This note is interpretation, not translation. It sets two kinds of words side by side: the good news, which blesses the one who trusts it, and sorcery, which this book ties to deception and to demons. The sections marked as Jon’s reading are in his own voice; the texts are under each step; and each step that no verse states carries a red flag.
Two kinds of words — Jon’s reading. The good news is God’s spell: words from God that bless you when you believe them. Sorcery is the opposite: words that curse you when you believe them, and they are the teachings of demons. Both work the same way. Faith comes by hearing, and so does the spell. Whichever you take in is the one that takes hold of you.
The English word. “Gospel” began in Old English as gōdspell, “good news,” made to translate the Greek euangelion, the word of Revelation 14:6. It was soon written and read as godspell, “God’s message,” and the related languages kept that sense (Old High German gotspel, Icelandic guðspjall). In Old English a spell was a story, a piece of news, a speech; the sense “words with magic power” comes in the 1500s. That is the history of English, not scripture, but it sets the two side by side: words spoken over a person, of two kinds.
Two hearings. “So trust comes from hearing, and hearing through the word (rhēma) of the Anointed” (Romans 10:17; some copies read “of God”). The other hearing is named just as plainly. “These nations … listen to soothsayers and diviners; but as for you, the LORD your God has not given you so. A prophet like me the LORD your God will raise up for you … to him you shall listen” (Deuteronomy 18:14–15): they listen to the sorcerers, you listen to Him. “Some will depart from the faith, paying attention to deceiving spirits and teachings of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1). “They will heap up teachers for themselves, having itching ears, and will turn their hearing away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3–4), and “hearing” there is akoē, the word of Romans 10:17. The first curse on man’s ground followed listening to the wrong voice: “because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate … cursed is the ground because of you” (Genesis 3:17), after the serpent’s word, the deception Paul names (2 Corinthians 11:3). Jesus said both sides: “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27), and “a stranger they will not follow … because they do not know the voice of strangers” (10:5); “take heed what you hear” (Mark 4:24), “take heed how you hear” (Luke 8:18). Revelation says it seven times: “let the one who has an ear hear what the Spirit says” (2:7 and each letter), and begins, “blessed is the one who reads aloud, and those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep them” (1:3). Even the old snake-charmer’s spell, lachash, a whisper, worked through the ear: the wicked are “like a deaf cobra that stops its ear, which will not hear the voice of charmers” (Psalm 58:4–5; 58:5–6 in the Hebrew).
What is believed works. Paul uses one word for how each takes hold. God’s word: “you received it not as the word of people but as it truly is, the word of God, which also works (energeitai) in you who believe” (1 Thessalonians 2:13); “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12). The lie: the lawless one comes “by the working (energeian) of the accuser, with all power and signs and wonders of a lie … because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God sends them a working of deception, so that they believe the lie” (2 Thessalonians 2:9–11). The word works in those who believe it; the deception works by being believed.
Every word from the mouth of God. When Jesus was led into the wilderness to be tested by the slanderer, and had gone forty days without food (Matthew 4:1–2), the tempter’s first offer was bread on his word: “if you are the Son of God, say that these stones become bread” (4:3). The answer was a sentence of Moses: “A person will not live on bread alone, but on every word coming out through the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3). The word there is rhēma, the same as in “trust comes from hearing” above. Moses said it of the manna: “he humbled you and let you go hungry and fed you the manna, which you did not know and your fathers did not know, so that he might make you know that a person does not live on bread alone, but on everything that comes out of the mouth of the LORD a person lives” (Deuteronomy 8:3). The Hebrew has no noun for “word”: kol motsa fi YHWH, “everything that comes out of the mouth of the LORD.” The Greek translation supplies it, epi panti rhēmati tō ekporeuomenō dia stomatos theou, and Matthew follows the Greek word for word (Luke 4:4 in the text used here gives only the first half). The verse before gives the reason: forty years in the wilderness “to humble you, to test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not” (8:2), and the manna was given “to do you good in the end” (8:16). So the bread was a lesson about the word: what keeps a person alive is what God says, and it is taken in the way food is. Jesus answered the tempter’s word with God’s.
