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The Beast

Renewing Your Mind / R.C. Sproul
The Truth Network Radio
February 24, 2021 12:01 am

The Beast

Renewing Your Mind / R.C. Sproul

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February 24, 2021 12:01 am

Who is the Beast identified in the book of Revelation? Has he already come, or should we still expect him? Today, R.C. Sproul points to a historical figure who fits the description right down to the name.

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Today on Redoing Your Mind... We've been looking at the mysterious figure of the Antichrist. And in our last session, we considered the New Testament teaching in John's epistle regarding Antichrist as well as Paul's treatment of the man of lawlessness, or the man of sin, in 2 Thessalonians. And as I mentioned at that time, we see an interrelatedness between the concept of the Antichrist, the man of lawlessness, and the beast that is described in the book of Revelation. And today we're going to turn our attention to the book of Revelation and its teaching regarding the beast.

It's found in chapter 13 of Revelation, beginning in verse 1. We read this, And then I stood on the sand of the sea, and I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name. Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority.

And I saw one of the heads as if it had been mortally wounded, but its deadly wound was healed, and all the world marveled and followed the beast. So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him? And he was given a mouth, speaking great things and blasphemies, and was given authority to continue for forty-two months. Then he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, his tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven. It was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them.

And authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation. All who dwell on the earth will worship him whose names have not been written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Then we go on to read more about the beast in verse 11, and I saw another beast coming out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon, and he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast whose deadly wound was healed. He performs great signs that even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling them who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, and the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. He causes all small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Here is this cryptic, mysterious message, let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666. Now, the first thing we understand about the beast is that he rises up out of the sea, and he is described as having ten heads and all these crowns and all of that sort of thing. And we saw earlier that there were references to the one who was alive, who was a king at this time in chapter 13 that we identified with the emperor Nero of the Roman Empire. Now, if we look at the imagery and the military power of this beast that comes out of the sea that has the seven heads and so on, most scholars would grant that this is obviously a reference to the military power of Rome, and that the seven heads refer to the seven mountains, or the seven hills.

One of the ancient references that we find in the literary sources of antiquity to the city of Rome is that Rome was commonly called the Septa Montium, or simply the seven mountains, because it was established on seven hills. But out of this Roman Empire, or Roman military power, is this mysterious figure of the beast who does all these wicked things and who is known by this strange and cryptic number 666, which is called the mark of the beast. Now again, throughout church history, people have sought to give clear identification to the beast who is known by the number 666, or to the beast as the Antichrist.

And again, we see the vacillation between the power of the institution, in this case perhaps the Roman government, and the power of an institution being embodied in a single person, like a king, an emperor, or some other representative person. Because of the religious activity that surrounds this figure of the beast and the Antichrist, some have argued historically that the Antichrist will be some kind of a clergy person or a famous religious person who will seek to be a false Christ or a substitute for Christ. At the time of the Reformation, the most popular candidate for fulfilling the image of Antichrist was the pope. Luther and Calvin both were convinced that the pope in Rome was the Antichrist, that the Roman Catholic Church was the Antichrist institution that was embodied in the one who called himself the vicar of Christ on earth, that is, the substitute for Jesus in the church, namely the pope, and that this was a time of unprecedented corruption in the papacy, which in fact all historians agree upon, including Roman Catholic historians in the days of the Borgia popes and so on.

Even by the 17th century in the Westminster Confession of Faith, it became an article of creedal affirmation. It was actually included in the Westminster Confession that said that the pope in Rome is the Antichrist. However, there are few today who would argue that the biblical imagery of Antichrist or the beast is fulfilled in the pope.

Others have looked to military leaders of great power and wickedness who have emerged historically. In the 20th century, some of the candidates for identification of Antichrist have been Joseph Stalin and Mussolini, because if you translate the title of Mussolini, Il Duce, in a certain way you can come up with the number 666, and obviously the most popular candidate in the 20th century has been Adolf Hitler because of his devastating destruction of the Jewish people and of his unprecedented wickedness. Also if you study the life of Adolf Hitler, you will see in the surviving journal entries from his own hand the occasion where he made an entry in which he said, today I have made a covenant with Satan. Those who were close to Hitler, some of his closest henchmen, were actively engaged in Satanism, and of course the surprising military might of the blitzkrieg and all thought that it was demonic in terms of its support. But again, since the passage of time, not too many people are looking now at Hitler as the fulfillment of the Antichrist as had been in previous generations. Now again, if we follow the process that we've been examining here in terms of our study of the timeframe references of the Mount of Olives discourse, the timeframe references of the book of Revelation, and we continue to struggle with this sense of the radical nearness of the time of fulfillment of so many of these prophecies that are set forth in the New Testament, obviously it would be important for us to consider the question of a first century fulfillment of this prophecy.

