And open your Bibles, please, to Revelation Chapter 13. Revelation Chapter 13, verse 11. We're in a serious strength for today, hope for tomorrow. And we'll finish up our look at these two beasts. Revelation Chapter 13, verse 11. And this is the word of God. Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast whose mortal wound was healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven in front of people by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast 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 image of the beast to be slain. Also, it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead. So no one can buy or sell anything unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom. Let the one who's understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it's the number of a man. And his number is 666. All right, let's pray. Father, we're glad this morning we have before us your word, your very word. It's true and it's certain. We're asking this morning for the help of your spirit to grasp what your word says. Father, what it teaches us, how it applies to the way you want us to think. The way he wants to live father, which wants to say Lord in this world in which we live. So help us. We pray again by your spirit. We ask in Jesus name. Amen. 666, it's probably the most tantalizing number in Revelation, perhaps the whole Bible. It's studied, it's discussed, it's feared, it's speculated about. To some, it seems quite obvious. Ronald Wilson Reagan, 666, right? And when he finished his term as president, he went to live where? At 666 St. Cloud Road. In fact, it was so obvious he had to change the address to 668. Then, of course, there was Bill Clinton. I mean, who else was the 66th Time magazine man of the year, all right? So across the years, people have tried to determine it. They've used geometry to determine just who is John referring to here. Geometry is when you represent words and names by numbers and the sums of their numerical equivalents. So, for example, many do think that 666 refers to Nero. So what do you do? You take the Latin spelling of Nero, start there, you add the word Caesar, You transliterate it to Greek, and then you translate it into Hebrew, and then you have to change a couple of letters because they don't fit, but when you do, you end up with 666. Quite frankly, that's a mathematical adventure that would be unlikely for any first century reader to take, let alone us today. They didn't know Hebrew, we don't either, all right? It's actually German scholars in the 1830s who came up with Demetria to make Nero fit 666. Others have taken it, and you can switch it around however you want, so you can have Stalin, you can have Hitler, if you want, any sort of Roman emperors. I just change the spelling, change the language, give them a title or two, and you get their numbers. I saw one pastor, Brad Mills, he called this pin the tail on the Antichrist. The answer is much simpler, and we'll look to a second century church father, Irenaeus, for guidance. So to calculate 666 and to heed the call for wisdom, let's go to the text. First, let's meet the second beast. Verse 11, then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon. So last week we met the first beast. The first beast came out of the sea. The first beast had seven heads, it had ten horns, and it was a hideous beast. It was a combination of a leopard and a bear and a lion. Imagery taken from the beast in Daniel 7. It was a fearsome beast. It imitated Jesus Christ with a mortal head wound, yet it was still alive. Now this week's beast comes from the land. And he's not so fearsome. In fact, he looks like a lamb. A cuddly little lamb. Nothing to fear in his appearance here. His two horns simply point properly to the ram in Daniel 8. And he's also, as a lamb, imitating Jesus as the lamb that we saw back in Revelation 5, the lamb who was slain. Now the thing is, appearances can be deceiving. Satan can appear as an angel of light, God's Word tells us. Elsewhere in Revelation, we're going to meet this beast again. He'll be called the false prophet over in chapter 16, 19, and 20. A prophet who looks like the real thing, talks like the real thing, but he's not the real thing. And so while Beast I attempted to intimidate the church, Beast II's goal is in some way to infiltrate the church so that the church becomes like the world. So the beast speaks like a dragon. In other words, he speaks like Satan. Satan's the dragon, the liar, father of lies. The very nature of his appearance is meant to be deceiving as well as his words. He's even given the first beast authority to speak for him, even as Jesus received authority from his father. And so he's the seer of the whole world. You maybe remember what Jesus said, Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. Well, here you go. In fact, Jesus said that during the time between his ascension and his return, false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. And so we connect this beast with the idea of Antichrist we see in 1 John with Paul's man of lawlessness. As such, people are always seeming to look for an individual. ignoring that John talks about many Antichrists, talks about the spirit of Antichrist. And so along with the dragon and the first beast, this second beast, together they function as an unholy trinity. Symbolically, together they mock the true trinity that we sang about just a moment ago, that we sang about with the Gloripatri as well. So looks alone, though, will not turn us away from the beast. We've got to observe the tactics of the beast. Verse 12, it exercises all the authority of the first people in his presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people. And