666

the second half of Revelation 13, we're starting in verse 11 in just a minute,

but we're continuing with this Revelation series. And last week in the first part of Revelation 13,

we were looking at the first beast who arises from the sea, that place of chaos and evil.

And this week, we're going to talk about the second beast who comes from the earth. So the first

beast comes from the sea, the second beast comes from the earth. And this is one of the most famous

passages in all of Revelation because it mentions some of the most familiar images from Revelation

that we are accustomed to, like the mark of the beast and the number 666. These are things that

most people know about or have heard at some point in their life. And I just want to start by

looking at verse 11 in this description of the second beast. Notice what it says there in verse

11. It says, then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb,

and it spoke like a dragon. Now, I want to ask you this question. What's distinctive about that

description? Anybody know? What do you notice about that description? Like, what's distinctive about

it? What's the point it's making here with this description? Okay. Okay, yeah, yeah. You're kind

of on the right track. So it's deceptive because if you were to look at this, it looks like a lamb,

right? You see this second beast, and it looks like a lamb just as Jesus is called the Lamb of God,

but it speaks like a dragon. So it looks like a lamb speaks like a dragon, and this really plays on

one of Jesus' favorite things to do when he was talking about the false teachers in Israel.

He often said they were like wolves in sheep's clothing, right? So they appeared to be sheep,

but they were actually wolves. They talked like wolves. They would lead people astray. And so

Jesus was warning people that these false teachers were especially deceptive and especially dangerous

for true believers because they appeared to be one thing, but they led many people astray because

they were, in fact, false teachers. And it seems like the same thing is true here of the second

beast. He seems innocent. He seems somewhat harmless. He appears to be a sheep, but God warns us,

do not trust him because if you listen to him, he talks like the dragon. His words are like that of

Satan and will lead people away from the true God towards false worship. And I want you to notice

this next description in verse 12. It says, it exercises all the authority of the first beast

in its presence and makes the earth and in its inhabitants worship the beast whose mortal wound

was healed. So notice there's a bit of a difference here, right? It has the same authority as the

first beast, but their goal is slightly different because if you remember last week, when we were

talking about the first beast, his whole goal was waging war on God and God's kingdom and God's

people. He was a war tyrant who was just out to wage war on God's kingdom. The second beast

is far more subtle than that. He's not a beast who goes and wages war in the traditional sense,

but rather he is someone who is trying to get people in the world to worship the dragon and the

first beast. So you can think about this beast. He is basically the propaganda arm of Satan's kingdom.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So the first beast, he's the war general who comes and wages war.

And the second beast is the propaganda arm of Satan's kingdom who tries to get people to worship

the dragon. And you can think about these beasts with a few examples throughout history. For instance,

you could say that the Soviet Union was like the first beast and the fact that it was wreaking

havoc on the world, but communism is like the second beast with its endless marches through

the the red square. The whole goal behind that was to get people to praise the Soviet Union. So

the Soviet Union itself, waging war on people, destroying nations, but the communism of the

Soviet Union was like the second beast trying to get people to align with their evil ideals. You

think about it like this. Hitler was like the first beast. And I think we all can just nod our

heads on that one. No description needed, right? Like he was waging war on people doing horrible

things. But but think about it like this. Nazism itself was like the second beast,

because Nazism with the Hitler youth and with all their rallies that they had, they were trying to

woo people to the side of who? Hitler, right? They're trying to gain allegiance and worship

for the first beast. And in this case, someone like Hitler. The same thing is true of the posters

of Chairman Mao. The whole goal, if you think about the posters of Chairman Mao that were plastered

everywhere was to get people to align with Mao and join him in his evil regime. I mean, I think

