This means that God’s holy people must endure persecution patiently, obeying his commands and maintaining their faith in Jesus. And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this down: Blessed are those who die in the Lord from now on. Yes, says the Spirit, they are blessed indeed, for they will rest from their hard work; for their good deeds follow them!”
Revelation 14:12-13
And he came on a place and stayed the night there, for the sun had gone. And he took stones of the place and placed them at his head; and he lay down in that place. [LITV]
Genesis 28:11
How or where is the sense of The Place described in the previous Gem found in Revelation? John’s letter of Revelation is full of horror and threatening situations which most of us would care to forget or even not know at all. I am very aware that the numbers of you who are following these Revelation Gems are falling by the wayside. I think it is because of the content of Revelation. That is especially true of the next passage we will be looking at – Revelation 14:14-20. Several of you have expressed the thought or request for me to hasten over the content of Revelation. “All this blood and death, persecution and martyrdom, it’s too much to take Ian! Please, can you stop these Gems on Revelation and move on to a more user friendly book?” My response to that request is “No”. I am a firm believer in finishing what I started and furthermore it is essential that I continue to the end in order for you to take in the point of Revelation. Let’s not abandon the course set before us just because the way is getting a little heavy.
In actual fact I thought of introducing the initial stages of this concept of ‘the place’ in Chapter 12 but decided to leave it until this point. For that reason I skipped over two verses found in Revelation 12:
And the woman fled into the wilderness, where God had prepared a place to care for her for 1,260 days.
Revelation 12:6
But she was given two wings like those of a great eagle so she could fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness. There she would be cared for and protected from the dragon for a time, times, and half a time.
Revelation 12:14
But instead I chose to deal with these verses after I had introduced the word Makom [מקום]. As you can see from the above two verses found in Revelation 12:6, 14, both uses of the word “place” are in accord with the Old Testament concept found in Genesis 28 and in other places. The care and protection sense is paramount in the context. The word for place in the context of Revelation 12 is [τόπῳ] and [τόπου] derived from the Greek noun [τόπος]. But that is only because the verses in Revelation come from the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and not the Hebrew of the Old Testament. However, I hasten to add [τόπον] is the very same word used in the Old Testament passages in Greek, the Septuagint [LXX] for Genesis 28:11.
Now the question which needs addressing is, what is the significance of this concept to us? To answer that question in the first instance I have given you a link to an anecdotal account I picked up from Leroy Eims in my first year as a Christian. Added to the concept of time is also the idea of place. In the previous Gem I mentioned that Makom transcends both time and place. I recall Leroy Eims saying the place of our Quiet Time is good to keep constant. i.e. that we have a designated place to meet daily with God. A place which in a personal sense becomes like Holy ground for us. A time and a place set aside where God can speak to us. But of course it can vary, we don’t have to stick to one place, God is everywhere.
When I read the words from Gordon Fee which I referred to in the previous Gem, they caught my attention.
“To take this imagery literally is simply to miss the point, especially if one is required to look upon the Divine “presence” as a place.”
Gordon Fee, Revelation p. 197
I thought that fits with a number of ideas with which I am familiar. I have also been intentionally re-reading two books I have read in the past. One book, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom I first read a long time ago. But in the context of preparing for these Gems I felt I needed to read it again. The second book is Left To Tell, the story of how Immaculee Ilibagiza discovered God during one of history’s bloodiest holocausts. I find it so amazing that I was re-reading these books within days of January 27th 2025, the 80th year since Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated on January 27th 1945. How like God to bring about the intersection of these thoughts at the perfect time! My impulse to re-read these two books must have come from Him. I could not get over the similarities between the experiences of these two women, which explains the significance of ‘the place’ hidden in the Hebrew word [מקום]. That dear readers, is the reason for me writing this series of Gems on Finding Ha Makom in Revelation.
It is the contemporaneous nature of revelation from God at a time when circumstances test human resolve and endurance to the maximum that indicates so strongly the intervention of God in human affairs. Allow me to clarify by using the testimony of each of these two women over the next Gems in this series. That’s the essence of the concept in a nutshell, but it will take some unpacking over the next Gems in this series.
What I find astounding are the similarities between Immaculee Ilibagiza and Corrie Ten Boom’s accounts. It is uncanny how both women experienced similar things while encountering nationwide holocaust at different times in human history when genocide was carried out on a scale hitherto unknown. In Corrie Ten Boom’s experience under the Nazi’s dedicated to the extermination of the Jews and in Immaculee Ilibagiza’s case of the Hutu bent on slaughtering every Tutsi they could find. In both examples, “normal, ordinary people” carried out unimaginable acts of horror on those who had been labelled as less than human. How does that happen? How do people who were friends with those now labelled as cockroaches, vermin, subhuman, suddenly feel they must kill them for the benefit of the nation?
