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Revelation (Part 17)

Revelation 13:1–10

Listen or read the following transcription as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 13:1–10


Chapter 12, if you recall, introduced the woman and the dragon, and the dragon is clearly identified for us as the Devil. Now in chapter 13, you find first the beast out of the sea and then the beast out of the earth, and we’ll take them step by step. Rather than reading the whole chapter, let me begin by reading just the first part, the beast out of the sea.

Remember too where we are in that chapter 12 pictures the dragon, the Devil, being thrown out of heaven and, in consequence, no longer having any access to God, and in a fury because, first, his regime has been restricted; second, his time is short; and third, he can’t do anything with the son of the woman; therefore, he is enraged against the woman and is venting his spleen against the church.

We’ve seen that. You must remember that that is the context in which all this is set. So he’s pursuing the woman who is in the desert, a place both of trial and of some protection, and the dragon now stands on the shore of the sea.

“And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.

One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast. Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, ‘Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?’

The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation.

All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world. He who has an ear, let him hear. If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity he will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, with the sword he will be killed. This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints.”

Now we saw last week that the beast, the dragon, the Devil, goes after the woman during 1,260 days or 42 months or three and a half years or time, times, and half a time. That is, an extended period of suffering that the Lord in his mercy cuts short. But Satan does not work in isolation. The point of this passage, chapter 13, is that he operates commonly through two agents. Through these two agents, Satan carries out his wretched war on God’s people.

The beast out of the sea is a grotesque seven-headed monster, and then we’ll see the beast out of the earth, less terrifying a spectacle but given to great deceptions. Right now, in the first part, I want to focus on the beast out of the sea so that we may better learn the nature of our opposition. I shall divide what I have to say in this first part into five points.

1. The power of Satan expresses itself in antichrists in concrete historical opposition to God’s people.

The ancient world commonly thought of the sea as evil or at least a symbol for evil, especially amongst non-seafaring peoples like the Jews. We’ll look at concrete references a little later on in the series. A beast out of the sea, then, suggests a beast out of this depth of chaos.

If you’re traveling on an oil tanker, you can sometimes go through parts of the sea that seem perfectly smooth, just wonderful, but for anybody living by the seashore, a land people, the sea is always moving. The tide is either coming in or it’s going out. It is always restless. It never stops. This is the source of chaos. This is the source of movement. This is the source of confusion. You can understand that.

So a beast coming out of the sea reflects the same chaos mobility threat. This sort of source for the beast is typical enough of apocalyptic literature, mixing the metaphors. The beast comes out of the Abyss in chapter 11, verse 7, and chapter 17, verse 8. Here this beast nevertheless comes out of the sea. Now then, ten horns and seven heads.

Here before we press on any further it is important to remember what I’ve mentioned before, that often apocalyptic will introduce something and then explain it in a later passage or at least enlarge upon it in a later passage or put it into a larger framework. In this particular case, a great deal about this beast reoccurs in chapter 17, verses 8 and following.

So while you keep your finger in chapter 13, turn to chapter 17, if you will. We’re going to be flipping back and forth. In chapter 17, you find a woman again, but this is quite a different woman. This is the woman on the beast, and the woman turns out to be (verse 5) “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and of the Abominations of the Earth. This woman is drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.”

John is greatly astonished (verse 6). The angel, who’s still interpreting things for John, says, “Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and of the beast she rides, which has the seven heads and ten horns.” Thus, this beast is identified as the beast that has just been introduced to us back in chapter 13. It’s the only one in the whole book like this. In other words, we know we’re talking now about the same beast.

Now listen to what is said. It’s very important. “The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction.” Out of the Abyss or out of the sea. It’s the same difference. Mixing of metaphors. “The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come. This calls for a mind with wisdom.” Well, I should say so.

“The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits.” What is that going to mean in the ancient world? “There are also seven kings.” You have your mingling of metaphors again. “Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for a little while. The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction.

The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast. They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.”

Now then, what does all this mean? We’ll be going back and forth here just a bit. Note several details still under the first point. First, was, now is not, and will come out of the Abyss (chapter 17, verse 8). At one level, this is a parody of the Lamb. God, or God and the Lamb, are constantly said to be the one who was and is and is to come. The language is redolent of the other.

The beast doesn’t quite make it. He was, now is not, and is to come. On the face of it, this suggests that the beast is that satanically inspired power that (however he’s understood historically; we’ll worry about that in a moment), having received a stroke of death (in chapter 13 he has received a fatal wound), nevertheless returns to hurl himself with renewed fury against the forces of God.

Look at chapter 13, verse 3: “One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed.” In verse 12, you’re really talking about the beast of the earth, but this beast of the earth looks back on the other beast. “[This beast from the earth] exercised all the authority of the first beast [the beast from the sea] on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.”

Do you hear the language there? Doesn’t it make you sit up and take notice? You can speak of a wound that has been healed, and you can speak of a fatal wound, but how you can speak of a fatal wound that has been healed? It is purposely incongruous, and the reason it’s incongruous is bound up with the fact that in chapter 17 he appears as the one who was and is not (because he was killed; he received a fatal wound) and yet will be.

That is, this beast comes, attacks, receives a fatal wound, and then disappears because of it, and then comes back again. In other words, it’s the beast who, as it were, keeps on coming out of the Abyss and out of the sea. It’s very important to see that the language, especially of chapter 13, verse 2, is drawn from the vision of Daniel 7.

In Daniel 7, there are four great beasts. The lion there represents Babylon; the bear, Media; the leopard, Persia; and the fourth beast is Greece. The ten horns coming out of Greece are, as far as I can see, the Seleucid kings. They follow out of Alexander the Great of Greece, and they lead out of the Greek Empire all the way to the terrible little horn, which is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who is in control when you have the three and a half years.

I mentioned all of that last week: Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the three and a half years from 167 to 164 BC when they made it a capital offense to observe the Sabbath or have any copy of Scripture and so on. All of this is past when John writes, but the beast is still here. He was, he is not, and he is to come.