North Korea right now, I mean, yeah, I don't know if y'all have ever seen any videos that come out

in North Korea, but like Kim Jong-un, he will walk into a room and people go crazy. Like they don't

even look like real people and where they're just jumping up and down and flapping their arms like

penguins. Absolutely insane. They put up posters everywhere about this guy. And the whole goal

is to get praise for Kim. It's the second beast at work. And I think, you know, I don't really

think y'all would disagree with this, but I think we could add our own country into the mix as much

as we might not like to do that. Sounds super weird since tomorrow is 4th of July. So let me just

say I love our country, but I think we could add our country into the mix here, especially when you

think about the mainstream media. No one's going to argue with me on that one, right? Yeah. There's

a lot of things to argue about later. So just hold still. But like mainstream media, can we not agree

that they kind of act like the second beast? I mean, if you think about their goal, what is the

mainstream media doing? They're seeking to distort the truth, to hide the truth, and the things that

they are putting out before the American people are meant to align the American people with the

side of the beast, right? Think about all that you see about abortion in this country. Oh, it's not

a sin. It's something to be rejoiced. It's something to be praised. You should gladly get behind this

thing. Think about the LGBT agenda, right? It's not enough to just say, oh, you should be accepting.

You have to join in with this. You have to participate in this because the goal is to gain

our allegiance. They want to align us with the objectives of the beast, the objectives of the

dragon. They want us to be part of Satan's dark kingdom. And to...

Yeah, that's exactly right. And you're seeing that in our country right now in just all sorts of

ways. But this is how the beasts work together throughout history. You have this military arm

and you have this propaganda arm. It's the false kingdom of the devil, the dragon, and it's the

false religion that the beast is promoting to try to get people to join the side of Satan.

But I want you to notice that the beast doesn't just utilize propaganda techniques. The Bible says

here that he also employs a bunch of false signs and miracles. Look at verses 13 through 15.

It says of the beast, it performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth

in front of people. And by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast,

it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was

wounded by the sword and yet lived. And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast

so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the beast,

the image of the beast, to be slain. Now, I want you to notice what he's trying to do here. He's

trying to win people to the side of the dragon. And this time specifically through signs and wonders.

And here's our problem today. One of the problems that we have today as Christians reading Revelation

is we like to imagine that this can only apply to some person at some point in the far-off future

who's going to come and do all these signs and wonders when in reality what you actually see

throughout history is the spirit of the beast at work in the world doing signs and wonders to

lead people away from Jesus. I mean, that's exactly what the purpose behind these signs and wonders

actually is. The whole purpose is to say you don't need God because look what we can do.

You have no need of a God who can do these things because we can explain them all away and they do

some pretty miraculous things to try to get us to abandon faith in God. I mean, for instance,

you can think about a couple of these that you might not have thought about before as signs and

wonders. We've had a lot of breakthroughs in the realms of science and medicine, right?

And those are good things, right? So a lot of the things I'm about to say, you might think,

oh, he's a crazy person, right? So again, don't clip me out of context. Here's what I'm saying.

I support science because God created science. I support medicine because God created medicine.

What I'm saying is that the beast have a way of taking a good thing that God has created

and trying to use them for deceptive purposes, right? Does that make sense? Can we all agree on

that? Right? So for instance, the Bible says that God created everything from nothing, right?

But scientists have come along and said, well, you don't actually need God for that.

How do you not need God for that? Yeah, who else can create something from nothing?

And scientists have proposed all these theories saying, well, actually, here's this great sign

and wonder that science did. And so you don't need God. So for instance, Stephen Hawking,

the late Stephen Hawking, his big theory was that it is entirely possible to get a world from nothing

using pure science, right? His big theory was because we have gravity and a law of gravity,

a universe can and will create itself. Now, I know he has doctor in front of his name.

And I know this might be like, well, that's too easy to explain away. There must be something

I'm missing here. No, no. He actually said, because there is a law such as the law of gravity,

a universe can and will create itself. What's the problem there? I think we're all logical enough

to figure this out. Does anyone see a problem? Who produced gravity? That's on track. Anybody

else got an answer for this? Right. So you basically end up with this endless loop where it's like,

okay, because there's a law of gravity, a universe can and will create itself. You're assuming that

the existence of the agent of creation that is necessary for that thing to be existing in the

first place. Does that make sense? Like you have to first have gravity and a law of gravity

before you have anything else, but you don't get gravity or a law of gravity if there is nothing.

