Revelation 13 (part 2)

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from Revelation 13 in his series called Missions as the Triumph of the Lamb.

“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.

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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. His number is 666.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

In following the sequence of thought from Revelation 12–14, we have discovered that Revelation 12 pictures the Devil as a great dragon. This Dragon, which once tried to destroy Christ, is now himself frustrated, because in principle he is a defeated foe. Nevertheless, this does not mean he is hiding, but rather, filled with fury, he is set to destroy, to harass, to persecute, to torment as many of the children of the woman, the messianic community, as possible.

But he doesn’t work alone. He has two helpers. The first is the beast out of the sea, elsewhere known in Scripture as the Antichrist, characterized especially by direct opposition to the people of God, and now we come to the second beast. It may be helpful to organize what needs to be said about this section into five points.

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

Once again it’s important to identify this beast and his function. The first thing that is said about him is that he comes out of the earth. Some have suggested this means local opposition versus Roman opposition, because when the Romans sent out their legions, sometimes they sent them out across the sea, that is, across the Mediterranean to the eastern seaboard, for example, or down into Egypt or whatever. They came by boat.

Thus, the main opposition from the sea was Rome, whereas local opposition against the church would not necessarily come by sea. So some have suggested it’s that simple distinction. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t, I think, pay enough respect to how apocalyptic literature works. Even so, when Rome really wanted to send vast numbers of troops, they didn’t send them by sea; they marched them around the outside of the Mediterranean.

Thus, for example, when Octavian wanted to take over Egypt, he brought the troops right around the outside and met up with Cleopatra and so forth. That’s just history. They didn’t have enough boats to send the legions in the great numbers they sometimes sent. It just doesn’t work. More likely, the symbolism arises from three other factors.

This passage from Job pictures two great beasts. People who interpret Job have a lot of debates going on about what kind of beast it refers to. One is called Behemoth, and the other is called Leviathan. One clearly is a land-based beast; the other is a sea-based beast. In Second Temple Judaism, these creatures, Leviathan and Behemoth, whatever they are in the ancient world, become almost mythical creatures for their savagery, for their danger. That’s the kind of symbolism that’s picked up here.

Moreover, we saw at the end of chapter 12 and the beginning of chapter 13 that the Devil, cast out of heaven, is now restricted to this earth, the land and the sea, and he calls forth helpers out of these domains. So it’s not too surprising that after the sea monster there’s also a land monster. But there’s even more than that. We’ll see decisive evidence in just a moment that this beast is a false prophet; that is, he’s characterized by deception.

If in the mind of the ancient Jews (and this is indubitable) the sea was the source of chaos, restlessness, surging confusion, and danger, by contrast, the earth appears to be stable unless you live in California and a few other places. Thus, it doesn’t seem to be so dangerous. But that is precisely what makes this beast more dangerous. He doesn’t seem to be dangerous. In other words, that’s the very nature of deception itself.

Elsewhere we’re told that the Devil does manifest himself in more than one mode. On the one hand, he’s sometimes described as a lion going about, seeking whom he may devour. On the other hand, he’s sometimes portrayed as an angel, masquerading as an angel, deceiving if possible the very elect. In other words, the Devil is not stupid. He can play both good cop and bad cop. He can come at you with one beast or the other beast, and the one seems so safe. Not from centers of surging chaos, but from stability.

That brings us to the heart of the matter. This beast is the satanically inspired power to deceive men and women in concrete historical terms. It’s what the text explicitly says. Verse 14: “Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth.” In verse 11, he has two horns like a lamb. Here it is not a question, I think, of kingly authority but just the image of a gentle harmlessness.

The language is probably drawn from the same sort of teaching Jesus himself gave. Do you remember what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount? “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” There are some attacks on the church that are really nasty that will land you in prison or see you executed, but there are others that come along and don’t say, “Here’s a great big, filthy, ugly doctrine to believe in. It’s full of heresy and poison. Go ahead; buy it.” Obviously not.

In many instances, people come and say, “Well, I’m so glad you’re a Christian; now there’s a deeper truth you also need to learn,” which then begins to take you gently away from the gospel. We’ll come to some examples, historical and present, in a few moments. Thus, when the text says this beast speaks like a dragon in verses 11–12, in the light of the entire picture probably not the roar of the Dragon but that he’s the Dragon’s mouthpiece. He leads the whole world astray, to use the language of chapter 12, verse 9.