If I mistake not, this beast recurs throughout history. He is Antiochus Epiphanes, but he’s also Nero. He’s the whole Roman Caesar institution that tries to destroy the church. Hence, the woman is the harlot sitting on the seven hills. The seven and the tens get mixed up in different ways. The seven heads are also identified in chapter 17 as the seven hills.

What would that mean to anybody living in the ancient world? What would it mean to anybody living in Europe today? It couldn’t mean anything other than the Roman power. The beast is also Pope Innocent III and Mao Zedong. You see, at John’s time of writing, he is not clearly manifest. “Now is not.” When you read the seven letters, you see that, yes, there has been a recent martyr, Antipas, but it’s not as if there are huge strings of people going off.

They see that there’s more martyrdom coming around the corner, but there has been one recently, and meanwhile, two or three of the churches are having a wonderful time, thank you very much. They’re certainly not facing martyrdom. Look at Laodicea. They’re having a wonderful time. There’s not emperor-wide persecution going on when John is writing, but he sees it’s coming around the corner. Now is not, but he comes back again. He surfaces again and again and again.

In John’s specific context, then, the major opposition to the church is certainly connected with the Roman Empire. Hence, chapter 17, verses 9–10. The seven hills on which the harlot is sitting is clearly Rome, the city built on seven hills. Rome began, of course, as seven settlements on the seven hills of the left bank of the Tiber River, but it becomes the epitome of all opposition to the church in John’s day.

Then there’s another mix of metaphors. The seven also equals seven kings, we’re told. Five are fallen, one is, and one is yet to come. Now what does that mean? The short answer is I don’t know, but there’s a longer answer. The reason I don’t know is not because there are no possibilities. It’s because there are two or three possibilities, and I don’t know quite which one works best.

The simplest solution would be that John is locating himself in Roman history, so that the seven kings are seven Caesars or something like that. The trouble is the various solutions don’t work very well. The most common one that’s offered is this. First Augustus Caesar, who’s around when Jesus is born. Then Tiberius Caesar, who’s around when Jesus ministers. Then Caligula.

I don’t know if you watched I, Claudius on PBS television a few years ago when it was on. Caligula was the one who was mad, the one who claimed that he was God and then deified his horse. He really was mad. Fourth, Claudius of I, Claudius fame; fifth, Nero; sixth, Vespasian, who now is (which would presuppose that this was written about AD 70 when Vespasian was on the throne); and Titus then becomes the one to come. That’s often suggested.

The problem is, first, the first Caesar wasn’t really Augustus; he was really Julius, as in Julius Caesar in Shakespeare. Second, it’s a slimmed-down list, because there were three quick emperors in the Year of the Four Emperors, it was called, in AD 70: Galba, Otho, and Vitellius between Nero and Vespasian. Then in addition, in my view, it’s more likely that Revelation was written in Domitian’s reign after Titus about AD 93 or thereabouts, not in Vespasian’s. I’m just not quite sure.

It may be that seven, which is so often used in John as a number to symbolize completeness, means that John sees in the seven kings the power of the Roman Empire as a whole. Part of it is passed (five kings), part of it is present (the sixth), and part of it is still to come. I’m not sure. In any case, this brings us to the third element in the interpretation of the beast, and this is what is perhaps most important for us.

There is more to come beyond the Roman Empire. Look at chapter 17, verse 11. You’ve been told in chapter 13 that he has seven heads. You’ve had the harlot riding the beast, identified with Rome, and then suddenly you are told (verse 11), “The beast who once was, and now is not …” Clearly we’re talking about the same beast. “… is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction.”

What is going on there? You have this whole thing nicely wrapped up with ten horns and seven heads, and suddenly in comes another one. The beast himself, we’re told, is an eighth king who belongs to the seven and yet succeeds them. He’s an eighth. He belongs to them in some sense, yet he succeeds them in another. What do you do with that? Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I know it’s disputed, but if I mistake not, this is tied to another Johannine writing.

In 1 John, chapter 2, we are told in verses 18–19, “My dear children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even so also now there are already many antichrists.” In other words, the arrival of Christ ensures also the arrival of Antichrist until finally in the new heaven and the new earth there’s no more opposition.

The assumption of the language in 1 John 2 is that there is an ultimate Antichrist to come but that in anticipation of his coming there are already many antichrists who come along. I think that is what is meant here. You see, once you’ve identified the seven heads as the seven hills of Rome, you bind it up with the Roman Empire, but then if you start mentioning an eighth, doesn’t it sound as if you’re going beyond the Roman Empire? There are only seven hills, not eight.

John is careful enough from his point of view that, at the end of the day, he doesn’t want to make the Roman Empire the sum total of all the active historical opposition against the people of God. The eighth belongs to the seven in the sense that he plays the same sort of role as the seven, but of course he’s an eighth, which puts him beyond. That suggests, I think, that this period, finally, is a time of special evil, the time of the Antichrist before the return of the Messiah.

Now if you go back to Revelation, chapter 13.… “The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion.” Clearly, this is not quite the same use of the symbolism that you find in Daniel 7. We’ve already seen that that’s the way the Old Testament is quoted again and again and again. It picks up some of the language from the Old Testament but twists it another way.

In other words, what this is suggesting is that this beast has some of the characteristics of the beasts that are identified for you in Daniel 7: the Babylonian cruelty, the Medo-Persian cruelty, and the Greek and Seleucid cruelties. It’s partly leopard, partly lion, and partly bear. It has part of all of them, but this is another beast, and the dragon gives this beast particular power and throne and great authority. What this suggests, then, is that the symbolism drawn from Daniel’s vision in Daniel 7 makes a kind of twofold point.