Right. Does that make sense? So you're assuming the agent of creation before the thing is actually

created that's needed to create. It just doesn't work. And so Lawrence Krauss and other scientists,

he proposed this theory about dark matter. He basically said the way you can get a universe

from nothing is all about dark matter. And there's a whole big scientific explanation for this about

how things add up and subtract and basically having an equilibrium in the existing universe.

But again, dark matter is not technically nothing. It's just invisible. It's a non-visible thing,

but it's not actually nothing. And so dark matter would have to exist first in order to get a universe,

but it can't exist unless there is something there in which it can exist. Does that make sense

to everybody? And so basically, here's my point in saying all this is that you have all these

scientific theories that people are putting out saying, here's this great sign. Here's this great

wonder that took place. You don't need God. That's the whole goal of the beast. Here's this amazing

thing that we can explain without God so you don't actually need God. The Bible tells us God created

man in his image, but then Charles Darwin came along and he said, actually fish and monkeys.

That's where you come from. We all evolved from single cell organisms that slowly and

progressively evolved over time and that's how we got to where we are today. Now that is completely

false and I mean there are very good reasons to prove that it is false, but suffice it to say.

That's another example of saying, here's this great wonder that took place. We can't prove it. There

is no evidence of it whatsoever, but isn't it amazing if a fish can become a monkey and a monkey

can become a person? That's a great sign. That's a great wonder. So you don't need a God who creates

everything. You have this other explanation. It's the beast working using good things that God has

created and corrupting them for his purposes. I mean even advances in medicine does this and again

I'm not anti-medicine. I'm a big proponent of medicine, but I also think that people can become

so reliant on medicine that they no longer see a need for God. They don't see a need for a God who

can heal when they've got aspirin who can do that. They don't see any need to believe in a God who can

raise people from the dead when they've got electrical devices that can shock people back to life

moments after their death. I mean people laugh at us when we have a whole list of people who are

hurting and infirmed and we pray for them and they say, why are you praying? Just take them to the

doctor and we're like, well we are going to do that, but we're also going to pray. We don't put all of

our trust in man and we don't put all of our trust in medicine. They're like, well we've got this new

wonder drug. It's this miracle. It's this wonder and it'll cure anything instantly. You don't need

God. That's exactly what the beast is doing here. He's using these things that God has created and

corrupting them for his own purposes. The beast does this to lead people astray. I want you to

notice verses 16 through 17. It says also, it calls his all both small and great, both rich and

poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead so that no one can buy

or sell unless he has the mark. That is the name of the beast or the number of its name. Now this is

the infamous mark of the beast, right? And some people have said that this is predicting a future

in which all people are going to have like a tattoo of a barcode or possibly a microchip implanted in

them and that you will not be able to buy or sell anything unless you have that barcode or microchip

or whatever the other possibility might be. And listen, that's entirely possible, but the problem

is that's not actually how the original readers would have understood this. We've discussed this

before back in Revelation chapter 7 when we were talking about the mark of God or the seal of God

Revelation 7 · chapter mention

on his people. Do you all remember that one? Probably not because I don't remember the last

time we were in Revelation chapter 7. But when it talked about the seal of God, do you remember

Revelation 7 · chapter mention

where he puts the seal? Forehead, yeah? Yeah, it was on the forehead, right? And I don't know if you

remember this, but we said the reason that the Bible says the seal of God is on the forehead and

the same reason that the mark of the beast is on the forehead is because in the first century,

the way that slave owners would brand their slaves was on the forehead or on their hand. It was a

way to show who that slave belonged to. It was a sign of ownership. And so if you saw a slave and

he had this branding on his hand or forehead, you'd be like, oh, he belongs to so-and-so. And so the

reason the Bible says that the seal of God is on the forehead is because it's a way of declaring to

the world we belong to God in the same way that the mark of the beast is placed on the forehead

or on the hand is a way of saying that person belongs to the beast. It's a way of saying that

