The Book of Revelation

Program # 19   

by: Ronald L. Dart

"And, I beheld another beast, come up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke as a dragon, {13}And he does great wonders, so that he makes fire to come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, {14} And he deceives them that dwell on the earth, by the means of these miracles which he had the power to do."

Yes, I suppose he would! We are in the 13th chapter of the book of Revelation around verses 11, 13 and 14 and I would say that if someone's able to bring fire down from heaven and to do miracles in the sight of men, he's going to deceive a few people. People are going to believe him, people will be impressed by what he does.

Now this one that comes along, this one that has horns like a lamb and speaks like a dragon is one who, well, the Lamb of God is Christ, the Dragon is the devil, and so you've got one that, what shall we say, looks Christian and speaks devilish, one who appears to be a minister of righteousness, but in fact is actually working out the Devil's agenda. Sobering thought isn't it?

Mark Of The Beast

This one that comes along says, "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads" (Revelation 13:16).

This is the famous 'mark of the beast.' You may have heard of it somewhere down the line, {17} "And that no man might buy or sell, save he had that mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

So there are economic consequences to what this one is going to do.

Now {18} "Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man and his number is six, six six."

Now we've got a fascinating study ahead of us. What is this mark of the beast? And how does it work?

Well remember as we started this series, we talked about placing ourselves in the position of someone living in Smyrna or Ephesus or Laodicea, and someone had come down the road with a manuscript, written by John, who had visions on the island of Patmos and he has all this written down and he is reading it to us.

Now we are no strangers to the idea of the beast being the Roman Empire, of the persecution that has come upon the church by the beast, that this whole system has been totally antithetical to Christ, against Christ, and against His disciples, and in some of our cities, if you're not a member of the guild, if you're not a member of a guild that has allegiance to this god or that god, you can't do business. The churches in some of these areas were really poverty-stricken, because the people who could not buy or sell. In most cases their problem was selling, because you know if you got money, you can almost always buy, but their economic consequences were severe.

So when they heard this read, they would have sagely nodded their heads and said, "Yeah, I understand that, I won't be able to buy or sell, if I don't accept this false religious system."

Now this is serious business, and this is looking ahead to the future, not just talking about something that happened long back in the past, we know that what happened to these early churches is a model, it is a type, it's an image as it were, of what's going to happen to real Christian people in the years ahead of us.

We are not there yet, but in the next chapter of Revelation, in chapter 14 and verse nine, there's a message from the third angel that says this, "He said, with a loud voice, "If any man worships the beast and his image, and receives his mark in his forehead or in his hand, {15} The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.""

What Is The Mark Of The Beast?

Now this is not where I want to be, nor you I'm sure, so it might be good for us to understand what the 'mark of the beast' is and what it is not! In a way, knowing what it is not, is the easiest part of it.

Tattoo

You know, a lot of people have assumed that this is some sort of an indelible tattoo. In other words, they haul you in, the police get you, they put you in cuffs, and they get the tattoo instrument out and they tattoo this 'mark of the beast' on your right hand and tattoo it on your forehead, and let you go back into society. I guess when you go into the grocery store and you show them your tattoo and they say, "Okay, sure, you can buy a gallon of milk." But if you go in there and you do not have a tattoo, they will tell you, "No, you can't buy a gallon of milk!"

Implant

There are others in this modern world now, this is more up-to-date. Now with the age of computers, some theorize that there's going to be an implant put under your skin. It may be an implant in your forehead or an implant in your right hand. So you go into the grocery store, you fill up your little basket with some milk and bread and a few odds and ends, you go up the checkout counter and when they get through running your groceries over the scanner, you slap your forehead down on the scanner and it reads your ID number, then it deducts five dollars from your account and you walk away with your groceries.

Now if you been following the revelation series here, you will be suspicious of this right away. Why? Well because it's a literal interpretation, right in the middle of a highly symbolic series of events.

