Don't Love the Beast!

Good afternoon, and happy Sabbath! I love the beast. At least, that's what I probably would have answered if you'd asked me in, say, 1993, when I was about 11 years old. You see, I grew up within a day's drive up here in Cincinnati, and for those on the broadcast, what you need to know about Cincinnati, which is the city of Seven Hills, it's also the home of the beast. When it was built in 1979 was the world's tallest, fastest, longest wooden roller coaster. In fact, it's still the longest, I believe, in the world, the longest wooden roller coaster. And I have to admit, I still kind of love the beast when I go there.

But there's another beast, there's another beast that we should not love. I think you know what I'm talking about. And we certainly shouldn't ride it. Because where it's going, it's going into abyss, it's going into darkness. And so, with that very tonal shift in my message, we'll go on to what Christ said in Matthew 24 when He talked to His disciples. He said, Jesus said there's going to be this beast power. It's a man, but it's a system. It's the whole thing together. That's going to rise, it's going to persecute God's people, and it's going to even oppose Christ when He returns. He's going to even make itself out to be God. Could you be deceived into loving this beast?

You know, it's hard, I think, for us to imagine, because it's such a villainous figure in the Bible. How could anyone possibly be fooled into thinking that this is the good guy? And yet, Jesus warned His followers to watch out. Don't love the beast. Don't love the beast. I really appreciated an interview that I heard this past, actually last week, on a podcast. It was Mr. Kubik's podcast, a council member, former president of the United Church of God. He interviewed a former plain truth writer and Beyond Today writer, Michael Snyder, and they were talking about this beast power, that the words that are used in the Bible, in Aramaic and in Greek, to talk about it, sometimes don't... when we see artwork, it doesn't quite capture what those words are representing, because when you try to represent visually what you see, it can come off a bit cartoonish. But these words are talking about something that is vicious, something that is wild. In fact, when Daniel saw these visions in Daniel 7, he said it made them ill. It made them physically ill. They caused them great distress.

You know, there are so many specifics about in-time prophecy that we don't know for sure.

We can make some solid deductions about them, but we have to always kind of stop every once in a while and recognize these are our attempts to kind of get behind the text. We're trying to get behind the text to figure out the who, the where, the when, and the how.

It's tomorrow's headlines today, but if we're not careful, we can end up assuming that that's the whole point of reading Daniel Revelation, reading the various prophetic books in the Bible, is to solve the puzzle and figure out the who, where, when, and how. And every so often we need to step back and just instead of trying to get behind the text, just read the text, see what it's really emphasizing, see what the big messages are, which is often what is so beastie about the beast and what is so lamby about the lamb.

What makes those on team lamb different from team beast? And how should this be forming for our character? How should this be formational for our character? Much of the language of Revelation is really aimed at the what and the why, so that we can discern the work of the lamb and the work of the powers behind the beast anywhere that we see them.

Prophetic books like Revelation and Daniel, they get at the real nature of things. They lay things bare. They take a view that just sort of slices down through history and shows you the way things are. They invite you to put on some different glasses than the ones that we normally wear when we're looking at the world with human eyes, and they let us see things a little bit more like God sees.

These books do help us understand end time sequences, but they also remind us that we all wake up every day and we do things that are either consistent with team beast or consistent with team lamb. But we have to wonder, why would anyone want to follow the beast? We know that in Revelation there are these seals that are opened, and the first four are the famous four horsemen of the apocalypse. And the first one is this horseman that's riding a white horse, which is the same color horse that later Jesus shows up and he rides a white horse.

And so you've got the same color horses but different riders. And we understand this in the church to be about religious deception for not just that but some other reasons as well. And so we say in our booklet, the book of Revelation Unveiled, we say, At the heart of the end time conflict is a crucial question.

Who will mankind worship? Satan or God? Notice the religious orientation of most of humanity. So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast, and they worship the beast saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him? Might makes right. People love a winner. They want to back a winner. This worship, it's interesting how it's framed here. This worship is rooted in, among other things, military superiority. Might makes right. One of the big questions that the book of Revelation is trying to answer for its readers is who really is the winning team? Who actually is the winning team?

I'd like to show you something someone shared with me a couple years ago. It was by a marketer. He's got this 13-page document that explains everything he's learned in marketing. He's tried to distill it down to a single sentence. And when you open it, he says, now don't read it too fast.

He's got all these framing things. I'm just going to jump you straight to the thing he says not to jump to, which is his one sentence that he's boiled down all marketing and persuasion to. I thought it was really quite good. He says, people will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies. This is, by the way, why right-wing people watch right- wing news and left-wing people watch left-wing news. We don't really want the facts. We want our facts. We don't want the truth. We want our truth. We're looking for that person who's going to come and say, look, they're the ones that are out to get you.