by the signs 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 yelled at. All right, to get us, to get the church to worship the false beast, he has to start with his first tactic, which is false teaching. This lamb appearing, dragon speaking beast, will seem to speak with religious authority. He'll point to those who have false religions or philosophies, but also, particularly for us, distortions of the Christian faith. When we looked at the letters back in chapters 2 and 3, the letters to the churches in Thyatira and Pergamum, they were being led astray by false teaching within the church. And it particularly was false teaching about sexual immorality. And so already the beast is at work on the land, and he still is today. And when I ask you, where is he attacking the church today? One answer certainly is in the Bible's teaching on human sexuality, being created male and female, and what that means for our identity, what that means for marriage. On the one hand, because Satan raised his old question to Adam and Eve, did God really say, not only are many churches beginning to question and be led astray by what they teach, accommodating to the culture, but Satan's also using this homosexuality as a wedge between the Bible-believing church and the culture around us. As we maintain there's a distinctive between male and female, as we teach what it means to be made in the image of God, as we teach about finding our identity in Jesus Christ. Satan's using that distortion to make us seem to the world hateful, to make us seem non-loving when people come with a confused identity. So his second tactic here is to lead the church into worship, false worship, to teach people to worship the first beast and then this image. We're going to come back to that in just a moment. A third tactic is signs and wonders. And so, as we saw with the two witnesses, we think back to Moses and Elijah. Moses did signs and wonders in Egypt to impact Pharaoh by showing who spoke for God. Elijah called down fire from heaven to show that he truly spoke for God. And we suggested back in chapter 11, the two witnesses, which we said was the church, actually, they were, when they spoke the fire, there was them proclaiming the word of God. But this isn't the fire of God's word here. This is counterfeit teaching marked by miraculous signs. Friends, no doubt the supernatural is real, all right? It's real. Don't be surprised, David Strain says it this way, the eerie and the powerful and the spiritual and the supernatural come from sources other than the word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Cosmic deception by real spiritual forces will lead people astray. Philip Johnson writes, as deceivers, these fake news teachers, they take their primary cue, again, from the culture, not the Bible. And they corrupt God's people spiritually by encouraging us to live in such a way that we oppose God, we oppose His agenda. We get people to say sin is what's not really sin anymore. And then he works to make humans make an image of that beast for worship. Now, we've already seen back in, again, the letter to the church in Ephesus. That church was in a town in Ephesus where they had made a statue of Domitian. Domitian claimed a self-title he gave to himself, humble man that he was, was Lord and God, all right, and called people to worship him. Even the Roman statesman Seneca referred to Nero as the savior of the world. And we'll glance back at the Old Testament. We know that false prophets and false teachers have always threatened God's people. And they do it by leading people into false worship. They deceive men and women to commit idolatry, to worship some other God than the true God that we declared we believed in today with the Apostles' Creed. And so we've got to be discerning when we listen to those who claim to speak God's Word, including pastors in the church. You'd be comparing what I say, or what Ben says, or what Dee says, or what Travis says, or what all our Sunday school teachers say, with what the Word of God says. And anytime any of us seek to get worship for anything other than Jesus, we're like the beast. And when the beast cannot deceive the church, he turns to persecute the church. And we see that here physically and economically. Look at verse 15. And if the second beast was allowed to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak, it might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. Now, the backdrop to this will take us back to Daniel 3, to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Notice the second beast here compels the earth's inhabitants to make the image of the first beast, the beast from the sea that symbolizes political power, we saw last week, that persecutes, that everyone would bow down and worship the kingdoms of this world. So what did Nebuchadnezzar do? He set up an image of gold that everyone would bow down to worship it. But of course, Nebuchadnezzar didn't actually do that. He told others to do it, right? Who actually had others do the work. And that's what the beast is doing here. He's getting the inhabitants of the earth to do his work for him. So that when they finish, the earth will bow down and worship. And then after that, the beast breathes life, the spirit of life, into the image. And so as the image falls down, it didn't fall down before, it would be slain. Of course, that's back to Daniel 3. As they gathered to worship the statute, you had Nebuchadnezzar's herald proclaim that they're commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, that when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, you're to fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar set up. Whoever