How to Read Revelation & Avoid the Mark of the Beast — Paul Lamicela — Ep. 211

That's the thing I hate most about wondering about the mark of the beast being some piece of technology, getting, "Oops, I just got the wrong credit card, and now I'm—now I'm going to hell," or something. Um, that has nothing to do with one's heart. But what John is talking about is, where is your allegiance? Are you living your life now marked by the—by God's name on your head or the world system name on your head?

Well, Paul Lamachela, thanks for coming back on the Cannon Baptist Perspectives podcast. So, uh, we're both here at Faith Builders, and over supper a few days ago, we started an interesting conversation, uh, about a topic we've been wanting to do on this podcast for a very long time, and that is how to read the book of Revelation and a lot of the surrounding stuff that comes with that. So we're going to dive right into that very large topic, and I'm very curious what all you have to say about it. Um, but yeah, maybe just a short introduction about yourself, and, um, and then we'll get into it.

Yeah, so I teach biblical studies. I have a PhD in biblical theology, and I've gotten increasingly interested in and really excited about the book of Revelation in recent years as I've, um, learned how to read it in light of the whole of the Bible and in light of its genre and stuff, things we'll be talking about, and realizing that it is a really powerful book that has so much to say to us, uh, us today. So I'm excited about—I'm excited about some of—some of these things. Okay, so, so when—when I look at the—the book of Revelation and I read it, I—I tend to get very confused. And you said something last night that—that was really helpful for me, and that is the—the whole genre question of what is this book, how does it fit into the New Testament, and so forth, and—and the surrounding context.

Uh, yeah, explain that a bit. What—what are we talking about when we look at Revelation? What—I guess, broadly speaking, what genre is this book? Yeah, so, you know, the first thing to say, probably, is that when—whenever we read a text, we automatically—um, we automatically get clues from the text about how to read it, right? So when I teach about genre in class, I—I put up a list of very—I put up examples of various types of texts. So I'll throw up something from a poem, right?

And students automatically know, just because they're familiar with this genre from our culture, they see the words, the line, you know, broken up into different lines. They just get the feel of it. It's not always easy exactly to pin down why, but you know, right? Because you're like, "Oh, that's a poem." And then a whole bunch of assumptions go into how you're supposed to read that. And I put up another example from, like, an instruction manual or something. And—and instantly, again, you know how to read it, or a fairy tale, and—and you know how to read it. And the book of Revelation is the same—is the same way, and it's—it's meant to be read in a certain way.

The reason I think one of—one of the main reasons we have in—in our—in our sort of modern Western evangelical Christianity, including, and I include, you know, Anabaptism in that for purposes of this, um, the reason we have trouble with it is that it's a genre that we don't have any other examples of in our own culture. Hmm. So what I like to tell students is—is that that's a—that's a problem with us, not with the text, but that if you would go back to first-century Jerusalem and go to a Barnes & Noble in Jerusalem, you would actually—there would be a whole shelf with apocalyptic texts. And so you would—it wouldn't be like Revelation is just this one weird thing.

You would recognize as soon as you start reading, "Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I know what this—I know how to read this because I've read other texts like this." Mm-hmm. Um, okay, what—like, you're mentioning the apocalyptic genre. So that's—that's where you're—you're framing this book, right, within the New Testament. Um, yeah, so—so maybe elaborate on that. What—what is that? Why this is so—why this is so important is that meaning, when I—when I write something, like, the—the genre I write it in determines how I expect the reader to get meaning out of it, right? So if I write a—a children's story, I would be really mad at you if you came back to me with, like, a whole list of critiques because you were trying to take it literally—quote, literally—and—and you're like, "It doesn't work," or something, or you interpret it in ways I never intended.

And my—what I would say to you is, "No, this is a children's story. You have to read it like a children's story," right? And—and if you said, "Well, but I want—I was trying to read you literally," I wouldn't be impressed. I'd be—I'd be annoyed because I would—I would say, "You're actually not—you're not taking me seriously." Mm-hmm. Like, you're—you're—you're playing games with me. Meaning comes when—when we—when we read a text, the goal is not to impose our own sort of ideas on how we should read it, Mm-hmm, but to—to submit ourselves to the way the author has—has written it. And it's—and I think that's especially true when we're dealing with the Bible, because there's not only a human author, John, but also a divine author.

