[Show clip from “The Wizard of Oz” – “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”
As we continue our journey through Revelation this morning, we’ll be introduced to a character that reminds me a lot of the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. Before we read our passage for this morning, let’s take a moment to review where we are.
Chapters 12-15 of Revelation comprise one long scene that reveals the underlying reasons for all of the events that we have seen portrayed by the seals and the trumpets. That scene revolves around seven major characters – the five we saw in chapter 12, the beast from the sea that we saw last week in the first part of Revelation 13 and the beast from the earth we’ll look at this morning. That scene is further broken down into seven sub-scenes. We’ve examined those first two sub-scenes the last two weeks and we’ll take a look at the third one this morning. So go ahead and open your Bibles to Revelation 13 and follow along as I begin reading in verse 11:
11 Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. 12 It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed. 13 It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people, 14 and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived. 15 And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. 16 Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, 17 so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. 18 This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
THE SECOND BEAST – THE FALSE PROPHET
This second beast will be referred to later on in the book of Revelation as the “false prophet” and our passage this morning makes it clear why he is given that title. So let’s see what we can learn about him from the text and then, most importantly, let’s develop some principles that we can apply in our day-today walk with Jesus.
• Mandate: to direct worship to the Antichrist
Last week we saw the first beast, who represented the Antichrist and the governmental alliance which he will control. The false prophet takes on more of a supporting role. Rather than direct attention to himself, his actions are intended to get people to worship the first beast, the Antichrist.
The false prophet relies upon the fact that man is hard-wired with a need to worship something or someone. And so, using the tools we’ll look at in just a moment, he works behind the scenes to encourage people to direct their worship toward the Antichrist.
The unholy trinity of the dragon and the two beasts is undoubtedly intended to be a counterfeit of the triune God. Just as Jesus received authority from His Father, the beast from the sea, the Antichrist, receives his authority from the dragon, Satan. And in much the same manner that the Holy Spirit glorifies Jesus, the beast from the earth, the false prophet, glorifies the Antichrist.
• Method: deception
Not surprisingly, the method that the false prophet employs is that of deception, which he has learned well from Satan, who was indentified back in chapter 12 as the one who deceives the whole world. That deception begins with his appearance. On the outside he looks like a gentle lamb, obviously trying to imitate the one who is described elsewhere in Revelation as a lamb – Jesus. But looks are deceiving. He may look like a lamb, but he speaks like a dragon. We’re reminded of this warning that Jesus gave to his followers.
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
Matthew 7:15 (ESV)
The apostle Paul also described how the evil one would operate by deception in the end times.
The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
2 Thessalonians 2:9-12 (ESV)
Jesus, when revealing what would occur in connection with His return, also warned against those who would operate by deception.
For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
Matthew 24:24 (ESV)
Since Satan has operated by deception beginning in the Garden with Adam and Eve, we shouldn’t be surprised that his minions will also operate in that manner. And we certainly have plenty of historical examples of those who have come to power through deception, some of them very recent.
But what is really scary to me is to see that even those who claim to be Christians will fall prey to the deception of the false prophet. The kind of deception that Satan employs is so subtle and so gradual that people don’t even see it. Satan doesn’t completely contradict truth all at once. He just twists it a little at a time until eventually we’re so far from the truth that it is difficult to return there.
There are a lot of groups today that call themselves Christians, but who have been led far astray by the deception of Satan. In most cases they didn’t just instantaneously morph into what they have become today. They just bought into the deception little by little until they are now so far from the truth that, apart from God’s intervention, they will never get back to the truth.
In this passage, God reveals two means by which the false prophet is going to accomplish this deception:
• Means:
o Signs
In many ways the false prophet is like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. He will be able to perform great signs. He’ll counterfeit what Elijah did when he called down fire from heaven. He’ll create an image of the Antichrist and enable the image to speak and to be able to kill the Christ followers who refuse to worship that image.