On the flip side, how do those now considered as less than cockroaches, deserving only to be exterminated, manage to hold on to their dignity as human beings when subject to such unimaginable suffering? While reading both women’s stories again at a poignant time in history I was struck by the influence of The Hiding Place! Both women experienced the Hiding place in a similar way and in so doing found Ha Makom, the God Place or God of the Place. They found a place in God which carried them through unimaginable suffering.
I am conflicted in bringing you this Gem series in knowing how much of the detail to share and knowing that I can only quote a certain percentage of these two books before exceeding copyright restrictions. My advice to you if you want to understand the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the Hutu killers is to read these two books for yourself. I don’t plan to share much of the detail from Corrie Ten Boom’s book by way of quotes. I figure most people have a good understanding of how tough the situation was for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in a Nazi concentration camp.
I also want to avoid giving you gratuitous graphic detail of the atrocities committed by the Hutu. But I will give you a summary to set the scene. Immaculee herself wrote:
I never allow myself to dwell on the details of Damascene’s murder. I think only of how he faced death, how he smiled before he died and how he prayed for those who killed him.
Immaculee Ilibagiza Left To Tell p. 156 [67%]
The situation had been building for some years toward genocide as a result of the ethnic roll call in schools. The Hutu majority arranged an orchestrated approach to dividing the races along ethnic lines and sending the message that the non-Hutu ethnic groups, Tutsi and Twa, were inferior to the Hutu majority. When Damascene, Immaculee’s elder brother, a Tutsi, was slaughtered (the only appropriate word for what happened), the Hutu leader, Felicien, taunted him about the fact that he had a Master’s Degree. Felicien said “I want to see the brain of someone with a Master’s degree.” Whereupon he sliced open Damascene’s head with a machete”. That was after he had already chopped off both his arms, progressively torturing him to make him give up Immaculee’s whereabouts, saying they wanted to have fun with his sister. “If you tell us we won’t kill you. If you don’t we will spend all night killing you.”
Damascene refused to beg for his life. Instead he said,
“Today is the day I go to God. I can feel Him all around us. He is watching, waiting to take me home. Go ahead – finish your work and send me to paradise. I pity you for killing people like it’s some kind of child’s game. . . The blood of the innocent people you cut down will follow you to your reckoning. But I am praying for you. I pray that you will see the evil you’re doing and ask for God’s forgiveness before it’s too late.”
Left To Tell, p. 154
While this was going on, Immaculee was trapped in her hiding place, a hidden internal bathroom in a Hutu pastor’s house. Immaculee Ilibagiza recognised the voice of Felicien, a businessman in her village of Kibuye. Yet he was one of the killers who were searching for her by name in order to kill her. This was a man who dressed impeccably and showed impeccable manners. He was a friend of her father’s and the father of the children she played with in primary school. What was so incongruous were the words he spoke which Immaculee heard through the bathroom wall, “I have killed 399 cockroaches, Immaculee will make 400. It’s a good number to kill.” This man was the Hutu gang leader of the killers seeking out any Tutsi with the purpose of murdering them. He constantly called out Immaculee’s name as he sought to find her as she hid with six other woman and girls in the 3ft by 4ft bathroom in Pastor Murinzi’s house. This man had personally sliced her mother into little pieces before murdering her brother in a similar way.
This murderous mayhem started on April 7th 1994 and ended 100 days later after over 1 million Tutsi tribesmen had been killed. Bodies were piled high across Rwanda. I told another family’s story in the Nugget Beautifully Broken – William Mwizerwa’s Story.
After reading these two books for the second time I have seen the reason why the perpetrators of genocide do what they do and how those persecuted can find the strength to stand against their persecutors. What amazed me was the fact that both stories begin with the families providing a hiding place for the persecuted and end up finding God’s hiding place [Makom] in the process of their journey. As a result I want to share with you what I have seen in this process and the harmonization between these two books. Following that, I wish to share with you the secret of ‘The Place’ which will hold you firm in the midst of such mayhem depicted in these two books. But more to the point I wish to show you the means of being able to survive the coming mayhem seen throughout the Book of Revelation. After all, that is what lies behind the way in which John shared what he saw and what he heard in his encouragement for the churches in Revelation.
- What was it that enabled Corrie Ten Boom and Immaculee Ilibagiza to survive?
- What is the reality of Ha Makom, The Place?
- What are the keys to the survival of these two women?
Peace is not the absence of trouble; it’s the presence of God.
Ian
The secret is found in the intimacy of the Presence of God.
Ian
Don’t just be enlightened by His principles, be impacted by His presence.
Robi Sonderegger
Man was so engineered by God that the presence of the Creator within the creature is indispensable to His humanity.
Major Ian Thomas