Now take a look at some later passages. We’ve seen already that later passages sometimes illuminate earlier ones. In three later passages, transparently this beast is labeled the false prophet. Revelation 16:13: “Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.” That’s the Dragon, the beast (that is, the first beast), and the false prophet.

Or again in chapter 19, verse 20: “But the beast was captured, and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf.” That’s exactly what that second beast had done. He had performed the miraculous signs on behalf of the first beast. Or again in chapter 20, verse 10: “And the Devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

Thus, the unholy triumvirate of the Devil, the first beast, and now the second beast, who is the false prophet, are finally disposed of. In other words, the very terminology, false prophet, suggests deception. That’s what false prophets do. They deceive you. They lead you astray.

2. The false prophet serves Antichrist, who serves Satan, an unholy triumvirate.

Look at verse 12 again. This false prophet, this second beast.… “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.” That’s quite remarkable. For anyone who has read what else John has written, including John’s gospel, you cannot help but think of the Trinity.

The Father sends the Son. The Son displays the glory of the Father. The Son obeys the Father. Then the Son, in his departure, is succeeded by the Holy Spirit, whose whole function is to bring glory to the Son. He’s to take of what Christ has given and then give it to Christ’s followers, Christ’s people. His whole aim is not to bring glory to himself, but to bring glory to Christ. “He shall speak of me,” Christ says. Thus, in chapter 16 of John’s gospel, the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ.

So what do we have here likewise? Satan sends the first beast, and the second beast comes along and tries to bring glory to the first beast. He wants all the world to worship the first beast. What you have in this chapter is a constant aping of the Trinity, which is a way of saying there is an alternative god structure set up. It’s the very nature of idolatry. You believe another god.

The false prophet glorifies the Antichrist as the Holy Spirit is sent to glorify the Son. In other words, that which opposes God often does so by surreptitiously trying to take God’s place. That which opposes God may not necessarily do so by confronting him directly but sometimes by trying to take his place. That is, at the end of the day, the essence of idolatry. You replace God with something that is non-god and make it god. That’s idolatry.

That’s why Paul can say covetousness is idolatry. If you want something badly enough, then for you that’s god. If you want it badly enough so that you bend all of your energies and life resources and desires and hopes and time and money toward it, that’s, for you, god. So that which we place as god, that which de-Gods God, that which domesticates God, is at the heart of idolatry.

3. The false prophet is full of deceptive power.

Look at verses 13 and following. “He performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men.” It sounds a bit like something Elijah would have done. “Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth.” It doesn’t say the signs were false and thus he deceived them, but that he performed signs and deceived them with his untruth.

One remembers, for example, the confrontation between Moses and the magicians of Egypt. The magicians of Egypt were able to do quite a lot and thus justify themselves and the superiority of Pharaoh and his court. “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.”

This was part of the standard tricks of paganism in the first century. The oracle of Delphi, for example, had some priestess hiding behind the statue or inside the statue somewhere, pretending to speak in oracular fashions, and sometimes these idols had small holes around the eyes where you could squish through some water so the idol would appear to cry on occasion. These things are well known from the ancient world, how it was done.

There were a lot of magicians who were traveling around. This was the age of Apollonius of Tyana, of Apelles of Ascalon. These are well-known figures in the ancient world who would be hired by the courts. Apelles of Ascalon frequented the courts of Caligula, for example. You see something of it in the book of Acts. What about the sorcerer Elymas in Acts, chapter 13? And you know what? We’re returning to that today.

Just consider, for example, how popular astrology has become again or new forms of spirituality, which depend far more on magic and non-scientific (“the force”) than anything else. Now we’ve lost the rationality of belief in God, we’re returning in Western culture to a belief in magic and judging it to be equally true with any other form of truth. We’re returning to all the appeal of ancient paganism, shortcuts to access to God.

In other words, the older this world gets in the Western world, the more appealing this sort of thing becomes again. If you read this in the 1950s, you’d think, “Who could believe in stuff like this?” Today it’s everywhere. My daughter lives in Ithaca, New York, Upstate New York. Do you know what the town of Ithaca was called when it was founded almost two and a half centuries ago? It was called Sodom.