It’s not hard to imagine why people are going to be so easily duped into following someone who can perform these kinds of signs and wonders. I think that is why both Jesus and Paul, in the passages we looked at earlier, specifically warned Christ followers that in the end times there will be signs and wonders that are for the purpose of trying to deceive even those who are Christ followers. But that is not the first time that God’s people were warned about the potential to be deceived by signs. We find this warning in the book of Deuteronomy:
If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
Deuteronomy 13:1-3
Unfortunately, there are a lot of well meaning Christians today that try to operate on the basis of signs. In fact, I would guess that most of us have engaged in that practice at some time in our lives. Let me just give you an example of how that might occur. Perhaps this is a little farfetched, but I think it will help to make my point.
Let’s say that a young Christian lady meets a non-Christian man. And they begin dating and eventually fall in love. And after some period of time, the young man asks her to marry him. So this young lady goes to God and says, “God can you just give me a sign so I’ll know if he’s the right one? How about this – if I go home tonight and he calls me, I’ll know it is your will for me to marry him. But if he doesn’t call, then I’ll know it’s your will not to marry him.” She does this of course knowing that he calls her every night.
The obvious problem here is that this young lady never consults the Bible, which would have given her a clear answer to her question. And we also know, both from our text this morning, as well as other passages, that Satan has the ability to manipulate circumstances and to create signs. That is why Jesus twice gave this very same answer to those who were asking Him to perform signs to prove that He was the Messiah:
An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Matthew 12:39; 16:4 (ESV)
The fact that Jesus has called those who seek for signs “evil and adulterous” is all the proof we need that we are not to live our lives in Him based on seeking signs.
o Mark of the beast
I know that for many of you, this is what you’ve been waiting for – the revelation of the identity of the Antichrist. If that is the case, then you are going to be greatly disappointed.
Over the years there have been countless attempts to identify the Antichrist based on the number of his name. Most of those efforts are based on a practice known as gematria. In ancient times, letters of the alphabet served as numbers. For instance, most of us are familiar with Roman numerals which use letters to designate numbers – “I” is 1, “v” is 5, “x” is 10, etc. So using the Greek system of numbering, various commentators over the years have attempted to identify the Antichrist by converting the names of their favorite suspects into a number and seeing if it would add up to 666.
Among those who have been identified as the Antichrist using that method range include Caesar Nero, Adolph Hitler, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Prince Charles, among others. As you can see, this is a very subjective approach, and by manipulating the system almost any name can be made to add up to 666.
If we stand back and take a look at the bigger picture here, we know that the number 6 in the Bible is the number of man. Man was created on the sixth day, for example. The number 6 also pictures the sinfulness of man since the number six falls short of the number 7, which as we have frequently seen throughout Revelation, is a picture of completeness and perfection and which is used therefore as a picture of God. We’ve seen the Holy Spirit pictured as the “seven spirits of God” and Jesus pictured as a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes.
So while it is possible that when the Antichrist comes on the scene, the letters in his name will add up to 666, the larger idea here is that 6 is the number of man and that the number 666 represents that idea raised to the third power, so to speak. This would be similar to the way that we see God praised as “holy, holy, holy” to emphasize that attribute. As one commentator put it, it represents “failure upon failure upon failure.” [Henriksen]
There has also been much speculation about exactly what form that mark will take, but again there just isn’t enough in the text to allow us to make that determination. What we can be sure of is that this mark is another counterfeit of Satan intended to imitate the seal on the foreheads of the 144,000 that we saw back in Revelation 7. And whatever that mark is, it is going to be required to engage in commerce.
Obviously that is going to provide a difficult choice to those Christians who desire to remain faithful to Jesus, but who also want to be able to provide for their families. This is one more example of how God is going to use tribulation for the purpose of identifying those who are the true followers of Jesus. As one commentator so aptly observed “Nominal Christians do not surrender their lives for a cause in which they do not really believe.” [Mounce]
So why does all this even matter to us? As far as we can tell the Antichrist and the false prophet aren’t on the scene right now. And it’s not even a given that they will come on the scene during any of our lifetimes. As we saw last week, the spirit of antichrist is present in the world already and that means that Satan is operating right now in the same way that will become more evident in the future – through deception. So we need to be equipped to counter that deception.
Last week, we saw that the coming of the Antichrist was a call to endurance and faith. This week, we see in verse 18 that the coming of the false prophet is a call to wisdom. So let’s take a few minutes to see how we can develop the kind of wisdom that counters the deception of the evil one.