And if we take seriously the fact that Scripture is inspired by God, then our only choice is to submit to the—the ways that God has chosen to reveal Himself. And that means apocalyptic genre in this case, right? And so if we—if we come—I mean, I want to preface everything I'm going to say, Mm-hmm, because for some people, this is new, uh, just due to—due to trends in the last hundred years in our country, basically, um, and—and dispensationalism and stuff. But, um, to say that the goal is never to—to say, "I need to read something literally." The goal is to say, "How does God and the human author want me to read this?" And that's a question that has to do with genre.

So if I go to a parable of Jesus and I say, "I need to take this literally," Jesus wouldn't be impressed, right? Because He's like, "No, that's a parable." Mm-hmm. And so to submit to Him in that—in that area means I need to understand that He's chosen to—to speak in a parable, and I need to interpret parables the way parables are meant to be interpreted. If I go to a Psalm, the same thing. It's a poem, and I have to interpret it as a poem because that's how David wrote it, and that's how the Holy Spirit wanted it written, right? And the same with—and the same with Revelation. So I'm going to explain what—how apocalyptic works.

Mm-hmm. And—but the reason why that's important is that, again, this is how John has chosen to communicate, and this is how the Spirit has inspired this, you know, intended this to be. And to take this seriously and to submit to it as Scripture means to be sensitive to the way that God has chosen it to be written, i.e., apocalyptic literature. Okay, so—that—oh, that makes a lot of sense. And I know I'm—I'm—I can already see the comments that'll be coming in where people are like, "But—but you're misidentifying the genre. You're, you know, this, that, whatever." I'm sure there'll be lots of—lots of ideas floating around there. But, um, I think that a key question for some people would be, "Well, how—how come you're defining it as apocalyptic, you know, genre?"

You know—you know what I mean? Like, right? Because honestly, when you were—we were kind of batting this around over the last couple of days before we recorded this, and you were saying some of that, and I'm like, "Okay, I guess. I don't know. I've never—I've never heard that before," or, "I've never thought about it quite like that." I guess I kind of know that in my head, but like, what even is the apocalyptic genre? Yeah, let's start. Okay, so let's talk about apocalyptic. So apocalyptic, um, as a genre is—we—we scholars talk about it as—as basically consisting of kind of a—a story, a narrative in presentation, where you have, um, a God's eye perspective of history, of—of the present and the future kind of together, that's revealed usually by an—by an angel or some other kind of heavenly tour guide, I call them usually, right?

So it's someone has—so it's—it's this—it's usually a human who's having a vision of these realities that's mediated or explained by an angel, and that uses very colorful, complex imagery and symbolism to—to do this. Um, and the goal of such texts is to give God's suffering people hope and—and challenge in time of—of difficulty. So that's kind of the—that's kind of the basic features, um, of how this—and again, central to that is these very, you know, very symbol-laden, um, usage of numbers, um, other kinds of symbols, um, representing other—other things. So that's—and now, again, Revelation isn't the only text we have like this. So this—this—this way of writing and speaking kind of basically the fountainhead seems to be the book of Daniel.

Mm-hmm. And he—where he has, again, you can think of—of some of these visions that he has where there's an angel that kind of shows him stuff, or he has these—these—these visions of beasts and representing kingdoms and, um, and all this sort of thing.

And the angel kind of tells him—tells him. So—so that kind of is the fountainhead. But then what happens is, in the next few centuries, from—from, you know, 300s or so BC all the way to 90 or around 180, we have a number, a decent number of texts like this being written in Jewish, non-Christian Jewish circles. I mean, in many cases, pre-Christian Jewish circles. So, um, we have—we have—we have a good number of examples, uh, that follow the same pattern.

And so the reason why people are maybe unsure or skeptical is—is only that they have never read other apocalyptic texts. As soon as you start reading them, it's very obvious that that's what Revelation is. Okay, so—so you mentioned Daniel as—as maybe the fountainhead or—or a represent—a representing piece, which makes sense because when people go down this whole street of trying to figure out, well, what does it mean and all this stuff, they are always—it's like always going back to Daniel. It seems like, right? Like every—well, yeah, and Revelation is like full of Daniel imagery too. So what are some of these other, like, apocalyptic texts? Yeah. Um, that I'm assuming most of us—I—I—I can't think of any that I've read personally.