Out of the mouth, in this book. The verb of Matthew 4:4, ekporeuomai, “come out,” stands with “mouth” in ten verses of the New Testament (Matthew 4:4, 15:11, 15:18; Luke 4:22; Ephesians 4:29; Revelation 1:16, 9:17, 9:18, 11:5, 19:15). Jesus used it Himself of what defiles: “what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and that is what defiles a person” (Matthew 15:18), and Luke uses it of His own speech, “the words of grace coming out of his mouth” (Luke 4:22). Paul sets the two side by side: “let no rotten word come out of your mouth, but only what is good for building up … so that it gives grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29). Half of the ten are in Revelation, and they sort into the two kinds of words this note is about. From Jesus’ mouth: “a sharp double-edged sword came out of his mouth” (1:16), and “a sharp sword comes out of his mouth, to strike the nations with it” (19:15), two verses after “his name is called: the Word of God” (19:13). From the two witnesses’ mouths, fire: “fire comes out of their mouths and eats up their enemies” (11:5), which is marked there as Jeremiah 5:14, “I am putting my words in your mouth as fire, and this people as wood, and it will eat them up,” so the fire is God’s words. From the horses’ mouths, “fire and smoke and sulphur,” and a third of humanity killed by them (9:17–18). And with “mouth” in 16:13 and the verb in 16:14: “three unclean spirits like frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the animal and out of the mouth of the false prophet. They are the spirits of demons performing signs, and they go out to the kings of the whole inhabited world, to gather them for the battle” (16:13–14). One verb carries the word that gives life and the spirits of demons that deceive the kings, which is Paul’s pair in 1 Timothy 4:1, “deceiving spirits and teachings of demons.”
How close this is. The verb and the noun are shared, and in the same construction, “out of the mouth” with “come out.” Revelation never quotes Deuteronomy 8:3 or Matthew 4:4, and it never says in so many words that the sword from His mouth is the word of God; the name “the Word of God” (19:13) and the sword (19:15) are two verses apart. Hebrews calls the word of God “sharper than any double-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12) and Paul calls “the sword of the Spirit” the rhēma of God (Ephesians 6:17); reading Revelation’s sword as the word is this note’s reading, made from those, and the Double-Edged Sword reading takes it further.
Manna, hidden. The food Deuteronomy hangs that lesson on comes back in this book as a promise: “To the one who comes through it I will give some of the hidden manna” (2:17). It is said to Pergamum, the assembly charged with holding the teaching of Balaam, “to eat food offered to idols and to commit sexual unfaithfulness” (2:14), the table this note follows above. John’s Gospel sets manna and Jesus together: “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat’” (John 6:31, from Psalm 78:24, where the Greek has arton ouranou edōken autois); “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will not go hungry, and whoever trusts in me will never be thirsty” (6:35); “the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life” (6:63), with rhēmata again. Revelation does not say what the hidden manna is. That the one who refused Balaam’s table is given God’s food is a likeness of situation the letter itself sets up, and joining it to John 6 is this note’s step.
Fed in the wilderness. Jesus answered in the wilderness with Israel’s wilderness lesson. In Revelation the woman flees “into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that they can feed her there” (12:6), and again she flies “into the wilderness to her place, where she is fed for a time, and times, and half a time, out of the snake’s reach” (12:14), a verse marked as Exodus 19:4, the eagles’ wings that brought Israel out. The verb “feed,” trephō, occurs in this book only in those two verses. The wilderness, God feeding His own there, and the snake or the slanderer kept from them, belong to Deuteronomy 8, Matthew 4 and Revelation 12 alike; the three share a shape and not wording, and the book does not say what the woman is fed with.
