October 12 2019
“666” OR “777”?
Oh, that mysterious number 666! How many have broken their brains to decipher it. Johan Herman Bavinck in his 85,000 word book on Revelation wisely avoids dealing with the number. Eugene H. Peterson, in his excellent exposition REVERSED THUNDER, The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination does mention it. He writes, “666 is a human number….It’s a religion that makes a show, that vaunts itself, that takes its eye of the poor and suffering and holy Christ. In the language of numbers, 666 is a triple failure to be 777, the three-times perfect, whole, divine number.”
That confounding number – 666 – is found in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, Chapter 13: 17-18. There is says,
“No one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
To me it looks more complicated than Peterson asserts. Bavinck wrote his book some 70 years ago. Then the most advanced technology was radio and a land-line telephone. Peterson’s book dates from 1988, also well before the advent of I.T., Information Technology, which has changed everything, including us humans and, I think, has made us ready to embrace THE BEAST.
Of course, that needs some explanation. The BEAST is a creature that devours everything. I believe that the time has come to identify that creature: it’s us: HUMAN GREED, causing societal collapse.
I also believe that, in line with the main motif of that last Bible book, eventually everything will resort to its true nature. Assuming this given, the meaning of 666 will be revealed.
How?
Let me repeat the words of caution, “Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
That man – humanity at large – operates without God, as Cain did who built the city, an open challenge to Eden. It’s also a number-game on which the computer is based: 010101010, now dominating and absorbing everything.
So, what is ’Wisdom’?
T. S. Eliot, some 100 years ago, coined the familiar saying, “”Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
Eliot really was a prophetic questioner. I too have a question: “Did we lose wisdom when we abandoned ‘the fear of the Lord’”?
The Bible repeatedly reminds us that “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. What does ‘The Fear of the Lord’ really mean?”
The word ‘fear’ has nothing to do with anxiety or fright or scare. It has everything to do with reverence and humility. But reverence for what or for whom?
Psalm 8 comes to mind:
“When I behold Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which You have set in place—
what is man that You are mindful of him,
or the son of man that You care for him.
It is that kind of awe I am hinting at.
Years ago our family visited Banff. When I stood in front of Lake Louise and saw the glaciers on the horizon, I spontaneously burst into tears, overcome with emotion, overawed by the majestic panorama.
“The fear of the Lord” starts with that frame of mind. There’s where wisdom has its origin, its start, humbled by the marvel of God’s creation. I emphasize the verb ‘start’. From there on in, it is hard work, and I confess: I am very much a novice in knowing creation, having barely made the first step in attaining the creational wisdom needed for knowing God.
The trouble is that today everything conspires to deprive us of wisdom. Churches are no help there. On the contrary: their heaven talk, and the widespread acceptance of Rapture, with its pre-tribulation nonsense, is just another hindrance to deal with the lack of wisdom.
The basic question today is: “Are we becoming an extension of the machine?”
Here’s where a Jewish historian, a professor by the name of Yuval Noah Harari, comes in. He is Worried about Our Souls. He thinks that “The big-data makeover of humanity could be a recipe for disaster.”
Just a few years ago Yuval Noah Harari was an obscure Israeli academic with a knack for playing with big ideas. Sapiens, a sweeping, cross-disciplinary account of human history landed on the bestseller list and remains there four years later.
Now he’s got a new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”.
Harari is openly critical of how Facebook and other tech companies exploit our personal data, and he worries that online interactions are replacing actual face-to-face encounters. Much of the book speculates on the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence (A.I.) He wonders if computer algorithms can know us better than we know ourselves, is there any room left for free will?
He thinks that we are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”
Well, I disagree there, and so do a lot of young people: world-wide they are demonstrating against Governments’ failure to combat Climate Change. Given human nature to ignore obvious signs, the world is in a death spiral, and the youth know this.
Climate Change will be worse than war-time conditions. Then there was HOPE. The war on nature is final.
I am old enough to remember the conditions in German-occupied Europe 1939-45 when the purchase of food and clothing involved coupons and identification. This time there won’t be paper coupons, or documented ID, but a chip in the shoulder or an eye-scan. Conform, or no food. That’s the future. And that’s what worries Harari.
HOMO MACHINA
Harari fears that “We have become HOMO MACHINA, no longer afraid of the machine, because we have become it. We no longer search for information. We Google. We trust the Google algorithm and we lose the ability to search for information independently.”
