The Beast from the Sea, as we saw, is John's symbol for the earthly power of the State when it has become corrupted from its true purpose. There is nothing wrong with the institution of government as such - indeed, it is ordained by God Himself to preserve at least some semblance of good order in a broken world. Paul was right: "There is no authority except from God." (Rom. 13:1) But as Michael Wilcock says, "It is God's will that there should be law and order; it is the devil's achievement that there should be bad law and tyrannical order. He puts blasphemies in the mouth of the state so that it installs itself in the place of God by demanding from its subjects a total, unconditional allegiance such as those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life will never give to any but Christ. They will support the State while it functions properly under divine authority, but not when it acts illegitimately as divine authority." (Michael Wilcock, "I Saw Heaven Opened" IVP,) And that is what Satan seduces it so very often to do. It usurps the authority God has given to Christ in the world.
And that is why John gives to both the Beast from the Sea and his henchman the Beast from the Earth features which make them a horrible parody of the Lamb. In ch. 5 John saw ...
But the Beast from the Sea has ...
A Lamb
he Who rules is meek and lowly of heart
standing
"having done all He still stands" ('He will not fail till He faithfully brings forth justice' Isa 42:4)
as though it had been slain
He recovered from His mortal wound ... He is risen and lives to bless
having seven horns
He exercises power in perfection
with seven eyes
He has a right perception of all things, and nothing is hidden from Him
He is the Lion of Judah
He is regal in His lordship.
And the Beast from the Earth has ...
the appearance of a leopard, a bear and a lion
swift savagery, not meekness
ten horns and seven heads
power and indestructibility - but no eyes!
it seems to have survived a mortal wound
but lives to blight, not bless
The Beast from the Earth is a parody too of Elijah, for as we are told in 16:13, he is a false prophet, "even making fire come down to earth from heaven in the sight of men."
two horns like a lamb *
it is weaker than Christ
speech like a dragon's
Christ's was "like the sound of many waters"
power to do miracles
which deceive, where Christ's revealed truth
Clearly John means us to see these two beasts as a combination who usurp Christ's authority in the earth.
Who is the Beast from the Earth, and what is his relation to the Beast from the Sea?
v. 12 It exercises the first beast's authority "in its presence" i.e. it cannot stand on its own. Without the Beast from the Sea it is powerless.
In 16:13 the three characters of this chapter - dragon, beast from the sea and beast from the earth - are identified as "the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet" - so the beast from the earth is to be distinguished by its message.
Remember that in John's day men's minds had not been secularised as 20th century man's mind has been: there was no philosophy without a religious component. Today there may be, so our equivalent is not necessarily a false theology, but a false ideology. No ideology has sufficient power of itself to sway the lives of men - it needs the power of an earthly state inspired by it to do that. And almost every government in the world relies heavily on the machinery of propaganda to maintain its power over people's minds.
In John's own day it was in fact the "Commune Asiæ" i.e. the Asiarchs and Priests of the local towns of Asia Minor in John's day who foisted Emperor worship first on the Cæsar Augustus - their ideology demanded it.
v. 13 It works great signs by means of which it deceives.
The priests of those Asian cults made citizens worship the 'beast' of their day, Rome, by miracles: in the Æsculapiæ I have seen in Turkey there are tunnels etc. to simulate a god's voice, and there were diseases - psychosomatically induced diseases - which they did heal. The priesthoods of those days were like schools of Houdinis, as Pharaoh had had his magicians. They had refined the science of persuasion by the technique psychologists refer to as 'suggestion' to a high degree.
They promoted loyalty to the Empire too by recounting tales of Rome's recovery from 'death strokes' it had suffered, proclaiming its invincibility by such 'signs.'
'Miracles' may be calculated trickery, or they may be genuine manifestations of demonic power. The People of God have been warned about them since the time of Moses: "If a prophet arises among you, or a dreamer of dreams, and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, 'Let us go after other gods,' which you have not known, 'and let us serve them,' you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the Lord your God is testing you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul." (Deut. 13:1-3)
Beware of the persuasion of mere signs - they are not a sure mark of truth. The only sign Christ would offer was Himself!