Yeah. No. So, um, I mean, there's—there's a bunch: Fourth Ezra, um, the Enoch, the Enochic literature. Oh. So it's called First Enoch, but there's—it's a collection of a few—of a few different apocalypses. Um, those were big—very big in the—in the era of the New Testament. Um, very popular. I think they may have made the Jerusalem or the—I don't know. That wouldn't be the Amazon. Maybe it'd be the Jordan—Jordan.com, Jordan River, uh, or—or something bestseller list. I don't know. Um, and, uh, and then, um, and then other texts like these, what I'm going to—I have a few examples from the Sibylline Oracles. Oh, yeah. Please, if you have examples. Yeah. So—and what we'll see is that, um, what's going on here, uh, people like to describe—people like to describe apocalyptic literature and Revelation as functioning similar in some ways to the way political cartoons operate in our culture, where, um, you can—and—and think about this.

There's people—people say when you read—when you open the newspaper—I mean, they don't—I don't know if anyone does anymore, but if—in theory, if someone would open the newspaper, um, there you can actually—you can have an article maybe on the front page that describes some political event, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then on the next page, you can have the sort of the comics, and that same event might be spoken of, but in—in political cartoon form, right? It's the same thing, but two extremely different ways of coming about it. The one uses just prose and kind of explains stuff in everyday language, and then the other one uses imagery that you have to be really familiar with.

And you actually can't get anything out of it unless you already know most of what it's trying to say, because you have to know. So, for example, I mean, the two political parties in the United States are symbolized by the donkey and the elephant, right? And so if I'm drawing a political cartoon, I just have to, like, dress up those characters in suits or something. Uh, and—and we know when you see a donkey or an elephant, oh, okay, so the Republicans are doing this and the Democrats are doing that, right? But you only know that if you're steeped in that symbolism that—that is part of our cultural encyclopedia. If you are from, I don't know, Asia and have never heard about, you don't know the symbolism, you—you read this cartoon and you're like, is this a children's cartoon?

Um, is—are these, you know, some sort of ancient Hindu gods that are making a comeback in the United States? Like, what's going on? Like, you know? Um, so that we see all over Revelation, but we also see that in these other texts and some of the same symbol, the same sort of cartoon tropes, uh, we see here that we see used in Revelation. So I'm going to go through a few. Yes, please. And when you start reading them, you start—you start thinking, especially if you—I mean, if you know Revelation decently, you start going like, wait, I've read—I know what this is talking about. So. And again, just to—just to—just to reiterate, this is from, um, like you're saying, 300 BC on up through like 100 AD era.

Yes. Yes. So—um—so this—so Sibylline Oracles is a collection of—of texts that are written over a span of a long time, and some of them are Christian. Uh, these are not. This—this from number Sibylline Oracles five is Jewish. Mm-hmm. Um, which is important because I—if you—if I give you examples from Christian texts, then that would probably be drawing on Revelation. So that would not be appropriate background literature, you know? But this—so these we believe are—this—this text we believe is written probably between 70 and 130 AD. So we're talking right at the same time John is writing Revelation, which makes it extra special, right? Because it shows what's in the air and what, you know, and what John's familiar with.

Like the culture. The cultural context with the—yeah, the cultural encyclopedia, as we call it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So here's a few—here's a few examples of features, tropes, images that we see here that I think are relevant to reading this. So, um, we have—um, what this text has this long section where it goes through, um, the leader—the—the emperors and such of Rome. But it never refers to any of them by name. It just hints at what their first letters of their names are by using numbers.

So here it says in Sibylline Oracles five, after many—well, there's another—yeah, after many princes, after warlike peoples, and after infants, children of the flock devouring beast, there will be the first prince who will sum up twice ten with his initial letter. Now, what are the infants, children of the flock devouring beast? First of all, do you know? No. Okay. I mean, you will know as soon as it—so this is—this is a cartoon image, just like—okay, I mean, I'm using that. Just like, um, if I would use the elephant to represent the Republicans, the infants, children of the flock devouring beast. So a flock devouring beast is a—is a—is a wolf, right? Okay. And these are infants who are children of a wolf.

Mm-hmm. Who's that? Oh, it's Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. Oh, wow. Right? I mean, which you're familiar with. Yeah. Right? Oh, wow. Okay. So I see that. Right. But it's just using—so it doesn't—it's not saying Rome. It's—it's just—it's just telling you the—it's using the—the little image, the icon almost, of the founding myth of Rome, right? Yeah. Okay. So it's—so basically after—after Rome begins, after these infants, Romulus and Remus, children of the flock devouring—so the myth, for those who don't know, is that Rome was founded by these twins. Rome—well, actually, it was by one of them after he killed his brother, I think. But, um, there were these twins, Romulus and Remus, that were abandoned by their mother, apparently, and suckled by a she-wolf, kind of raised by a wolf, right?