Again, the man of lawlessness was said to be already at work. Two, the spirit of the Antichrist was already in the world, and John announced his near manifestation, and three, the language of the book of Revelation which speaks about those things that must shortly come to pass, coupled with the very nature of the literary descriptive forms that we find in Revelation that many scholars say was written in a kind of code in order to protect the Christian community that was engaged in reading this information from discovery and persecution. We also know that the first century church endured enormous persecution, first at the hands of the Jewish community, but then secondly at the hands of the Romans. And one of the most significant persecutions arose in the decade of the sixties under the authority of Nero. And it was under Nero's authority that the persecution of Christians began, and as tradition tells us, Nero himself perhaps started the great fire that destroyed so many sections of Rome and turned around and blamed it on the Christians, which caused the Christians to come in great popular disfavor at that time. It was under Nero that the two great saints of the first century church were executed, Peter and Paul. Both of them were martyred under the reign of Nero and at his command. Now, if we consider the possibility of a first century candidate and a candidate who would appear before the coming of Jesus in terms of the destruction of Jerusalem and the judgment coming of Christ on the temple and on the Jewish nation, we would be looking for somebody who would appear obviously before 70 AD.

If that is the timeframe in which we are restricted to work for the fulfillment of this concept of Antichrist, then obviously the most likely candidate would be Nero. In the ancient world, even among pagans, nobody distinguished themselves for their wickedness to the degree that the emperor Nero did. Nero's life was a life of radical violence and debauchery. He murdered several of his own family members. He castrated a boy and then, quote, married the boy.

He brutally murdered his own wife while she was pregnant by kicking her to death. And the historian Suetonius wrote that Nero devised a kind of game in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women who were bound to stakes. That is, a part of the entertainment that he sponsored, either in the Circus Maximus or in the Colosseum, probably in the Circus Maximus, was that he would get these people, men and women, have them secured at the stake, and then he would come out dressed up like a lion or a wolf or covering himself in skins, and then would attack the genitals of these people who were there.

And so, this kind of behavior was extreme, to say the least. Nero began his reign as emperor in the year 54. His persecution in the Christian community was in the year 64, and he committed suicide in the year 68, 14 years after he assumed the power of the emperor.

He committed suicide at the age of 31, so that he rose to power when he was 17 years old. Again, more summations of the character of Nero from antiquity. The historian Tacitus spoke of Nero's cruel nature, and Pliny, the Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, described Nero, quote, as the destroyer of the human race and, quote, the poison of the world. The Roman satirist, Juvenal, spoke of, quote, Nero's cruel and bloody tyranny. Apollonius of Tyana specifically says in his writings that the favorite nickname that people had for Nero was simply the beast. He makes this comment, in my travels, which have been wider than ever man yet accomplished, I have seen many, many wild beasts of Arabia and India. But this beast that is commonly called a tyrant, I know not how many heads it has, nor if it be crooked of claw and armed with horrible fangs.

And of a wild beast, you cannot say that they were ever known to eat their own mother. But Nero has gorged himself on this diet. And so the historical record, not from the Christian community, but from the contemporaries of Nero, from the Roman culture itself, describes consistently and constantly the bestial character of this madman of antiquity. Well, what about the cryptic number that the author of Revelation warns the people to be alert to and is cluing them in to a manner in which he can be recognized, and he indicates that this beast can be known by a number, and the number is the number 666.

Now before I explore that number, I want to also mention that oddly, in some variant manuscripts that go way back in history of the book of Revelation, there is a textual variant in this verse so that the number that is listed there is not the number 666, but it is the number 616. Now a textual variant is usually understood to take place when the original manuscript was copied by hand by a monk or by somebody, and in the process of copying that laborious, tedious process of copying word for word the text of Scripture, occasionally a letter was missed, or somebody forgot to cross a T or dot an I, or a simple mistake entered into the process. And by the careful study of the existing manuscripts that we have from antiquity, we see that these things happened and several examples of them.