The ideology, v. 14, "is allowed" to perform its signs, inspiring worship of the "state," notice. Again, the permission is undoubtedly God's, not Satan's. This is in line with the style of God's judgments as Paul expounds it in Romans 1 - when we turn from God to idols, God delivers us up to the power over us of those idols to which we turn ... and Satan does lend them powers. It is God's will that when we turn from Him to idols we should taste the bitter fruits of our choice; there is no help for it anyway.
v. 15 It "gives breath" to the beast, and a "voice" - the ideology is the 'life' of the party, of the State. This is why propaganda is so vital an ingredient in the exercise of political power.
And the ideology is death to nonconformists - "it was allowed to cause those who will not worship the image of the beast to be slain" v. 15 - as it was in Russia - and as it is in less severe but nonetheless real ways even in Canberra.
v. 16 It "marks" ** its captives on ...
i. the right hand: in the area of action,
ii. the forehead: in the area of thought or motivation (what you have a mind to).
Note that the followers of the Lamb too have a "seal on their foreheads" 7:3 - they are motivated differently.
If we insist on understanding John to imply that there is some literal mark which is 'stamped' somehow on the beast's followers we must show what is the parallel mark with which the Lamb's followers are stamped! To ignore this is to be guilty of gross inconsistency in our interpretation of Scripture. Those who say the Beast's mark is an invisible imprint on the palm of the hand to enable us to do our shopping and our banking, or '666' on our Bank Card, must come up with a matching suggestion for Christians - what 'marks' do they wear?
This is surely enough to show us again that John is conveying an idea with his picture, not an actual detail of real life.
The Name and the Number - 666
Now to the riddle in v. 18 about the number of the beast, 666, over whose solution gallons of ink have been spilled. How are we to understand this verse?
John often represents
things with both a picture and a number ...
The Church by ... The Elders, the Woman, the Witnesses - and
144,000
The Church Age by ... The Woman nourished, Witnesses preaching,
Nations occupying Jerusalem - and 42 months, 1260 days, 3.5
yrs.
False Religion or the
Ideology is represented by both a picture and a number
The Beast from the Earth - and 666.
It is extraordinary to what lengths people have gone to identify a historical person by that number. John never intended us to do that, I believe. What he says is really quite straightforward.
He says v. 18: "Here wisdom is" - here is a call for understanding. "The one having reason, let him reckon the number of the beast." In other words, "Use your brains now. We have given the Church a number, 144,000; we have given the Church Age a number, 3.5, 42, 1260; what number shall we give the Beast? He is of the earth remember, not heaven." Notice, the sentence ends there with a FULL STOP - not a comma. John is saying, "It is a human number. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six." The final clause is not part of the riddle: it is the answer! The answer is: Six six six.
In other words, having established his way of identifying things with pictures and numbers, John invites his readers this time to share with him the process of reasoning by which he does it. "You work it out this time - he falls short of the standards of heaven, remember." Note that John says, "Reckon the number;" not "reckon the meaning of the number." In other words, he says,
"Question: what number shall we give him?
"Answer: 666. QED!"
Think how John has done it up till now.
The Church is 144,000
- why? Because it is ...
- 12 (12 Tribes of the Old Covenant, 12 Apostles of the New)
multiplied together, or squared: 12 x 12, which indicates
intensity
- multiplied by 1,000, which indicates abundance ("a multitude no-one
can number").
So how do you work
out a number for the Beast?
... his message falls short of the truth, as sin is a falling short
of the Glory of God, so make it 6 (not 7);
... it is "the lie" which in fact looks very near the truth (that is
why it has such power to deceive), which makes 6 even better;
... and it persistently falls short of the truth, so put it three
times, 666. Three always signifies completeness - the Beast's lie is
a full-blooded lie, an absolute whopper of a lie. (Hitler: "The
bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed."