First, the beast of the sea embodies all the evil of previous empires, which in John’s perspective meet in Rome. Second, the beast’s authority is, finally, derived from Satan. “The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.” Now before we press on with the chapter, it’s important to think through what this means. If the beast recurs, if the beast recurred even in the first century, yet there are beasts beyond Rome, if Antichrist comes at the end but there are antichrists who come in anticipation of the end …

If these are concrete historical personages but with the authority of the Devil behind them, this means that when a Pope Innocent III or a Hitler or an Idi Amin or a Stalin erupts, from a theological perspective, as he hurls all his weight and cruelty against all that is good and right, and not least against the church, what you see is the concretizing in history of the power of Satan himself coming again against Christ, often trying to claim the authority of Christ; antichrists afresh in anticipation of the final Antichrist again and again and again.

Again and again and again he receives a fatal wound, and the people rejoice, and then they’re astonished that he springs back to life again. Isn’t that what happened at the end of World War I? “The war to end all wars.” Then there was World War II. Now, of course, with the Cold War theoretically dead, you have all kinds of people saying conflict has ended in history.

One person actually wrote a book that history now is at an end. It got wonderful reviews in the New York Times review of books. It’s an idiotic thesis. You really have to be smart to be that stupid. I don’t know what else to say. In any case, from God’s perspective, until the final Antichrist comes, there will be antichrists, and just when we think he’s dead, he comes back to life.

I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen in the next five years, let alone the next 50 or 100, but if the Lord tarries, I’ll guarantee you this: there will be more war, a lot more war, a lot more suffering, bloody revolution, more persecution, because antichrist keeps coming back. You give him a fatal wound, and everybody says, “Aha!” Then he comes back, and everybody says, “Oh, you can’t beat him, can you?” and everybody joins him. It has been a regular pattern in history.

Thus, Satan takes over the legitimate interests of the state until the state becomes Satan’s toy to oppose Christ. In verses 3–4 you have this fatal wound, and some people have tried to tie this with a particular Roman emperor. That is true. Nero committed suicide, probably, in AD 68, and he was so evil that there arose after him a Nero redivivus, Nero coming back to life, myth, and some people think that’s what John is referring to, but John is not so superstitious. He just isn’t.

The point is rather articulated down in verse 12 and in verse 14 with respect to the second beast who brings honor to the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed (verse 12). Verse 14: “He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.” In other words, he receives a fatal wound, but the beast surprisingly lives. People are constantly surprised at the survivability of raw evil.

Verse 4: “Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, ‘Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?’ ” Isn’t that what many, many well-meaning people have said under various totalitarian regimes of left and right? “You can’t fight the state. It’s just too powerful.” You could fight it the way Bonhoeffer did, but he paid for it with his life.

Again, the same sort of notion appears in chapter 17, verse 8. “The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come.” They’re astonished when he comes back again. They think they’ve won. They think they’ve put him down. He’s gone. He receives the fatal wound, and then he comes back again. They’re astonished.

From the beginning of history, pagan and immoral states have sometimes risen in violent evil against God’s people. They eventually receive mighty deathblows, blows finally from God, but the evil returns. Pharaoh and Egypt, mighty Assyria. Met any Assyrians recently? The empire is wiped out. There are a small handful of them, a couple little villages; that’s it. Babylon, Rome, Hitler with his thousand-year Reich.

Shall our culture survive if it squeezes God to the periphery and worships self and things and success and money and sports and media personalities? Another form of beast. Antichrist comes in many forms. First John 2:18: “Even so there are many antichrists.” When the Antichrist comes, then many people say, “Now what’s the use?” Chapter 13, verse 4: “Who can fight this one?”

Even the question they ask in 13:4 is really a parody of Old Testament language. For example, Exodus 15:11: “Who among the gods is like you, O Lord?” But they ask, “Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?” He can be brutal. Look at all of the crowns on his horns, but the point to be observed from all of this, it seems to me, is the power of Satan expresses itself in antichrists in concrete historical opposition to God’s people.

2. Antichrist is full of blasphemy.

Look at the end of verse 1: “And on each head a blasphemous name.” At one level, of course, this language is tied to the tendency of Roman emperors to take divine names on themselves, which would inevitably be a great offense to genuine believers. Augustus was proclaimed Divus, one like the gods, even in his lifetime. Nero was called savior of the world on his coins. For Christians, there is only one Savior of the world. That’s a biblical title. It’s found in John, chapter 4.

The Roman Senate from Augustus on regularly declared the deceased emperors to be divine. Domitian, who I think is on the throne in John’s day, was addressed in Latin as dominus deus noster. For you people who did a bit of Latin when you were in school, what does that mean? “Our lord and god.”

My father taught me, “Latin is a dead language, as dead as dead can be. It killed all the Romans, and now it’s killing me.” He also taught me to conjugate verbs: amo, amas, amat, and so forth. So he said, “Amo, amas, I loved the lass, and she was tall and slender. Amas, amat, she laid me flat, beware the feminine gender.” I got my introduction to Latin very early on.

If you have, then, Domitian being addressed, “dominus deus noster,” “our lord and our god,” how would Christians view that? The issue is larger than the vulgar blasphemy of Roman emperors. Look at verses 5–6: “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months.” That is, the whole period of this time of sharp opposition against God’s people. “He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.”

The model, again, is the supreme blasphemer: Antiochus IV Epiphanes. You remember how he blasphemed: by desecrating the temple, by putting a pig in the place of a lamb, by making it a capital offense to worship God at all. One remembers 2 Thessalonians 2:4: “The one who comes opposes and exalts himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, and even sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”

I think the way this works is after the first clause, the unpacking of what it means to blaspheme God is sorted out in the next clauses. Thus, you have, “He was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies,” and so on. “He opened his mouth to blaspheme God …” What does it mean to blaspheme God? It means to slander God. “… to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.”

His name. That is, all that he is as represented by his name. It’s not mere profanity, although it includes profanity, but it means anything that you can do to make a joke about God or to cut him down to size or to make him just like you or to make him evil or to laugh at him, anything that demeans him, anything that slanders him, anything that depreciates him, to make him just a loving fuddy-duddy old grandfather, or to make him a horrific hater of people.