Even the numbers in Revelation are not to be taken literally. So to have the idea that this is some literal mark on your hand or your forehead is almost certain to lead you down the wrong path in understanding this, so what is the symbolism?

God’s Mark - A Seal

Well earlier in Revelation, we came across something similar to a 'mark', but it's on God side of the equation, this time, not the Devils.

Remember Revelation 7, verse 1, John saw a vision and he said, "After these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth nor on the sea nor on any tree, {2} And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God, and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea."

You have four angels standing, ready to wreak havoc upon everything, and they say, "Whoa, hold it, wait!"

Verse 3, "This angel from the east says, "Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.""

Do You Know What A Seal Is?

Do you know what a seal is? It's like a signet ring, it is something that when you put hot wax on something, you press the ring into it and it leaves a mark in the wax, and you pull it out and you can look at that and you can tell, that the wax has not been broken so the seal has not been broken and you can tell who's seal it is and whose mark it is, because of the signet ring, that has made the mark in the wax.

Alright, here comes an angel, "Who has the seal of the living God, who says "Wait, don't hurt the earth, neither the sea, or the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads," {4} And I heard the number of them that were sealed, and there were sealed 144,000 of all the tribes of Israel."

Now where does the idea of sealing in the forehead come from? Well, a little background. John is not the first prophet to stand before God and get a vision of things like this. Ezekiel did as well. And Ezekiel in his prophecies is in vision, just like John is. He's carried away as it were someplace else, and he's seeing these things and is writing them all down vigorously, so that all of us will know what it was that he saw.

Well, he was taken to the place of the temple of God, and this is at a time when Israel, because of their continued sins and their ongoing rebellion against God had incurred His wrath and He is about to judge them for it. He is about to chastise them for it. The punishment that is about to come upon the city is downright severe. So here stands Ezekiel watching all these things in vision and hears the word of the LORD cry in his ears with a loud voice.

Destroying Weapon and the Writers Inkhorn

The chapter is nine and the verse is one of Ezekiel, and the LORD said, "Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near, every man with his destroying weapon in his hand, {2} And, behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lies toward the north, and every man had a slaughter weapon in his hand, and one man among them was clothed with linen, with the writers inkhorn by his side, and they went in, and they stood beside the brazen altar."

Now there is something curious about this one right off the bat, because it starts off with six men, not seven, normally in the Bible, you would expect these men or angels, or whatever they were, to show up on the site in numbers of seven or four, or three. These are the numbers of completeness, being three, being a number of completeness, because you can enclose a triangle with three sides, it is the smallest number of sides you can enclose something like this. Four is a number sides in a square. Three plus four is seven and so you get this idea of a double completeness or a real complete completeness, if you will. But we don't have four, we don't have three, we don't seven, we have six.

Now wait a minute, we have seven! Six of them have a slaughter weapon in their hand. One of them has a writers inkhorn.

Verse three now of Ezekiel 9, "And the glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the cherub, whereupon he was, to the threshold of the house, and he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writer's inkhorn by his side, {4} And the Lord said to him, "Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and cry for all the abominations that are done in the middle of the city," {5} And to the others he said in my hearing, "You follow him through the city and smite. Let not your eye spare, neither have you pity, {6} Slay utterly old and young, maids and little children, and women, just don't come near any man, (and presumably any woman,) upon whom is the mark and begin at my sanctuary." Then they began at the ancient men, the old men, who were right in front of the house of God, the Temple."

So you start with the people, who you really thought were the leaders, who were the religious ones, who are the ones at the sanctuary, the closest to God, and yet the destroying work, begins with them.

This great angel will mark the foreheads of those who sigh and cry for the abominations in Israel, the imagery of this passage is different, but the parallel with Revelation is astonishing. Remember, if you expect to understand prophecy, you need to understand the history that underlies the whole thing.