And they then, you know, start Rome. So after this happens, there will be the first prince of apparently Rome, who will sum up twice ten with his initial letter. He's like, okay. And then it says—so it keeps going and explains—he will have his first letter of ten, so that after him—and then after him will reign whoever obtained as initial the first of the alphabet. So what in the world is going on here?

Whose number will sum up twice—he will sum up twice ten with—how do you sum up ten with a letter? Yeah. So in the ancient world, we don't have numerals to represent, uh, numbers, right? Okay. That's kind of a later Arabic kind of thing, which was one of the best inventions of all time, probably. I just asked my students, how would you like doing long division with—with using letters instead of numbers? And it's terrible, right? But so what you do instead is you have a system whereby every letter stands for a number. Uh, and so, you know, the first several letters might stand for the first several numbers, but then you'll have other later letters in the alphabet that stand for 20 or 30 or 100 or things like that.

Okay. So if you live in a culture that—that does that, right, then you're—you're going to start playing little games with this. Because when you see people's names, you're going to also know—recognize those characters as numbers, and you can always do little math calculations in your head. Oh, man. Yeah. Okay. So I see that. Yeah. And there would always be these kind of—I'm sure you can imagine there being these kids, probably boys of a certain age, that would just annoy everybody by referring to people by their numbers and stuff like that, right?

Um, but—but anyway, this—this is what this is called gematria, the use of, um, kind of studying or thinking about playing with words or names, especially, um, with their numbers. Mm-hmm. So this happens, um, and this happens not just in literary texts, but there was a—we—we have evidence of this in graffiti from the ancient world, and I think this is—this is awesome. Um, but I think it was in Smyrna from the second century AD. So this is one of the places that this—the book of Revelation was sent to, right? Because one of the seven churches. Oh, right. Yeah. And archaeologists uncovered a—a graffito where some, you know, second century young guy had spray painted or whatever the—I don't know how they did it back then, but they spray painted on—on some wall.

I love the girl whose number is 1085 or something like that, right? And he wasn't talking about her phone number, but—but he was talking about that the—the letters of her name add up to this thing. And so he probably has like half the girls in Smyrna like trying to calculate, is this me, you know? Which is just fantastic. But all that goes—that is amazing. It is. But it goes to show this type of thing is—is common, right? And so in apocalyptic literature, yeah, this type of thing is—is—is big because numbers, unlike in other types of literature, in apocalyptic numbers are always symbolic of something, right? You just have to know what the numbers stand for.

Okay. So which makes a lot of sense because you even just glance through Revelation. Yeah. And there's numbers all over the place. There are, right? And they always—they're—they're significant numbers. Yeah. They—they stand in for something. Yeah. So in this case, he goes—he—he speaks of, uh, Caesar as, uh, beginning with the number—with the number ten, right?

And then because Julius—Julius Caesar is the—the I is, uh, stands for the number ten, right? Um, and then—and then he refers to the one after him as the initial being Augustus, the person, uh, with the first letter of the alphabet. So that's just one example of how this—and this text goes on and on, like talking about the next number of emperors all with the number of their initial letter instead of ever saying their—their names. Interesting. So we have Roman emperors who are children or sort of descendants of this beast, Mm-hmm, right? That are all referred to by the number of their name, right? Mm-hmm. Well, that's interesting because this is starting to already sound like Revelation, isn't it?

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Where—where John says that the—the—a mark of the beast, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name. Mm-hmm. And you're like, wait, I've read stuff like that here, right? So that's one example.

Another example is how these texts will speak of Rome as Babylon. Why? Well, I think the reason is that, um, there—there were only two nations that ever destroyed Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, and they were Babylon and Rome. Okay. That makes—yes, that makes a lot of sense. And so when—and so especially as you get to the, you know, texts that were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, it's going to be so natural to think of Rome as the new Babylon. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. That—okay. That makes—that makes so much sense. Yeah. And so by, again, by overlaying Babylon, by speaking of Rome as Babylon, almost like a cartoon image again, yeah, you—you pick up and invest what's going on in the present with all the meaning and symbolism of the story in the Old Testament.