Harari thinks that we have entered a new phase in human history, where the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering can hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer us and create new life forms.
“This can change our imagination, too. If our imagination is too limited to think of new possibilities, we can just improve it.”
666.
Here’s where “666” comes in. We can manipulate the human mind to see Climate Change as normal, can be bent to accept a man such as Donald Trump as a divine ruler, can be conned to see heat and drought and storms and tornadoes as perfectly normal, and poor Africans and Asians as purely disposable, as long as we have a tankful of gas and a bellyful of fabricated food and, of course, the proper number, the right combination of identification and personality.
Says Harari, “We’re about to start combining the organic with inorganic bots to create cyborgs……………..One of the most important forces in history is human stupidity. We should never underestimate human stupidity.”
That last statement, about human stupidity, is already all too evident, witness Climate Change, Brexit, Trump, Rapture, and the list goes on.
He writes, “Experiments are already under way to augment the human immune system with an inorganic, bionic system. Millions of nano-robots and sensors monitor what’s happening inside the human body. They could discover the beginning of cancer, or some infectious disease, and fight against these dangers for your health. The system can monitor not just what goes wrong. It can also regulate our moods, our emotions, our thoughts. That means an external system can get to know us much better than we know ourselves. We go to therapy for years to get in touch with our emotions, but this system, whether it belongs to Google or Amazon or the government, can monitor our emotions in ways that neither we nor our therapist can approach in any way…….. Fear and anger and love, or any human emotion, are in the end just a biochemical process. In the same way we can diagnose flu, we also can diagnose anger. You might ask somebody, “Why are you angry? What are you angry about?” And they will say, “I’m not angry about anything, what do you want?” But this external system doesn’t need to ask this. It can monitor our heart, our brain, our blood pressure. It can have a scale of anger and it can know we are now a 6.8 on a scale of 1-to-10. Combining this with enormous amounts of data collected 24 hours a day can provide the best healthcare in history. It can also be the foundation of the worst dictatorial regimes in history.”
No longer God the creator: only MAN the manipulator.
Harari fears that an external system can know us better than we know ourselves. It can predict our choices and decisions. It can manipulate our emotions, and it can sell us anything, whether a product or a politician.
The fear Harari has is that we will shift authority to THE MACHINE, indicating the frightening scenario that the robots will make better decisions than we.
And then Harari asks the most important question: “What is human life all about?”
He says, “For thousands of years we have constructed this idea of human life as a drama of decision-making. Life is a road with many intersections, and every couple of days or months or years, we need to make decisions. If we make good decisions, we go to heaven; if we make bad decisions, we go to hell.”
Earlier this week I watched the leaders of 6 (Canadian) political parties debate. Climate change being one topic. They all projected a future as an extension of the past, while all around us the world is boiling. Literally.
Today two things are happening at the same time.
First: we’ve gained the ability to hack human beings. If you believe in free will, you will say this is impossible. Nobody can know me better than I know myself. Nobody can predict my choices or manipulate my desires, because they are a reflection of my free will, of my free spirit.
Secondly: thanks to loss of religion, mentally and spiritually wounded by TV and media, we have become the easiest persons to hack and to manipulate.
This brings me to the question: “What does it mean to be human?”
We are made in the image of God. We perfectly fitted in the Garden of Eden, where we were charged to develop creation, make it more beautiful, explore its potential, live in full unity with nature, always learning, always caring, always serving. Especially the latter: servants in chief, honoring God as Creator in everything, singing his praises.
God gave us full authority, trusting that we would do it right and knowing that we could.
Well, it did not pan out that way. So Jesus, God’s son, also the perfect human, out of pure love for his COSMOS, sacrificed his life and straightened out the mess we created. That’s why John 3: 16 is perhaps the most important text in the Bible. His death of the cross ensured our eternal life on earth, to be made perfect again when Christ returns. I am eagerly awaiting his coming, while trying to live as our original mandate requires.
That effort is now threatened by today’s technical development, robbing us of our initial calling: our very humanity is at stake. We were created to serve. Instead the real danger is that we become slaves to the technological society, a system that will abuse creation till it succumbs into chaos, implementing the aim of God’s adversary who wants to see it destroyed.
We are at a crossroad: which way? 666 or777?
There’s a song: “I want to follow Jesus.” Jesus once said: “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7: 14.) Be among the few.