DEVELOPING WISDOM THAT COUNTERS DECEPTION
1. Absorb the authentic rather than focus on the fake
In the United States, one of the functions of the Secret Service is to detect counterfeit currency. Their agents are trained to spot counterfeits not by studying the counterfeits themselves, but by being so familiar with the real currency, that they will immediately spot anything that doesn’t match up with the real thing.
That is the perfect picture of how we are to develop the kind of wisdom that will counter the deception of Satan. We learn to discern that which is not genuine by getting so familiar with the real thing that spotting the counterfeits becomes quite easy.
That principle is confirmed by the Proverbs:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
Proverbs 9:10 (ESV)
Where does wisdom begin? By fearing God and growing in our knowledge and understanding of Him. We need to get to know God so intimately that when some kind of deception comes into our lives, we immediately recognize that it doesn’t conform to that which we know about God.
It is true that we need at least some degree of understanding about Satan and his ways. So passages like ours this morning are helpful in revealing the methods and weapons that he utilizes. But ultimately, we will be much more likely to avoid being deceived if we spend our time and effort in the presence of Jesus, getting to know Him through His Word and through prayer.
In a sense, we would do well to heed the words from the Wizard of Oz that we saw earlier - “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”
2. Treasure the truth rather than pursue the pleasant
Nobody likes pain and most of us do whatever we can to avoid it. Unfortunately Satan takes full advantage of our aversion to pain. We certainly have seen that with both the Antichrist and the false prophet. They are able to come to power because they offer people an alternative to pain – be it physical, economic or emotional.
Certainly Christians are not immune to this tendency to avoid pain. That’s why we see the development of large churches that promise people relief from pain in some manner. Some promise freedom from financial pain through the prosperity gospel. Some promise freedom from physical pain through healing. Some promise freedom from emotional pain by offering messages that are intended to help people feel good about themselves. Now I’m certainly not saying that every large church is guilty of such teaching, but at the same time it is certainly obvious that holding to the truth is not a popular thing in our culture. This is exactly the situation that Paul wrote about in his second letter to Timothy:
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
2 Timothy 4:3, 4 (ESV)
The truth is not always pleasant or painless. In fact, the truth of God’s Word often reveals some very ugly things about our lives that we must deal with through confession and repentance. We have consistently seen in Revelation that treasuring the truth is not easy. It certainly won’t prevent pain, or even death. But Jesus made it very clear that holding to the truth is evidence that we are genuine disciples:
So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
John 8:31, 32 (ESV)
So if we want to develop wisdom that will counter the deception of Satan, we must come to treasure truth rather than pursue that which is pleasant and will spare us from pain.
3. Understand the unseen rather than surrender to the seen
We are a very visually oriented society and we are influenced by the things we see. For instance, that is one of the reasons that we use PowerPoint in our worship service because for most of us our learning is improved when we can both hear and see.
So it’s not surprising that the world is going to be so easily deceived by that which they can see when the false prophet is able to perform all kinds of signs. Because we are so visually oriented, problems arise when there is a conflict between what we can see and what we know to be true.
Here’s a great example.
[Show “Fighting Gravity” clip]
If we went strictly on what we could see here, we would have to conclude that it is somehow possible to overcome gravity or that gravity isn’t always operational. But what we saw certainly conflicts with what we know to be true about gravity. So we have a choice to make. Will we live our lives based on what we think to be true based on what we saw or will we live them based on what we know to be true, even though we can’t see it? I don’t know about you, but even after watching that video, I’m not going to roll out of bed tomorrow morning and just assume that I won’t hit the floor.
The same thing is true in our spiritual lives. Satan is capable of manipulating our circumstances and the things that we can see for the purpose of drawing us away from the truth and deceiving us. So we have a choice to make. Will we live our lives based on what we see and end up being deceived? Or will we develop the wisdom that will allow us to hold to the truth even though we can’t always see it with our physical eyes?
Paul described that choice with these familiar words:
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:17, 18 (ESV)
We are in a spiritual battle right now, one in which the man behind the curtain is trying to deceive us. But we would do well to heed his own words - “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” - and instead make sure that we keep our eyes on the founder and perfecter of our faith – the Lord Jesus Christ.