a person's life is going to be marked by ownership to the beast. Basically, people are going to see

how a person lives, and it is going to be very evident to this person, to everyone watching,

if this person belongs to the Lord or belongs to the beast, everything in their life is going to

tell you who owns them. And what about all this stuff about buying and selling? Well, I think it

has to do with the difficulty that Christians have faced historically and continue to face

in the world today simply by being Christians. For instance, in the first century, when this was

written, Christians were virtually banned from being able to buy and sell goods. They would go

into the marketplace, everyone knew they were Christians, and they would try to participate

in buying and selling, and they weren't allowed to, simply because they were Christ followers,

and they refused to participate in emperor worship. They said, hey, you don't worship the emperor,

you're not part of the imperial cult, therefore, we don't want anything to do with you, right? You

can't buy, you can't sell, it's going to be incredibly difficult. And listen, we're starting to see

some of that even in our own country today. I think it was like a couple years ago now,

California specifically, I know this isn't going to shock you, but California specifically

started trying to pass a ban where Christian books that opposed the LGBT agenda or Christian

books that openly opposed abortion were going to be restricted in their state and not able to be

published. The booksellers would not be able to sell them and people would not be able to buy them,

why? Because they were explicitly Christian and went against the cultural agenda. Also, let's just

say, if you have a Christian business, let's say it's a bakery, for instance, right? A Christian

bakery. As a business owner, you have the right to sell or restrict services from whoever you want

to, right? Can we agree like, thank the Lord for capitalism, we appreciate it, it's a good thing,

you have the right to determine who you do business with. But let's say a Christian bakery, if one

existed, decided that they did not want to sell their goods or services to someone who was a part

of an agenda that they did not agree with. Well, do you think the world would respond and say,

that's fine, we get it, you're allowed to do that? Or do you think the world would do absolutely

everything they can to get that business shut down and make it impossible for that Christian

business to be able to sell their goods or buy goods from other people in order to be able to

do business as everyone else is able to? Which one do you think is most likely? Probably the last

one, right? And that's exactly what we're saying. The Bible is saying here, as long as the spirit

of the beast is at work in the world, Christians are going to have difficulty living in this world.

But who is the beast? It's kind of what's happening with Kenya and our Bibles right now.

There is a general tax increase, but basically as soon as the post office in Kenya found out,

we shipped 120 Swahili Bibles, they decided that the tax all of a sudden went up a good bit. So,

yeah, good spot, Doug. All right, so the question is then, who is the beast? Look at verse 18 with me.

This calls for wisdom. What is this referring to? Back in verse 17, when it's talking about the name

of the beast or his number. So this calls for wisdom, let the one who has understanding

calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man and his number is 666.

It's good to have my whiteboard back. All right, so let's dive in. 666. This is a very infamous

number. And the main thing that you will hear about 666 from pretty much anyone is they'll say

that 666 equals Nero, the emperor of Rome. Anybody know why?

Okay, something to do with the addition of the alphabet. Yeah, we'll get there in just a second.

Right, so basically this view that 666 equals Nero, it's held by mostly post-millennials or

they view that 666, when you add up the letters, the numerical values of Nero, it equals 666. But

this is unconvincing for a number of reasons, which I'll get into in just a moment. But just so

you know how this works and what Cayley is talking about, there's a phrase for a system that's called

Hebrew-Gematria. I don't know if you want to write that down and google it later, feel free to.