It was founded by coastal peoples who moved to the interior, as it then was, and decided to build a town for themselves that was free of all bourgeois morality and they could do whatever they wanted and would live the way they pleased and so forth. Eventually, of course, it became just another town and the home of Cornell University and so forth, but at the time it began as Sodom, and then it took on the name instead of one of the Indian tribes in the area and came to be called Ithaca, New York.

To this day, there are more witch’s covens in Ithaca than there are churches, this in the heart of the scientific Western world. You have to understand that these things have their own appeal in all kinds of areas. In Metro Chicago where I live, there’s a Catholic church with a statue, which people say every once in a while cries tears when something horrible is going on in the larger world. I’ve never seen them. I have to get down there sometime. I’m sure I’ll be impressed.

Sometimes there is some element in it that I don’t pretend to understand, but sometimes there is just plain skullduggery, plain deception. Have you heard of Popoff the evangelist? That’s his name. He’s a Russian American. He had a particular kind of healing ministry about 15 or 18 years ago in California. He had a particular shtick.

When people came into the vast halls (and they were coming in vast numbers), he would suddenly stop in the middle of his discourse and say, “The Lord is telling me there is a woman in J 46 who has severe back pain. Come forward and be healed.” So she would come forward, and sure enough, she was in J 46 and she had severe back pain and she wanted to be healed.

Inevitably, this was such an attraction, because it looked as if he not only had a word from the Lord to explain who this person was, but then there was the healing as well. However, the media became interested, and they tried to find some sort of collusion, somebody somewhere along the line who had been paid or set up to do this to make Popoff look good. They couldn’t find anybody. Nobody would admit to being a stooge.

But they noticed that Popoff wore a hearing aid. Now what a healer is doing with a hearing aid is another point that I won’t go into, but in any case they had some suspicions. So what they did was they went in with a radio scanner. For the technologically challenged, a radio scanner is a device that sweeps across the radio bands and locks on the strongest signal.

It transpired that Mrs. Popoff was one of the attendants at the door who was handing out cards to people and saying, “If you have prayer requests, why don’t you write them on this card and put them in the box?” If she saw one coming in who said, “I have terminal melanoma; I only have six months left to live,” then it went in the rubbish bin, but if it was something that had any hope of being psychosomatic, she would note where the person sat, and then she’d write “J 46.”

In the middle of the meeting, she had a little radio, and what was in his ear was, in fact, a radio receiver. So what ABC, American Broadcasting Corporation, television played on national news was first the vision of this thing.… They had a tiny mini-cam that people couldn’t see and spot what they were doing just looking at the whole congregation as it appeared to unfold. “The Lord is telling me in J 46 there is a woman …”

Then they played it again but dubbed in the sound of Mrs. Popoff’s radio signal. “Oh dear, down in J 46 there’s one who says she has severe back pain.” “The Lord is telling me …” Well, needless to say, after that his ministry popped off. A few years later, I was back in California for something and in a hotel room and flicked on the TV, and lo and behold, it was on a religious channel, and there was dear old Popoff back at it again. His numbers were not quite so big, but people have short memories.

Now do not misunderstand me. I am not saying God cannot heal miraculously today. He may choose to do so. I am saying the guy was a farce. He was a deceiver. My only regret in this whole thing was that it was ABC that found him out instead of ordinary evangelical Christians, because we have a certain kind of responsibility to clean out the phonies. The vast percentage, I’m sure, of those who were there and being duped by this thing were just ordinary believers who were a bit naÔve, wanting quick answers to serious problems.

The things that deceive, however, are many, and sometimes they’re far subtler than that. That’s such an easy one, so demonstrable, on national television. Once you’ve seen what was done, you can’t respect it at all. It’s just disgusting. But some forms of deceit are far subtler than that. I was in Papua New Guinea a number of years ago at a large-ish conference, and somewhere along the line I made some passing judgment, just by way of illustration, about rebirthing techniques.

Now rebirthing techniques were developed to handle people who had been abused when they were very, very small, and there is a kind of Christianized version of these rebirthing techniques that is pretty widespread in American pop Christian psychology. What happens is those who have been abused are brought into a small group, and the person leading this rebirthing experience wants you to close your eyes and imagine your birth again.

So this rebirth is not the rebirth of Genesis 3; it’s your own birth played out in your mind again. You are to picture yourself coming down your mother’s birth canal, and as you begin to be pushed out, there is Jesus, who actually gently eases you out and wipes the yuck off your face and clamps the cord and cuts it and smacks your bottom so that you suck in that first breath of life and gives you your first cuddle and so on.