And that's kind of tying in with what Daniel would be saying in some ways, right? Because he was writing in Babylon, like he was a captive in Babylon as well. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. And if you're a Christian, like John, then Rome has even more significance as Babylon because Rome also has this eschatological significance in that it was in part responsible for the crucifixion of the Messiah, right? Oh, right. And so Rome for you isn't only the city that the nation, sort of the empire that just destroyed Jerusalem, but it also stands in for the ultimate—the ultimate adversary of God and God's people because it is this nation that—this people, these leaders that crucified Jesus, right?

And so whatever happens in the future, you can—any—all of God's enemies, the power, the forces, the powers, the political powers or whatever that oppose God can always be thought of as Rome. Yeah. In a sense, because Rome is the the beginning of the powers that stood against and crucified, you know, persecuted Jesus.

So it adds that layer of—Mm-hmm. Of a thing there. So in this text, um, it says, "When after the fourth year," and interesting, the fourth year here is equivalent to Daniel's three and a half times. Um, so it's—it's thinking of that. Okay. So after the fourth year, a great star shines, which alone will destroy the whole earth because of the honor, uh, which they gave to the Poseidon of the sea. Now, Poseidon is a—is a chaos monster, right? And—and here, um, this great star is destroying, um, this—this sea, the sea dragon, the sea monster, which is actually the same thing that Revelation is trying to say in Revelation 21 when he says, "In the new creation, the sea will be no more," right?

It's not that Paul has anything—I mean, it's not that John has anything against seas, but that the sea in—in this context represents chaos and—and that sort of thing, right? So here it's spoken of as a—as a sea monster, Poseidon of the sea.

Um, and in Revelation it's just spoken of as a sea. So, uh, this great star comes, which will destroy the earth. A great star will come from heaven to the wondrous sea, the Mediterranean, presumably, and will burn the deep sea and Babylon itself and the land of Italy, because of which many holy, faithful Hebrews and a true people perish. Now, we'll burn—so this star we'll talk about in a minute what stars represent, but the star will come—it's not a flaming ball of gas in this—in the apocalyptic, but a star will come from heaven and burn the deep sea and Babylon itself and the land of Italy. It's clearly not talking about the Babylon that's over, you know, over—over here.

It's speaking of Rome, right? It's the Babylon in the land of Italy, but it's speaking of it as a Babylon, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and—and we will—I mean, in Revelation, we have the same—there's a lot of Babylon imagery, but it's—it's intertwined also with Rome imagery.

You know, he does—John does exactly the same thing. So I have one more example of this here. Mm-hmm. Um, when Italy produces a great marvel for men, and what is this great marvel that Italy is producing? It's not pizza yet. Um, a murmuring of infants by an unpolluted spring in a shady cave, children of a flock devouring beast. This is Romulus and Remus again. Oh, okay. So, okay. So basically, it's—this is this crazy way of saying, um, when Rome starts, right? Who, when they have become men, in other words, when Rome has reached maturity, they will cast down headlong many who have shameless spirit on seven strong hills, both number a hundred.

So when Romulus and Remus grow up, in other words, when Rome kind of reaches its power, they will cast down headlong many who have shameless spirit from seven strong hills. So you're going to do a lot of—reek a lot of havoc from these or on these seven hills. And it says both—both of these infants number a hundred, which the letter R, Romulus and Remus, stands for a hundred.

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So you see how—yeah, wow. I was getting—yeah, I was like, what is this a hundred thing? Yeah, exactly. But it's going back to the number of the—the number representing the first letter of their name. Yeah. So now you're like, whoa, that's—that's complicated. Well, maybe, but it would be—that's actually not any more complicated than a modern political cartoon. But wouldn't this also—I'm just totally speculating here, but if—if they didn't have, you know, a mass printing presses, for example, you had to encode this in ways to make it easy to remember. Is this just a way to make it easy to remember stuff? Like with extremely vivid imagery like that and encoding information into it?

Or is this just—this is just a style that's—it's a style. It's—it's—it makes it—it gives you a different—a different feel, right? Yeah. Because it's not—it's not pretending to provide information as much as it is to remind embattled people that despite the fact that things seem chaotic, that God is still sovereign over it, he has a plan for it. Um, he's got things under control. Mm-hmm. And the future can—is known to him and can be hinted at to us. Mm-hmm. And, um, and that sort of thing. So it's—it's—it's meant that way. Yeah. Oh, that's just interesting. Because again, to our modern ears, all of this seems pretty bizarre. Yeah. And maybe that's why there's so much fascination around Revelation now.