does not fall down in worship shall immediately be cast into a burning, fiery furnace." Now here's the thing. It brings life into that image. You know, if an image were really worthy of worship, you'd think it could speak for itself. It wouldn't have to have a herald make a declaration, right? But nonetheless, it cannot speak. Or perhaps demons would be required to make it speak. And so the beast from the earth in Revelation 13 symbolizes this kind of power. It symbolizes those political, religious, and economic entities that serve as agents who carry out the persecution of the church when faithful people refuse to practice idolatry and abandon the true worship of God. So friends, today we see that the beast offers many ways Many images that would take us away from true worship. You know, school textbooks that distort the history. People amazingly want to hear the opinion of LeBron James and Taylor Swift. Who knows why, rather than listen to God. People no longer say, what does the Bible say, but what do they say? Science, say, that's the ultimate question people put up to us. Materialism offers a variety of ways of gods for people to worship. A fanatical allegiance to sports and enjoying spending weekends pursuing those distracts people from the worship of the true God. I mean, we're overwhelmed with choices to prioritize everything above the glory of God. The world promises what it cannot deliver, yet people will settle for the counterfeit alternatives. They'll do that rather than placing their trust in Jesus Christ. Now, how do we prevent this from happening? Or how do we remedy it if it's happening in our lives? And the answer is quite simple. It's knowing Christ. How do you learn to discern a counterfeit dollar bill? What do they teach you to do? You study the real thing, all right? We study the real thing. We study Christ. We study His Word. We get to know Christ better and better. And then we can identify counterfeit teaching, counterfeit practices in our culture, in our world. Now, when we recognize the false and we're not worship the beast, what happens to us? Well, just like under Nebuchadnezzar, we face death. That's happening today. Go to Nigeria, extreme persecution, North Korea, China, Iran, show that. If you want to see an early exchange of letters on that, go back and just Google Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan, and you don't have time to read their exchange, but an interesting exchange about persecution of God's people there. But then there's another means of persecution. Verse 16, also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, in other words, everybody, to be marked on the right hand or on 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. So you've got economic discrimination here. And so the beast is going to use economic discrimination against the church. Of course, we can think of modern technology that makes it easier, and I'm not talking about getting a barcode on your forehead, all right? You don't have to worry about that, or chips inserted in your arm, or maybe under your skin when you were vaccinated, okay? That didn't happen, okay? But the Chinese government already has a card system in place so that people can do certain things or not do certain things. And you know, there are places in our nation, we didn't face it much around here, but you had to show with COVID, you had to show you'd been vaccinated before you get into certain venues there. There are still a few places around like that. So what is this mark that signifies the devotion to the beast? Well, one thing we can say, it's clearly intended to imitate the mark that we saw Christians get a couple of chapters ago. God's people have the name of Christ and of God the Father on their foreheads and hands, we're told. We've been sealed. We've been protected by that. And so what we find here again is the counterfeit to that. It's the imitation of that. And anyone who rejects Christ has that imitation. They're characterized by it. Those who worship the beast bear the stamp of the beast. They have the character of the beast. Psalm 116 warns us that those who make idols become like them. And so do all who worship them. So if we believe Satan's lie, if we're taken in by him, then that foolishness of Satan begins to characterize us and that deception. So this doesn't mean a literal mark any more than the seal or mark that God put on us as His people. But it certainly does mean there are going to be some kind of means for non-believers to allow them to continue in commerce and business when those without the means, card, whatever it might be. I just think of students in some countries who aren't allowed to go to higher education because they're Christians. The state knows the difference. The reality is society sees Christians as misfits who cannot be trusted. We're phobic. We're hateful. We don't fit in. And if you watch the trajectory of Christians here in the United States, it shows the reality that we're increasingly not fitting in. If you want to see how it's going to turn out, just watch Canada. They're a little ahead of us on the pathway. We see it in the troubles that bakers and florists and web designers are running into. Look at the opposition that Chick-fil-A is faced in certain places. You notice for certain places you won't find any advertisements for MyPillow, because the founder of that is a Christian. For corporations, they're now graded not so much on how much money they're making, but how they cooperate with ESG, with environmental, social, and governance criteria drawn up by arbitrary self-appointed people. It's not about the product the corporations make or it's not about the services that they provide. It's