Hebrew-Gematria. And basically what it is is in Hebrew, every single letter of the Hebrew alphabet

has a numerical value. And it's not just the letters themselves, but in Hebrew you have

final forms of letters and those forms of letters actually have a different value than the regular

form of the letters. Very complicated. So basically when you add up the Hebrew letters of Nero, they

say it equals 666. Now I've got six reasons why this is not accurate or convincing. I don't have

666, I was hoping I could get there, but I just I got six. So first this only works with a very

specific configuration of Nero's name and title. So you can't use Nero Caesar. What you have to do

is you use Nero Caesar. So Nero Caesar and this was only one of Nero's many titles and it wasn't

even his most common one. So the Emperor of Rome had a bunch of different titles and this was one

of his titles, but it was not his main one, but you just had to pick which one you thought was

going to be right in order to get this to work. The second problem with this view is you have to

transliterate. Anybody know what Nero Nero Caesar, what language this would have been? Latin? Yes,

all right. So you have to transliterate Latin to Hebrew. Now maybe you're thinking that doesn't

seem that hard, but just remember the historical context. Who is John writing to? Do you remember

the first couple chapters? Who is he saying he's sending this letter to? The churches, yeah, the

seven churches in Asia Minor. Fun fact about the seven churches in Asia Minor, they were all pretty

much Gentile churches. There were some Jewish Christians in there, but the overwhelming majority

of these churches would have been Gentile churches filled with Gentile believers and

most Gentile believers, if not all of them, they did not know Hebrew. And again, you might be like,

okay, well no big deal because there were some Jewish Christians in the churches. Well, here's

the problem. Even the Jewish Christians didn't know Hebrew. Hebrew had basically died out at this

time. It was a dead language. It had been replaced by Aramaic. Really the only people who knew or

spoke Hebrew at this time were the religious elites. Think about the Pharisees, the scribes,

things like that, but your average Joe in one of these churches did not know Hebrew. All right,

so third, in order to equal 666, you actually have to misspell Caesar. So in Hebrew, there's this little

letter. It looks like this. It's called a yod. So that's a yod. It's the smallest letter in Hebrew.

And it's required to spell Caesar properly, but if you add that letter, it no longer equals 666.

So that letter conveniently disappears in order to get this to equal 666. Also,

I knew that didn't look right. The H is on the end because Hebrew. Fourth, none of the early

church fathers at all ever identified Nero with 666, which seems pretty telling, does it not? If

you're one of the early church fathers, if this was a main idea going around at the time, you would

think one of them would have associated 666 with Nero, but there's no evidence that any of them

ever did. Also, fifth, the proposal given the context seems so unlikely as to be virtually

impossible. So just I want you to think about this for a second. Let's say that you're one of

the Christians in one of these Gentile churches, and you have just heard John say, hey, the number

of the beast is 666. Let me ask you this. Is your first thought as a Gentile Christian, I need to go

and pick one of Nero's titles. Hope I get the right one. I didn't need to transliterate that Latin

into a language that no one knows at the time and hope that someone can tell me how to use

that language. And then I need to intentionally misspell the transliteration of that title

into Hebrew. Then I have to use a Hebrew numerical system, Gamatria, that is completely foreign to

me that I've never even heard of in order to get Nero to equal 666. Do you think that would have

crossed your mind as one of John's readers? Again, I don't want to dismiss this entirely because it

is technically possible given a wide range of conditions being met. It is technically possible,

but it is most likely and highly unlikely. This is really important. John has this habit

throughout the book of Revelation where anytime he wants you to think in Hebrew or Greek, he tells

you. So for instance, Revelation 9.11, John writes and says, they have a king over them, the angel

of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek he is Apollyon. Also in

Revelation 16.16, he writes and said, and they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is

called Armageddon. If John is wanting to communicate his readers, hey, you need to think in terms of

Hebrew right now, he helps us out and says it's in Hebrew or it's in Greek. He doesn't specify here

and you have to understand he's not calling on people to think mathematically here. That was not

his intention. He's calling people to think ethically. The reason I want to make this point

is because people have this bad habit where they'll see 666 and they want to make it equal

a person of their choosing. And this has been demonstrated by scholars for a long time now.

You can pretty much get any name to equal 666. They've done it with pretty much every pope

who's ever existed. All power to him. Go for it. I'm all for that. That's fine with me.