Those who have been through this, granted that they find it difficult to believe that God loved them, granted that they’ve been abused, granted that they have been taught their own intrinsic worthlessness by the abuse they have suffered, will sometimes testify that they have been considerably helped. For the first time, they feel as if Christ has loved them actually from the very beginning.

Now I made some sort of slighting remark about rebirthing techniques, and it got me into trouble. There was a young couple there in their mid-30s who were very anxious to meet me afterwards, upset, tingling with a mixture of resentment and desire to talk. They invited me back to their place for a meal, and I went. We got through the food, but I could see that the food wasn’t of any interest to them at all that day.

Eventually, the fellow said to me, “I really have to challenge what you said today. After all, I myself am one of these people who has been immensely helped by rebirthing techniques. I’m a classic case. I was sodomized when I was just a very little boy by both my father and my uncle. I’m a classic victim of abuse. Eventually, at the age of 17, I started going to a local church. Somebody in high school brought me along, and there I was converted.

Eventually I went to university, and then Bible college, and married my wife, and here I am on the mission field. I could have told you, yes, God loves me. It’s a theological point, and I believe what the Bible says, but I really didn’t feel it. If he really loved me, why did I go through all of that? Then not long ago, somebody came through here and led those of us who have this sort of background in a rebirthing experience. I have to tell you, as he led me through it, I wept for half an hour or 40 minutes as I realized for the first time that Jesus really did love me from the beginning.

As a result of believing now, understanding more, feeling that Christ has loved me from the beginning, I think my wife could tell you I’m better able to give and receive love. I think I’m a better husband. I think I’ll be a better missionary. There’s no place in the Bible that condemns rebirthing techniques, and if all truth is God’s truth and I feel that Christ loves me more now because of it, then who on earth are you to condemn this thing that has seen my sanctification improve?”

Well, sort of told me, didn’t it? It was a pretty good question. What do you say? I said, “My dear brother, if as a result of your experiences in a rebirthing group you really do love your wife more and you love Christ more and are better able to receive his love, God bless you. I’m not going to argue with you. Have a nice afternoon. If, on the other hand, you really want to hear what I would say if you are up to it, I’ll tell you, but it’s going to hurt. Are you sure you want this?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I do.” I said, “Okay, I need to ask you some questions first. My first question is this. Do you believe you could have received the same cathartic release (which transparently you did receive) and thus the same healing in your own mind if, instead of taking you through a rebirthing technique, someone had instead taken you to, let us say, Ephesians 3:14–21 and brought you through the passage very slowly and helped you to understand it?

There Paul prays that you may have power, together with all the saints, that you may grasp how long and wide and high and deep is the love of God that surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fullness of God, which is a Pauline expression, that you might be perfectly mature. Supposing someone, instead of rebirthing technique, had taken you to that passage and worked it right through in your life and shown what it means, all of God’s love for you in Christ Jesus displayed supremely on the cross, had shown you that.

Do you think you might have had a similar sort of cathartic experience that would have made you better able to receive the love of God in Christ and better able to love your wife and receive love from her and so on?” He thought about it for a while and said, “Yeah, I suppose I could have. I’m not disputing that this same sort of healing could have come by some other route. That’s not my point. My point is that it came by this route, and if the result was equally good and equally Christ-centered, then why criticize it?”

So I said, “Then my second question for you is this. If someone were to come to you now from an abused background, to which Jesus would you point him? Would you point him to the Jesus who hangs on the cross and whose love is measured by the cross or would you point him to the imaginary Jesus who stands between your mother’s legs, pulls you out of the birth canal, and wipes yuck off your face? Which Jesus will you point him to?” That’s the problem.

You see, here is a young fellow who’s a missionary. He studied the Bible. He’s serious about his work. The Devil isn’t going to come and say to him, “Why don’t you buy into New Age spirituality? Why don’t you love the Devil? Why don’t you reject the truth of the gospel?” He’s not going to say that, because it’s not going to get him anywhere. The Devil is not stupid.

The Devil is far more likely to say, “I know your sins have been forgiven by the cross. That’s pretty nice, but clearly the cross has not dealt with your deepest emotional needs. Here is a technique we can adjust a wee bit for your Christian conscience’s sake, and this emotional technique will give you a kind of healing that the gospel itself doesn’t give you.”

