Daily Devotional For November 22, 2025
And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered to make war with the one sitting on the (white) horse and with his army. And the beast was captured, also the false prophet who performed miraculous signs before him (with these signs he deceived those who received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image). These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with sulphur. And the rest were killed by the sword that came out of the mouth of the one sitting on the (white) horse. And all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh. Rev 19:19-21.
When I was a teen-age boy, I was fascinated by these images. I guess I had the youthful ability to disconnect a fantasy image from its gruesome reality. As I have gotten older, I have become less comfortable with these images. The thought of human beings burning in a fire or being penetrated with a sword is not pleasant. I even get wimpy when faced with the dentist’s needle!
We know from literature of the times, however, that the apocalyptic images of Revelation 19 resonated with that generation. God meets people where they are. The message of this violence is that sin and evil will one day be eliminated from the earth. Abuse and torture will end when the beast and the false prophet meet their end. It is like medicine for a sick world.
For most of human history, bacterial infections were like a death sentence. Pneumonia, scarlet fever, syphilis and festering wounds meant that few people lived beyond middle age. But on September 3, 1928, in London, a Scottish researcher named Andrew Fleming glanced at some petri dishes in his laboratory. They were about to be sterilized for reuse.
“That’s funny,” said Fleming. He noticed that the bacterial cultures in the petri dishes were dying off. The culprit seemed to be a liquid he called “mold juice,” the product of spores that must have wafted in from a lab downstairs. Fleming determined that the spores were penicillium notatum and renamed the juice penicillin.
Fleming had seen the horrors of infection during the World War. He was searching for a safe and powerful antibiotic. Up until that day he had found only a very weak one, called lysozyme, which he extracted from body fluids. Amazingly, even after the discovery of penicillin, it was still a decade before other scientists took notice of Fleming’s work, purified penicillin for mass production, and turned it into a miracle drug.1 Antibiotics are God’s tokens within the natural world that He will one day purify the universe from sin and evil.
Lord, thank You for the promise that suffering, sin and evil will not last forever. I open myself to Your cleansing spiritual antibiotics today. I want to be more like You.
1 Michael Lemonick, “The Overlooked Miracle,” Time, March 31, 2003, A10.