Eating the word. John is handed the word as food: “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey” (10:9), and so it was (10:10). That is Ezekiel’s scroll, marked at 10:10: “eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel … and I ate it, and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness” (Ezekiel 3:1, 3:3). Jeremiah says the same of himself: “your words were found, and I ate them, and your word became to me a joy and the gladness of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16, in the Hebrew; the Greek translation reads differently there and has no eating). And Amos promises the opposite of the manna: “I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD” (Amos 8:11), bread and the word set against each other again, and the word reached by hearing. So the scriptures speak of God’s word as eaten and as heard in the same breath, which is this note’s point: what is believed is taken in. John’s scroll also shows that the word taken in is not always easy to carry: sweet in the mouth, bitter afterwards.
Galatians: the good news as blessing, and a spell. Paul opens the chapter: “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” (Galatians 3:1). The verb, ebaskanen, is the evil eye, the casting of a spell; it is its only use in the New Testament. The next verse sets the remedy against it: “did you receive the Spirit by works of law, or by hearing with trust?” (3:2). Then he defines the good news by blessing: “the scripture, foreseeing that God would make the nations right by trust, announced the good news beforehand to Abraham: ‘in you all the nations will be blessed.’ So those who are of trust are blessed” (3:8–9). And the other side by curse: “as many as are of works of law are under a curse” (3:10). “The Anointed bought us out of the curse of the law … so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the nations … so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through trust” (3:13–14).
The same letter comes back to it before it names sorcery. “You were running well. Who cut in on you, so that you are not persuaded by the truth? This persuasion is not from the one who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump … the one who troubles you will bear his judgment” (5:7–10). “Persuasion,” peismonē, is found only there in the New Testament. The ones who troubled them are the ones the Jerusalem letter describes: “some from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls” (Acts 15:24). Then the list: “the works of the flesh are plain: sexual unfaithfulness, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery (pharmakeia), enmities, strife, jealousy, rages, rivalries, divisions, factions” (Galatians 5:19–20). Sexual unfaithfulness, idolatry and sorcery are the three Revelation keeps together (9:20–21; 21:8; 22:15), and both books shut them out (Galatians 5:21; Revelation 22:15). “Factions,” hairesis, is the word Acts uses for the circumcision party (Acts 15:5) and Peter for “destructive heresies” (2 Peter 2:1); “divisions” is found elsewhere only at Romans 16:17–18, of those who cause divisions “contrary to the teaching … and by smooth talk and fine words deceive the hearts of the simple.”
Leaven. Jesus said what leaven is. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” and “then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6, 16:12); “the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (Luke 12:1), the word Paul uses of the teachings of demons, spoken “through the hypocrisy of liars” (1 Timothy 4:2). Jesus used it the other way too: “the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matthew 13:33). Leaven is what spreads through the whole batch; there is a leaven of the kingdom and a leaven of false teaching. Paul sets truth against the old leaven: “not with the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:8).
What the word “sorcery” is in scripture. The Hebrew is kashaf and keshef, thirteen words in twelve verses of the Hebrew Bible; the Greek is pharmakeia and pharmakos, from pharmakon, a drug, potion or poison, and in the New Testament it is five words in five verses (Galatians 5:20; Revelation 9:21, 18:23, 21:8, 22:15). Wherever it is shown at work, it is spoken: the Greek translators set it beside the epaoidos, the one who sings a spell, at Pharaoh’s court (“the enchanters did the same by their sorceries,” Exodus 7:11, 7:22, 8:7), in the forbidden list (“sorcerer … one who binds a spell,” Deuteronomy 18:10–11), at Babylon (“in your sorcery, in the great strength of your spells,” Isaiah 47:9, 12) and at Nebuchadnezzar’s throne (Daniel 2:2). It goes with lies and false prophets: “do not listen to your prophets, your diviners … or your sorcerers, who speak to you … for they prophesy a lie to you, to remove you far from your land” (Jeremiah 27:9–10); “a swift witness against the sorcerers … and those who swear falsely” (Malachi 3:5). It goes with prostitution: “the prostitutions of Jezebel your mother and her many sorceries” (2 Kings 9:22); Nineveh, “mistress of sorceries, who sells nations through her prostitutions” (Nahum 3:4). It goes with idols: “I will cut off sorceries from your hand … and you will no longer bow to the work of your hands” (Micah 5:12–13). And it fails before God: the enchanters could copy the first signs, then “could not,” and said “this is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:18–19); “the sorcerers could not stand before Moses” (9:11); Babylon’s sorcerers could not reveal the king’s mystery, “but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (Daniel 2:27–28).
