May 25, 2003
A Rehearsal for Armageddon
The Rev. Dr. Riley E. Jensen

Karl Barth once advised aspiring young preachers to meet the criterion of relevance by preaching with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  On this Memorial Day Sunday, the traditional opening day for summer, it is impossible to escape the press of world events because we are remembering with sorrow and gratitude the loss of men and women who just a year ago were alive-and-well and with their families.  We remember them.  We honor them.  We are thankful for their sacrifice and loyalty.

Memorial Day reminds us of the cost of war that can never be taken lightly.  Certainly as those who are followers of the Prince of Peace, war is a confusing and tragic admission of failure.  We live in a broken world where we are not always able to live up to our ideals.  As President Carter said, “War may be a necessary evil, but let us never forget that it is evil.”

Therefore, it is especially troublesome to me in times like these to hear Christians try to justify war on the basis of misguided scriptural interpretation.  As we prepared for and engaged in the War in Iraq, I heard and read more than once references to the Biblical battle of Armageddon seemingly to portray the inevitability of war as part of the plan of God, a mere rehearsal for Armageddon.

Certainly arguments for and against that war will continue, but I believe on this Memorial Day that we can best honor those brave, loyal men and women who gave their lives by rededicating ourselves to the principle that in the mind of God war is not inevitable and most assuredly it is not part of the plan of God.

Unfortunately, a biblical word that is used only one time in the entire Bible has crept into popular usage to do just that.  Therefore, on this Memorial Day Sunday I want to offer another Biblical interpretation for Armageddon as being anything but inevitable and which we need to work to avoid at all costs.

I.                  Armageddon is Like a Window

To begin, let me develop a framework by borrowing an image from Ortega y Gasset.  In a critical essay that he wrote on modern art some years ago, he suggested that the knack which we must master in order to appreciate contemporary painting is symbolized by the experience of looking through a window at a garden.  Optically, it is possible to do either of two things.  We may focus upon the window; if we do so, we see the garden, but it is only a confused mass of color, pointlessly framed by the window.  If, however, we focus upon the garden, we not only see the garden clearly and appreciate it fully, but we also see the window as it should be seen.  The function of a window is transparency, and the more transparent it is, the more perfectly it fulfills its reason for being.  It is when we see through a window that we see a window as it is intended to be seen.

To interpret this passage in a way that will be helpful to us here and now, we need to think of Armageddon as the window.  For some reason biblical literalists have become fixated on this obscure and highly symbolic passage.  I visited the Armageddon website to be reminded that those who interpret Biblical prophecy literally understand Armageddon to be a literal future battle.  The website says that “According to the Bible, it is the battle when God finally comes and takes over the world and rules it the way it should have been ruled all along.”

Interestingly enough “the three foul spirits” of Verse 13 is the reference to the original evil trinity, the axis of evil as it were -- the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet.  Friends, we are dealing with apocalyptic literature here.  This is a particular kind of stylized writing that we find in other places in the Bible -- most notably in the Book of Daniel.  It is written to a people during a time of extreme persecution, probably during the horrors of the reign of the Roman Emperor, Diocletion.  The message of hope was that despite their terrible circumstance justice would prevail.

The writer certainly did not intend for it to become a doomsday image that would paralyze people with fear.  He did not intend for it to become a threat, conjuring up images of a final holocaust, nor did he intend for it to be a gambit in a political chess game, a kind of Super Bowl for militarists to test the final state of the art.

Depending upon your background, it may come as some surprise to you (or no surprise to you) that there are people who interpret this passage literally.  These people are not bothered by the fact that the language is symbolic, that there is no place or has never been a place which has carried the name, Armageddon.  Of course, they would quickly note that literally, Armageddon means Har-Meggido, The Mount of Meggido.

I have visited Meggido.  There is nothing left now but the ruins of an ancient city high on a hill, dominating the beautiful and expansive Plain of Esdraelon.  Indeed, this Plain is most famous for the many ancient battles fought on its surface.  For one who would want to press the literalism of this passage, such geography is convenient and was no doubt in the mind of the original writer.

But I am suggesting that to press the literalism of such an obviously symbolic passage is not helpful.  It’s not helpful because it causes us to look too much at the window rather than through it.

II.              Showing the Failure of Evil

I want us to look through the window of Armageddon to see what is on the other side, and what is on the other side is a pathetic picture of the failure of evil.