The reason that things are going wrong for you is because of those people. And you know what? I'm your champion. I'm here to protect you.

We love that as people. And that's how the Rogues Gallery of people who have tried to restart Rome, who've tried to restart the Roman dream over time, these are just some of them, this is how they operate. It's always worked. It's going to keep working. It's going to be trading on fear. We know from the prophetic picture, for instance, Daniel, he has these visions in Daniel 7, and then later in Daniel, at the end of the book, he talks about this King of the North and King of the South. And for a number of reasons, we connect this King of the North to this beast power that rises. And so when you look at that story, it's talking about how the King of the South, we see it as a confederation of nations. It's going to push at the King of the North. So the King of the North has cause. And you can imagine, if you're being pushed at, there's going to be a lot of fear. There's going to be a lot of fear of the people who are out there, and you're going to look for the one who is going to save your people and your way of life as you know it. It's easy to see why someone would back a champion. Again, people will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies. So action steps. What about us? What can we do? Well, we can keep our clothes unspotted. Keep your clothes unspotted. Be careful not to be impressed with beastly things.

There's a lot of properties we see. This is just a very small subset of things that are said about the beast and things that are said about the lamb. They have very different characteristics.

The beast may start by appearing to represent God, but inevitably it's his own image he promotes and asks people to worship, not God. And in a world where raw power is increasingly viewed as the highest good, we have to make sure that we don't begin to admire and adopt these traits ourselves.

Sometimes I think we can get so impressed with the warrior-like qualities of the lamb in Scripture that we forget to consider the lamb-like qualities of God's true warrior. How is it the beast is going to fool people if he's such an anti-lamb? It's really not such a mystery. We can see it every day. We can look at the TV ministries and online Christian ministries that are out there.

Maybe I shouldn't paint with a whole broad brush, but you can look at a lot of them and see that they're all set up in the name of Christ, but many of them you look at what's on the jumbotron, what's in their marketing, and you realize a lot of these are just personality cults. That's what they are. They're about the image of that person, rather than what they have come there saying that they're going to do. Wouldn't it be great if all choices look like this?

I think sometimes this is how it plays out in our minds when we imagine if we live to the end time and the scenario is going to come about, we're going to have to resist the beast. There's going to be a clear choice, but most choices in life don't work like this. You don't have the path that's going up into the sunshine over here and then the one that's going down into the deep, dark forest over here. Most choices in life are more like this. They're just putting one foot in front of the other every day, making small decisions, walking along, and then one day you realize the path that you've gone down and who you've gone down it with. I appreciate Mitch leading Psalm 1, actually. Blessed and Happy is the Man. Psalm 1 kicks off the whole book of the Psalter with this line where it says, blessed is the one who does not walk and step with the wicked, stand in the way that sinners take, and sit in the company of mockers. Walk, stand, sit. It's a progression that happens over time, and it's a choice that's made little by little every day.

When we hitch ourselves to certain kinds of bandwagon, maybe political bandwagon, we begin to value what they value, and we then begin to merge our identity with theirs. Our identity becomes their identity. Once that happens, we're invested, and once we're invested, the allegiance part is actually just one small final step. That part gets easy, and probably when the beast arrives, we're going to see that many won't let themselves even see what's happening when the who, the where, and the when become clear, because by then they're invested. So we have to watch out for that. We're told over and over again in the Bible, come out of her, my people.

But what if the beast comes after us? How do we resist the beast? And here's the part where you might expect me to say, well, you've got to have courage, and you've got to dig down and find that courage. But you don't need to find that courage from way deep down inside. It will be provided to you through the vine that you're attached to. It's going to be provided to you by our Father, whom we love, and our shepherd who dwells in us. Or is it a matter of knowing every last characteristic about the beast? Do we have to be a doctorate in beastonomics? Well, not necessarily. We don't need to know every last aspect of the beast. I saw this great thing that Dave Middleton, who's a UCG member, wrote on one of our Facebook groups this week. He said, we often build negative identity. We define ourselves by what we are not. For example, I'm not like those people. This creates a fragile identity that requires constant validation and opposition to sustain itself.

That's true. We shouldn't need the enemy in order to know who we are. It's not about knowing and hating the beast. It's about knowing and loving the Lamb. So don't love the beast. Don't love raw power, even when it promises riches or safety from the barbarians at the gates. Most of all, love God. Love God. Obey Jesus' commandments. Pray without ceasing.

Thoroughly know His word and conform to His image. Love the Lamb.