So here are people, whom God marks in their foreheads, so he can recognize his own, just before a terrible slaughter is wrought on the rest.

And we've got something almost identical in the book of Revelation. Not only is there a mark upon those who love God, but there's a mark upon those who don't.

What might this mean? Is the 'mark' literal? Is it figurative? We will talk about it in just a moment.

Who Do You Want To Get Your Mark From?

People are going to be getting a mark in their right hand or in their forehead and they may get this mark from God on the one hand, or they may get it from the Devil or the Beast on the other. What does it mean, is it literal or it figurative?

Well, the right hand and the forehead are really a pretty common image in the Bible. Take for example the section beginning in verse one of Deuteronomy 6, "Moses speaks to the people and he says, "Now these are the commandments, the statutes and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, so you might do them in the land where you go to possess it.""

He has all kinds of things about the promises of God and in verse four, He says, "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD, {5} And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might. {6} And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart."

So the commandments of God, the statutes, the judgments, all the things that God gave to them were to be where? In their heart. Now basically you know, this is symbolic or figurative language, it is talking about being in your mind and to be internalized.

He says, {7} "You shall teach them diligently to your children, you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you get up, {8}And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes."

In other words, they are going to be on your right hand and they are going to be on your forehead.

"You," {9} "shall write them on the posts of your house, and on your gates."

It is the commandments of God now, that are to dominate the consciousness and the activities of people, they are in the forehead, the will, the conscious mind and in the right hand, that is their strength, their power, their action, the things that they do. That's what this is talking about.

And when He says, {5} "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and all of your life, and all of your might." He is talking about your forehead and you're right hand, the symbolism of the heart, and your strength.

Now there's another passage that's very similar to this in Deuteronomy the 11th chapter and in verse 16, Moses says, "Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods, and worship them, {17} And then the LORD's wrath be kindled against you, and He shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit, and lest you perish quickly from off the good land which the LORD gives you. {18} Therefore shall you lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes."

Couplet Is Saying Something In Different Ways

All right, we know that frontlets between your eyes, is a reference to the forehead, now just a small aside, a short lesson in literature here. This is a couplet, a couplet is where you say the same thing in two different ways in the same little verse.

A couplet is this, "Therefore shall you lay up these words in your heart and your soul." That's the first half, and the second half is, "And bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes."

In other words, your forehead and your hand are comparable to your heart and your soul and the soul simply means life. So your heart and your life, your mind and your actions, your forehead and your hand. This is the way the theme is developed here.

Now, what we know is, that there is a ‘mark of the beast’ and a ‘mark of God’, and we shouldn't be surprised if the Lamb Dragon should attempt to counterfeit all there is of God, to try to look as much like God as he possibly can, to do things the way God does things.

The Beast claims to be God. The Lamb Dragon encourages the world to worship the Beast and receive the Beast's mark or the Beast's sign, so that we will not know you belong to the Beast, instead of belonging to God. That's what the whole thing is all about.

Who Do You Belong To?

It's a question of who you belong to, God or the Devil. Christ or the Beast. And the question is, how you can tell the difference? If you have the Sign of God, you can't have the Sign of the Beast. The Sign of God involves keeping all of the commandments of God. All ten of them.

The first commandment is, "You shall have no other gods before Me." Being involved with God, having God's mark upon you, which means you belong to Him and you can't belong to anybody else, but still, what might the sign or the mark of the Beast be?

What Is The Sign Of God?

Back in Exodus 31, there's more about the sign or the mark of God that I think you should know. In the 31st chapter of Exodus and in verse 12 it says, "The Lord spoke to Moses and said this, {13} "Speak to the children of Israel, saying, "Verily My Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a Sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the LORD that does sanctify you.""

The word 'LORD' here is the Hebrew tetra gramaton and can be translated as Jehovah, Yehovah or Yahweh, depending upon how you want to pronounce it.

