The Beast: The Last Days According to Jesus with R.C. Sproul

the mysterious figure of the Antichrist considered the New Testament teaching in the epistle of John regarding the Antichrist, as well as Paul's treatment of the man of sin or the man of sin in 2 Thessalonians and as I mentioned that at that time we see an interrelationship between the concept of the Antichrist, the man of sin and the

beast

that is described in the book of Revelation and today we are going to focus our attention on the book of Revelation and its teaching on the Beast found in chapter 13 of Revelation beginning in verse 1. I read this and then I stood on the sand of the sea and I saw a

beast

coming up out of the sea that had seven heads and ten horns and on its horns ten crowns and on its head a blasphemous name.

Now the Beast that I saw was like a leopard its feet were like bear feet its mouth like a lion's mouth the dragon gave it its power its throne and great authority and I saw one of the heads as if it had been mortally wounded but it is mortal The wound was healed and everyone marveled and followed the beasts and they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the Beast and they worshiped the Beast saying who is like the Beast who can make war against him and he was given a mouth that spoke greatly . things and blasphemies and he was given authority to continue for forty-two months then he opened his mouth and blasphemed against God to blaspheme his name his tabernacle and those who dwell in heaven it was granted to him to make war against the saints and defeat them and it was given to him authority over every tribe, tongue and nation, everyone who lives on earth will worship Him whose names have not been written in the book of life of the slain lamb from the foundation of the world.

Then we move on to read more about the beast in verse 11 and I saw another beast coming out of the earth and it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon and it exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence and causes the earth and those who live in it. to worship the first beast whose deadly wound was healed, he performs great signs that even brings down fire from heaven on the earth and the sight of men and deceives the inhabitants of the earth with those signs that he was allowed to do in the sight of men. the Beast telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image for the Beast who was wounded by the sword and lived he was given power to give breath to the image of the Beast and the image of the Beast should speak and cause all those who would not worship the image of the Beast are killed, he causes all small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on the right hand or on the forehead and that no one can buy or sell except those who It has the mark or the name of the beast or the number of its name here is wisdom here is this mysterious and cryptic message that he who has understanding calculate the number of the beast because it is the number of a man his number is six six six now The first thing we understand about the beast is that it comes out of the sea and it's described as having ten heads and all these crowns and all that kind of stuff and we saw before that there were references to the one who was alive. who was a king at this time in Chapter 13 that we identify with Emperor Nero of the Roman Empire now if we look at the images 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 septa montien or simply the seven mountains because it was established on Seven Hills but outside of this Roman Empire or Roman military power is this mysterious figure of the Beast who does all these evil things and who is known for this strange and cryptic number six six six which is called the mark of the beast now again throughout church history people have tried to give a clear identification to the beast that is known by the number 666 or the beast as the Antichrist and again we see the hesitation. 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 such as a king, an emperor or some other representative person due to the religious activity surrounding this figure of the beast and the Antichrist Some have historically argued that the Antichrist will be some kind of clergyman or 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 to fulfill the image of the Antichrist was. Both Pope Luther and Calvin were convinced that the Pope in Rome was the Antichrist, that the Roman Catholic Church was the anti-Christian institution embodied in him. called Vicar of Christ on earth, who is the substitute of Jesus in the world. church, namely the Pope and that this was a time of unprecedented corruption in the papacy, a fact on which all historians agree, including Roman Catholic historians in the

days

of Pope Borgia and so on even in the 17th century in the Westminster Confession of Faith. it became an article of creed affirmation that was actually included in the Westminster Confession that said the Pope in Rome is the Antichrist;

However, today there are some who would argue that the biblical images of the Antichrist or the Beast are fulfilled in the Pope, others have looked to the military leaders of great power and evil who have historically emerged in the 20th century, some of the candidates for the identification of the Antichrist have been Joseph Stalin and Mussolini because if you translate the title of Mussolini ill duche in a certain way, it can be obtained with the number 666 and obviously the most popular candidate in the 20th century has been Adolf Hitler due to his devastating destruction of the Jewish people and their unprecedented evil.

Also, if you study the life of Adolf Hitler, you will see surviving diary entries. from his own hand the occasion when he made an entry in which he said today I have made a pact with Satan and those who were close to Hitler, some of his closest henchmen were actively involved in Satanism and of course the surprising military pied could have done it. the Blitzkrieg and also thought it was demonic in terms of its support, but again, since the passage of time, not many people now see Hitler as the fulfillment of the Antichrist as he had been in previous generations now again if we follow the process that we have been examining here in terms of our study of the time frame references of the Mount of Olives discourse, the time frame references of the book of Revelation and we continue to wrestle with this sense of the radical closeness of the time of the fulfillment of so many of these prophecies set forth in the New Testament it would obviously be important for us to consider the question of the fulfillment of this prophecy in the first century.

The man of sin was said to be already working for the spirit of Antichrist. was already in the world and John announced its near manifestation and three the language of the book of Revelation that speaks of those things that soon came to pass along with the very nature of the literary descriptive forms that we find in Revelation that many scholars say was written in a kind code to protect the Christian community that was involved 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 Committee community but then secondarily at the hands of the Christian community. hands of the Romans and one of the most significant persecutions arose in the 60s under the authority of Nero and it was under the authority of Nero that the persecution of Christians began and this tradition tells us that perhaps Nero himself began the great fire that destroyed so many Christians. many sections of Rome turned around and blamed the Christians, which caused the Christians to gain great popular disapproval at the time.

