3 And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.”
4 These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. 5 And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes. If anyone would harm them, this is how he is doomed to be killed. 6 They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire. 7 And when they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, 8 and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified. 9 For three and a half days some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb, 10 and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth. 11 But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them. 12 Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies watched them. 13 And at that hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.
14 The second woe has passed; behold, the third woe is soon to come.
This frightening reality is in fact already showing signs of taking place in the world of the twentieth century - in Russia, and even more so in China, where organised religion is being steadily suppressed, and only State-controlled travesties of the faith are now allowed. What has happened to the faithful leaders of the Church in China? What news we do have is enough to indicate that one by one they are being broken by the diabolic agency of brainwashing. What will happen if Communism sweeps the West? This pattern will begin to emerge, inevitably. A puppet Church would be allowed to remain, but the true Church would be silenced. Some time ago a TV film portrayed the stamping out by the Nazis of a living testimony in the Churches in Germany, and the replacement of real men of God by puppets who would speak the National-Socialist gospel, and God's true servants were dragged to concentration camps or shot. One could not help thinking with a strange thrill of dread, that, change the names and the nation, and you had a prophetic preview of what the Bible says will happen before the end of the age. If this happens in our lifetime - as well it may! - the question that must be asked is whether we in our general flabbiness of body and spirit will be able to stand up to it. Would we capitulate, or would we stand, until we were mown down as opposers of the new regime? Such a prophecy should give a new and graphic force to Paul's words in Ephesians 6:13 about standing in the evil day. We may yet have to prove how truly and how seriously we have taken the idea of the Christian armour.