continues to insist there has been no worldwide flood, a number of Bible readers consider the flood story to be a local event. They point to other locations in scripture where “the whole world” appears to mean only the surrounding area of the writer.

The flood story, however, carries an unmistakable moral lesson: Life on earth would not have survived were it not for Noah’s faithfulness. Life was preserved only because Noah brought animals into the ark, to preserve these species on earth. That’s the entire point of the flood myth, isn’t it? God wiped out his creation and started over.

But not only does external evidence undermine this interpretation, the Bible itself does! If you believe all life on earth was destroyed, consider the following:

Genesis 6:4, The Nephilim were on the earth in those days–and also afterward–when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

This verse is provided to bolster the wickedness of mankind before the flood. The story reads as if God wished to destroy the Nephilim (giants) by the flood. But then comes this verse, long after the flood, describing the fearsome people inhabiting the promised land:

Numbers 13:33, We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Perhaps the Nephilim were so tall that they were able to keep their heads above water?

//The book of Jonah is a wonderful, humanitarian story about universal love. You know the story: God says to Jonah, “go, preach to Nineveh.” Jonah balks, for who could be sympathetic toward the hated Assyrians and their capital city of Nineveh? Jonah runs the other way. He winds up on a boat tossed by a powerful storm, is heaved overboard by the sailors when he is discovered to be the cause for God’s wrath, and is swallowed by a big fish. When the fish coughs him up three days later, Jonah has had enough. He repents and does what God commands, preaching to Nineveh.

The whole city of Nineveh repents (Jonah must have been one heckuva preacher) and Jonah is miffed because God decides to pardon them. Jonah goes and sulks under a big “gourd” to escape the hot sun and contemplate the unfairness of life. Before the next day dawns, however, God creates a little worm who eats the gourd. Jonah is miffed all the more. God explains his lesson: Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

This tale might be considered no more than a fun bedtime story, were it not for its timing. Scholars date the writing of this book precisely to a period in time when Jerusalem was undergoing a severe ethnic cleansing, shortly after a wave of Jews returned from captivity in Babylon. In an attempt to purify God’s race, all non-Jews were being banished outside the walls of Jerusalem, even though it meant breaking up marriages and families.

Enter the anonymous book of Jonah, a bit of protest literature, with its plea for tolerance for all nations. The man Jonah, readers would recognize, is a portrayal of the Jews’ own bigotry.

Karen writes with wit and passion. She’s opinionated and direct, and she gets on her high horse a bit as she exposes The Secret as utter hogwash, money-grubbing TV evangelism as downright fraud, and Bernie Madoff as the embodiment of evil. But she’s serious about learning from the example of Jesus, and I dare say she has Jesus on her side. That is, if Jesus’ teachings about money and its use are to be taken seriously.

Worth reading!