It was under Nero that the two great saints of the first century church were executed, both Peter and Paul. They were martyred under Nero's reign and under his orders 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 coming of Christ's judgment on the temple . and in the Jewish nation we would be looking for someone who would obviously appear before the year 70 AD, if that is the time period in which we are restricted to working towards the fulfillment of this concept of the Antichrist, then obviously the most likely candidate would be Nero in In the ancient world, even among the pagans, no one was distinguished by his evil to the extent that the emperor Nero did.

Nero's life was one of radical violence and debauchery. He murdered several members of his own family. He castrated a child and then, quote, married the child who brutally murdered his own pregnant wife by kicking her to death and the historian Suetonius wrote that Nero devised a kind of game in which he covered himself with the skin of some animal wild man would break free from a cage and attack the private parts of men and women who were tied to stakes, that is part of the entertainment that he sponsored, whether in the maqam Maximus circus or in the Colosseum, probably in the Circus Maximus, it was that he would get these people, men and women, secured at the stake and then he would come out dressed as a lion or a wolf or cover himself in furs and then attack the genitals of these people that were there, so this type of behavior It was extreme, to say the least.

Nero began his reign as Emperor in the year 54, his persecution of the Christian community was in the year 64 and he committed suicide in the year 68. 14 years after assuming the power of the Emperor, he committed suicide at the age of 31 so that he would rise to power when he was 17 years old Again more summaries of the character of Nero from ancient times, the historian Tacitus spoke of the cruel nature of Nero and many of the Roman naturalists many of the elders described Nero cite as the destroyer of the human race and cite the poison of the world of which the youthful Roman satirist spoke.

I quote the cruel and bloody tyranny of Nero and Apollo notes Apollonius of Tyana specifically says in his writings that the favorite nickname people had for Nero was simply the Beast. He makes this comment on my travels, which have been more extensive than ever undertaken by man. many, many wild beasts from Arabia and India, but this beast that is commonly called a tyrant, I do not know how many heads it has or whether it will be crooked with claws and armed with horrible fangs, and it cannot be said that a beast ever was. It is known that They eat their own mother, but Nero has gorged himself on this diet, so the historical record not of the Christian community but of Nero's contemporaries in Roman culture itself consistently and constantly describes the bestial character of this madman of the antiquity. the cryptic number to which the author of the Apocalypse warns people to be alert and is sticking them so that it can be recognized and indicates that the ant that this beast can be known by a number and the number is the number six six six now , before exploring that number, I also want to mention that, interestingly, in some manuscript variants going back to the history of the book of Revelation, there is a textual variant on this verse, so the number that appears there is not the number six six six but it is the number six one six now it is usually understood that a textual variant takes place when the original manuscript was copied by hand by a monk or by someone and in the process of copying in that laborious and tedious process of copying word - per word, in the text of Scripture occasionally a letter was omitted or someone forgot the T cross or dot and I or a simple error entered the process and through this careful study of the extant manuscripts that we have from ancient times we see that these things happened and various examples of them, but this may be of special importance, as we will see at one time in the ancient world, cryptograms were common, a cryptogram was a coded message by which numbers and letters were related in the three groups main languages.

What we are concerned with here in ancient times, that is, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, all three had systems for using their letters for numbers, so all three languages ​​were used in cryptogrammatical ways. We are familiar with this even today, at least with respect to Latin because we are aware of the use of Roman numerals and not Roman numerals are simply Latin letters that have a numerical value like the Latin letter X has the numerical value of 10 the letter Latin V has the numerical value 5 the Latin letter M has a numerical value of 1000 and so on with D and L and wah and I and other letters that have a clear numerical value now this was also true in Hebrew and if we look at the name of Nero in Hebrew we get the transliterated name Nero Kyser which is Nero Caesar and in the Hebrew alphabet and numerology this name Nero Kaiser when translated into numbers reaches the number six six six exactly however in the ancient world the Greek name of Caesar changed Kaiser neuron to Kaiser strait a very slight variation in the Greek writing and numerical equivalence of the Greek formof the Emperor Nero's name came out at number six one six one of the most prominent textual scholars of the 20th century is a man named Bruce Metzger of Princeton and Metzger once offered the opinion that, in his opinion as the supreme textual critic in the world today , his opinion was that in all likelihood the textual variant in Greek that was found in ancient times where the number is six one six instead of six six six was an intentional and intentional variation so that Greek-speaking people would be able to discern the number based on the Greek language instead of requiring them to know Hebrew to understand this coded figure.

We also know that during the reign of Caligula and the reign of Nero there was a rapid expansion of the cult of the Emperor within the country. Rome and some of the previous emperors, such as Augustus himself, were given the honor of being considered 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 It did happen and it happened by order of Nero himself, Nero had his statue installed, for example, in the temple of Mars and imposed the worship of his statue.

Also people like Josephus saw the great sacrilege that was an abomination of desolation when the Roman standards that were worshiped as representatives of the Emperor were brought to the temple itself as an act of desecration of the Jewish religion, so we see that in all things that describe the vicious, quasi-religious and military character of the Beast, seen in the real life of Nero led many historians and scholars to believe that the Beast in sight, as well as the Antichrist and the man of sin in the church of the first century, were fulfilled in the person of Nero because it was linked to the events that would soon take place in the destruction of Jerusalem and God's judgment on the Jewish people now others who are also impressed by Nero's candidacy for the identity of the beast They say that at least Nero was a type of the Beast and the Antichrist and those who believe that the Antichrist is still in the future. come to say that it will be like Nero in his manifestation