not about how they market or distribute. It's about satisfying more and more the world's prevailing mindset when it comes to environmental and social policies. And so the absence of the mark affects the normal lifestyle of believers. Again, that was already happening back in the letters to the churches, back in chapters 2 and 3. Craftsmen in Smyrna, Philadelphia, already were not able to market their goods because they didn't belong to the guilds, because the guilds always had their own god that they insisted that they worship. And so the call is for wisdom. Verse 18, this calls for wisdom. Let the one who is understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666. All right, so how do we calculate the number of the beast? At the time of the Reformation, if we were living then, it would have been easy. We would have just said it was the Pope, and we would have been settled, and everybody would have agreed with us. All right? Turns out it's not. And I don't have a mathematical equation to get it for you today. I know you're waiting for that big revelation there. But let me ask you this. The number of completeness or wholeness in Revelation is? Seven. I was glad we got that. Okay. A lot of sevens in Revelation. So six is a number just slightly less than completion or perfection. Six represents human effort. Irenaeus, back in the second century, described six as a number, he said, that sums up the whole of our apostasy towards God, our turning away from a perfect God to imperfect people. And so if you had seven, seven, seven, That would represent complete perfection, and that would point to God. Here it's clear, we said, however, that 666 is not God's number, but whose is it? It's man's number, a man's number. So 666 represents a man without God. Even as the beast is a parody, an imitation of Christ, it's likely that John intends 666 to be a parody, an imitation of 777. A number shorter, completeness repeated three times in a trinity of imperfection, utter imperfection. David Strange said 666 is perfect imperfection, complete incompletion. And so yes, Nero fits that, Domitian fits that, Stalin fits that, Hitler fits that. Any who turn people away from God fits that. And so we need wisdom. Not wisdom to solve mathematical puzzles, but the wisdom that knows God. The wisdom that knows God's word, that knows God's ways. It's wisdom of knowing what life in covenant with God is to be about. How God wants us day by day by day to live out that relationship. So we're called to be wise. We're called to be understanding. Recognize the beast, the kingdoms of this world and rebellion against God and how they fall short of the glory of the true God. Recognize that the world's teaching always goes against God's word. Realize the world's always trying to take our worship away from the true God, to any God, any other God, a God of our own making. We run into that today, particularly with people who say, you know, now they're spiritual. That's what you hear. You know, they don't need or want the church anymore, but they're still, they're spiritual. They have hope in this vague sense of spirituality of their own making. I might just say three words to that. No, no, no. Okay? The person who puts their hope in spirituality, is just as lost as the people who put their hope in Allah or Buddha or Oprah. It's all the same. So much of what passes for Christianity in our culture, be cautious, falls short. It's 666. So what about us? As we navigate this world we live in, we saw two weeks ago, we've got to continue to go back to the blood of the Lamb. Back to our testimony of trusting in Jesus Christ. So last week, we've got to endure with persecution. And we've got to believe, endure. We've got to be tough and get through it. Depending upon God, faith in God, faith in what Christ has done for us. The spiritual battles we saw today, the physical and economic persecution, they are going to come. And so we need to see the need for wisdom. So much energy over the years has been, and times, put into trying to determine 666. Instead, we realize it all does is points to the failures of the kingdoms of this world. The inability that the world has to replace God as the rule of the universe we live in. Our need is to know Christ. to know the cross, to know his death, his resurrection, his ascension. So when the world tries to imitate Jesus, we're not deceived. So calculating the number of the beast is not about who can come up with the cleverest conclusion. That means that the believer will be able by the Holy Spirit to discern and identify the work of Satan that would destroy the church. Let me just say, too, that if you don't know Christ, If you don't know about his cross, or his resurrection, or his forgiveness of sins, his hope of eternal life, we'd love to share that with you today, so that you can have hope and have the wisdom necessary for living in God's world. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for truth. We thank you for your Son, Jesus Christ, and that he alone is the Lamb. And that while Satan would try to imitate Jesus, while Satan would try to make us go astray, that Father, you've called on us to exercise wisdom, to calculate the number and realize that the kingdoms of this world are in a battle against us, a battle against the church and against truth and against your son, Jesus Christ. So, Father, give us the courage to stand for truth, we would pray. Give us wisdom to know Christ better and better and better. Is there anybody here that doesn't yet know him today? Father, show them your son. Show them your love, we would pray, and draw them to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. And this we ask in Jesus name. Amen.