In Revelation 10, the apostle John was told to take a book out of an angel's hand, and to eat it. Oh how sweet the Word was! How enjoyable! But he was warned that after the sweetness had faded away, the bitterness would come. In connection with that bitterness, the angel declares that John would be sharing his message with many nations.

John was very old. I am not aware of a tradition that has John traveling around the world after this imprisonment on Patmos. The general consensus is that John's work, his revelation, committed to a scroll and the publishers of all time, would take that journey without him.

Why is such publishing success considered bitterness? For one thing, the treasures enclosed in that prophecy of John was in part the reason for his own death. It has caused the death of many other witnesses, martyrs. It has been rejected and hated as well as honored and loved. Men have scoffed and ridiculed and largely ignored the writings of what they might call a first century ascetic, or perhaps madman.

Authoring of any kind is a painful business. But bringing forth God's very words on a planet that hates Him is not a way to become accepted and promoted by the masses. The prophet Ezekiel had a similar experience in his day, as well as Jeremiah in his. Jesus, the living Word of God proclaimed by Heaven's publishers, was sent to a garbage dump and left to perish.

Yes, the wonder and fascination of that good word from God have a price tag attached. When the words that have come into the mind, come out of the mouth or the pen, trouble follows. Wonder at the Word is re-directed to the wonder of man's hardness. Fascination is now focused on the many devices the children of men have to reject and isolate.

Every layer of truth is rejected by one class of mankind or the other. Simple truth like the creation is viciously assaulted on college campuses by atheistic professors and their professing Christian counterparts.

Similarly assailed are the cardinal doctrines of our faith. And those who have been born and bred in one denomination will see Scriptures only through their group's eyes and oppose and persecute those who dare to see it differently.

Those who have found every Word of God to be sweet and pure will find themselves ridiculed and set aside in many churches. They will be called legalistic or divisive, the perpetrators not realizing that the bad kind of division is caused by error, not by truth. Jesus promised the other kind of division, the kind that divides light from darkness. He not only sees it coming, He encourages it.

In North Korea, and many other places in this day, everything is risked when one discovers just how sweet God's Word is, whether by owning one's own rare copy of the Bible, or by secretly meeting in out of the way places with others who enjoy the same food.