That’s all slandering God, because it is presenting a god other than the God who is there. It is to slander God. To misrepresent him is to slander him. And his dwelling place. That is, everything associated with his abode, with heaven, with holiness, with the ultimate goal; anything that depreciates that. Instead you live now. And those who live in heaven. That’s probably a reference not only to angels but to the people of God who join him there. Hebrews 12:22: “You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God.”

When I was a boy in high school in the town of Drummondville, about 40,000 people in the province of Quebec in the eastern township.… The town itself was about 97 percent French, and on the street we spoke French. The church was bilingual. I got a part-time job after school and that was all in French, and so on. But in fact, I did go to an English school. The English school had French every day and some stuff was taught in French, but it was more English than French.

Therefore, in a town of 40,000 with only a 3 or 4 percent English-speaking population, inevitably the school was small. It went all the way from one to high school with only about 280 students or something, so it was quite a small school. This meant we didn’t have the best band programs in the world and all the optional extras you get in posh schools today. You don’t always attract the best teachers to those things either, although it was an earlier generation where there was a higher percentage of good teachers around, I sometimes think, than today.

In the Lord’s mercy, we did have, during much of my time there, two very extraordinary school principals, who tended to really put time into students who were excelling. They’d pull them aside and talk with them, push them, challenge them, chivy them along, and so on. The first one was Mr. Lindsay. He taught history. He was an extraordinary man. He gave me a desire to teach and to read history that very few people have given me.

The next man, who was there when I graduated, was.… He looked like a big fat slob, but he had a mind like a steel trap. He knew how to discipline, knew how to keep things running, and was one of the best teachers of English literature I’ve ever sat under. It was in those days where he would come in and say things like, “Well, of course, any student worth anything in this class will automatically memorize a quarter to a third of all the poetry we read.” It was just expected.

I didn’t quite manage it, but I got awfully close, just because this guy set the standards and expected us to do it. He could do it himself. Every day or two we’d have a page of poetry to memorize, and every once in a while he’d spring it on you too. He’d say, “All right, ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ by the next day.” That was about a page and a half or two pages.

Then he’d suddenly pick you up and say, “All right, today we’re going to have recitation. Carson, ‘Abou Ben Adhem.’ ” And you’d start. “Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase) awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, and saw within the …” You’d go on and on and on. Then he’d say, “Sit down; next!” and just keep on going. That was the kind of standards you had in those days.

Somehow or other, he took a shine to me and pulled me into his office after school every once in a while. In those days, there were no school buses. It was a small enough town … we walked or rode our bicycles. We’d talk. He’d just talk. We’d tell jokes, and he’d tell about his time in World War II and what graduate school was like and imagination and fire. He wasn’t a Christian at all. He knew my father was a Baptist minister, but he was an interesting, sparkling man who got me going on things. We’d debate and stuff.

One day, we were talking along, and partly because he was paying me attention.… You know, when you’re 15 or 16, you’re at the center of the universe. Because he was paying me attention, he was fostering this view that I was center of the universe. Then one day, we were talking after school in his office, and we were joking about this or that. I don’t even remember what. He said something to me, you know, “I think there is nothing too high and mighty that you can’t joke about. Do you?”

Have you ever had some of those moments in your experience, moments of serendipity, aha experiences, where you think, “Aha, I see now”? That was one of my aha experiences, a moment of serendipity. I liked the man, but for the first time.… I mean, my father tried to warn me a little bit and say, “Try to think through the kind of framework out of which he’s arguing. It’s not just individual arguments but a framework, a whole worldview that you’re dealing with.”

Suddenly I saw it, and behind the man I saw a beast. Nothing too high? Nothing too mighty that you can’t laugh at and malign God and his name and his throne and heaven? Nothing? Isn’t that another way of saying that you are god? It’s very important to see, then, that these blasphemies are very comprehensive. Antichrist is full of blasphemy. The whole question is one of who is in charge, who is doing the assessing. Do we stand back and poke fun at others, including God, or is God in charge of us?

3. Antichrist commands wide allegiance.

We’ve already looked at verses 3b and 4 and noticed the breadth of allegiance there. Now 7b and 8: “He was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.” Do you see that?

Now you’re getting this setup that becomes stronger and stronger and stronger into chapter 14. You get either the people who are lined up with the beast or the people who are lined up with the Lamb. There are only two groups here. At the end of the day, this beast is worshiped by everybody except for one group. These are not the peculiarly awful people. These are not the particularly miserable customers in society. This is everybody except for those who are in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

In one sense, the formula in 7b (people from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation) apes the extent of the gospel that we saw in chapter 5, where, again, the gospel is proclaimed and Christ draws men and women from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. In one sense, again, there is an aping of that, but verse 8 makes one exception; namely, those who do not, those whose names are in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

Now at one level, again, this is understandable, especially in totalitarian regimes. Whenever you have a totalitarian regime, a really truly totalitarian regime, what they really want is absolute conformity. I don’t care whether it’s a totalitarian regime of the left or the right. That’s what they want. It was true in the Roman Empire. It was true in Nazism. It’s true in Communist totalitarianism. It doesn’t really make much difference.

But there is a way in a democratic society that you can have a kind of totalitarianism without imposition of absolute authority. The worship of a satanically inspired perversion of secular authority is still an ultimate offense against the one true God. If, at the end of the day, the demand of all of society is to worship pluralism as a philosophy or to worship self-fulfillment as a society or to adopt a therapeutic model in which the whole universe exists to meet my needs …

There was a time when need was a verb, not a noun. “I need something.” Now I have needs. We’ve seen that before. So there are ways of distorting whole plausibility structures, structures of the way people think, until finally Antichrist commands extraordinarily wide allegiance.

4. Antichrist causes great suffering among the people of God.

Look at verse 9: “He who has an ear, let him hear.” I suspect in this context it’s not so much saying, “Now you need to reflect about this.” It’s a strong, “Now here this.” I think that is correct. “Listen to this now. If you have any sense at all, if you’re listening at all, hear this. If you have any sort of ear, listen.” What do you listen to? “If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity he will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, with the sword he will be killed.”

