20:1 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.
4 Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also, I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. 5The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. 6 Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power.
Rev 20:1-6
We have arrived at chapter twenty. This is the chapter of judgment and resurrection. The corresponding Tarot card is also called Judgment.
An angel comes down from heaven who holds the key to the bottomless pit. The Greek word translated as “bottomless pit” is “abyss”. In the Kabbalah, the abyss is the space between the top three sefiroth, the heavens or spiritual worlds, and the rest of the Tree of Life. It is an inner space which separates our experience as human beings from our experience as spiritual beings.
It is part of our spiritual evolution to “cross the abyss.” To make the journey from understanding ourselves as human beings, to experiencing that our true home is in the heavens. The devil, the dragon, that power which wants to bar our entrance into divine consciousness, is bound away for a time so that we can make this journey. This is a gift of spirit. It is a time of grace.
If we experience this grace, then we are gifted for a time with spiritual vision. We see thrones, that is, the ruling spiritual principles within. We see all our spiritual thoughts and energies. Revelation calls these the souls beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and the word of God. Even in our darkest hours, the soul sends us understanding of our true nature and purpose, but often our analytical mind “decapitates” the thoughts before they can illuminate our darkness. With the sealing away of the dragon, we have an opportunity to recover our true spiritual thinking.
This stage of our evolution is a gift of grace. We have not conquered the dragon ourselves as yet, that is still to come, but we have a spiritual experience, we live for a time in a spiritual consciousness.
Our task is to take this consciousness back across the abyss and retain it when the arrows of human suffering and pain pierce us again. We can turn our back on the spiritual experience and forget - or we can choose to remember. Remembering spirit as human beings is difficult, but there is one energy that remains. This is the intense feeling of deepest gratitude. If we can live in the power of gratitude then we will remember who we truly are, and be ready for the call of our divine spirit to once again rise into the heavens and claim our heritage as Children of God.
The image
There comes a point in our spiritual evolution, when we recognise that we have a spiritual evolution. Such a realisation is not a matter of theory, or intellect, it is a deep gut-wrenching movement to a completely different understanding. In such a metanoia, a ‘turn-around’, we start to live as spiritual beings, not as earthly beings. We may have to discard our intellectual opinions about our importance and self-importance - we become “beheaded for the testimony of Jesus.”
Today, let us take time to discover where we are going in life. Are we willing to be rejected because of our understanding and spiritual expression? If we are able to stand within our individuality, and respond from the deep urgings of the Christ within, then we are on the way to transformation of the soul, the astral and the etheric. Eventually we too, will transform the physical body into the Resurrection Body.
The Resurrection Body: So something has happened to us in which a change, a transformation has taken place. At the end of this age (of the world) there is a division. There will be a spiritual company of people who live on a spiritual plane, who will receive their resurrection body, the same body that Jesus had, or should I say their real body, that which they originally came with when they entered this earth. That body is now restored back to them; the outer, which does not belong to us, has fallen away. They have transformed themselves into that spiritual likeness of which Jesus was the prototype. That change, that transformation is called the first resurrection; the change of the physical into its spiritual equivalent.
Rev Mario Schoenmaker, The Book of Revelation, 1984 Lecture Series