Thus, you think you’re still on train with the gospel, but what, in fact, has happened is you’ve been sidetracked about five degrees. As time progresses, the separation gets larger and larger and larger, and it’ll get even larger when you start passing it on to the next generation and they start passing it on to the next generation, so now salvation will be something that just sort of gives you an escape ticket out of hell, but the real emotional cleansing comes from the rebirthing technique in American pop psychology. Now do you smell the sulfur?

I don’t even deny that the fellow was helped by it. That’s not my point. Look around the world, brothers and sisters in Christ. There are an awful lot of things going on that are aimed at deceiving us in one fashion or another. Let me list three or four. In some circles, for example, provided you have the truth of the gospel, that’s all you need to worry about. You’re faithful, provided that you preserve the truth of the gospel.

Then what will you do with passages that keep saying something like, “By this shall all men know that you’re my disciples, if you love one another”? On the other side, nowadays there is such a love of something vague called spirituality that it’s pretty hard to criticize it. It has approximately the plus value that apple pie and motherhood did in the 1950s. Neither is all that respected today, but in the 1950s they were so respected that in the Western world you couldn’t criticize either.

Spirituality is like that today. Whether your spirituality is formed out of a Buddhist worldview or crystals or wearing a special copper bracelet around your wrist or it comes from meditation.… It doesn’t matter what you meditate on. It can be a form of yoga meditation, where you meditate on a black dot in the middle of a white frame and concentrate on it as your legs are in contorting positions, and you sort of contemplate it for half an hour and thus you feel very relaxed.

I’m not denying that you will feel very relaxed. Not for a moment. All I’m saying is it’s not spirituality in any Pauline term. Spirituality in the Bible is bound up with having the Spirit, and having the Spirit in the Bible is bound up with changed behavior, loving people for Christ’s sake, cherishing the truth. Meditation in the Bible is bound up with thinking God’s thoughts after him, turning them over in your mind, hiding his Word in your heart, that you may not sin against him.

In other words, transparently, something like spirituality has now become so widespread you can be ever so spiritual and not even be a Christian. Paul says it’s by faith in Christ that we have the Spirit, and if we do not have the Spirit, we are not of him. There’s a deep antithesis that is bound up with the cross with what the gospel is about.

Let’s try another one. Democracy has taken different forms in different countries. In the UK it’s a parliamentary democracy. In republican democracies, the strength is not in the parliamentary system (there isn’t one) but in balances between the branches, so you have the executive branch and the legislative branch and the judicial branch separated in various ways, and they play off against one another.

Let me take the example of the American experiment for a moment to draw your attention to a very interesting fact. When the founders of the American Republic put together the Constitution and wrote voluminously on the subject in what are called the Federalist Papers two centuries plus ago, they didn’t write about the great wisdom of the American people. They didn’t believe in it.

Although many of them weren’t Christians, they belonged enough to the Judeo-Christian heritage that they believed human beings, you and me, are wicked and often stupid. We say stupid things. We do stupid things. We act selfishly. So they were afraid to give too much power just to the electorate. They were afraid of a populist sort of religion, so they wanted a representative system of government.

Even when you vote for the president of the United States, you don’t vote directly. You vote for members of what’s called the Electoral College, and the Electoral College then casts its vote in favor of the president. They wanted a distance between the direct appeal to the masses and the actual decision. They didn’t trust the masses. It was all based on the fact that they still believed that human beings were evil.

They wanted a system by which they could turf the blighters out every few years. They wanted a system that was owned by the people, so we, the people, constitute the final sanction for government. That was the thought in the American experiment. Nowadays, throughout the entire Western world.… I don’t care whether it’s the UK or Germany or France or Canada or the United States. It doesn’t matter.

Universally now, when the people speak in their vote.… The politicians of that country speak of the great wisdom of the French people or the British people or the American people. You hear it all the time. “Well, the people say that.” Give me a break. If you have 300 million sinners voting, you have 300 million sinners voting. They can be coerced by oratory into voting for stupid and wicked and self-centered policies. Just because you have 300 million sinners voting doesn’t necessarily mean the policies are any better.

