Daily Devotional For August 10, 2025
And I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and upon his horns ten royal crowns, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy. The beast I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like a bear, and his mouth was like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority. Rev 13:1-2.
The description of the beast in this passage has political overtones. Horns are frequently a symbol of political power in the Old Testament. The beast wears the royal crowns (diadems) of political authority. The leopard, the bear and the lion remind the reader of the great empires of the past like Babylon, Persia and Greece. Behind all this political power lurks the dragon, that old devil, the serpent and Satan (Rev 12:7-9).
One of the horrifying things about this passage is that the devil does not do his work alone, but has the active support of people. Human beings who follow Satan are capable of incredible awfulness. It does not take long to come up with a Hall of Shame that includes Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot; the Arab and Western slave trade; terrorism; and genocide in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Armenian Turkey. No evil is impossible when demonic power removes all human restraint and amplifies the natural evil of human sin.
But is the ultimate level of evil always done by other people in far away places? Human rights investigator Gary Haugen discovered in Rwanda that mass murder does not require “pathological” killers. “When all restraints are released, farmers, clerks, school principals, mothers, doctors, mayors, and carpenters can pick up machetes and hack to death defenseless women and children.” Haugen concludes, “The person without God. . . is a very scary creature”1
The Nazis knew that almost anyone is capable of unspeakable brutality. Prospective SS officers received a German Shepherd puppy at the beginning of training. The puppy grew up with the officer candidate; they worked, played and slept together. They were constant companions for six months, the dog developing total trust for the budding officer. But the officer’s final test before induction into the SS was to strangle the dog to death with his bare hands. Those who couldn’t do it were expelled from the SS. Those who did the deed had become capable of monstrous evil, and it had happened in only six months.
We certainly object to evil when it gets out of hand in a quantitative way. But are we as willing to acknowledge that the evil we exhibit each day is not substantively different from that which lives on a large scale? But for the grace of God. . . .
Lord, don‘t be afraid to confront me about the depth of my own depravity. I am willing to know the truth about myself, so You can purify me and make me more like You.
1 Keener, 346-347.