It’s very important to recognize that this is within the context of chapter 12. In chapter 12, the other children of the woman fly into the desert. The desert, on the one hand, is the place of testing, and all that, preparatory to getting to the Promised Land. On the other hand, God does protect his people. Now the question arises.… Does this mean the protection is such that they really won’t suffer anything? Not according to this verse. According to this verse, a lot of them are going to get killed.

It begins to raise a theme that becomes stronger and stronger and stronger as the book goes along. It has been hinted at several times already. Namely, are we being protected from such things or protected in such things? If you’re protected from such things, then ultimately they don’t happen to you. If you’re protected in such things, then you may suffer them and you may endure them, but you persevere and hang on and are faithful even while you suffer.

The Lord may spare us from all kinds of things as well, but at the end of the day, what you discover is that a great deal of the faithfulness in this book that is called for is faithfulness to persevere in there right in the midst of suffering. It gets stronger and stronger a theme. And you have to remember that sort of theme is a common one in the New Testament.

Very often people quote, “More than conquerors.” Where does that phrase come from? Romans 8. When we use it, often more than conquerors means something like, “Oh, I can live above it all. There are those Christians down there who get stuck in the muck every once in a while, but I am more than a conqueror.” But in the context of Romans 8, it’s in the context of being harried like sheep, of being persecuted all day long, of being martyred, of being opposed, of being persecuted, trashed.

“No, but in all of these things we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us.” In all these things? In that sense, the conquering has to do with persevering, being willing to face persecution and death. In other words, more than conqueror has nothing to do with our psychological comfort zones, being able to live this “victorious Christian life” while everybody else is down there in sort of second-tier Christianity.

The precise shape of more than conqueror depends a great deal on the particular temptations we’re called upon to suffer, but in this context in chapter 13, the kind of afflictions this beast lashes out upon the people of God are, first and foremost, in terms of concrete, physical, malicious opposition that lead to martyrdom and death.

And the proper response? “This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints.” And not less than both. Faithfulness, yes, but that could be fickle faith, last for a while and be faithful for a while and not endure, but it’s supposed to be patient endurance as well. You endure and you are patient in it. It is a prolonged effort. There are forms of patient endurance that are merely stoical. No, no, no. This must be a faithful patient endurance. Not less than both. That’s what it calls for.

Thus, at the end of the day, humanity is here divided, especially in verse 8, between those belonging to the Lamb who was slain and those who follow the beast who slays and the dragon he serves. There is a fantastic contrast between the two leaders, the beast and the Antichrist. The Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world (verse 8). He is the one we must follow, precisely because we’re prepared to die. We follow a Lamb who was slain.

Now we turn to the second beast. We’ll go more quickly through the second beast before we take a break. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men.

Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number.” Better, “It is a man’s number,” I think it should be rendered. “His number is 666.”

Now what does this mean? Well, we’ve seen the beast out of the sea. Now we have the beast out of the earth. At first appearance, he is less daunting than the first beast. There’s nothing here about gruesome and grotesque horns and so forth. On closer inspection, his danger comes from his immense power to deceive. The first beast is engaged in outright opposition. The second beast is given to deception. Once again, I think it will be helpful to break up the text into five points.

1. The power of Satan expresses itself in false prophets in concrete historical deception.

Again, it is important to identify this beast. First he comes out of the earth, clearly a contrast to 13:1, the beast who comes out of the sea. Some have suggested that this means local opposition as opposed to Roman opposition, which could easily come from across the sea. The Romans often transported their troops across the Mediterranean Sea. So this would be local opposition, stuff grown on your home turf, as it were. But I think that just won’t work.

After all, there were many parts of the Roman Empire that were served by Roman roads rather than by boats. That’s why the Romans built the roads: so they would have rapid communications and could move their armies in a big hurry. In any case, the fundamental difference between the two beasts is not their geographical provenance. No, I think the likely symbolism arises from three other factors.

First, some Jewish apocalyptic spoke of two primeval monsters (1 Enoch 60, verses 7–10): Leviathan, who lives in the abysses of the ocean, and Behemoth (Leviathan is female; Behemoth is male), living in waste wilderness named Dendain, you get in Jewish apocalyptic. These primeval monsters become symbols for all that is evil, violent, chaotic, and malicious. I think the apocalyptist is using that kind of heritage, this form of literary expression.

More important, do you recall that we’re told in chapter 12 that the beast is cast down to the earth? Chapter 12, verse 12: “Rejoice, you heavens.” That is, because Satan has been thrown out, as we saw earlier. Verse 9: “He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” He’s hurled down out of heaven (verse 9). He lost his space in heaven (verse 8).

Verse 12: “Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea.” That is, the whole human domain, the earth and the sea. So now you have the beast coming out of each of them. Part of this double beast, coming out from the earth and from the sea, is merely a reflection of the language that’s already established for you in chapter 12.

Then in the third place, and perhaps this is the most important, we have already seen that for landlubbers like the Jews, the sea was a symbolism for chaos, for movement, for restlessness, for upheaval, so a beast coming out of the sea carries with it that kind of overtone, but unless you live in California, the land normally signals stability.

The beast here comes in a way that does not seem to threaten. That’s the very nature of stability. If you’re in the midst of a surging sea, you’re not too surprised if there’s a storm now and then. You’re always surprised by an earthquake. The land is supposed to be stable. The Japanese built for it, but it wasn’t stable enough.

In other words, this is a kind of platform for stability, which is the very foundation of all deception. In other words, it seems to me this is peculiarly appropriate symbolism when the chief function of the second beast is to deceive. That, I think, is what brings us to the heart of the matter. This beast is the satanically inspired power to deceive men and women, manifesting itself in concrete historical experiences.