The drug and the cup. The root word was neutral in Greek: medicine, poison, dye or charm. In the Bible it is never medicine; it is medicine only in Sirach, outside the Hebrew Bible (“the Lord created medicines out of the earth,” Sirach 38:4). Scripture approves medicine in other words: “is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” (Jeremiah 8:22); “those who are well do not need a physician” (Matthew 9:12); “Luke, the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14). Where Revelation pictures a potion, it is Babylon’s cup: “Babylon was a golden cup in the LORD’s hand, making all the earth drunk; the nations drank of her wine, therefore the nations went mad” (Jeremiah 51:7); “she has made all the nations drink of the wine of the passion of her sexual unfaithfulness” (Revelation 14:8); a golden cup “full of abominations” (17:4); “in the cup she mixed, mix a double portion for her” (18:6); and in the same chapter, “all the nations were led off the road by your sorcery” (18:23). A drink, like a word, works by being taken in. Against her cup stands God’s: “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (22:2), and “let the one who is thirsty come … take the water of life free” (22:17).
Lies that kill when they are heard. Ezekiel 13 is the nearest thing in scripture to a definition. Women who prophesy “out of their own heart” sew bands for the wrists and veils for the head “to hunt souls” (13:17–18), “to put to death souls who should not die, and to keep alive souls who should not live, by your lying to my people, who listen to lies” (13:19). “You have made the heart of the righteous sad with a lie, when I had not made him sad, and strengthened the hands of the wicked” (13:22). And God’s answer: “I am against your bands … I will tear them from your arms and let the souls go free”; “I will deliver my people from your hand” (13:20, 13:23). In the Greek of that chapter the false prophets are “uttering empty things” (13:9) to “a people who listen” (13:19), with the verb Luke uses for what the Spirit gave the apostles “to utter” at Pentecost (Acts 2:4, 2:14): one verb, two kinds of speech.
Balaam: the curse that failed, and the word that was taken in. Balak hired Balaam because “whom you bless is blessed, and whom you curse is cursed” (Numbers 22:6). It failed. “How can I curse whom God has not cursed?” (23:8). “God is not a man, that he should lie … Look, I have received a command to bless: he has blessed, and I cannot reverse it. He has not seen iniquity in Jacob … there is no enchantment against Jacob, no divination against Israel” (23:19–23). Jacob’s own name is the heel-grabber, the supplanter (Genesis 25:26, 27:36), and he is the one no spell can touch; the protection rests on God being with him, not on his record. “The LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the LORD your God loved you” (Deuteronomy 23:5; 23:6 in the Hebrew). Paul says it of every gift: “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). The plague came another way. The women of Moab “invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods” (Numbers 25:2), and Moses says they did it “by the word of Balaam” (31:16). The Greek translation puts two words against each other: “according to the word (rhēma) of Balaam, to make them fall away and disregard the word (rhēma) of the Lord.” Revelation calls it “the teaching of Balaam” (2:14). Moses draws the line himself: “every man who followed Baal-Peor, the LORD your God destroyed from among you; but you who held fast to the LORD your God are alive, every one of you, today” (Deuteronomy 4:3–4). The curse spoken at God’s people could not touch them; the word they took in did.