Today, universally, there is an assumption of intrinsic human goodness. This is the more astonishing when we’ve just come through the bloodiest century in all of recorded history. At the end of the nineteenth century, people were thinking that everything was getting so good. In fact, they wondered if they could avoid war ever again. Then came World War I, and it was so bloody that people spoke of that one as “The war to end all wars.”

Then 20 years later we had World War II, and since then, skirmishes of various sorts, and hanging over our heads at least the threat of nuclear holocaust. Apart from war in the twentieth century, we have managed to butcher a million and a half gypsies, a million and a half Armenians, six million Jews, a third of the population of Cambodia, up to 20 million Ukrainians, up to 50 million Chinese, a million Hutus and Tutsis, and on and on and on; about 100 million people we’ve managed to butcher, apart from war itself.

Now we come to the end of the twentieth century, and we buy into postmodernism, in which each view is as good as any other view and there is no such thing as objective evil. How evil can you get? If somebody says something is evil or that a position is evil today, he’s dismissed. “Oh, he’s intolerant.” We’re a long way from the pages of Scripture. We can be snookered by that too, so that the most important good we pursue is simply to be nice or to appear to be nice in the eyes of Western media. And the false prophet wins again.

The nature of deceit catches us where we’re least looking. Today there are very, very few churches in the Western world that have come from an evangelical background that are really likely to be duped by classic liberalism. Classic liberalism is everywhere on the decline. The mainline denominations are declining. The mainline institutions are declining. Their voice in the popular media is declining.

Mainline liberalism today is on the wane almost everywhere, numerically, in terms of power, and most evangelicals are not attracted to mainline liberalism. It’s just not our danger today. So we think we’re perfectly safe so long as we’re not liberal. But the Devil is not stupid. The question always to ask is.… Where are the subtle points today?

If the apostle Peter had to be rebuked by an apostle Paul in the first century, then suddenly you start reflecting on the fact that the subtlest dangers in any age are the ones that an awful lot of Christians don’t even see. It teaches you to walk with humility. It teaches you to go back to Scripture again and again and again. It’s the only way you can ever even begin to be safe. So the false prophet, then, is full of deceptive power.

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 cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.” All who refused to worship the beast. “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.”

Clearly, there is some sort of economic boycott here. That is, unless you toe the line you can’t buy and sell. So there’s an economic boycott. Of course, in totalitarian regimes, that’s a pretty standard trick of one fashion or another. In many totalitarian regimes of the left or the right, unless you toe the line, you or your children can’t go to university.

That’s the way it was right throughout the USSR in its heyday. It was very difficult for serious Christians who were consistent in public ever to get their children into any university to study anything at all. It was a kind of economic boycott. They become marginalized … the ignorant, the fools who are left behind.

But I suspect there is an obvious parody to what’s going on here too. I mentioned that one of the things about apocalyptic literature is the way it appeals to the Old Testament. Now there are some books in the New Testament that appeal to the Old Testament with a lot of direct quotations. You read chunks of Romans, for example, or chunks of Matthew or Hebrews, and they’re constantly quoting the Old Testament.

The book of Revelation almost never does. It only has one direct quote. That’s the Trisagion that we looked at the first night, the “Holy, holy, holy,” quoted directly from Isaiah, chapter 6. But no book alludes to the Old Testament more than Revelation. There’s scarcely a pair of verses you can read in the book of Revelation that do not have some resonance with the Old Testament. The more you know the Old Testament, the more you think, “Oh yeah, that’s bringing that one forward. Oh yeah, it’s making a reference to that.”

It’s all over the place. It’s just interlaced with Old Testament allusions. So also here. This is almost certainly referring to Ezekiel, chapter 9. That’s part of a long vision. In a fairly apocalyptic book, Ezekiel 8–11 is one long vision. There, Ezekiel is transported in his vision from where he is in exile on the banks of the Chebar River 700 miles away to Jerusalem, where he sees in his vision all the horrible idolatry that’s going on in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is going to be destroyed because of it.

He sees in his vision that because of all of this, the mobile throne chariot he has seen already in the first chapter is parked outside the gates of the temple, and the glory of God lifts off the temple and goes and sits on this mobile chariot, which moves outside the Jerusalem walls, across the Kidron Valley, and up the Mount of Olives, which is a way of saying God has abandoned the temple.