Thus, 14a: “Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth.” Look at the two horns of a lamb in verse 11. It’s not a question of kingly authority. The image rather is of gentleness, of harmlessness, a nice lamb, cuddly, just growing horns, thank you. Suddenly, then, you remember some of the other biblical passages. Matthew 7:15: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”

Or again, the Devil may go about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, but he may go about as an angel of light, deceiving, if it were possible, the very elect. The beast speaks like a dragon, we’re told. This does not mean, in the light of the entire picture, that he roars like a dragon, because then he wouldn’t be deceiving anybody. The point is he’s the dragon’s mouthpiece.

Once again you have a situation where you can unpack the meaning of this symbolism by later in the book, and this, it seems to me, is the clincher that this line of interpretation just has to be right. Look at 16:13: “Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs.” Forget the frogs for a moment. “They came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast …” That’s the first beast. “… and out of the mouth of the false prophet.” That’s the second beast.

Or again, chapter 19, verse 20: “But the beast [the first beast] was captured, and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast.” The second beast is identified again as the false prophet. Or again in chapter 20, verse 10: “The devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown.”

The very terminology false prophet suggests deception. What else can that mean? In other words, there are times when Satan doesn’t come to us and say, “Here is a great big packet of heretical teaching. Go ahead; believe it.” Satan is not stupid. How is he likely to come?

Isn’t he more likely to come and say, “Well, I know that quite a few people have thought that, but there are some disadvantages from several points of view. Across the reaches of church history, there have been others who have taken another point of view. For example, you should really read the readings of Origen on the nature of the soul. He’ll help you a great deal in this regard.

Yes, there are some people who do think that hell continues to exist, but there are some very godly people, you know, who actually believe in annihilationism. You die, and then you face your punishment, and then ultimately you are annihilated. Some very godly people have held that view. Some very godly people do hold that view, in all sincerity.

Yes, it’s right to believe that Jesus is divine. I mean, he is unique and is to be honored in many ways, but of course, we all are image bearers, aren’t we? We all have something of the spark of the divine in us. Doesn’t the Bible call all of us God’s image bearers? He’s one with us and walked this dusty path.

Part of the problem, of course, is that too many Christians have so emphasized his deity that we’ve forgotten his humanity. If you begin with a Christology from below, you really are much more likely to appeal to the common person on the street. After all, you do want to appeal in the gospel to the common person on the street, don’t you?”

Of course you have to say, “Yes, yes, yes,” because it’s the only answer a thinking Christian can say, but if you’re a thinking Christian who’s alert, you might also want to say “Yes, but …” now and then. At no time in the history of the church has the church moved holus-bolus from truth to flat-out heresy in one step. Never, never, never. It always takes a little smidgen, a little piece opening up to other things.

In the history of North American seminaries, often there has been an attempt to at least be broad-minded enough to let in some people who have a slightly broader view of the authority of Scripture or the person of Christ, or maybe they don’t believe in substitution but they do believe Christ’s death is really strategic and important, at least. So you’re becoming just a little more tolerant. I mean, you don’t want to be intolerant, do you? That’s narrow and bigoted and right-wing and merely modernist, not postmodernist, and all the rest.

Yes, and there’s a sense in which you don’t want to be right-wing and reactionary and heresy hunting and all of that, yet by the time most of those are in control, they don’t want you there. That has been the history of North American seminaries. They squeeze you out. Then they have the seminary and the books and the endowments and the students, and the whole denomination gets shot. Only in a handful of cases has it been possible to retrieve anything.

Again, I don’t want to start a heresy hunt or anything, because there are some people on the far right wing who are defined negatively. You know them only by what they’re against. They have nothing positive to say. They don’t contend for the faith. They’re contentious about the faith. They’re just nasty people. What else can you say?

There’s not a trace of compassion in them. They don’t weep over the city. They’re just a nasty piece of work, and they call it faithfulness. But the very fact that they exist also makes it easy for the Devil to come along and say, “You don’t want to be like that, do you?” You end up so spongy that you have no spinal cord left at all. The Devil is not stupid.

What that means, then, brothers and sisters in Christ, is that every generation is in danger of skewing things. It’s very easy to spot the heresies in some other generation. We all think we are very terribly perceptive in ours, but the truth of the matter is the overwhelming majority of us really aren’t. We’re too busy fighting yesterday’s fights in yesterday’s categories.

The only thing I can think of that will even begin to guard us against this kind of thing is prayerful, humble, repeated rereading and rereading and rereading and rereading and rereading and rereading of Scripture so that we really do think God’s thoughts after him. Even then we can be self-deceived, but it’s a first step.

2. The False Prophet serves Antichrist, who serves Satan, an unholy triumvirate.

We saw that the first beast received his authority from Satan. The second beast, the False Prophet, serves Antichrist, and Antichrist, we’ve seen, serves Satan. So now you have an unholy triumvirate, a kind of foil, a kind of aping of the Trinity.

“He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf …” In his presence is what is really meant. “… and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast,” which we’ve already seen from the previous part of the chapter, which is the same thing as worshiping Satan. The language, in fact, is again redolent of the relationships amongst the persons of the Godhead.

According to Matthew 11:27, and again especially in the fourth gospel, the Son receives authority from his Father to say and do certain things. There is a functional subordination in the Bible of the Son to the Father. The Son says only what the Father gives him to say. The Son does only what the Father gives him to do. There is a functional subordination of the eternal Son to the eternal Father.

Then the Holy Spirit comes along and is sent by the Father and the Son. Thus, there is an economic subordination within the triune God. So there’s a subordination here too. The Antichrist is from Satan (Revelation 13:4), and as the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ (John 16:14), so the False Prophet glorifies the Antichrist here. An unholy trinity, if you like, an unholy triumvirate, aping God, as it were.

I think there are two things to learn from this second point. First, that which opposes God often does so by surreptitiously trying to take God’s place. That which opposes God may not do so from an external atheistic perspective, as in a totalitarian regime that is controlled by a philosophical materialism. It may try to take God’s perspective.