Unfaithfulness, and the bride — Jon’s reading. Moses calls Peor ma’al against the LORD (Numbers 31:16), the word the law uses for a wife’s unfaithfulness (“if any man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him,” 5:12), and on the day it happened the text calls it prostitution, zanah (25:1). The two words stand in one verse only once: “they were unfaithful to the God of their fathers, and prostituted themselves after the gods of the peoples of the land” (1 Chronicles 5:25). The pull was always to their gods, not their nation: “they will turn your son away from following me, to serve other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:4); “their daughters prostitute themselves after their gods” (Exodus 34:16); Solomon’s wives “turned his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:4); and Ruth the Moabite, who said “your God my God” (Ruth 1:16), became David’s great-grandmother. (Ezra and Nehemiah speak of “the peoples of the lands, with their abominations,” Ezra 9:1, and Nehemiah reads the law that excluded Moab for hiring Balaam, Nehemiah 13:1–2; their wording is about peoples, with the gods underneath.) I believe this is the picture God is drawing of unfaithfulness to Jesus. Paul says Peor was drawn for us: “these things became types for us … let us not commit sexual unfaithfulness, as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in one day … they were written for our instruction” (1 Corinthians 10:6, 10:8, 10:11). The church is the bride: “I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to the Anointed. But I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your minds may be corrupted … if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus … or you receive a different spirit … or a different good news” (2 Corinthians 11:2–4); “this mystery is great, but I speak about the Anointed and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). God said it first: “your Maker is your husband” (Isaiah 54:5); “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you will know the LORD” (Hosea 2:20; 2:22 in the Hebrew). And the book ends with the two women: the prostitute (17:1–5) and “the bride, the wife of the Lamb” (21:9), who “has made herself ready” (19:7) and says, with the Spirit, “Come” (22:17).
Ephesus: the books burned. At Ephesus some exorcists tried to use Jesus’ name as a formula, and the spirit answered, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” (Acts 19:13–15). Then “many of those who had believed came, confessing and declaring their practices, and a good number of those who had practised magic brought their books together and burned them in front of everyone; and they counted the price and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed” (19:18–20). The books of spells went into the fire and the word grew. Ephesus is where Timothy was when Paul wrote of the teachings of demons (1 Timothy 1:3; 4:1), and it is the first of the seven letters in this book, the one that tested those who called themselves apostles and “found them liars” (Revelation 2:2). On Cyprus, “Elymas the magician,” whom Luke also calls “a false prophet,” “opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith”; Paul called him “full of all deceit … son of the slanderer”; and the proconsul “believed, astonished at the teaching of the Lord” (Acts 13:6–12). The contest was over trust.
Commandments of men, and made-up words. Scripture has its own names for rules added to God’s word. Jesus: “in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Leaving the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men … making void the word of God by your tradition which you handed on; and you do many such things” (Mark 7:7–8, 7:13). Paul: “see that no one carries you off as captives through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men … and not according to the Anointed” (Colossians 2:8); “why … do you submit to decrees, ‘do not handle, do not taste’ … according to the commandments and teachings of men?” (2:20–22). Peter: “false teachers … will bring in destructive heresies … and in greed they will make merchandise of you with fabricated words” (2 Peter 2:1–3), plastois logois, made-up words, the only use of the word in the New Testament; and “they went astray, following the way of Balaam” (2:15). Revelation puts merchants, going astray and sorcery in one sentence: “your merchants were the great men of the earth, because all the nations were led off the road by your sorcery” (18:23). Paul has a canon too, and he names it: “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as many as walk by this rule (kanōn), peace be on them, and mercy” (Galatians 6:15–16).
Rome’s canon — Jon’s reading. I think the sorcery is their canon. The Ephesians burned their books when they believed; Rome writes books of its own, and much of what is in them is contrary to scripture. Paul named two marks of the teachings of demons, “forbidding marriage, and requiring abstinence from foods” (1 Timothy 4:3), and both are in Rome’s code (canon 277 §1 on clerical celibacy; canons 1250–1251 on days of abstinence), as the note The Faith, or the Teachings of Demons sets out. At the Lord’s table Paul says “let a person examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Corinthians 11:28), “wait for one another” (11:33), and “we who are many are one body, for we all share the one bread” (10:17); Jesus said “drink from it, all of you” (Matthew 26:27). Rome gives the bread without the cup, admits only its own members (canon 844), and requires a fast (canon 919) and confession to a priest first (canon 916). These are made up: no verse requires them. Peter himself drew back from eating with fellow believers over rules, and Paul opposed him to his face because it was “not walking straight toward the truth of the good news” (Galatians 2:12–14).
