THINGS WE’VE BEEN TAUGHT TO FEAR
THE MARK OF THE BEAST
Isn’t it time to stop all the hysteria over the mark of the beast? Those who allow themselves to be caught up in the fear of microchips implanted in their hands or foreheads have missed the point, not having been educated concerning the historical and cultural forces at work at the time that John wrote Revelation or the Jewish practices and symbols involved. I mean no condemnation or judgment. We can’t blame most people who don’t have time to research things deeply for believing what they see in print. There’s simply been too much fear-mongering published by those who really don’t know or understand. Unfortunately, it does generate excitement and attract a lot of attention.
The apostle John wrote:
And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name (Revelation 13:16-17).
What was he actually saying to first- and second-century Christians, and what might it have to do with the time in which we live? Deuteronomy 6:6-8 reads:
These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.
In Bible times, in literal obedience to this instruction, every Jewish man would begin the day by binding a small leather box on his hand and another on his forehead. These would contain a few lines of Scripture. Even today, orthodox Jews carry this daily ritual forward to mark themselves as covenanted to God and walking in subjection to His Word.
To illustrate the point, I once found myself waiting to board an early morning flight to London just at sunrise. A Jewish man in orthodox garb and the long ear locks, worn by eastern European orthodox Jews, stood facing the rising sun as it shone through the floor-to-ceiling window in the waiting area by the gate. Rocking back and forth in prayer, he donned his phylacteries—one leather box on his hand, secured by straps up his forearm, and the other on his forehead.
Understand that, as apocalyptic literature, Revelation is a book written in code, filled with symbols and metaphors familiar to its intended audience and never meant to be taken literally. Every first- and second-century Jewish person reading this passage would have understood references to the mark on the forehead and the hand and called up the mental image of a man wearing his phylacteries to declare his devotion to God.
John wrote symbolically concerning a specific situation faced by believers who lived in his day. Consider, therefore, that in many cities of the Roman Empire, one had to belong to a trade guild in order to do business. Each guild worshiped a patron god from the pantheon of Roman deities. Meetings were held in the temples of those deities where they offered sacrifices to the patron gods of those guilds. The meetings included feasts, often followed by orgies. Obviously, no Christian could participate in such things and could not therefore legally ply a trade. In other words, they could not buy or sell.
In that light, the mark of the beast points not to a literal mark but rather to a system in which standing for one’s faith, being marked by God as belonging to Him in covenant, could exact an economic penalty. Obviously, considering the history from which the symbolism is drawn, a microchip embedded in someone’s hand is a stretch too far. The language speaks symbolically to what happened in John’s day and perhaps yet to come in our own time when failure to declare loyalty or obedience to an ungodly system might mean loss of income or even business closure. Already, in my own city of Denver, Colorado, a cake shop owner has been successfully sued by a gay couple for refusing, for the sake of Christian conscience, to make a wedding cake for their same-sex marriage celebration. Similar suits have been filed and won in other U.S. cities as well. We have seen county clerks and justices of the peace under persecution for refusing to grant marriage licenses to gay couples. Praise God that the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld the right of that cake shop owner to refuse service, but the process of appeal was long and arduous.
How many of us have paid a price for bringing a Bible to the workplace? Or for speaking out about Jesus in the public school system? Forget about microchips. The more likely scenario is the one I’m describing, symbolically represented by “the mark” and applicable to our own day as well as to John’s. This is prophetic perspective—one historical fulfillment followed by a greater one in the fullness of the original word.
Think of it another way. Why would any person or government go to the expense, and weather the public outcry, to insert a chip in anyone’s hand, much less on the forehead, when the world is turning to much more efficient and reliable fingerprint technology, facial recognition software, and even iris recognition?
THE ANTICHRIST
If you have been fearing the rise of the antichrist, please stop. I will say simply that it’s probably not what you think it is or who you might suppose it to be. Even more, why attribute more power to an antichrist figure than we do to Jesus our Lord? Or do we truly believe that Jesus is, in fact, Lord? Fear points to the presence of some degree of unbelief in the power and sovereignty of the God we serve.
See Revelation 13:18: “Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The ancient world didn’t use the Arabic numerals we employ today. Instead, they used letters of the alphabet to indicate numerical values in a system called gematria. Even today we use Roman numerals, letters of the Latin alphabet, only to date movie releases and Super Bowls, but for literally nothing else. In the ancient world, anyone’s name could therefore be represented numerically by adding up the values of the letters in the name. Ancient graffiti, for instance, have been found carved into stone with statements like, “John loves she whose number is 585.”
No one has ever been able to identify any literal person in history whose name could be numerically represented by 666. The problem with attempting to apply 666 to anyone in John’s day is that it corresponds to no known historical leader or emperor. The name “Nero,” the evil emperor who used Christians dipped in tar as torches at his garden parties, almost fits, but only if misspelled in Latin as “Neron.”
The issue gets worse when you try to apply the number of a name to anyone in modern times. We no longer use gematria to calculate numerical values. Further, in the original Greek, there is no definite article in front of man. It can therefore be translated either as “a man” or simply as “man,” but not “the man.” In other words, 666 can be understood as the number of “man” in general. If it is the number of man in general, then it would indicate a time when man deifies himself and rejects God—a time when mankind makes its own rules and exalts the human spirit, or a time when the majority become conditioned to believe that we’re all good people and therefore will go to heaven. And what about all those who want to believe that we are all little christs, extensions of deity? If 666 refers to a specific man, then we have a problem because it becomes nearly impossible to identify who that man might be, either from John’s day or in our own.