That is why in the New Testament idolatry is defined as covetousness in Colossians, because in covetousness you want something so badly it dominates your mind. That’s what you think about. That’s what you gravitate toward. That’s what you dream of. If you dream of it all the time, that’s what you gravitate toward, that’s what you can’t live without, that’s your god. It’s a form of idolatry.

It’s not for nothing that the first and the last of the Ten Commandments begin, “You shall have no other god before me,” and the last one is, “You shall not be covetous,” because the two are the flip side one of the other. There’s a kind of literary inclusio in the Ten Commandments. Both have to do with the godhood of God.

Do you remember how 1 John begins? I’m persuaded that John thinks very deeply about these things. Remember how 1 John argues, offering three tests, perhaps four, for genuine spirituality and godliness and orthodoxy and so on? He works through the importance of love and the importance of obedience. You get through the whole thing, clearly, in my view, responding to the proto-Gnostic heresy at the end of the first century …

The very last verse of the very last chapter, 1 John 5:21.… Do you remember how the epistle ends? “My little children, keep yourselves from idols.” You look at this and think, “Where does this come from?” He hasn’t been talking about idols. He hasn’t mentioned idols in the whole thing. In fact, there are all kinds of literary critics who will say this was put in by some late redactor who didn’t know what he was doing.

John thinks very profoundly. What he’s saying is if you have a form of Christianity where you don’t love one another, if you have a form of Christianity where you don’t confess that Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh, if you have a form of Christianity that does not obey, you are in idolatry. It’s not the real Jesus. It’s not the real Christianity. It’s idolatry. “My little children, keep yourselves from idols.” John thinks very profoundly about these things.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, after all, have a Christ, and in some ways he’s the same as yours. They believe he was born in Bethlehem, that his mother was Mary, that his father wasn’t the real father, that he was actually begotten by God, and so on. They believe all these things. Isn’t he the same as your Christ? It turns out that he’s not, even though he has many points of parallel. Eventually, you have to say, “Keep yourself from idols,” because the construction isn’t the same as the Christ of the Bible.

The second thing to observe from this is that Satan may use quite different forms of evil to reinforce one another to achieve his main aim. You know these cop shows on TV. They try to show you what they say is true in real life (I haven’t spent enough time in police stations to know for sure), where they have a good cop/bad cop routine.

One ugly-looking cop is threatening to beat you around if you don’t cooperate, and the other cop is pretending to be a good cop and saying, “Hey, just back off. This fellow is going to help us, isn’t he? I’ll go get you a cup of coffee.” It’s all smooth. The idea is he’s supposed to win your confidence. “Hey, I can’t really help you against this brute unless you give me something for him.” So the good cop/bad cop routine plays out.

The point to remember in the good cop/bad cop routine is that both cops are after the same thing. The thing you have to remember in the first beast/second beast routine is that they’re both after the same thing. That’s the point. One may proceed by persecution, scare the pants off some people, and make them throw things over.

The other one achieves by being open-minded and deceiving you and this sort of thing, but they’re after the same thing. They still want you to worship the same beast, who’s still controlled by the same being, namely Satan. If you don’t see that, you’re going to get seduced. It’s as simple as that. You just got snookered by the good cop.

3. The False Prophet is full of deceptive power.

Just as at the end of chapter 12, verses 13 and following, we saw that the language used to describe the dragon going after the woman and her other offspring is full of language drawn from the exodus (out in the desert, the eagle saving her, and so on), so now some of the language is drawn from Elijah, the forerunner.

Verses 13–14: “He performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men.” That, of course, sounds very much like Elijah. F.F. Bruce describes him as the minister of propaganda for the Antichrist, because we’re told of him, “Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth.”

Look at verses 14b and 15: “He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.” There was common belief in the ancient world that certain statues spoke. That was a not uncommon belief.

In Chicago, in one of the Catholic churches, there is a statue that is often said to weep. I’d love to examine it closely myself. Certainly in the ancient world ventriloquism was common enough too. Apollonius of Tyana, who was one of the great shysters of the ancient world.… That was his age. Apelles of Ascalon was at home in the courts of Caligula, for example. The sorcerer Elymas on Cyprus in Acts, chapter 13, went about deceiving various people, trying to control the governor by his sorcery.

It was the age of black magic, of astrology, of all kinds of manipulation. What was actually demonic and what was just trick and what was just psychological you can’t always untangle. You don’t need to if you’re a Christian. What is clear is that there are repeated historical patterns of deception, culminating finally in the False Prophet at the time of the ultimate Antichrist.

If the second beast serves the first beast, if the False Prophet serves the Antichrist, and antichrist comes along in various historical personages up to the ultimate Antichrist, this means correspondingly that the power of deception, the second beast, must come along in various historical periods again and again and again in various ways.

We need, I think, to think about this question of religious and moral deception more holistically than we sometimes do. Did you see the exposure on Bill Moyer four or five years ago of the evangelist in California by the name of Popoff? Let me tell you about it, because most of you obviously haven’t.

Popoff was one of these evangelists, a healing-type evangelist in Southern California, who brought in the crowds and a lot of money. He had a particular shtick. He would be up there claiming to hear the voice of God, and he’d say, “There is a woman by the name of Brown in row 13, seat G. Your problem is …” And he’d name the actual problem and tell her to come forward. Then he’d lay hands on her, and she’d fall or not, and many reported healings. This ability to just pick people out like that and have them come forward, and he’d be right.

Some of his critics noticed that he wore a hearing aid, apparently. A healer with a hearing aid doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but you have to at least ask the question. So somebody went in there with a radio scanner. A radio scanner is a reception device that scans all frequencies within certain bands, going back and forth, and will stop at the strongest frequency that’s around until you tell it to go on.

It turned out that what happened is when people were coming in, they were asked to fill out little prayer cards and put their name on them so that the staff could pray for them. It was often Popoff’s wife who took them in at the counter, and when she saw a suitable one.… You know, it wasn’t, “I’m in my last stage of cancer getting ready to die. I won’t live longer than three weeks.” That one doesn’t get anything, but someone with back pain or one of these things that has a pretty good chance of being at least partially psychosomatic.… She’d think, “That one we’ll handle.”