The sin that leads to death. Rome builds its line between mortal and venial sin on 1 John 5:16–17. In its own words: “Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law” (Catechism 1855); “grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man” (1858); and if it is not repented and forgiven, it causes “the eternal death of hell” (1861). Missing Sunday Mass on purpose is listed as grave (2181). John defines life and death three verses earlier: “the one who has the Son has life; the one who does not have the Son does not have life” (1 John 5:12); “the one who does not trust God has made him a liar, because he has not trusted the testimony God has given about his Son” (5:10). The verse itself says, “if anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he will ask, and God will give him life” (5:16): another believer prays, and God gives life. John’s Gospel says the same: “unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24); the Spirit convicts “of sin, because they do not believe in me” (16:9). So for John the sin toward death is refusing God’s word about His Son; for Rome it is a list of law-breakings, which is the footing Paul calls a curse (Galatians 3:10). And the next verse is the promise: “everyone born of God does not keep on sinning, but the One born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him” (1 John 5:18). That is “no enchantment against Jacob” again: the one who holds the Son is out of the evil one’s reach.
King Nebuchadnezzar — Jon’s reading. Revelation builds its Babylon from his story, and I read it as a warning shaped like the papacy. His court was full of sorcerers who could not reveal the mystery (Daniel 2:2, 2:27–28). He made one command to “peoples, nations and languages” (3:4), the list Revelation uses for the animal’s reach: “when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre … fall down and bow to the golden image,” and “whoever does not fall down and bow will be thrown into the furnace” (3:5–6), which Revelation repeats of the image of the animal (13:15). The image was sixty cubits high and six wide (3:1). He renamed God’s people after his gods: “Belteshazzar, according to the name of my god” (4:8; 4:5 in the Aramaic; 1:7). And “Babylon the great” is his own boast: “is not this Babylon the great, which I have built … by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?” (4:30; 4:27 in the Aramaic), Babylōn hē megalē in the Greek, word for word what Revelation calls her (14:8; 18:2). Isaiah’s king of Babylon says, “I will set my throne on high … I will sit on the mount of assembly … I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:13–14), and Paul’s man of lawlessness “sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4). One ruler commanding all peoples, an image to bow to under threat, sorcerers at his throne, God’s people renamed, and the boast of “Babylon the great”: that is the pattern I see in the papacy.
But his story is part of God’s plan, and it ends in mercy. God called him “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, my servant” (Jeremiah 27:6), and the sorcerers in that chapter were the ones lying (27:9–10). He was humbled “until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (Daniel 4:32), and then: “I lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High … those who walk in pride he is able to humble” (4:34, 4:37). Maybe this means Rome will turn and see the truth. The Lord “is patient toward you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to a change of mind” (2 Peter 3:9), and the call to God’s people in Babylon is “come out of her, my people” (Revelation 18:4). The ones the book throws into the lake of fire are not the pope or the church: they are the animal and the false prophet (19:20), the slanderer (20:10), and Death and Hades (20:14). The prostitute is burned (17:16; 18:8) and Jezebel is thrown onto a bed (2:22); the book does not say either goes into the lake. I read those as the spirits at work, not the people they work through. Rome distinguishes honouring an image from worshipping God, and a Catholic reader will say so; this is a critique of a doctrine, not of a people, and anyone who trusts Jesus is saved on the same terms as anyone else, Catholics included.
