END OF FEBRUARY 2020
THE TWO WITNESSES.
The Lessing Version.
We must remember that Creation – God’s handiwork – always wins: Jesus’ death resulted in resurrection; Creation’s death will bring total cosmic renewal.
For my blog I often rely our divine guidance. This happened again now when I randomly took from my book collection Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s short stories, and discovered that there is more to Lessing than I thought: she also is a prophetess. I then read her short story: Report on the threatened City, and I was right away reminded of Revelation 11, which describes the fate of the TWO WITNESSES.
Doris Lessing must have used this Bible passage as her template, because there are too many similarities for it to be coincidental. With Doris the two witnesses come in UFOs, in a machine barely visible to the human eye. They come to warn the people in the city to relocate, because in 5 years it will be destroyed by an earthquake: they know that.
These spacemen are keen observers: They notice right away something they already had suspected:” the older these humans get, the less open they are to new thought material.” They kept on telling them the bad news of the coming disaster, but “their warning was like pouring a liquid into a container that has a hole in it”.
Generally, the feelings in the threatened city are best interpreted by a song a female vocalist has composed,
We know the earth we live
upon is due to fall.
We know the ground we walk upon must shake.
We know and so…..We eat and drink and love,
Keep High, Keep Love, for we must die.
The spacemen also discover that the earth people have become so dependent on machinery that they have lost confidence in their own powers of observation. These two ‘witnesses’ (that’s really what they are) notice a lot about the psyche of these bi-pedal creatures because the two extraterritorial invaders can read the minds of the earthlings and have concluded that the young are in a state of disabling despair and “that society is indifferent to death and suffering.”
In the end, when the curiosity factor has vanished, their message causes hostility: “The mob was angered to the point of wishing to kill us….. so the mission must be regarded as failure.” And they returned in their UFO to their home.
The
Biblical Version, found in Revelation 11.
Here also two missionaries, sent expressly from heaven. They are dispatched to warn the earth’s inhabitants of catastrophic happenings. The footnote in my Bible suggests that the two witnesses may symbolize believers who testify in the final period before Christ returns. That sounds credible, because I can hardly imagine that visible to the naked eye – and that today means appearing on TV – two celestial creatures descend from heaven, and start warning the people that THE END IS NEAR. What their coming does suggest, is that the church’s function is over: the two come because the bringing of the Good News by traditional ways no longer works, something that is now quite evident.
What both stories make plain is that we live in a time of apostasy, of chaos, and dissolution. Amidst this witless and disoriented generation people arise, such as Doris Lessing, an atheist by the way, and such respected scientists managing such websites as ARCTIC NEWS, and numerous books and articles, that warn us of our imminent demise– without much effect, I might add, as we keep on pursuing our carbon-rich path to perdition.
At this stage of history, by the Grace of God, contemporary technology can bring God’s message to the utmost ends of the world, and be read throughout the most distant countries, precisely at a time of immense insanity in an era speeding to complete collapse. Will these mini-sermons give new hope to a generation that is so tired and has lost its foothold? Will the Biblical truth that only Jesus Christ is Lord, and that in turning to him there is salvation, be proclaimed? Will a generation, totally estranged from the Gospel, still be able to adopt a new mindset?
Similarities
Exactly as in the Doris Lessing tale, in Revelation 11 too people, in their blind hate, will try to kill the bringers of the ONLY Good News. They won’t accept the truth that Christ will return to undo the environmental damage and renew the earth.
Why? The people of today cannot accept that message because it is too old-fashioned, too opposed to their deepest and most secret thoughts. After all these witnesses say things that have been heard from time immemorial and already then rejected as useless. These messengers bring something to the fore that, for centuries, has been repeated and already then seen as impossible for to embrace.
In both stories the witnesses come through as upright and strong, but the message is simply seen as dated, as belonging to earlier times. Their words convey strength but what they say has so often been heard before that it falls on deaf ears. No, even though they are well-spoken and their holy zeal impressive, the earth people refuse to become Christ’s disciples.
The carriers of the very last exhortation on behalf of God, will vanish in the end, just as the words and warnings spoken by so many other prophets and apostles before have gone unheeded.
Revelation 11 also relates how the TWO WITNESSES are killed, their bodies publicly displayed: “For three and a half days people from every nation, tribe, and language will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because those two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth …………Then they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on”.
Both versions end in an enormous earthquake, so gigantic that a third of the earth is affected, with more disasters to follow.
Get used to it: The CORONAVIRUS pandemic is just the beginning!