SEEK 25 – 666
Question: What can you say about 666?
Bible Reading: Revelation 13
Text: 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. (Revelation 13:18)
Would you accept a hotel room with the number 666? When your car reaches 666 miles and crashes do you think that’s a coincidence? What do you think is on channel 666 on your TV? It’s possible that you may be suffering from Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia – now there’s a word you don’t hear every day. It’s the fear of the number 666.
In case you think it’s not a real fear, there genuinely are people who won’t travel on route 666 – apparently you can get your kicks on route 66, but route 666 is another matter altogether. It is a road serving the Four Corners area of the US (New Mexico, Nevada) and had a higher-than-average number of accidents. It has now been renamed Route 491. And then there was the infamous case of President Ronald and Nancy Reagan who in 1989 bought a new home in the Bel Air area of Los Angeles, 666 St Cloud Road. They renumbered it to 668. They too suffered from Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.
Many people have an awareness of the number 666 which has now passed into popular culture, because of films like The Omen and of course the obsession with the number in rock music. Britney Spears wearing a 666 t-shirt, Iron Maiden singing ‘The Number of the Beast’, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin have all provided plenty of material for those Christian conspiracy theorists who see rock music as the mark of the Beast, the spawn of Satan.
Others see the mark of the beast is your social insurance number, or your credit card, or an implant in your body put there by the state when you were born, or the Covid vaccine! The theories are numerous. To my mind it is a complete waste of time, energy and money spending precious time on such silly speculations. The apostle John was not writing about credit cards or Western social welfare systems. He was not writing about Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Napoleon or even Bill Gates. So, what did he mean?
If you were a slave, as many of John’s readers would have been, then you would have been branded, like cattle. You would also have been aware of the image of Caesar on coinage, indicating that it ultimately belonged to him. The mark was all about who you belonged to. In ancient languages letters were often used for numbers. So for example, a=1, b=2, c=3 etc. A name could be represented by adding up the numbers. There is an example in Pompeii of graffiti on a wall reading, ‘I love her whose name is 545.’ When you transliterate Nero Caesar from Greek to Hebrew you end up with the number 666. The number of the beast is simply the number of the Roman emperor who was persecuting the Christians. This numerical code/imagery was actually quite clever for the Christians. Why? Because they could see themselves as the number above, the heavenly 777. Even better, the name Jesus in Greek transliterated into 888.
The point of Revelation 13 is not to provide 21st century Western Christian authors with material to apply to our particular political circumstances – as though the Holy Spirit was recording the event before it happened. No: he is showing John firstly that the opposition is fierce, perhaps worse even than John’s worse nightmare. But he is also showing him in pictorial form that the opposition is limited. The beast out of the sea was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and in the opposite of Revelation 7 to rule over every tribe, language, people and nation. It’s not the Lamb at the centre of the throne who is ruling; apparently it is the beast. But even in the midst of that evil John is being told it is limited. He was ‘given’ the authority. His time was limited (the 42 months). We are not told the reason of these things. But we are told that the Lord’s people have to be patient and faithful. That’s one of the key lessons.
The encouragement is that the sovereignty of God is always more apparent when it seems as though wickedness has reached its deepest limit. There is nothing blacker than the horror of the cross. And yet God meant it for the ultimate good. John talks about the Lamb slain from the creation of the world. The cross was not God’s plan B or Z. It was his means all along to rescue not just humanity but the whole creation. It’s in the horror of the cross that the is defeated, without humanity being wiped out. The cross of the Lamb defeats the number of the Beast.
Consider: In the words of Bob Dylan, ‘You gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.’ Your name is either in the Lamb’s book of life, or you have the mark of the beast. Which one do you choose? Do you have the mark of the Lamb, or the number of the Beast?
Recommended Further Reading: Blessed – Nancy Guthrie
Prayer: O Lord, we praise your Name that you have defeated death and the Devil. We thank you that though Satan, the Beast, seeks to place his mark upon all humanity, yet you are rescuing a number that no one can count, and bringing them into the glorious freedom of your kingdom. O Lord grant that I may be in your Book of Life, Amen.
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