Then she’d watch where the person would go sit and make a little note on the card. Once everybody was seated, she had a little radio, and the thing in Popoff’s ear was not a hearing aid; it was a radio receiver. Moyer and his crew were taping all this in secret, what was going on, and hearing Popoff, but the scanner was picking up the little voice from Mrs. Popoff, and then they just put the two together in real time and played it on the air.

Popoff is now out of business, thank God, but the point to recognize in all of this is that the overwhelming majority of those who supported Popoff were some brand or other of evangelical or charismatic. Don’t kid yourself. The overwhelming majority. Again, do not misunderstand me. I am not a cessationist. I am not trying to teach that there’s no real healing today. I’m not for a moment arguing that it’s wrong to pray for the sick or that God doesn’t or can’t heal.

I’m saying that we live in an age that just loves displays of power, and we can’t get enough of it. We intoxicate ourselves on it, and we think that’s more significant than seeing someone born out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. It’s appalling. As a result, we have an overwhelmingly high percentage of claims that are outrageous and some out-and-out shysters. In any case, even where there’s not a shyster-ism going on, the focus is wrong. It detracts us from what lies at the very center.

In other words, there can be a power of deception to divert attention rather than to deny the foundations. If I were Satan going after a church, I wouldn’t start off by denying the truthfulness of Scripture. I wouldn’t start off by damning Christ. I wouldn’t start off by denying substitutionary atonement. I’d start off by diversions.

I’d break down the associations between blessings and the cross, break down the associations between the blessings and self-denial, talk more and more about power and less and less about self-denial, talk more and more about the blessings that come from the Spirit abstracted from the cross, which alone provides the Spirit, and on and on and on, until you break down the associational links that tie things to that which is at the center.

After you’ve done that for one generation, the next generation you can take right off into heresy. It’s as easy as pie. It has been done again and again. The result is that we have shoved a whole culture along. It’s not just within evangelicalism. We have shoved a whole culture along. During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in one of his radio fireside chats that he had …

Most here aren’t old enough to remember those fireside chats, but he was the one who started the mass media. Before him, there was no president who got on the radio regularly, let alone television. He’d have these fireside chats to let you know what was going on. At the height of the Great Depression, one of his famous lines was, “Our troubles, thank God, are only material.”

Can you imagine Clinton saying that or Reagan or Kennedy or Johnson or Carter or anybody? You’d be impeached. That reflects such a difference in worldview in just 60 years. It’s just a fantastic difference in worldview, and it has all come about bit by bit, bit by bit, bit by bit. In other words, naturalism teaches that the ultimately important things are just things. The acquisition of things signals success. There is an assumption of human goodness.

When the founding fathers wrote the Constitution in this country, whether they were deists or theists, one of the things they believed in formatively, to a man, was that human nature is depraved, and the reason they wanted a democracy was so that you could turf the blighters out every so often. They saw democracy as merely a way of not letting too much power get into any one person’s hand for too long, a way, finally, of stopping too much evil accumulating in one person.

They believed what Lord Acton said in Britain the century before. “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We don’t believe that today. We so believe in goodness that, as a result, politician after politician after politician from every party and in every Western democratic nation speaks of the great wisdom of the X people. In this country, American; in Canada, Canadian; in Britain, British.

The great wisdom of the American people. Thomas Jefferson thought that? You have to be joking. He didn’t think anything of the kind. He just wanted to make sure that all of the sinners amongst the American people had a way of getting out corrupt sinners who were powerful at the top, but nobody believes that today. It’s all gone. Spirituality is one of the “in” things today. And so one could go on. I don’t want to spend the whole time becoming depressed about the various forms of deception that are around.

In the moral arena, so much parades itself as moral, from the left and the right, that at the end of the day is just profoundly self-seeking. Meanwhile, the fundamental questions of morality that are bound up with the character of God and what he demands; that’s good, and the character of God and what he prohibits; that’s bad.… All of that’s lost. All of that’s gone. But that was the common worldview in the Antebellum Period in this country.

It’s very important to understand, then, that the False Prophet is full of deceptive power, and we have moved, generation by generation, away from the kind of base that was here at the beginning in terms of worldview, and if we’re going to begin to claw back by the mercies of God in reformation and revival and teaching and preaching, it must be worldview preaching and teaching. It must be holistic. It must embrace everything, absolutely everything.

4. The False Prophet demands conformity.

Verses 15–17: “He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak,” and so on. “He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.”

An economic boycott here. All kinds of backgrounds have been suggested. The obvious point is the parody of the sealing of the elect that we saw in Revelation, chapter 7. In chapter 7, all of God’s people have a mark put on them. Now the Beast has a mark on all of his people. Then in case you’ve missed that contrast, it comes back again in chapter 14, verse 1: all of the people who have the name of the Lamb on them and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.

Now you have everybody in the world with either the mark of the Beast or the mark of the Lamb. Clearly, in chapter 13 here at the end, the mark of the Beast is put on some people so that they escape the wrath of the Beast. Everybody who doesn’t have the mark of the Beast has to face the wrath of the Beast, but we saw in chapter 7 (and will see again at the beginning of chapter 14) that if you have the mark of the Lamb you don’t have to face the Lamb’s wrath.

Now we see something I’ve hinted at again and again and again in the book. Now it’s coming to clear cited expression. You either have the mark of the Beast and face the wrath of the Lamb or you have the mark of the Lamb and face the wrath of the Beast. You’re going to have some mark and you’re going to face some wrath. The question is.… Whose mark and whose wrath?

Historically, of course, pressure came again and again and again from the imperial cult. The official policy was to make refusal to worship the emperor a capital offense. If you were in the Roman Empire, you had to worship the emperor or you were treasonous. Let’s take a break, and then I’ll say something about 666.