Who's In Charge?

One of the most disturbing movies ever produced is Francis Ford Coppola’s classic reflection on the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now. The film tracks an American officer who is sent upriver into the heart of the war-torn countryside in order to find and eventually assassinate a renegade commander who has holed up in an inaccessible region. Forging deep into the battle zone, the officer arrives at a remote river outpost in the middle of a shattering firestorm. Shells are exploding everywhere. Men are being blown to bits. Those who are fighting have the wide-eyed, desperate look of men who are virtually insane, and the whole scene is bathed in the red-orange colour of the exploding bombs and automated fire. It’s a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. It is hell.

“Who’s in charge here?” The officer asks.

Nobody answers his question.

Many observers of the world would recognize that this is a portrait of our times: no one is in charge, and we are all headed for eventual destruction. But silence is not the answer that the author of the Bible’s great Apocalypse gives to the question “Who’s in charge?” The apostle John answers that question by saying that God is in charge and that the world events-even those that are most terrifying-are controlled by Christ, who is the Lord of history. He states this boldly when he describes how the Lamb who is before the throne takes the scroll from the hands of God the Father and begins to break its seals.

James Montgomery Boyce. Seven Churches Four Horsemen One Lord: Lessons from the Apocalypse. P & R publishers. New Jersey. 2020 page 199