So when the whole place is destroyed, it’s not because God couldn’t defend it, but rather because God has ordained destruction because of all of the idolatry. It’s not that Nebuchadnezzar was too strong for God; it’s that God himself sanctioned this judicial punishment because the whole place had fallen into such moral disrepair. Then, as the vision progresses, there are destroying angels that are about to be sent out. This is still in the vision. It’s a glorified Spirit-given dream.

In this vision, there is one particular man with a writing script, a little pen with a sack of ink powder or ink fluid, and he is supposed to go through the streets of Jerusalem and mark a sign on the forehead of all of the people of Jerusalem who have been disgusted by the evil and who have prayed for righteousness and integrity, because God wants them to be spared when the destroying angel goes through the city.

What you have is a parody of that here. Now the beast puts a mark on the forehead or the wrist of everyone who doesn’t belong to him. Thus you have a tension set up. You either have the mark of the Beast and are spared his wrath or you have the mark of the Lamb and are spared his wrath. In fact, that’s exactly where the next chapter goes. “Then I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.” That’s picking up from the same vision of Ezekiel.

You either have the mark of the Beast and thus you’re saved the wrath of the Beast but you’ll face the wrath of the Lamb, or you have the mark of the Lamb and thus you’re saved the wrath of the Lamb but you’ll face the wrath of the Beast. You’re going to face somebody’s wrath. The question is.… Whose wrath do you want to face, the wrath of the Beast or the wrath of the Lamb?

Now you hear the words of Jesus coming across the centuries, saying, “Do not fear him who can destroy your body. Fear him, rather, who after destroying your body casts body and soul into hell.” That’s what leads you into the next chapter, which we’ll look at in the next section. The false prophet ultimately demands conformity. Of course, there was historical pressure in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the second century just after John’s time.

In the reign of Trajan, for example, it became official policy to make refusal to worship the emperor as god a capital offense. Ignatius, for example, at the age of 84, was brought before the emperor. He was bishop of Smyrna. “All you have to do is offer a small pinch of incense to the emperor, and you will live. Why should you die at the age of 84?” He says, “All of these years I have served Christ Jesus, and he did me no wrong. How can I deny my God and King?” He was thrown to the lions.

Now what is this mark? We’re told in verse 17 that this mark is the name of the beast or the number of the name. The name of the beast is the number. In English, we have one set of symbols for letters and another set of symbols for numbers. Our first digit is simply a 1 and then 2 and then a 3, and those marks on the page are quite different from our letters, which are A and B and C and so on.

Both in Hebrew and Greek, they use letters as numbers. So if you were writing, then you wrote and they were letters. If you were doing arithmetic, then they were numbers. A, alpha, was 1. Beta was 2. Because it was a base-10 system like ours today, once you got through the first nine numbers and got to 10, you didn’t put a zero at the end of it, because they didn’t have zeroes. Nobody had figured out null yet at that point in the mathematical development.

So the next one was just the tenth letter, and then the eleventh letter. You got to the end of the alphabet, and then you went back to A and put A, alpha, and then a prime beside it. So you can imagine it wasn’t easy to do arithmetic in the ancient world, because things didn’t line up. It was a base-10 system the way it worked, but the numbers didn’t show that it was a base-10 system.

This meant that every single name allowed you to add up the number value of the letters. Every single name had a number value. That sort of game was called gematria. You find it in one or two places in the New Testament. Do you remember the genealogy of Matthew, chapter 1, very carefully cast in three 14s?

You have 14 names until David, then 14 names during the years of the Davidic dynasty, and then 14 roughly (it’s purposely truncated for another reason) until the coming of Christ again. So 14, 14, and 14. But David in Hebrew in its most common spelling is dalet, vav, dalet, four plus six plus four, which is 14. In other words, it’s a way of reinforcing that at the heart of the whole thing is David, David’s dynasty and the king coming from David’s line. You can’t do that in English.

That means you find actual graffiti in the ancient world, “I love her whose number is 545.” That’s a direct quote, and it’s not giving dimensions. What can I say? It’s gematria. Now what that name is I don’t know, but that’s a very famous graffito that has come down to us from the first century. “I love her whose number is 545.” That brings me to my last point.

5. Identification of the false prophet may be difficult.

Verse 18: “This calls for wisdom.” Well, I should say so. “If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is a man’s number. His number is 666.” Now I know that in many parts of the Western world hotels don’t have the thirteenth floor. They go from 12 to 14 because a lot of people are so superstitious they don’t want to have a room on floor 13. Personally, I couldn’t give a rip. If they’d just lower the rates on floor 13, I’d be just as happy.

