Chapter Twenty-Eight -Contending With Two Ferocious Beasts

The Death Stroke

Early in the Lord's day, calamity strikes the wild beast.  John reports: " And I saw one of its heads as though slaughtered to death, but its death-stroke got healed, and all the earth followed the wild beast with admiration."  (Revelation 13:3)  This verse says that one head of the wild beast received a death stroke, but verse 12 speaks as though the entire beast suffered?  Why is that? Well, the beast's heads are not all in the ascendancy together. Each in its turn has lorded it over mankind particularly God's people.  (Revelation 17:10) Thus, as the Lord's day begins, there is only one head, the seven acting as the dominant world power. A death stroke on that head brings great distress to the entire wild beast.

What was the death stroke?  Later, it is called a sword stroke, and a sword is a symbol of warfare.  This sword stroke, administered early in the Lord's day, must relate to the first world war, which devastated and drained Satan's political wild beast.  (Revelation 6:4, 8; 13:14) Author Maurice Genevoix, who was a military officer during that war, said of it:  "Everyone agrees in recognizing that in the whole history of mankind, few dates have had the importance of August 2, 1914.  First Europe and soon after almost all humanity found themselves plunged into a dreadful event.  Conventions, agreements, moral laws, all the foundations shook; from one day to the next, everything was called into question.  The event was to exceed  both instinctive forebodings and reasonable anticipations. Enormous, chaotic, monstrous, it still drags us in its wake. -Maurice Genevoix, member of the academie Francaise, quoted in the book Promise of Greatness. (1968).  

For the dominant seventh head of the wild beast, that was was a major disaster. Along with other European nations, Britain lost its young men in traumatic numbers.  In one battle along, the Battle of the River Somme in 1916, 420,000 British soldiers died, along with 200,000 French and 450,000 German-more than 1,000,000 fatalities! Economically, too, Britain-together with the rest of Europe-was shattered. The huge British Empire staggered under the blow and never fully recovered. Indeed, that war, with 28 leading nations participating, sent the entire world reeling as if by a deathblow. On August 4, 1979 just 65 years after the outbreak of World War I, The Economist, of London, England, commented:  "In 1914 the world  lost a coherence which it has not managed to recapture since. 

At the same time, the Great War, as it was then called, opened the way for the United States to emerge distinctly as part of the Anglo-American World Power.  For the first years of the war, public opinion kept the United States out of the conflict. But as historian Esme' Wingfield-Stratford wrote, "it was all a questions of whether, at this hour of supreme crisis, Britain and the United States would sink their differences in the realization of [their] overmastering unity and common trusteeship."  As events turned out, they  did. In 1917 the United States contributed her resources and manpower to bolster the seventh head, combining Britain and the United States, came out on the winning side.

Next time: Chapter Twenty-Eight -Contending With Two Ferocious Beasts -Conclusion of The Death Stroke

From the book of Revelation