76. Seven chapters in the Book of Revelation deal specifically with this affliction or attack by falsities against the truth. This attack is meant by the black horse and the pale horse that came forth from the scroll when the Lamb opened its seals (Revelation 6:5– 8). This attack is meant by the beast that rose up from the abyss and made war against the two witnesses and killed them (Revelation 11:7 and following). This attack is meant by the dragon that stood before the woman who was about to give birth, waiting to devour her child, and persecuted her in the desert; there it sent forth water like a river from its mouth to swallow her up (Revelation 12). This attack is also meant by the beast from the sea, who had a body like a leopard, feet like a bear, and a mouth like a lion (Revelation 13:2). This attack is also meant by the three spirits that were like frogs, which came out of the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet (Revelation 16:13). Finally, this attack is what is meant by the fact that after the seven angels poured out their bowls full of the wrath of God, which were the seven last plagues, onto the ground, into the sea, into the rivers and springs, into the sun, onto the throne of the beast, into the Euphrates, and finally into the air, there was a great earthquake unlike any that had occurred since the creation of humankind on the earth (Revelation 16). The “earthquake” means that the church is turned upside down; this is brought about by people teaching what is false and falsifying the truth.

Similar things are meant by the following passage as well:

The angel put forth his sickle and harvested the vineyard of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trampled, and blood came out, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred stadia. (Revelation 14:19, 20)

“Blood” here means truth that has been falsified.

There are many other examples in those seven chapters; see, if you wish, the explanations of those chapters and the accounts of memorable occurrences that come after them.

61. Brief Analysis

Surely everyone knows that God is compassion and mercy itself. He is absolute love and absolute goodness. These qualities constitute his underlying reality or essence. Surely, then, everyone sees the contradiction in saying that compassion itself or absolute goodness could look at the human race with anger, become our enemy, turn away from us, and lock us all into damnation and nevertheless continue to be his own divine essence, to be God. Attitudes and actions of that kind belong to a wicked person, not a virtuous one. They belong to an angel of hell, not an angel of heaven. It is horrendous to attribute them to God.

The fact that things like this have been taught is clear from direct statements made by many of the founders, the councils, and the churches as a whole, from the first centuries of Christianity right up to the present day.

It is also clear from indirect evidence. There are derivative teachings that must have come from thoughts like these as their source, the way effects come from a cause or bodily actions from a brain. For instance, the notion that God needed to be reconciled to us; that he was in fact reconciled through his love for his Son and through the Son’s intercession and mediation; that God needed to be appeased by seeing his Son’s final wretched suffering, and that this brought him back and more or less forced him to adopt a merciful attitude; that God went from being our enemy to being our friend and adopted us (children of wrath that we are) as children of grace.

(For the point that it would be merely human behavior for God to assign the justice and rewards of his Son to unjust people who begged him for it on the basis on their faith alone, see the last analytical section in this little work [§112].)