God’s Passion – His Heated Breathing

You have heard of the “Passion of the Christ.” It is a movie from 2004 that graphically shows how Jesus willingly gave up His life to be tortured to death on a Roman cross. It is called a “passion” primarily because the Latin word for enduring suffering is passio. There is a related Greek word that perhaps explains this the best: thumos. (The hyperlink will take you to Biblehub’s definitions.)

I’d like to explain this word before I shock you with a passage from the Bible that uses this word in two seemingly different senses. Many, if not most translations, will not even translate the words the same, even though the two occurrences of thumos are only separated by one verse. Many others try to paraphrase away the intended narrative contrast – all missing the point – and all missing a VITAL opportunity to know more about Who our God is, What Kind He is.

Notice that Strong’s defines thumos as passion, specifically the outburst of passion. HELPS, a more recent source for definitions in association with Biblehub, would have us understand thumos as rushing along with heated breathing. Like many words, it has both a positive and negative sense. Getting all heated up about something rubbing you the wrong way can express wrath, fury, and anger. In a positive sense, well, I will let the Bible express it. As I said, the struggle is finding a translation that will let the thumos words be simply translated the same in the directly contrasting and scandalous sense they were intended to be seen. Below are two translations available with www.e-sword.net.

Rev 14:8  And another second angel followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, who caused all the nations to drink from the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.” 

Rev 14:9  And another third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, 

Rev 14:10  he himself also will drink of the wine of the anger of God that has been mixed full strength in the cup of his wrath, and will be tortured with fire and sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. Revelation 14:8-10  Lexham English Bible

Rev 14:8  A second angel followed the first one, saying, “She has fallen! Great Babylon has fallen! She made all peoples drink her wine—the strong wine of her immoral lust!” 

Rev 14:9  A third angel followed the first two, saying in a loud voice, “Those who worship the beast and its image and receive the mark on their forehead or on their hand 

Rev 14:10  will themselves drink God’s wine, the wine of his fury, which he has poured at full strength into the cup of his anger! All who do this will be tormented in fire and sulfur before the holy angels and the Lamb.. Revelation 14:8-10  Good News Bible

All the highlighted words above, passion, anger, lust, and fury are the Greek word thumos. Babylon’s thumos is cast in the light of a prostitute or porn star, which is an extreme image of the flesh getting its satisfaction. In an unsettling contrast, God’s thumos is Jesus being Himself on the cross, also with heavy and heated breathing as the flesh gets no satisfaction. In fact, while Jesus is on the cross during his excruciating suffering, He brought the flesh of Adam’s kind into inactivity, rendering it ineffective (John 1:29, Rom 6:6, 2Co 5:21, Heb 9:26, 1Pe 2:24, 1 Jo 3:5).

See in the face of Jesus, a type of passion for us that willingly gives Himself away to free us from the fleeting and temporal passion of the dying flesh (2Co 4:6). Jesus has a way of being that is a river of life for others even though He is being slowly tortured on an execution implement. He is the Light in the darkness. The flesh getting its satisfaction is the extreme opposite – primarily concerned about its own satisfaction.

These contrasting passions are set in context of the lake of fire situated before the presence of The Lamb, Jesus, and His set-apart messengers. Rather than fall into the devil’s trap of putting off all such images into the future, embrace this last book of the Bible as the Revelation of Jesus Christ – like it says in the first phrase of the book. You see, it is when the Holy Spirit shows you Who Jesus is being through the fire of affliction, you discover that He is always the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8). The messengers are therefore not angelic entities, but regular people like you and me who capture the heart of Jesus being Who He is by the same Eternal Spirit.

As Paul said in Galatians 1:12–16, the true, revealed Gospel is “preaching Him,” the Person of Jesus, not a teaching. The Gospel is not Jesus plus something, or even about Him – it is Him as the Good News! Learning how King Jesus governs in His kingdom reveals whether you are a law-abiding citizen of it or not. Those who resist His way of being, which is the Image and Likeness we as humans are designed to bear, express their ontological friction in Rev 14:11 as the smoke of their torment rising into forever. (Ontology is the nature of being.) Jesus called the way of His being, “Greater Love” in John 15:13. God never changes Who He is.

Therefore, this place people were never supposed to experience, simply resist Greater Love – not its intellectual attainment as a factoid, but its inner core trajectory of being. For more on this, look for the posts about Genesis 3:8, and how God has a sound of walking by His Spirit-Breeze-Breath that goes through all the trees unchanged, even the tree of knowing good and bad. Only a Spirit and Life encounter with Jesus’ Person can rescue people from this humanistic world sinking into existential despair.