Rev 21:8

One of my country Baptist friends posted this dire verse  on Facebook. Of course he cited the King James Version: my maternal grandfather, also a country Baptist, explained when I was young that it was the only true and completely accurate Word of God. 

What grabbed my attention was the word, “sorcerers.” What is sorcery exactly? What did they understand it to mean?

So I went to the Sacra Vulgata, and found out that in Latin the word is veneficus. Now we think of sorcerers as being like wizards, and wizards as being old men; so at first I thought the etymology might be shared with venerable. 

But I looked it up and it’s not! It shares the etymology for venomous. The Latin was for a maker of poisons and drugs. 

That reminded me of something that we just saw in the Anabasis. So I looked it up, and sure enough in the original Greek the word is pharmakois. 

This I take to be the meaning of the words, which are necessarily ambiguous, since {pharmakon}, "a drug," also means "poison." Did Cheirisophus conceivably die of fever brought on by some poisonous draught? or did he take poison whilst suffering from fever? or did he die under treatment?

That's true: the word that is the root of "pharmacy" or "pharmaceutical" can mean either "drug" or "poison." And so it is often the case even with true drugs, where the right dosage is efficacious and the wrong one is fatal.

Thus, the sorcerers who are headed to the Lake of Fire are poisoners and makes of false drugs that kill instead — one thinks of dealers of drugs laced with fentanyl, but also of pushers of hard drugs generally. Makers of false medicines. That’s what the word means. 

UPDATE: After I went to bed last night, another thought about this occurred to me. The passage seems on first glance to refer to something from fantasy stories, which in the mind of the modern is the sort of thing that puts the Bible into the genre of fantasy stories. That's how they prefer to think of it anyway, and "sorcerer" at first seems like evidence for that preferred proposition.

Once you understand that they're talking about drug dealers and pushers and makers of false medicines, however, you realize that this is a real and pressing problem that you read about every day in the newspaper. The Bible is suddenly speaking to very real problems that bedevil contemporary society.

Of course, since this is the Revelation of St. John the Divine, you still have the Beast and the Dragon and various other mystic imagery. It only moves the needle a little on that point; but it does move it.