In this book. The thread of deception runs through Revelation in one verb, “lead off the road” (planaō), in eight verses: by teaching, the woman Jezebel who “teaches my servants and leads them off” (2:20), the name of the queen whose sins were “prostitutions and sorceries” (2 Kings 9:22); by sorcery, “all the nations were led off the road by your sorcery” (18:23); by signs (13:14; 19:20); and by the dragon himself, “who leads the whole inhabited world off the road” (12:9; 20:3, 8, 10). Three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouths of the dragon, the animal and the false prophet: “they are the spirits of demons, performing signs” (16:13–14), where Pharaoh’s enchanters had brought up frogs “by their sorceries” (Exodus 8:7). Out of His mouth comes a sharp sword (1:16; 19:15), and of the 144,000, “in their mouth no lie was found” (14:5). Sorcerers stand beside “everyone who deals in lies” (21:8) and “everyone who loves and practises a lie” (22:15); demons and sorcery stand in neighbouring verses (9:20–21), and Babylon is “a home for demons” (18:2). Against all of it the book blesses words: seven blessings (1:3; 14:13; 16:15; 19:9; 20:6; 22:7; 22:14), “these are true words of God” (19:9), “these words are trustworthy and true” (21:5), God’s people conquering “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (12:11), the one good news (14:6), and at the end, “there will no longer be any curse” (22:3).
Where this stops. The verses are quoted where they stand, rendered from the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Leningrad Codex, the Greek of Swete’s Septuagint and Nestle 1904; Rome’s words are quoted from its Catechism and Code. The note does not say what Babylon’s sorcery was made of; the word also covers potions, and the book’s picture of it is a mixed cup. It does not say any person is lost: the call is to come out, and the gifts of God are irrevocable. Protection for God’s people is set out more fully in Fear Not, Child of God.
Red flag That sorcery is the teaching of demons, and that hearing it is the sorcery Revelation names. No verse says the two are one. What is stated: Paul sets “who has bewitched you?” against “hearing with trust” (Galatians 3:1–2) and puts sorcery in the list that follows a persuasion “not from the one who calls you” (5:8, 5:20); the teachings of demons are listened to (1 Timothy 4:1); sorcerers speak lies that are listened to (Jeremiah 27:9–10); and this book uses one verb for Jezebel’s teaching and Babylon’s sorcery (2:20, 18:23). But pharmakeia in scripture is always the occult practice of spells, charms and potions, and Revelation never says what Babylon’s sorcery consisted of.
Red flag That Rome’s canon law is the sorcery of Revelation 18:23, and that Nebuchadnezzar is a warning shaped like the papacy. The book names no institution, and Daniel’s king was a pagan ruler, called God’s servant (Jeremiah 27:6), not the head of God’s people. What is stated: two canons carry the two marks of 1 Timothy 4:3; several canons and the Catechism are quoted above beside the scriptures they differ from; Revelation takes “Babylon the great,” the image and the “peoples, nations and languages” from Daniel 3 and 4; and Jesus calls added rules “the commandments of men” that void God’s word (Mark 7:7–13). The books burned at Ephesus were books of magic (Acts 19:19), not of law. Joining Rome to the sorcery and to the king is Jon’s reading.
James 2, and the law of liberty — Jon’s reading. Rome’s answer to “trust alone” is James: Trent’s decree on justification quotes “a person is justified by works and not by trust alone” (James 2:24, in its chapter 10), and in the same decree binds the ten commandments on the justified (chapter 11; canons 19 and 20). Jon reads the quotation as a way of bringing the law of Moses back in under James’s name, and says James will not carry it. The law James names is the King’s. He calls it “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (1:25) and “the law of liberty” his readers will be judged by (2:12), a phrase found in no other book and never said of Sinai; and “the royal law” (2:8, nomos basilikos, a king’s law, an adjective the New Testament otherwise uses only of Herod and of a royal official), three verses after “the kingdom he promised to those who love him” (2:5). The one commandment he quotes under that name is the one the King spoke: “love your neighbour as yourself” (2:8), Moses’ words from Leviticus 19:18 that Jesus made the second of the two on which “the whole law and the prophets hang” (Matthew 22:39–40), and then made His own, “this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12; 13:34). John calls it “his commandment”, in one breath with trusting in the name of His Son (1 John 3:23; 4:21), and says “his commandments are not burdensome” (5:3), where the law was a yoke “neither our fathers nor we were able to bear” (Acts 15:10). So the words are Moses’ and the law is the King’s. The liberty is His too. He opened His preaching with Isaiah’s “to proclaim liberty to the captives” (Luke 4:18; Isaiah 61:1, where the Hebrew deror is the jubilee’s word, Leviticus 25:10), said “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36), and Paul wrote “it was for freedom that the Anointed freed us; stand firm, then, and do not be held again in a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1), the same word as James’s eleutheria; Luke 4:18’s word is aphesis, release, which is also the word for forgiveness. And the chapter is about love and mercy from its first verse: partiality in the assembly (2:1–4), the poor chosen (2:5), and “judgment is without mercy to the one who showed no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment” (2:13). When James does cite two of the ten, adultery and murder (2:11), it is to say that “whoever keeps the whole law and stumbles in one point has become guilty of all” (2:10), which is Paul’s own argument against relying on it: “as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law” (Galatians 3:10, from Deuteronomy 27:26), “the Anointed redeemed us from the curse of the law” (3:13), and “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). The two works James then names are Abraham’s offering and Rahab’s welcome (2:21, 2:25), which Hebrews calls acts of trust (11:17, 11:31); the reading on the good news sets that out under “What James means”.