Exactly. You know, it's just like, what is this? So the seven strong hills. Okay. What's that? What is—isn't Rome built on seven hills or something? Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And so—and so it's just like if I say, you know, talk about all the corruption in the Windy City. Mm-hmm. Right? Well, if you—you know, we know the Windy City is a stand-in for Chicago. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Which is terrible. Yeah. Which is very corrupt. But, um, if I say the Big Apple, it's New York. Right. If I say the city on seven hills, it is Rome. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's again, it's just another—it's another trope that you are supposed to know.

Um, now, what's—again, what's really interesting about this is if we go to Revelation, just really quick here, you have—you have the same imagery used. Yeah. I was going to say that sounds familiar, right? I do. I mean, it is, right? Yeah. It's—it's used in here somewhere. It is.

So in Revelation 17, uh, verse 5, on her forehead, this is the the prostitute, which—which picks up Old Testament. So I—we're talking about all this genre stuff. But what—what John is doing is—is in this genre, he's pulling almost everything out of the Old Testament. Revelation is just absolutely full of Old Testament. Okay. Okay. The Old Testament stories, Old Testament imagery, it's all coming to its climax in this book. So the prostitute, um, on her forehead was written a name of mystery. And what is her name? Babylon the Great, mother of prostitutes and earth's abominations. So she's—this prostitute is called Babylon. And already, if you're reading this text in this century and you're familiar with, you know this probably refers to Rome, right?

Mm-hmm. Uh, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And remember, this is like after Nero. So, you know. Oh, that's a really good point. Stuff has happened. Just for context, when was Nero emperor, roughly? Uh, he was—it was before Revelation was written. What are the exact years? It was like—like in the 60s? The 60s. The 60s. Yeah, the 60s sounds right. Yeah. Because I just remember, you know, knowing that when Paul was writing, like, the book of Romans, you know, Nero would have been the current emperor. Exactly. And he was—and he was executed under him. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Nero had him executed. So that's a really bad person.

A bit of it. Yeah. He—he did a lot of things against the truth. Yeah. Okay. Fast. Good context. Okay. So then, um, when I saw—oh, okay. So he—so he kind of talks a little bit about this. And then verse 9, this calls for a mind with wisdom. Okay. So it's like, John's like, think about this—think about the imagery here. Mm-hmm. The seven head—oh, so—so she's sitting on a beast with seven heads. I think I—I should have said that. The angel said to me, "Why are you marveling? I will tell you the mystery of the woman and and of the beast with seven heads and ten horns that carries her." So this prostitute Babylon is sitting on this—this seven-headed beast.

Uh, the beast that—and I always tell people, don't ever make a—try to make a movie about Revelation because it's imagery that works in literature. But as soon as you start just picking it on a screen, it's really creepy, right? Very weird. Very weird. Uh, the beast that you saw was and is not and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. The dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast because it was and is not and is to come. This calls for a mind with wisdom. Okay. What are the seven heads of the beast?

The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sat. You're like, "Ding." Oh. Right. Dead giveaway. Oh, wow. Okay. Right. So—and now that was Revelation 17, what verse? No. Verse 9. So you have the—you have the prostitute named Babylon sitting on the seven heads, which are seven mountains, Rome, right? It's—it's obviously this whole—this whole image is speaking of Rome. But—but Rome, again, not in—in a limit—in a way that's limited to just the historical Rome. I think Rome is representative of the forces, the powers that stand against Jesus and his people.

And then it says, uh, the seven heads are also seven kings, five of which have fallen. One is the other, uh, has not yet come. So they also represent the—the kings of the emperors of Rome, a certain sequence of them, right? So, I mean, that's just the same thing—that's the same thing that we have in this text, right? So, yeah, I'm really seeing how John, yeah, is a—is a big deal here. Yeah. I have one more example. Yes. And this is about how stars, you know, we've—you've heard a lot of weird—you hear a lot of weird stuff from the last 50 years of people think reading Revelation, where stars falling from the sky, it's all about, um, almost pictured as a literal, like, astronomical stars, like, crashing down, which, of course, doesn't work, right?

You can't have a third of the star—like, each star is bigger than the earth, and it just doesn't work. Mm-hmm. Um, but that's not—that's—that's just not what Revelation is talking about. Mm-hmm. Um, so here, again, in Sibling Oracles, 5, I saw the threat of the burning sun among the stars and the terrible wrath of the moon among the lightning flashes. The stars travailed in battle. God bade them fought. For over against the sun, long flames were in strife.

