The sound of gunfire echoed down the hall in the early-morning hours of 23 January 1998, waking the Revas family. Wearing sombreros, army fatigues, and T-shirts, a small squadron of the FARC guerrillas (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) armed with revolvers, Uzi machine guns, and AK-47 rifles burst through the door. They demanded to escort Pastor Antonio Revas and his oldest son, twenty-two-year-old Roberto, to a meeting with one of the local FARC commanders. Revas and Roberto kissed and hugged their families goodbye for the last time.
At the time, Revas’s wife, Rosa, wasn’t worried or fearful. The men had visited her home before, demanding that her sons join the rebel movement. She began talking with the men and told them she needed to dress Roberto before he left for the meeting. While in an adjacent room, Rosa quietly whispered her suspicions to Roberto. Roberto assured his mother that he would be all right, reminding her of God’s continual presence.
Rosa, along with her daughter-in-law and several of her children, waited all night for Revas and Roberto to return. When morning arrived and the two men were still absent, Rosa’s daughter-in-law and two grandchildren headed out to search for them. Not long afterward, they returned shouting, “Mum, we need some sheets! We need some sheets! They’ve been shot! They’ve been shot!”
Only one block from their home, Revas and Roberto had been shot and killed. One bullet had pierced the back of Roberto’s head. Revas had been shot in the back of his neck and through his forehead.
Why did the FARC guerrillas target Antonio and Roberto Revas? The family had stood up to the guerrillas on many occasions. When the guerrillas would come to the house and demand that their sons join their Marxist movement, Revas and Rosa would refuse, explaining that they were born-again believers and did not support Marxist ideology.
Revas also refused to make the payments required of all the farmers, quoting the book of Malachi 3:8, saying the tithes go to the house of the Lord and not to the rebels.
Even after these deaths, the FARC guerrillas weren’t finished with the Revas family. Shortly after the assassination of Revas and his son Roberto, the FARC guerrillas occupied the family farm and seized their harvest. The Marxist guerrillas kidnapped Rosa’s younger son Juan. Juan failed to return home after several weeks, so Rosa travelled into town to meet with a known leader of FARC.
Snarling in disgust, the man pulled out a revolver, looked Rosa in the eye and said: “You don’t need to be asking about your son. You don’t need to be telling anybody where he is. And if you tell anybody that he’s gone, you’re going to suffer the consequences.”
Rosa and her family were eventually driven from their land. They are now living in a small house in another village, far from their ancestral home. The Revas family stood strong in the Lord. Revas and Roberto suffered for Christ and gave up their lives for His name’s sake. The impact of their lives continues in Colombia and across the world.
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