The Beast.

Revelation 12:18-13:10

August 11, 2019

I.

Having been foiled by the earth in his plan to exterminate the church and then obliterate creation, the red dragon, a/k/a Satan, the Accuser, goes to the beach.  He looks out at the great sea which represents the primeval chaos that God subdues in the beginning when creating the world; Satan goes there because he is about chaos and annihilation.  And he conjures from the waters of the sea an ally, a tool, a perverse helper.  

Since he could not defeat the church directly, he is going to use his deep knowledge of human psychology to lure people over to his project, so that they basically and willingly do his job for him.  The kill themselves, each other, and the planet.  This new threat is a monster or Beast, which John describes in symbolic terms as having many heads, powerful horns, and blasphemous names.  Satan gives the beast his power and authority. 

The people go gaga over the Beast; they are infatuated with the Beast.  They enthusiastically follow the Beast and even offer thankful worship to the red dragon for concocting it.  They treat the Beast like a rock star and savior, the answer to all their prayers.   

And the Beast basically conquers the whole world in the name of the red dragon, Satan, the Accuser.  It even conquers the church.  Satan’s plan works spectacularly well.  These are indeed dark days for the earth and for God’s people.  John does not sugar-coat it.  The Beast and the dragon win.

What John has in mind here is based on the visions of the prophet Daniel about the rise and succession of violent and brutal empires.  John sees this culminating in the eruption of this Beast which represents the Roman Empire, which invaded his part of the world from the western sea.  

For us it is the murderous, thieving power of every empire and world order, every colonialist, conquering, extractive, repressive, and hegemonic secular authority.  They are all based on blasphemy, which is the rejection, mockery, and misrepresentation of the good God.  They all feed and tempt the human ego with daydreams of power, fame, and especially wealth, if we will only serve and worship the red dragon.  And they deliver!  That’s the thing.  For the people at the top, Empires do generate lots of wealth.  They do exert seemingly invincible power.  They do make for glorious stories in history books.

The Beast is a supremely effective agent of Satan’s narcissistic nihilism, the mission of which is to consume, deplete, degrade, and destroy the creation, and snuff humanity in the burned-over wasteland that inevitably results.  The Beast turns us against each other, and against the planet, in competition and violence.  

The Beast, as the tool of the dragon, the Accuser, has engineered a whole global system to remind us about what — or who — we don’t have, about who has more than us and who wants to take away what we have, about what we deserve, about what we should want and really need, and constantly sticks in our face images of the life we could have if only we worshiped and gave ourselves over with more enthusiasm and devotion to the greed, gluttony, lust, fear, envy, resentment, and vanity the red dragon inspires in the human heart and which the Beast institutionalizes.  

II.  

• When millions of people are conscripted into slavery to make others rich, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When mountains are blown apart to get at the coal inside them, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When the Amazon rainforest is mowed down at a prodigious and increasing rate, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When great nations flush their resources into preparations for and perpetration of war, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When our lifestyles spawn epidemics of cancer, heart disease, addiction, and depression, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When our homes are shattered by divorce and domestic violence, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When children are victims of sexual predation or pawns of political agendas, allowed to go hungry or receive inferior education, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When species of life on this planet are going extinct at a rate unprecedented for millions of years, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When hateful people can easily obtain military grade weapons and slaughter scores of unarmed people at whim, and this is something that happens regularly and only here, and we cannot motivate ourselves to do anything about?  The Beast.  
• When we are in the middle of the hottest year in recorded history, glaciers are melting, and we have unprecedented wild fires, floods, hurricanes, and droughts, and can’t seem to do anything about that either even though we know what to do and have the ability to do it?  

The Beast even presents itself in Christian-like garb so effectively that many think the Beast is Christianity.  The Beast mimics Christianity by apparently recovering from a death-blow, sort of like the Lamb, and therefore claims to be the real resurrection force.  It points to the way it can turn a profit from disasters, the way it can “make the desert bloom,” the way it can raise standards of living.  The Beast is always about what it calls “progress,” “enlightenment,” and “development.”  That’s what makes it so tempting and powerful.  It feeds and appeals to our ego.

The cost of all this supposed advancement is always the sacrifice of someone else.  A scapegoat.  An enemy.  A loser.  This seems to work in getting people together.  But John suggests that eventually we all pay the cost of an unsustainable regime.  Eventually, under the Beast, the whole creation gets sacrificed, annihilated, exterminated… which is the ultimate agenda of the red dragon.  

John says, “Let anyone who has an ear listen: If you are to be taken captive, into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed.”  If you live by the Beast’s law and justice, then you get to suffer the Beast’s consequences.  If you’re going to continue to be captive to the Beast’s ideology of violence and retribution, of might makes right, then be prepared to suffer this yourself.  If you’re so ready to sacrifice others then get ready to be the next sacrifice, because that’s the deal with the Beast. 

III.

Paul says “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  Other people are not the problem.  They’re just mortals like us.  Neither Paul nor John blame ordinary humans for this global catastrophe.  Neither of them ever even suggests that the people of God may use violence against others.  For that would play into the claws of the Beast who is always about dividing us against ourselves and each other.  

Jesus, on the other hand, rather than blaming people, gives us the example of forgiving those killing him while they were doing it.  He shows us a new way to act based on a way of thinking that is diametrically opposed to the ignorance and fear that the Beast is pushing on us.  Jesus begins his ministry by calling for repentance, a different way of thinking, literally having a new, transformed mind, leading to the transformed actions of discipleship.  

This new mind John says has to do with turning away from the Beast and his patron, the red dragon.  It means turning away from the fear, anger, hatred that he inspires and stokes in us.  It means turning away from the delusion of our separation.  It means turning away from selfish violence that seeks to take and hoard and keep and consume.    

In letting that all go, as Jesus does on the cross, we come to see that our names have been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, that is, the roll of people who participate in the death and therefore in the resurrection, of the Lamb of God, who was slain and yet who now lives: Jesus Christ, who gives his life for the life of the world, who absorbs and transfigures the full force of the Beast’s  violence on the cross, disarming it, neutralizing it, exhausting it, and finally using it as a way to identify with all of us who are subject to death, and through it leading us all home.

We are witnesses that  death no longer has power over us, and neither do fear or anger or shame.  For in him we have died to our separate, divided, deluded, selfish existence; and in him we are raised to a life of oneness with all.

That’s why he calls for endurance: active resistance; and faith: a continual acting out of our deep trust in the God of love and life.  That’s why we gather together to be the church, to enact in our own lives here and now his Kingdom of love, peace, and justice.  Here and now we turn from selfish to selfless, from hostility to compassion, from taking to sharing, from winning to giving, from enmity to community, from hatred to love, and from death to life.  Here and now we become by his power and Spirit a refuge of compassion, a haven of forgiveness, a garden of joy, a home of healing, and an open door of acceptance and welcome to all.

IV.

Meanwhile, the Beast keeps winning.  And those who follow Jesus keep losing.  It can get discouraging, which is why John feels the urgency to write this book.   

The irony of Christian faith is that in losing we win.  Because to lose means we are, on the one hand, letting go of our old selves and the fear, shame, anger, and selfish violence that characterized them and that kill us and the world.  And on the other hand, our losing means we are offering up and contributing and allowing to flow through us the love of God, which is being poured into our hearts in Christ Jesus.

It is this life of letting go, of forgiveness, of release and relinquishment that guarantees that our names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and that we do inherit together the true life of eternity with and in the living and good God who creates, redeems, and sustains the universe in sovereign love.

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