Perhaps more telling is John’s own definition of “the” antichrist. “Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). John penned the Revelation as well as First John. He identifies the antichrist specifically as the spirit that denies the incarnation of Jesus, God become man. He said it again in First John 4:2-3, “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” In Second John 1:7 he made the same point: “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.” One of the key debates in the early church had to do with the incarnation. Did God truly become flesh? Or did He only seem or appear to do so? Or was it simply that God took an ordinary man and adopted him? The former is what we call Doceticism, while the latter is Adoptionism. John saw both of these heresies developing and warned against them, calling them “antichrist.”
In other words, we could safely identify “the” antichrist as Satan, who seeks to undermine the truth that God became flesh in Jesus in order to save us. The battle over that foundational element of our faith formed the core of many of the early church’s doctrinal debates. Greek philosophy had invaded the Roman world. In Greek thought, flesh was seen as evil. The idea that God would defile Himself by having anything to do with it seemed inconceivable.
The antichrist now works in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and other faiths in which the idea of God becoming man is seen as anathema. The secular world merely sneers at the idea with no religious reason for doing so.
My point? Settle down and stop feeding fear. No attempt to identify the antichrist as a specific man has ever resulted in a workable conclusion. In short, “antichrist” is first a spirit—Satan himself, in my opinion—that denies the true identity and nature of Jesus, His divinity, and the reality of His incarnation.
Nevertheless, attempts to identify who this antichrist might be continue to proliferate. As I grew up in the midst of the frenzy over the soon return of Jesus and impending rapture that infused the Jesus Movement, I saw numerous efforts to identify some living person as the antichrist. For example, as noted earlier in this book, in the early 1970s both the prince of Spain and Henry Kissinger were put forward as candidates who supposedly fit all the signs. More recently, people have tried to lay it on Barack Obama or even the current Pope. It just doesn’t work!
In the coming days, we must choose to walk in our appointed glory as we focus not on the antichrist, the mark of the beast, or any other distraction, but rather on the face of Jesus. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).
THE TWO BEASTS AND THE ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT
Revelation 13 speaks of two beasts, one coming up from the sea with ten horns and seven heads on which were blasphemous names, and the other having two horns like a lamb and speaking as a dragon. Some—mostly those who see Revelation as entirely a book of future prophecies yet to be fulfilled—believe this to be the coming emergence of a one-world government with the antichrist at its head.
Remember, however, that historical context informs meaning. By the time John wrote the Revelation, emperor worship had taken root in the Roman Empire. This arose as a popular response of gratitude for the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. Prior to Rome establishing its rule over the whole of the Mediterranean Basin, brigands, thieves, and pirates made trade difficult, if not impossible. Travel and the transportation of goods were dangerous pursuits. As a result, everyone suffered economically and in other ways. The rise of Rome to dominance brought peace and stability as the empire constructed roads for commerce and Roman power enforced safety on the sea and land. The empire prospered, and with it all the nations and people groups it encompassed.
Not only did Rome worship a pantheon of gods, but, as prosperity grew, people began to exalt the “genius” or the spirit of Rome, personified and embodied in the emperor. Some emperors actually began to respond to this by openly claiming divinity. In some cities and regions of the empire, the law required every subject of the realm to sacrifice a pinch of incense annually to the emperor and declare, “Caesar is Lord.” Christians, of course, could not do so—Jesus alone is Lord—and were therefore branded as subversives, disloyal to the Roman state. At the cost of their livelihoods and sometimes their lives, they stood their ground.
Beast number one, therefore, symbolically represents the Roman Empire and its government arising from the masses of people symbolized by the sea. Beast number two represents the pagan religious system with its worship of the emperor. As the second beast rode upon the back of the first beast, we understand that the pagan system of worship, imposed upon Christians and practiced in the empire, was supported and enforced by the government of Rome—a religious beast bound together with and empowered by a governmental beast.
Is this picture of a one world government with its religious system limited to John’s day under the Romans? Or might there be an element of prophetic perspective involved in which there may yet be a greater fulfillment reflective of the first one that manifested in John’s day? The answer remains unclear.
Why do I question this? In contrast to the Roman Empire of John’s day, current trends point not to the growth of a one world government, but to increasing division and fragmentation, and I find nothing in Scripture that would compel me to conclude that a one world government applies to anything but the historical situation in John’s day. The United Nations is an impotent organization functioning as little more than a platform for the nations of the world to argue and hurl accusations at one another—and especially at Israel. It seems that every ethnic group seeks to become its own nation. The Soviet Union is no more, its various member nations now functioning as independent states. The European Union includes many more than ten nations, and even some of those nations appear to be increasingly restive under its dominion. Witness the exit of the United Kingdom! A one world government hardly seems likely in light of the trend to fragmentation around the world. This alone should allay our misguided fears and put to rest a raft of conspiracy theories.
Could it be that our modern version of the two beasts can be found in the growing influence of political correctness and the legal penalties visited upon those who will not bow the knee to its godless principles? Could it be that the penalties visited upon Christian businesses that refuse to compromise biblical mandates and values represent a measure of what John foresaw, especially if prophetic perspective is involved? Could it be that a modern version of the Roman system could be reflected in job losses suffered by believers who refuse agreement with certain ungodly leftist philosophies? Could it be that the image of the second beast appearing as a lamb and the image of the resurrected beast in Revelation 13:14 reflect the truncated and compromised version of Christianity growing in our culture that claims to worship Jesus, but clearly not the real Jesus of the biblical record?
In any case, we must not allow these things to consume our attention. We must rather seek a purity of focus on who Jesus truly is, gazing into His face, being transformed by His glory. Do this, and we will win, no matter what happens in the world around us or what pressures may come against us. What is clear is that deep darkness will cover the peoples, but the glory of the Lord will rise upon us. Once more, no matter the world condition, we arise victorious.