Sometimes we get carried away by the bizarreness of the images of the Book of Revelation.  They seem to be made to order for your vintage horror movie, and yet it is important to remember that this book was written to be understood by a people immersed in the images and the symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures.  On the other hand, it was intended to be interpreted as so much nonsense by anyone else because it was treason to advocate the overthrow of the Roman government.  The kind of persecution endured at this time by Christians (under the rule of Diocletian) can be compared to the most awful tragedies experienced by any people, and certainly was thought by many at that time to signal the end of the world.

Even as here, where the writer is talking about the Bowls of the Wrath of God in the previous chapter, he has referred to the seven plagues.  At that time, these references would not fail to remind the perceptive reader of the plagues of the Exodus, which were designed not ultimately for judgment but for deliverance.

You see, we are dealing here not with a conquest by evil but with the failure of evil.  Remembering that the Egyptian plagues had to do with frogs, it is symbolic that the unclean spirits issuing from that evil trinity -- the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet -- are like frogs.  What is being pictured here is a devastating caricature of the failure of evil.  That which people fear most because it appears to be mighty and eternally entrenched becomes at long last only a ridiculous spawning of silly creatures of the night.

III.           The Triumph of the Good

So then, in interpreting this concept of Armageddon, we can stop looking at the window, which is filled with the bizarre images of a final cataclysmic battle, and look through it to discover what this must have meant to the reader and hence to us.

In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, there is a Knight who tells a young witch being bound to the stake that he wants to meet the Devil, and when she asks him why, he says, “I want to ask him about God.  He, if anyone, must know.”

The point, it seems to me, is that darkness has meaning only in contrast to the light.  Terrible images, which seem to accompany this final holocaust called Armageddon, are the product of one person’s efforts to show the greatness and the power of the kind of God who can overcome even such forces of destruction.  You see, the message is one of hope.  It is one of triumph.  There is life after Armageddon.

No matter how awful the tragedies or the circumstances which you or I may confront, no matter how great the odds there seem to be against us, no matter how many battles we have lost or how little energy we seem to have left, the final word has not yet been spoken because the final word is God’s word.

The image of Armageddon is so persuasive because nothing more awful could be imagined by this writer, and yet it is just his effort to give an apocalyptic illustration to the meaning of those words in Romans, Chapter 8, “Who can separate us from the love of Christ?  Can trouble, pain, or persecution?  Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, or the threat of force of arms?  I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

Imagine if you will a person who has been chronically ill, jaundiced, and immobilized by an unidentified virus.  A powerful antibiotic has been recently introduced into the bloodstream.  On the surface it appears that the patient will die since there is no known treatment.  But actually a potent healing force is already at work successfully beginning to battle the infection day and night.  The patient, however, remains miserable, and there is no obvious indication yet that a turning point has been reached.

But for us, the turning point has been reached in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  It’s like reading the final chapter of a book.  We know how the story’s going to end, we just don’t know how it’s going to get there.

Armageddon does not have to happen.  It is simply a symbol of the worst that can happen if we let it.  Therefore, I am troubled when this word enters discussions as if there is going to be an inevitable final military showdown between us -- the good guys and them -- who are, of course, the bad guys.

Ultimately, Armageddon has to do with the spiritual warfare where the good people and the bad people are not quite as easily distinguished because in this spiritual warfare, the battle is within us.  It’s like the old Indian who described his inner turmoil in terms of two dogs fighting within him.  When asked which dog is winning, he replied, “The one I feed the most.”

Make no mistake about it – it is a battle.  But the biggest battle wages within each of us where both the seeds of good and evil reside.  The likelihood of a future literal Armageddon is certainly not the will of God but enters into the realm of possibility as we too easily divide the world into two camps – those who are for us and those who are against us.

The words of James Russell Lowell call us to engage the battle of life in a way that will prevent a literal Armageddon from ever coming to pass:

“By the light of burning martyrs,

Jesus’ bleeding feet I track,

toiling up new Calvary’s ever with the

cross that turns not back,

new occasions teach new duties,

time makes ancient good uncouth,

they must upward still and onward,

who would keep abreast of truth.”

We know we live in the kind of world where war is a necessary evil.  But as Christians let us never glorify it.  And on this Memorial Day, let us look through the window to see another Biblical vision – the one where the lion lies down with the lamb, and swords are turned into plowshares, and “they shall not hurt or kill on all my holy mountain”. 

It seems to me that is the kind of vision to lift up as a memorial for those who have given their lives in the cause of peace.