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When I was fourteen, my dad had a birthday coming up, and my mom decided to throw him a surprise party with his childhood friends. It was a strict secret. My brothers and I were not supposed to say a word, and in our house, we were not very good at keeping secrets. I remember standing in the laundry room when I casually asked Dad, “When are the Bakers coming?” The Bakers were the family of his childhood friend, and they had kids our age. I was looking forward to seeing them. But that was the secret, and Dad didn’t know. Dad gave me a cockeyed look and said, “What are you talking about?” I knew right away I had just let a secret loose into the wild. So I babbled some nonsense, pretending I was confused about something I’d overheard. Dad looked at me even more cockeyed and said simply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” As far as I know, I didn’t spoil the surprise, but I came close. In this chapter of Revelation, John receives a secret. It’s sealed up, and we’re not allowed to know what it is. But one day, it will be revealed.

When I was about nine years old, I was digging in the yard. My brother saw me with the shovel and said, “If you keep going, you’ll reach China.” He probably meant this as a joke, though I wouldn’t put much confidence in either of our understanding of geography or plate tectonics at the time. I abruptly stopped, finding it disturbing to imagine people from another part of the world crawling up out of my favorite hole project. At various times throughout childhood, I would return to the dream of digging a really deep hole. When we were eleven or twelve, we attempted to dig a hole big enough to be a boy’s bunker. For the uninitiated, this is like a clubhouse, but just way more subterranean. We never got deep enough to make the bunker, but we had one fantastic mud day, when my younger brother had the idea of filling our in-progress hole via the garden hose. The deepest hole I have ever seen was actually a cavern, one of those where you can pay a little money and they will take you down into the dark. Although this one was rigged with lights, the tour guide turned them off at one point and let us just experience the dark silence. Later in the tour, he turned the lights off again and said, “If you were to walk ten steps in the direction of my voice, you would fall forever. Or at least that’s what the first explorers down here thought.” He went on to explain that there was an underground overlook that the previous century’s spelunkers had discovered. When they had thrown a rock over the edge to gauge the depth, they never heard the crash. They wondered if they had truly found a bottomless pit. It turned out that they didn’t hear the crash because the not-so-bottomless hole was lined, a few hundred feet below, with a deep layer of guano. That’s bat poop. Centuries’ worth of it. The rock had landed with a soft, silent plop. It certainly wasn’t bottomless, but it wasn’t the kind of bottom you’d want to find either. In this chapter of Revelation, we discover a pit so unfathomable that the author calls it the abyss, or in some translations, the bottomless pit.

When I was about twelve, my brother Lance and I were turned loose in the woods while Dad helped a friend build a house. We had matches in our fanny packs—tough-guy gear, somehow still in a fanny pack. We came to a field of tall, crispy, late-season grass. Lance lit a match, dropped it, and we stamped it out. Then another. Then another, waiting a little longer each time. It was fun—until it wasn't. The burn stopped being a little circle and started spreading. One of the other boys wanted to run. We had a moment of indecision that almost divided our group. Fire does that. We turned back, dipped our turtlenecks in a nearby pond, and beat the flames until we were choking and covered in ash. We got it out. When we got back, Dad joked that we looked like we'd been playing in a fire. That night Mom got a call: the burn was the size of three school buses. Our punishment was no fireworks at the church lock-in. We never played that game again. I tell that story because Jesus talks about fire in this passage, and it is jarring.

1998 was a huge year for life-ending meteor strikes to the earth, at least according to Hollywood. I was a freshman in high school when two major movies with the same premise came out only a few months from each other: Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, and Deep Impact, starring Elijah Wood and Morgan Freeman. These two movies depicted extinction-level events where something from space came to Earth with cataclysmic effects. The fear of space rock impacts was not just in the movies. The late 90s were already flooded with existential dread. As Y2K (Year 2000) was approaching, there was talk of the end of the world as we knew it. In ’94, astronomers watched in awe as pieces of a giant comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, smashed into Jupiter. In early ’98, just months before these two movies debuted, the discovery of a mile-wide asteroid, hypothetically on a collision course with Earth, was announced to the public. It splashed across newspapers and outlets worldwide and terrified everyone. The same year that the public panic was peaking, and the movies were released, the US government announced a NASA program called the Spaceguard Survey, a kind of planetary defense that was supposed to chart near-Earth objects that pose a threat. These were my high school years, years we lived in the notion that the end of the world was possibly at hand. It was in that time that my youth group took up the study of Revelation. As we worked our way through the verses on Sunday nights, I was astonished. Especially in chapter eight, where the content, specifically Wormwood, sounded a lot like the two movies I had just seen in the theater. I was both amazed and not a little scared. As the years have passed, the meteor hysteria has decreased, but one day, it will return with a fiery resolve. That’s one thing we will discover in this chapter.

Six seals broken. The world in chaos. The roar of judgment is deafening. Then... absolute silence. The angels hold back the wind. Heaven holds its breath. In the eerie quiet before the final strike, two mysterious groups emerge from the devastation. An army of 144,000, marked for survival in the crossfire. And a great multitude, […]

Snowstorms & Sunday School. Summary: Lucas and Kristah Kitchen discuss Kristah's history with the ministry, the unexpected weather at the recent FGI Women's Retreat, and the vision for a new FGI children's curriculum. Episode Highlights

I remember the first time I visited a hot springs location. Arkansas has a famous place where boiling water comes bubbling up out of the ground. Years later, I would find myself in Yellowstone National Park, where the water comes out so hot it can boil a buffalo. Literally, a park ranger told us a […]

A few years ago, I changed the locks on my house. I swapped out our deadbolts for digital keypads. Now, it’s much easier to get in and even give access to others who need to while we’re away. About a half dozen people probably have the code to our locks and could get into our […]

A friend of mine recently told a story about growing up on a farm. When his dad went into town he would leave a list of chores for his sons to do. My friend was one of those sons. There were certain easy chores, and there were some that no one wanted to do. The […]

In 1789, the HMS Bounty became famous not for its intended mission but for the dramatic mutiny led by Fletcher Christian against Captain William Bligh. The mutineers wanted the idyllic life they had experienced in Tahiti and chose to rebel against their leader who had high expectations for his crew. This story of mutiny displays […]

“When my brothers and I were in Junior High, we often played in the woods near our house and we had a big secret. Next to the muddy little creek that snaked through the trees at the bottom of the ravine, we had our boyhood pride and joy hidden away for no prying eyes to […]

I can’t say I’ve ever truly suffered physically. I’ve had a few scrapes and scratches in my years. One of which was right across the sensitive surface of my eye. It was excruciating, but it passed in a few days. Beyond that, I can hardly think of a time when I faced any intense pain.  […]

When I was in college, I had an acquaintance who loved to argue about theology. I often saw him following others around, talking incessantly, trying to find someone to debate. Most didn’t take the bait, but occasionally, I’d spot him and another going at it. One day, he picked me up to try his pitch.  […]

In today's study, we dive into the Apostle John's awe-inspiring visions on the island of Patmos, as detailed in the opening of Revelation. Amidst persecution and divine encounters, John is tasked with delivering messages to the seven churches, revealing the majesty of Christ and the profound symbolism of his vision. Join us as we explore […]

Welcome to the Free Grace Bible Study, where today's episode takes us into the heart of the Book of Revelation, Revelation 1:1 through 8. The Revelation of Jesus Christ, is a message that transcends time, given to John for all of God's servants. Through today's passage, we explore the profound grace, peace, and impending return […]