They said Ronald Reagan. When you added up the letters of his name, it equaled 666. This has also

been done for Hitler as well as a couple other people. I think they tried it with Richard Nixon

as well. So if you work hard enough at this and I could show you what the letters in Hebrew equal

and I can show you the numbers, you could probably make your own name equal 666 if you tried hard

enough and worked with a certain configuration. So you could do this with anyone and I don't think

that's the point that John is making here. I don't think he's saying, hey, for every person who ever

lives, check them by this number to make sure they're not the beast because many names equal 666.

So what is the point? Well, I think a symbolic interpretation is called for here because numbers

are incredibly important in the Bible and especially in the book of Revelation. For instance, the number

7 is the number of perfection. We know this. Everybody knows 7 is the number of perfection.

What number comes before 7? Oh, come on. That's the easy one. It's not a trick question. Ha,

actually in Hebrew it says no. It's actually just 6. It's 6. So if 7 is the number of perfection,

then 6 doesn't quite reach perfection. In fact, throughout the Bible, 6 is the number of imperfection.

It is imperfect, incomplete, and defective. And it's interesting because in the book of Revelation,

you see this number 6 is repeated three times here. Can you think of anything else that's

repeated three times in the book of Revelation? Yes, exactly. Holy, holy, holy, right? That's

what the angels say about God. God is holy, holy, holy. Well, the beast is 666. He is completely

and totally imperfect and lacking. And I really think this has more to do with mankind in general

than it does for a particular person specifically. For instance, I want you to look at your Bibles

there in verse 18. Here's something really interesting for you. I think unless I'm wrong,

pretty much all of your translations are going to say this is the number of a man, right?

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

Which one? And the NIV? Okay. Anybody else have anything different?

Kudos to the NIV. I'm very impressed with them. I didn't know that, so I'm very impressed with

them. Actually, so yeah, a lot of other translations will say it's the number of a man. Well, here's

what's really interesting. And the reason I think that's a poor translation is because in Greek,

they use the article very intentionally, right? They'll use the or a or an very intentionally,

but interestingly enough, in the Greek of this verse, there is no article. So in Greek, it does not

say the number of a man. In fact, the proper translation should be this is the number of man

or as the NIV has rightly rendered, this is man's number. It's in the genitive sense,

meaning possessive in Greek, and there is no article. This is man's mankind's number.

It means that the beast is going to empower and embody many people throughout history

who oppose Christ and his kingdom and seek to lead people away from the one true God. So in that

sense, it's not actually technically wrong to say that Nero is associated with the beast. Now,

666 with Nero, that is wrong, but to associate Nero with the beast, that's not wrong, because Nero

was certainly empowered by the beast. Was he not? You look at what he did, what he tried to do,

he was leading people astray, but this is also true for many people throughout history. You could

add Hitler to this list, you could add Stalin, Mao, Putin, the Kim dynasty in North Korea, as

we've already mentioned. Whenever humanity perverts God's order in this world, it's a depiction of

the beast at work in the world. Mankind in our sin, we are imperfect and the devil loves nothing

more than to work in sinful man to accomplish his purposes. And this makes sense of John's statement

there in verse 18 that this calls for wisdom. He's not saying that you need scholarship to

figure this out. He's not saying that you need intelligence. He's not saying you need to be

able to read Latin, read Greek, transliterate Latin to Hebrew and then use a Hebrew numerical system.

No, he's saying this requires wisdom. As Christ followers, you need wisdom from the Lord to be

able to recognize the beast's activity in the world, identify the spirit of the beast at work in

the world and resist his attempts to lead you astray. This is why we need wisdom. And so for us today,

as Christians reading this, we should pray to the Lord to give us wisdom. We should ask God to help

us recognize the beast and his activity at work in the world today. We need to ask God to give

us the wisdom to identify the spirit of the beast at work in the world today. And we need to pray

for strength and wisdom to resist the beast and his deceits and his temptations that would lead

us away from Christ. More than anything, we need to pray for wisdom and ask for the spirit's guidance

to help us walk in step with him rather than in step with the beast. So this is the second beast

and he is already at work in the world today. He will continue to be at work in the world until

Jesus returns, but Jesus will have the victory. All right, Michael Stevenson, you're up.