Daily Devotional For July 16, 2025
And their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. And some from every people and tribe and language and nation will gaze on their bodies for three and a half days, and they would not permit their bodies to be placed in a tomb. Rev 11:8-9.
At 4 PM on the 27th of October, 1962 President John F. Kennedy met with his military leaders. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that the US attack Cuba within 36 hours and destroy the Soviet missiles that had been detected there. The CIA assured the leaders that the nuclear warheads to arm those missiles had not yet been delivered. What they did not know at the time was that the Soviets already had 162 nuclear warheads in Cuba. Fidel Castro had even recommended to Nikita Krushchev that nuclear weapons be used if the US invaded. Events were spiraling out of control.
Krushchev had sized up the young president Kennedy as a weakling. He considered him full of talk but timid in action. He knew that getting nuclear missiles into Cuba would change the balance of power in an instant. He calculated that Kennedy would bluster, but in the end do nothing. He was wrong.
Not only did Kennedy challenge Cuba, he threw down the glove to Krushchev’s own Soviet Union. He did this in spite of great danger to his people. When he asked Walter Sweeney, chief of the Tactical Air Command, if he was certain he could take out all the missiles, Sweeney replied, “We have the finest fighter force in the world; we have trained for this kind of operation, and they would destroy the great majority. But there might be one or two or five left.”
On October 27 Krushchev gave no signs of backing down. Kennedy’s advisors were split between those who wanted to attack and those who thought they should negotiate. At the last minute Kennedy took up an offer from Krushchev to withdraw the missiles if the US promised not to invade Cuba. Krushchev was worried that war would break out in the six hours it took to encode and transmit a message from the Kremlin to the White House. So he decided to broadcast his response to Kennedy on Moscow public radio.1
The two witnesses seemed weak and helpless to their enemies. Evil is often emboldened by a “turn the other cheek” mentality. But those who assert their power and position against God’s people in this life miscalculate as surely as the Soviet premier did in 1962. The Book of Revelation teaches us that the triumph of evil is always short-lived. In the end the people of God will be vindicated in the sight of all who have despised and abused them (Rev 20:7-10).
Lord, give me the patience to wait for Your vindication.
1 Robert McNamara, Averting the Apocalypse, Time, March 31, 2003, A45.