Revelations 8:10 and 11 – Bitterness
10The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— 11the name of the star is Wormwood A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter
This verse stands out to me every time I read it. The strongest word for me is Wormwood. Funny, in a strange way, that that name means Bitterness. Over the last year I have seen so may folks fall away from a true walk with Christ into something else that it brings tears to my eyes, and in most every case it is due to the fact that they have allowed Bitterness to take hold in their heart.
There is another truth in this verse that I have not seen before. “…And many people died from the waters that had become bitter”. The living word of Christ often flows through his followers via dreams, revelations, prayer, deeper understanding of the word, etc. If we call The Word of Christ the Living Water, wouldn’t it stand to reason that if we take the word and filter it through a false doctrine of some type would become something different, bitter and hurtful? Turning it from living water to bitter water, causing people to die spiritually.
I believe that in the end times we will see real physical bitter water due to wormwood, but that there is also the spiritual aspect I describe above due to bitterness allowed to take root in our heart.
midnightcry said,
January 16, 2009 at 9:56 pm
One of the things that I have always found so interesting as I read about “wormwood” in this passage is that in Russian the word “wormwood” is the word Chernobyl. After the April 26, 1986 nuclear disaster at the town of Chernobyl in Russia, hundreds of thousands of square miles of land were devastated and abandoned by the people who lived there. Today they are ghost towns, ghost villages and ghost farms. The effects of radiation on the land will make the land unsafe for humans for another 300-900 years.
The effects of radiation on the people exposed quickly ended their lives or produced birth defects so hideous that the Soviet government worked to hide exactly what happened.
Today the decaying tomb of Reactor 3 is falling apart and still contains enough radioactive material to destroy Europe.
When I take the picture of Chernobyl in the natural and lay it beside the picture of Wormwood in Revelation 8, the enormity of the consequences of the bitterness of offense and a distorted gospel is staggering.
You have hit it on the head exactly Jeremy. The Chernobyl we wrestle with everyday is the temptation for division and anger and self-imposed pictures of who Jesus should be.
We must check our hearts every day to keep them pure before the LORD. We must work on forgiveness and letting go of things that just are not our responsibility. We must keep the Word open so that the pure image of Jesus is ever before us. Anything else is radioactive to our souls.
(I really like this photojournal written by a Russian biker girl about her trips into the dead zone. It is very long but very interesting.
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/index.html)