But this may be of special significance as we shall see in a moment. In the ancient world, cryptograms were a common thing. Cryptogram was an encoded message whereby numbers and letters were related. Now in the three major language groups that we're concerned about here in antiquity, namely Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, all three of them had systems of using their letters for numbers so that all three languages were used in cryptogrammatical ways. We're familiar with this even today, at least with respect to Latin, because we are aware of the use of Roman numerals.

And Roman numerals are simply Latin letters that have a numerical value, like the Latin letter X has the numerical value of 10, the Latin letter V has the numerical value 5, the Latin letter M has the numerical value of 1,000, and so on with D and L and I and other letters that have a clear numerical value. Now, this was also true in Hebrew. And if we looked at the name of Nero in Hebrew, we get the name transliterated, Neron Kaiser. That is Nero Caesar. But in the Hebrew alphabet and numerology, this name, Nero Kaiser, when translated into numbers comes to the number 666, exactly. However, in the ancient world, the Greek name of Caesar changed from Neron Kaiser to Nero Kaiser, a very slight variation in the writing. And the Greek numerical equivalency of the Greek form of the name of the Emperor Nero came out to the number 616. One of the most preeminent textual scholars of the 20th century is a man by the name of Bruce Metzger from Princeton.

And Metzger once offered the opinion that in his judgment, as the supreme textual critic in the world today, that his judgment was that in all probability, the textual variant in the Greek that was found in antiquity, where the number is 616 rather than 666, was an intentional variation so that Greek-speaking people would be able to discern the number on the basis of the Greek language rather than requiring them to know Hebrew in order to understand this encoded cipher. We also know that during Caligula's reign and the reign of Nero, there was a rapid expansion of emperor worship within Rome. And some of the earlier emperors, such as Augustus himself, were given the honor of being regarded as deities after their death, but people did not practice the worship of their images during their lifetime. But under Caligula and especially under Nero, this did occur, and it occurred by Nero's own command. Nero had his statue set up, for example, in the Temple of Mars and enforced the worship of his statue. Also, people such as Josephus saw the great sacrilege, which was an abomination of desolation, take place when the Roman standards, which were worshiped as representatives of the emperor, were brought in to the temple itself as an act of desecration of the Jewish religion. So we see that in all of the things that describe the vicious, wicked, quasi-religious and military character of the beast are seen in the actual life of Nero, leading many historians and scholars to believe that the beast in view, as well as antichrist and man of lawlessness in the first century church, was fulfilled in the person of Nero because it was linked to the events that were soon to take place in the destruction of Jerusalem and the judgment of God upon the Jewish people. Now, others who also are impressed by Nero's candidacy for the identity of the beast say that at least Nero was a type of the beast and antichrist, and those who believe that the antichrist is still future, yet to come, say that he will be like Nero in his manifestation. Well that's certainly a helpful perspective on the beast, isn't it?

Dr. R.C. Sproul is taking us through his series, The Last Days According to Jesus, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday. Thank you for being with us. This week we're concentrating on the predictions about the end times that we find in the book of Revelation. Admittedly, this is a confusing, mysterious topic. There are many theories and views out there and many questions, like when will Christ return?

Who is the beast? Will the church be around for any of these events? I think you'll find this series by Dr. Sproul helpful. We'll be glad to send you the 12 messages on two DVDs when you contact us today with a donation of any amount.

You can give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org, or if you prefer, you can call us at 800-435-4343. It should be our constant desire to learn more about God and what He's revealed about Himself and us in Scripture. Dr. Sproul realized that many times we fall short of that ideal, and he made this observation. He said, we're hoping that around the corner something new is going to give our lives meaning that it lacks today, when in reality the deepest truths of life are already available to us. That's why we're passionate about making sound biblical teaching available to believers around the world 24 hours a day. One of the many ways you can connect with us is through RefNet. That's our 24-hour internet radio station. When you tune in, you'll hear curated Christian content from a Reformed perspective, from noted teachers like Sinclair Ferguson, Alistair Begg, John MacArthur, and of course, Dr. R.C.

Sproul. You can listen at any time when you go to RefNet.fm or when you download the free RefNet app. Tomorrow, R.C. continues this series with a message on the Rapture. The popular notion out there is that the Church will be taken up to heaven before the Great Tribulation, but is that what we find in Scripture? Please join us again Thursday for Renewing Your Mind.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-12-22 07:28:52 / 2023-12-22 07:37:08 / 8

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