After a season of freedom to preach the gospel, the apostles Peter and Paul were killed while John was exiled to Patmos. Their murder silenced those apostles. A period of oppression settled upon the church so that in certain areas of God’s world the church scarcely survived. In Rome, for example, Emperor Nero used the false accusation that the Christians were responsible to setting the city on fire to persecute the church cruelly. In the days of the Great Reformation of the 16th century, the church in the Lowlands where Guido de Brès ministered was all but crushed and de Brès himself martyred for the gospel. Across the Western world today there is a deliberate effort to cancel out the record of how the gospel has been instrumental in forming so many of the western nations. So many other parallel examples can be found in so many other parts of God’s wide world.
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.