It is a sign between you and Yahweh or Yehovah, that you belong to Him as opposed to you belonging to somebody else. What is? The Sabbaths!

Verse 14, "You shall keep the Sabbath therefore, for it is holy unto you: everyone that defiles it shall surely be put to death, or whoever does any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people."

Well, yeah, he doesn't have the Sign that he belongs to God.

{15} "Six days may work be done, but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD, whoever does any work on the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death."

In that economy and in that civil structure, the death penalty went with breaking the Sabbath day.

{16} "Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. {17} It is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever."

Remember The Sabbath

The Sign of God is His Commandments, and in particular, the fourth commandment. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy."

You know it's odd, but we used to be a Sabbath keeping people in this country, even though it was kept on Sunday instead of the seventh day of the week. I was surprised not long ago to be listening to a book on tape about Teddy Roosevelt's biography and learned that Teddy Roosevelt's father was a devout Christian and his entire family, in fact, were devout Christians, and his family observed the Sunday Sabbath very strictly. They wouldn't go hunting on the Sabbath, they wouldn't go fishing on the Sabbath, they couldn't play certain games on the Sabbath day. It was a day of rest and they observed it very strictly in the Roosevelt household.

I talked to some friends of mine, some elderly friends who have been around a long time, and we were pondering the change. They related about talking to their neighbors, some they said, didn't go to church, one of them mentioned that he wanted to plow his field on Sunday, so he hooked up his horses and went back and plowed a field that was out of side of the road. Why? Well he didn't want his neighbors to see him working on Sunday.

When I used to visit Northern Ireland to go fishing, I found many 'No Sunday Fishing' signs along the rivers that late. As late as around 25 years ago here in Texas, there were blue laws that prohibited certain stores from opening on Sunday. Why did they do that? It was the Sabbath, it was a holdover of the old idea that Sunday was the Sabbath and you don't work on the Sabbath day.

They tell me it was World War II that started the change in this country. Factories had to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the war effort, and we have never been the same sense.

There is also a theological change that took place about that time with the growing realization that Sunday really wasn't the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the seventh day of the week and Sunday is the first day and it just won't work. So they began to call Sunday the Lord's day, instead of the Sabbath day and you stopped hearing the deacons in the church say "Bless us Lord on this your Sabbath day" and they would talk about the Lord's day instead.

My Sabbaths Is A Sign Between Me And Them

So God said in Ezekiel 20 and verse 10, "I caused Israel to go out of the land of Egypt, and brought them into the wilderness, {11} And I gave them my statutes and showed them my judgments, which if a man do, he shall live in them. {12} Moreover, also I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between Me and them, that they might know that I am Yehovah that sanctifies them."

There they are. He said, "I want you to know who I am and I want you to know who you are. I want to know that you belong to Me and not some other god."

Later in verse 19, He says this, "I am the LORD your God, walk in My statutes, keep My judgments, and do them. {20} Hallow My Sabbaths, and they shall be a Sign between Me and you, so that you may know that I am Jehovah your God, not somebody else."

Now of all the laws given to Israel of old, the one law that identified them as the people of a particular god was the Sabbath day. I'm not a follower of Baal. I'm not a follower of Moloch. I'm not chasing some other god up and down the roads. I am a follower of God, the true God, of Yahweh, of Yehovah, of Jehovah. Not the others.

How can you tell? Rest!

How can you tell? Because I REST on the seventh day, and I don't work. They were to have this sign in there foreheads and in their right hands. That meant they were to accept it with the will and to live it with their hands.

Now, what about the Beast? Well, it says "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond to receive a mark in their right hand or in there foreheads."

That has to do with something they do with their will and with their hands.

Revelation 13 and verse 17 says, "And that no man might buy or sell save he that had the mark, or the name of the Beast or the number of his name. {18} Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred threescore and six."

The Beast and his mouthpiece then have their own mark or sign. This sign is accepted with the will, or it's at least obeyed with the hands, it has economic consequences just as being a Christian in the first century had economic consequences, exactly how that works, we are not told.