And the two-horned rush of the moon was changed. Lucifer fought, mounted on the back of Leo. Capricorn smoked the ankle of the young Taurus. Taurus deprived Capricorn of his day of return. So it keeps going about these constellations and stuff fighting. The strength of the mighty day star burned up Aquarius. Heaven itself was roused until it shook the fighters. In anger, heaven cast them headlong to the earth. Accordingly, stricken into the baths of ocean, they quickly kindled the whole earth, and the sky remained starless. So this picture is the cosmic, the stars and such, not as balls of gas, but as sort of heavenly beings, kind of angels, right? That fight in heaven, right? There's war in heaven.

Um, and then heaven casts—casts these fighting stars, angels, to to the earth, right? He's like, well, I've—I've that I heard—I know I've heard that, right? From Revelation. Yeah. Okay. So, huh, um, in Revelation, and there's other examples of this that I—that unfortunately, uh, from other texts that we can't, um, go to now. But in Revelation, we have—we have this text. So actually, we should have known this from Revelation chapter 1. Mm-hmm. Because Revelation chapter 1, verse 20, um, there—there is the the seven stars and the seven golden lampstands, right? The beginning of the book. Yeah. And it actually says, in Revelation 1, verse 20, "As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches."

So it makes it explicit that stars are angels. But then in Revelation 9, um, the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit, right? The star falling is not a star, as we think of stars, but it is an angel, right? Just like these fighters in this text. Or in Revelation 12, the beast, his tail sweeps down a third of the stars of heaven and casts them to the earth.

Um, and in Revelation 6, we have stars and, uh, and and the sun kind of crashing down to earth and the and the sky sort of vanishing, just like, uh, just like in this text. So stars represent, and there's other texts, not Sibling Oracles, that that talk about this a lot more too. But stars are representative of angels. So when we we see stars falling from the sky, star, like the the dragon's tail sweeping down stars that follow him, this is speaking of cosmic powers, evil powers or or good powers in various cases. Mm-hmm. Um, so again, another example of of how there's so much overlap.

Yeah. Whoa. Okay. So, so to so to back it out on the genre question, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So, which again, seems so foundational to to all of this. Mm-hmm. I have always heard a very literalist interpretation of Revelation. For lack of a better term, because I think it will make more sense to the audience, but basically what Tim Leahy outlined in the whole Left Behind series, which are gargantuanly popular, if that's the right way of phrasing it. I mean, just absolutely massive runaway bestsellers. Right. And that kind of kicked off a whole genre, really, back to John, of pop culture in Christian, um, fiction. Oh yeah. Around all this end-time stuff and the tribulation and the rapture and the whatever you want to just, the whole works.

So that would have been, what was that, like mid-90s. And that is still very alive and well today. And that was been, that would have been what I was used to hearing quite a lot in different places I've been. And it seems like that's very common. It's common, yeah. Through pop culture. Just pop culture, but also, yeah, of course, the Anabaptist world is not immune from it. You know, it feels like there's this fixation with following the news. Is it happening? Is it happening? It's the end of the world, you know, all that stuff. Um, I would love to hear you respond to that because I got kind of disillusioned with the whole thing. It felt so shallow.

It didn't feel like it fit. And I actually just simply stopped reading Revelation as a result, which is now, now that I think about it, I mean, that's kind of sad, you know? Well, it's very sad. It's very sad. No, I think that that's happened to a lot of people in our generation. I mean, I went through a phase like that too, because you get so like, you just get so like, I don't know, a bad taste in your mouth from, um, kind of the old, the sort of read the newspapers and try to figure out what all this stuff is. Oh yeah. And they've been doing it for like 30 something years. It's always wrong.

You know, and then it's always, you know, and then in time they're like, "Oh, well, that wasn't quite right." And then, you know, and people debate all these crazy terms and you're like, "Yeah, whatever." So you just ignore it. Um, but what I I'm really passionate about saying, no, Revelation needs to be rehabilitated.

Um, it it has so much to say. And this is why we spent so much time talking about genre, was that as soon as we realized, no, no, no, this is not as, it is a weird text, but it's weird for completely different reasons than maybe some of us grew up thinking it was weird for. It's not weird because it's talking about, you know, tanks and nuclear warfare. It's weird because, um, it was written in in a this ancient, ancient genre, but that is good news for us because that means that, um, what we need and what it does for us, it's it's not a code, but it's a pair of glasses that we're supposed to view our lives and the world.

Um, wow. John wrote it, John wrote it to people in the first century AD, expecting them to understand it and to order their lives accordingly. And that's the goal of apocalyptic. It's not supposed to, it's not trying, it's not some Nostradamus style sort of secret code into the future. It speaks of how God will climactically be victorious in the future.

