John sees a second beast coming up from the earth who draws worship back to the first beast. This may have brought to John’s mind the many local shrines that pointed to emperor worship. Many of these shrines employed clever trickery to make the images do certain things to lure people into belief. As for those who refused to worship these images, they were often refused the mark of entry to the marketplaces. The number 666 is a cryptogram, and when the numbers are matched to Hebrew letters it spells ‘Nero Caesar’. Nero was dead when John had this vision, but Nero is probably being used here as a foreshadower of one still to come. John probably had to encrypt this part of the message to protect himself in case the letter got into the wrong hands. It would have been easy for John to see the connection between the second beast and the realities of his time but, yet again, there is always something bigger going on. This power of lawlessness is still at work in the world now and will increase its intensity as the age draws to a close. The part about buying and selling is a particularly poignant warning for us in our consumer culture. The modern world places economics at the centre of life, and money, as the saying goes, making the world go round. But money should not be the centre of our orbit. As Christians we must live for something greater than material gain. Life is not about buying and selling but about receiving and giving what comes freely from God.
Ask God to help you live in the flow of what he is doing.
Read Revelation 13:11-18.
