Wandering Stars
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament [1]
‘Let any one who has an ear listen:-Whoever is destined for captivity, to captivity he goes:† whoever kills by the sword, by the sword must he be killed. This is what shows the patience and faith of the saints,’ viz. abstaining from the use of force, when they were sent to prison or put to death for declining to invoke the emperor’s genius and throw a few grains of incense on the altar. Even when the pagan hordes from the East are roused by God to attack and destroy Rome, the saints rejoice, but it is the rejoicing of those who ‘stand still and see the salvation of God’ in the rout of their oppressor; they take no active part in the campaign.‡ The prophet maintains the primitive Christian standpoint on this issue. There is no question whatsoever of an armed revolt against the State. The duty of Christians is simply to wait, under any storm of persecution, until God intervenes to inaugurate the reign of the saints by destroying their tyrant. But this passivity is accompanied by a certain vindictiveness (cf. the taunt-song in Revelation 18 and Revelation 19:1 f.). Now vindictiveness, which is the temptation of moral indignation, is often more likely to beset those who can do nothing but look on than those who are able to take some active part in avenging atrocities. So it is here. The Christians exult over Rome’s doom, and their satisfaction is bound up with an attitude of grim quietism. This is thrown into relief against a singularly dramatic background of militant supernatural power in action, depicted on the ordinary lines of apocalyptic hope. Such a hope becomes intelligible when it is remembered that its heart is ‘the doctrine of the approaching Judgement, and the doctrine of the approaching Judgement was in essence an expression of the Jews’ unquenchable conviction that God would not altogether allow His Chosen People to perish in their struggle with the Civilization of the heathen world’ (Burkitt, Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, London, 1914, p. 49). Already this had been partially moralized and made transcendental. Now it is Christianized, perhaps as far as it ever could be. The prophet will have his people remain unintimidated by the last threats; he assures them that it is the fury of desperation-of a foe whose end is near. ‘The devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ St. John encourages the church by the thought that the quarrel between them and the Roman power is God’s affair, a Satanic challenge of their God which can have only one ending. But this thought is worked out in a series of predictions which are sometimes truculent and weird; the adversary of God is no longer a political power, it is an incarnation of supernatural evil; the Roman State is an inspiration of the devil, and the final struggle is between the protagonists of good and evil. This Asiatic Christian prophet allows no considerations of patriotism to qualify or check his exultant anticipations of the doom that is to fall upon the Roman empire. He anticipates, as some of the later Sibyllinists did, the triumph of the East over the West; only, the antipathy is based on a resentment not of Rome’s economic maladministration but of her irreligious policy in the Eastern and especially the Asiatic provinces. There is to be an end, before long, to the fascination, the impiety, and the luxury of Rome-all due to her possession by the evil one! The victory already won over the dragon in the upper world is being followed by the dragon’s final campaign on earth;* in the crushing offensive taken by God the prophet sees a bloody rout of the enemy, messiah in action as a triumphant conqueror, and the total destruction of all Satan’s hosts, human and supernatural. The divine retribution is worked out in history. The transcendental and supernatural transformation of messiah’s conquest is as obvious as in the later Jewish apocalyptic, more obvious indeed at several points, but this does not mean that the historical process is evaporated into a spiritual sequence. The book lent itself to allegory, but allegory was the last thing in the writer’s mind. The author or prophet is dealing with realities of this world; the Roman religious policy is to him the supreme device of Satan, and the seriousness of the situation calls out the powers of God and His messiah. It is a holy war which ends in a ghas
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Bibliography Information Hastings, James. Entry for 'Wandering Stars'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/w/wandering-stars.html. 1906-1918.