But it's meant, as John himself says, the point of this is to overcome. Like he says this in all of the letters to the churches, to the one who overcomes. And then, and then when he says that, he usually pairs it with some other piece of imagery that shows up in the rest of the book, right? I'll make him a pillar in the temple of God. I will stamp on his forehead the new, the name, uh, you know, that sort of thing. He will not be part of the judgment, things like that. So these embattled churches, uh, these churches who are faced with, I think there are two dangers in Revelation that that John wants us to to avoid.

And that is the the fear of of persecution that that the beast kind of represents, right? The the the scary threat of of um of persecution on various levels. And then the allure of the prostitute, right? And both both of those, both of those are are are one of the same, one and the same, right? It's the the prostitute sits on the beast, right? It's they're both Rome, but two aspects, right? One is one is the way that that the political forces or whatever can come against Christians and and kill them, persecute them, take away their businesses, whatever.

Uh, the other is the way that economic wealth, the the allure of social um approval, um things like that can can kind of allure us to get into bed in a sense with with the prostitute, right? Mm-hmm. And those are the two, those are the two dangers that that Revelation is is warning us that John is saying, you need to be people who conquer, in other words, who who stay faithful to the true wait for the, you know, as the as the true bride who's waiting for the, you know, for the marriage supper of the lamb. So stay away from the allure of the world, which is nothing other than the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.

And don't be terrorized by the threat of persecution. Don't let that cause you to um stop following Jesus. Mm-hmm. And so in in this all this imagery that Revelation is is using is meant to, that's what's meant to get us to do, right? And I think a lot of the looking at newspapers and trying to figure out like what piece of technology this very, that's actually a distraction from, and it actually can keep us from what from evaluating our hearts against what this what this imagery is telling us, right? It could almost, could it it could it result in, um yeah, like you're saying a distraction and then totally miss the point and and almost let ourselves off the hook of what this is actually talking about.

Oh, absolutely. It can be a cop-out. Because it can be like, well, as long as, you know, it puts the beast, it turns the beast into sort of Russia or something like that, right? Which is far away. Which is far away. I think we've all heard, you know, a bunch of times and, you know, or certain events that, oh, well, that's that's going to happen at some point in the future. So then that tends to, I think you'd mentioned this last night as well when we were chatting about this, but um it it tends to turn Revelation into this future thing that doesn't really apply, like right here and now, because, oh, well, it's talking about something in the future.

And so maybe that's some of the fixation with so many people trying to figure out, oh, what's happening in our lifetime, which we've been hearing that for 60 years, whatever. And it hasn't happened. Yeah. And Revelation speaks, and this is the way apocalyptic works. It speaks of the present and the future kind of together. Okay. So Revelation is speaking, I think, all the stuff about tribulation, about the beast, about the prostitute. This is all stuff that's happening in John's day and continuing to happen now. And I think Revelation does have a climax in the future when Jesus returns, judges his enemies, sets up, you know, brings about the new heavens and new earth. And so there, sure, I'm not saying there's no future implications.

I'm not saying that there will not be another iteration of the beast and the prostitute and whatever in the future, but it's going to be, it'll be precisely that. It'll be the last in a series. It won't be something categorically different from what we're experiencing now. And John himself says this outside of Revelation where he says, many antichrists have already come into the world. Hmm. Right? And so whatever the final iteration is, it's a it's just a final iteration in the pattern.

That's interesting because when you talk about the antichrist, I mean, so many people turn into a categorically different event, you know, like this is going to be like a really bad person. Like this is going to be completely different than before, you know? And so then there's always, right? But John's thinking of things like, in some cases, maybe even false teachers in the church. Oh. And in other cases, he's thinking of Emperor Nero. Hmm. Right? So he's, it's it's an anti-Messiah. It's it's any powerful figure or influential figure that opposes the reign of Jesus.

So, so again, I'm kind of anticipating some of the comments we'll get where people will be like, yeah, but that now you're not taking the Bible literally for what it's saying. This is, you know, and again, you kind of touched on this with the genre question, but people kind of get bent out of shape about that. And you're like, well, but if you just start reading the Bible symbolically, then so many things go out the window. Well, like how do you, how do you respond? Well, I mean, in I I again, it's about, it's a question of reading the way John and and God intends us to read, not about literalness or otherwise. That's just the wrong question to ask.