Some years ago I was involved in putting together a questionnaire that asked people about the ‘big questions’ of life, things about where we come from, belief in God, the purpose of life, whether there is life after death, etc…. The project had two aims: the first was to genuinely discover what the majority of the target group actually believed and the second aim was simply to encourage people to begin to think about the big questions in the first place. In fact the whole thing was a flop! Not because the questionnaire was badly put together or many people weren’t willing to ask their friends and colleagues to fill it in – it was a flop because most of those friends and colleagues read the first few questions and said they just didn’t want to think about such things!
The truth is that our culture is full of incomplete answers to those questions. They are incomplete because in that they are inconsistent or contradictory. For example: the same person who will tell you that we came by accident through the big-bang & evolution, may well believe that the purpose of life is to help others (why – if we are all just an accident?) and then tell you that rather than face judgement or Heaven or even oblivion, everyone is simply reincarnated! Even some of the big world-religions don’t add up with their different hopes for men and women, or their different certainties of living…
Despite all of the above, the ideology of the particular culture that we live in can be violently opposed to those who wont conform – particularly if its because they want to conform to something else. Examples of that opposition are shown on our news screens on a daily basis – for example with Christians being persecuted in Islamic regimes. In our own culture there are many different ideologies that we are apparently not even supposed to question: the growing insistence on political correctness in just about every sphere of life, or the ever-present environmental issue that has to be taken into account. There are also sub-cultures which have their own rules of conformity: middle-class standards of living are surely an aspiration to which only the ‘odd’ wont conform. Bulging muscles and a 6-pack are surely the aspiration for young men, and tight clothes with enough eye-catching cleavage or tanned-leg showing are the ‘uniform’ for young women. Non-conformists be different at your peril!
Yet the message of Revelation 13: 11 – 18 is that human ideology will always ultimately fail. Not only will it fail to satisfy, it will inevitably end-up being a slave-master which demands more and more adherence from its followers and never deliver what it promises. In other words, it really is a ‘beast’! And whether it appears as a dominant life-threatening false-religious regime or just as an office culture where some people are the ‘in-crowd’ and others just don’t fit, the badge of the beast is always ‘666’. Since ‘7’ in the book of Revelation is the short-hand for things being complete and repeating things three times presents their certainty, the badge of the beast forever cries ‘not quite, not quite, not quite’ or ‘failure, failure failure’.
So what hope? Revelation 14:1 – 5 presents the glorious hope! Here is a certainty that those who trust in Jesus, whom He has ‘bought’ with His own blood on the cross, can rejoice in! Because He has rescued them (us) He sees true Christians as righteous and beautiful and pure and Holy and clean. What is remarkable about vs 1 to 5 is that, just as in the previous two chapters, these verses figuratively describe a present reality: Christians are gathered around the Lamb, following Him through life, regarded by Him as pure. Fantastic! That wonderful realization that Christians are free to be what He has saved us to be really should be the liberating! The implications of that wonderful freedom are massive – so long as we remember that true freedom is not the freedom to do what we like (because that changes with the weather!) but the freedom to do what we should. (Which is actually just common sense: can you imagine what would happen if everyone just ‘picked’ which side of the road they fancied driving on?!). Living in that freedom therefore obliges us to embrace and behave as if we belong. In serving the Lord Jesus, we are not running at the beck and call of a beast, but freely serving the true King.
So what of everyone else? Rev 14: 6 – 11 are full of dire and serious warnings for those who only reject the truth. The angels are unambiguous in their warning that there IS a God, that alternatives WILL fail and that Hell IS a conscious painful eternal reality that Jesus came to save us from. The graphic images of Rev 14: 9 – 11 are almost too awful to contemplate – yet they are there to persuade us of God’s wrath. What is so sad is that it is all so unnecessary. Jesus drank the cup of God’s wrath on our behalf (Matt 26:39), He paid the price so we could be forgiven, He died the death that we deserve, He shed His blood to redeem us. How sad for those men and women who look to the beast for hope rather than to Christ.