I know people who wouldn’t dare have “666” together on their number plates. As a result, in many countries in the Western world.… In fact, they look for things that are going to be embarrassing, and 666 is one of them, and they usually don’t assign that one. I keep these files at home of strange suggestions, and my file on 666 is very thick. One suggestion has it it’s the initials of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Vespasian. Of course, you have to leave out Otho and Vitellius, but apart from that it works.

During the time that this was most likely written, the emperor was called Domitian. If you take an abbreviated Greek form of the full Latin title of Domitian, you can get 666, but it has to be an abbreviated Greek form. What can I say? I read a very learned article about 20 years ago proving that 666 was Henry Kissinger. Mind you, you had to put “Kissinger” in Syriac to make it work, but you could do it.

Others have pointed out that 666 is the triangular number of 36. Now I bet you don’t remember what a triangular number is when I mention one … 153. The reason it’s called a triangular number is if you put dots in an equilateral triangle.… So you have one and then two and then three. Now you have three dots on each side. You keep going down until you have 17 dots on a side. All the total number of dots is 153.

Now 666 is the triangular number of 36, and 36 is the triangular number of 8, and in Revelation 17 we’ve seen that there is an eighth king beyond the seventh. Oh, well, that proves it, doesn’t it? I suppose the most common solution is that this is actually referring to Nero Caesar. There are various reasons why people prefer this one, but to get it, just to keep things in perspective, you need a Hebrew transliteration of the Greek form of the Latin name, and the Hebrew spelling has to be defective. Not very convincing.

Some take it to have another symbolism. Just as 7 marks perfection, then 777 would be the perfection of perfection. So 666 marks, “Nice try, folks.” Failure upon failure upon failure, trying to ape God and never quite making it. Some have thought it means something like that. The truth of the matter is I don’t know. Already in the second century they didn’t know. There’s no decisive, convincing exegesis of this number even in second-century sources, which means that it was forgotten pretty fast. Probably John’s readers knew exactly who John had in mind, but we don’t.

That may be part of the providential ordering of things, precisely because the false beast is a false prophet. False prophets in the very nature of the case are hard to detect. Sometimes you have to say they’re also ambiguous. It would be very nice if every movement that came along was transparently either right from the throne room of God or right from the pit, so you could either bless it or damn it to hell and be done with it. But that’s not the way false prophets work, is it?

That is precisely why we’re called upon to be discerning, to test everything with Scripture again and again and again, especially in those areas where we are most likely to be deceived, because the pressures of our culture are all tilting in one direction or because our background is all tilting in one direction or our denomination is all tilting in one direction. How on earth can you ever hope to reform things unless you go back to Scripture again and again and again and again?

Do you remember Psalm 1? Right at the head of the Psalter is this remarkable first psalm. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.” Now the righteous person is described negatively, what he’s not like. He does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly. He does not stand in the way of sinners (that is, stand in their moccasins, do what they do). He does not sit in the seat of mockers.

Now Hebrew poetry loves parallelism, so what you’d expect in verse 2 is, “Blessed, rather, is the person who walks in the counsel of the righteous, who stands in the way of the upright, and who sits in the seat of the praising.” That’s what you’d expect, the counter parallel. Instead, verse 2 gives you just one positive criterion. “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” If you have that criterion, you have everything.

We are to think God’s thoughts after him. That demands serious reading and rereading and rereading of Scripture, trying to understand it. After all, that’s what the Bible says, isn’t it? As a person thinks in his heart, so is he. You’re not what you think you are, but what you think, you are. You’re not what you drink. You’re not what you eat. You’re not what you wear. You’re what you think.

That’s why the New Testament likewise says, “Do not be conformed to this world …” There’s the deception. “… but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” You are what you think, so unless you train your mind by the Word of God, inevitably, you will instead be conformed to this world. That is inevitable.

So how is the righteous person described positively? He meditates on the law day and night. He thinks about it. He reads it. He hides it in his heart. He delights in it. That brings him, of course, always back to God and the gospel, to Christ and the cross and the resurrection, to the eternal things that matter eternally. Therein, and therein alone, do we beat deception, by the grace of God.