What we are told is that, if you don't belong to the Beast, if you don't have his identifying mark, if you don't have His identifying sign, that you're going to have a very hard time doing business in the world when it comes down to this very very difficult time.

The Beast Has His Own Day Of Worship

Some theologians believe that just as the Sabbath was the sign of God, the Beast has his own day of worship, apart from the day of God. The god of Rome was Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, and his day, his birthday, by the way, was December 25, which should give you pause, but his day of worship was, sorry about this, it was Sunday.

So here we are today and have been for many years, many Christians assuming that Sunday was the Sabbath day and it really wasn't! The day that is God's Sign, the day that says you belong to Him, is the seventh day Saturday Sabbath day.

So what is this about Sunday? Well, at least some people have been correct in stop calling Sunday the Sabbath day. But one should take a good hard look at that.

Who Are You Going To Obey In Your Suffering?

Who is your God? How does the world know? If you carry the sign of the true God, you're going to suffer from the Beast, but if you carry the sign of the Beast, you going to suffer from God.

It kind of looks like the years just ahead of us now, you're going to suffer. You just have to decide who you're going to honor in your suffering? Who are you going to obey in your suffering?

Finally in all this it says, {18} "Let him that has understanding or wisdom, know this, count the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666."

Now what in the world would that mean? How could it be applied in anyway?

Someone once sent me a picture, once upon a time, with a black helicopter with the number 66 on the side and I was kind of puzzled by it. They were saying that "Some of these helicopters were going around with a number 66 on it." While the number was 66, it wasn't 666, but he thought there was some beast power at work up in the northwestern part of the United States at that time.

Well, you can stop worrying about that, and if your car license plate has 666 on it, you don't have to worry about that. If your phone number, your phone exchanges has 666, you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about four sixes or two sixes or anything of the sort.

What is this? It's called here the number of a man. It's the number of his name. Now, in the ancient world, they didn't use the Arabic style numbers that we use. They used letters for numbers and so that any combination of alphabetical letters could have within it, a set of numbers which could be put together in some way to come up with a total, or a sequence of digits.

Now if you were in Smyrna or Pergamus, or Thyatira, and you heard this letter read before the congregation, you would leave church that day and get together with your friends and sit down and say, "Okay, how many ways are there to put together this 666 to give us the name of a man?"

Now, I suspect they would've come up with a fairly good sized list. And somewhere on that list, the commentators tell us, there would've been the name "Nero Caesar."

Now it would've been almost impossible in the first century for you to come to any other conclusion than that Nero was the beast because he was a beast in every way you and I might ever think about the beast being a beast.

What's important about him is, he was a Roman Emperor, and so in the minds of the hearers it would've identified the beast with the Roman Empire, not only with the Roman Empire, but with a man, who was at the head of the Roman Empire and his name was Nero.

Now when you understand the connection between history and prophecy, you will look back to the former things, so you can understand the latter end thereof, as Isaiah put it, and you will be looking toward the end of time, of a Roman connection, and of a man like Nero, who has the power over people's lives. Nero was a type of this beast. Now can you imagine with all the trappings of Nazi Germany, with all their Roman paraphernalia, that someone might have seen in Adolf Hitler the antitype of Nero?

There's one ahead, until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, You were Born to Win!

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This article was transcribed with

minor editing from a Born to Win Radio Program by: Ronald L. Dart

Titled: The Book of Revelation -Program #19

Transcribed by: bb 8-1-24

You can contact Ronald L. Dart Ministries at P.O. Box 560

Whitehouse, TX 75791

1-888-Bible- 44

Ronald L. Dart was an evangelist and is heard daily and weekly on his Born to Win radio program. 
The program can be heard on over one hundred radio stations across the nation.

In the Portsmouth, Ohio area you can listen to the Born to Win radio program on 
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