How the chapter ends — Jon’s reading. James closes the argument with two people, and Jon reads the choice of them as the point: neither could have been justified by the law of Moses, because neither stood under it. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar? You see that trust was working together with his works, and by the works the trust was made complete; and the scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham trusted God, and it was counted to him as righteousness, and he was called God’s friend” (2:21–23). Abraham lived before the law: Paul counts it, “the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterwards, does not annul a covenant ratified beforehand by God” (Galatians 3:17), and the counting of Genesis 15:6 came before his circumcision, “not in circumcision but in uncircumcision” (Romans 4:10), “not through law” (4:13). And Genesis 15:6 is the very verse Paul builds justification by trust on (Romans 4:3; Galatians 3:6); James quotes the same words. “In the same way, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works, when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?” (2:25). Rahab was a Canaanite of Jericho, a city under the ban, of whom the law said “you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:2; 20:17), and a prostitute, whom the law keeps out of the house of the LORD (23:17–18). Her own word for what she did is mercy, chesed: “I have shown you mercy; now show mercy to my father’s house” (Joshua 2:12; the Greek has eleos, the word of James 2:13), and she was spared and “lived in the midst of Israel to this day” (6:25), and stands in the line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Hebrews says of both that it was by trust (11:17, 11:31). So James’s two works are one man’s trust and one woman’s mercy, from two people the law could not justify; and Jon hears in that pair the one commandment John gives in two halves, “that we trust in the name of his Son Jesus the Anointed, and love one another” (1 John 3:23), which is the royal law of 2:8 beside the trust of 2:23.
Red flag That Rome quotes James 2 in order to bring the law of Moses back in. What is stated is the juxtaposition: Trent quotes James 2:24 and binds the commandments in the same decree; it does not say that is why it quotes him, and its own reason given is that faith, hope and love are to be joined (chapter 7). That James names the law as the King’s law of liberty and love, that Jesus spoke it and John calls it His, that James cites the ten only to show that one breach is guilt of all, and that he gives trust-acts as his works, is in the text; that this undoes Rome’s use of him is the reading. So is the step from his two examples: that Abraham lived before the law and Rahab outside it is stated (Galatians 3:17; Deuteronomy 7:2), but James does not say he chose them for that, and his own sentence, “a person is justified by works and not by trust alone” (2:24), stands as he wrote it; that his pair echoes trust in the Son and love for one another (1 John 3:23) is a likeness of sense, not a quotation.
Red flag That the prostitute and Jezebel are spirits rather than people, and that the ones thrown into the lake are the spirits. Revelation 19:20, 20:10 and 20:14 name the animal, the false prophet, the slanderer, and Death and Hades; but 20:15 adds “anyone not found written in the book of life,” and 21:8 lists kinds of people. Daniel 7:17 calls the beasts kings, and Ephesians 6:12 names the powers behind rulers; which the book means is not stated. Reading them as the spirits at work is Jon’s.
How sure I am — Jon. I am not fully confident of the readings flagged above. They are my best explanation of what I have studied here. If I learn otherwise, I will take them down, and my email is on the About page of this site if you want to show me.