There you have it.
John in fact uses numbers with great consistency in Revelation. (See table in the Appendices.)
2 = Adequate Witness
3 = Completeness (as one thrd = Incompleteness)
4 = Anything that concerns the earth (because it has 4 corners)
5 = Smallness (David's five smooth stones)
6 = Sin, the 'falling short of the Glory of God' (Rom. 3:23), always falling short of ...
7 = Perfection, perfect unity in diversity (7 colours in the rainbow, 7 days of the week etc.)
10 = Fulness or Completeness in Aggregation as 7 is in Integration.
12 = the Church (12 Tribes, 12 Apostles)
24 = The Continuous Church through both ages
... etc. etc.
To square a number is to intensify the idea it represents; to multiply it by 1,000 is enlarge it; 10,000 = Innumerable - too big to count.
The number of the Beast signifies a persistent falling short of 7, the number for true and complete perfection.
The attempt to identify a historical character by making the letters add up to his name is a total misunderstanding of John's intention, as I see it. (The first nine letters of the Greek alphabet stand for the figures 1-9, the rest for tens and their multiples. Martin Luther's name adds up to 666 just as Adolf Hitler's does!)
Any ideology, philosophy or religion that lures our trust and obedience away from God so as to anchor it in some human system is the 'Beast from the Earth' - whether it be Marxism, the ideology that 'gives breath' to Communism, or Humanism which 'gives breath' to many contemporary policies both Liberal and Labour, or whatever. To identify the Beast from the Earth exclusively as Roman Catholicism is thoroughly pernicious - Protestantism is just as susceptible to corruption as Catholicism is, as any student of Church history knows.
The Beast from the Sea is Satan's perversion of the State; the Beast from the Earth is Satan's perversion of 'Wisdom,' to use the word the Hebrew would have used where we would say philosophy or ideology.
At any stage in history it is possible to point to incarnations of the two Beasts. You can look at a system of government that has become incipiently evil so as to commandeer the very souls of its citizens and you can say, "That is the Beast from the Sea in our time." You can look at a religion or an ideology which promotes and justifies that régime, and you can say, "That is the Beast from the Earth in our time."
Without doubt, humanism and communism both qualify; so does materialism ... and Mohammedanism. The Ayatollah Khomeini used Islam to 'give breath' to his fanatical thirst for power and dominance evidenced in the war between Iran and Iraq.
We may corrupt the United Nations Charter to the same ends ... even the Declaration of Human Rights so as to make the American Dream the West's substitute for the Gospel.
It is a very subtle business, and Christians need wisdom, perception, a sound mind, "a reason for the faith that is in them" ... 'nous', if you like.
How sure are we of our faith? How pure is it? How untainted is it by worldliness? i.e., to what degree do we see Christianity as a means to some worldly end - even some worthy worldly end, like good government and social welfare ... as though good government and social welfare were our salvation? They are but a fruit of it.
That is the snare with which the devil snares us.
No religion is pure that fails to espouse as its entire aim and its whole endeavour the glory of God, and the glory of God alone. Persuade any human government on earth of that! We are corrupt - far more corrupt than we have the eyes John had to see. John has challenged us here at a far deeper level than we generally appreciate. As we have said, to follow the Lamb is not a game we can play. He is pleading for a radical personal devotion to God and to His Christ of everything we have it in us to be - and to nothing else. That is why John will make the qualifications of a real Christian so stringent, 14:4.
* The word for 'mark' is 'charagma.' Its uses:
1. Soldiers branded themselves with the name of their general.
2. A charagma was on every contract of sale: the Imperial Seal, bearing the Emperor's name and the date.
3. Coinage bore the image of the Cæsar.
4. The certificate given to those who had burned their incense to the Emperor.
** The priestly headdress of the Asian cults had two horns.
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