November 1 2015
That dreaded number: 666.
My NIV study Bible tells me that the most acceptable explanation for this number is that, as the number 7 signifies perfection the triple 6 indicates a valiant attempt to reach that perfect stage but in the end, fails.
I mostly agree with that rationale, but I think there’s also more to this.
In the past 3 months I have translated a Dutch book dealing with Revelation and the author, the late Johan Herman Bavinck, a theologian and professor of Mission at the Free University in Amsterdam, refrains from giving any explanation to the many numbers bantered about there. This caused Walter Brueggemann, offering a short review on the book, to write:
“J. H. Bavinck has written a commentary on the Book of Revelation. It would, however, be wrong to call this a commentary, because he honors none of the turgid protocols of commentary. He sweeps away the calendar-counting of hysterical fundamentalism; he has no patience with the book-keeping mentality of historical criticism. Rather he plunges us into the great cosmic drama of conflict that defines the earth as it yearns for the perfections of heaven. The writer of Revelation knows that “everything on earth is tiring” as the church lives in conformity and contamination. But the lamb/lion is relentless even while remaining hidden and delayed. Bavinck says of the book of Revelation that it swells “to a mighty choral, the jubilation song of the victory.” And he offers us, on that great choral, a vast fugue that calls us to great imagination through which we as church will be drawn and empowered to live differently in the world. We have no commentary like this that is itself emancipatory and of transformative, well beyond our usual arithmetic of piety and morality.”
Brueggemann lauds the absence of the guessing game that has made Revelation the source of the most outlandish speculation about the end of the world and what is in store for us in the final days. Perhaps foolishly, I will venture into a field where these two learned men, Bavinck and Brueggemann, don’t want to go.
Why do I do that?
I am not a theologian, just an informed layman whose opinion really does not matter. Bavinck is quite cautious in the Revelation’s number game. The number 666 he does not mention at all and he only devotes a few words to the Thousand Years of binding Satan (Revelation 20), saying only that it probably occurred in the past.
When I look back many centuries it dawned on me that the period from about 600 A.D. to 1600 A.D. could be seen as the most fitting time frame. St. Boniface, a Celtic missionary, born in England in 672, ventured into the Netherlands to preach the gospel there which cost him his life: he was murdered in Dokkum, the top of Friesland, in Netherlands in 754. The blood of martyrs always has been the seed of the church. No exception there. That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch of the church ever produced. (He was excommunicated). Throughout the Middle Ages Christianity flourished as never before. All the great cathedrals were built during that period. Also the St. James Bible, the Westminster and the Belgic Confessions and the Heidelberg Catechism date from that time. All these documents are still in use. So that period could well have been the era Revelation pointed to. That period ended with the 30 year religious war (1618-48) which was the most devastating conflict Europe ever experienced. Since then wars have dominated the world scene, culminating in the war on Creation, now raging in full force.
Back to 666.
Bavinck wrote En Voortwentelen de Eeuwen in the mid 1950’s thus more than 60 years ago. I translated the title as And On and On the Ages Roll. When Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan, publishes it next year it may emerge as At the Threshold of Eternity, a commentary on Revelation. In that sixty years interval we have experienced the advance of technology with the Internet, instant photography, but also the onset of all the catastrophic symptoms so well outlined in the book of Revelation.
Bavinck sees the main aspect of the last bible book in Revelation 22: 11. There it says: “Let those who do wrong, continue to do wrong….Let those who do right continue to do right“. He writes: “Now we can approach what can be seen as the heart of this book, its dominating theme. This can be captured in one phrase: everything becomes what it is. That’s what the book is all about, that is the meaning of all happenings and in particular of this final phase.”
He continues: “That simply means that we now live in a masked world, a world in disguise. Matters are not what they are, are different from what they are in fact. That is the secret that this world so carefully wants to conceal. The Satan, that immense moving power behind the world’s happenings holds humanity in the clutches of the fateful illusion that God is dead matter, something stale situated in the past, a self-satisfied sugar uncle, far beyond from being relevant. He has sold humanity on the notion that men and women everywhere are now fully in charge.”
About the final phase we now live in, Bavinck writes: “Nature will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: nature will breach all the constrains humanity has laid upon it, and will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics. All these will be more severe than ever. And as part of all this comes the dissolution of human society. Wars will come of an intensity and severity never before experienced, causing incalculable confusion. And all this will result in the coming of the kingdom of the one world-tyrant, the beast with his abhorrent body, arising out of the ocean of the community of nations. Again for a short spell the human throne will be established. Humanity has not turned to God, has only become more outspoken in his resistance, more spiteful in its hatred, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, who is unjust, more injustice will ensue, who is vile, more vileness will follow. The mask falls off.”
The stage is set for that final phase. Each week now we experience another 1000 year event: floods, droughts, storms, you name it. That the masks are falling off we see in the Volkswagen cover up of the true emissions. We also see this in the Roman Catholic Church where its sexual abuse scandals are coming out in the open. We see this in Capitalism, causing the destruction of the entire world for the sake of money. We see this in the Snowden revelation, outlining the extent of government penetration into the internet and other digital data. We see this in the millions of refugees now escaping the wars everywhere. We see this in the impossibility to cut down on energy use.
This month the world meets in Paris and people there will call for a ban on all carbon products, which is easier said than done. All plastic is derived from oil sources, all vehicles move on gasoline. There are today more than 6000 items that depend on carbon-based material to exist: car bumpers, airplanes: there is no end to its uses. There simply is no substitute. Or take air conditioning: The USA, a nation with 318 million people accounting for just 4.5% of world population consumes more energy for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. It uses more electricity for cooling than Africa, population 1.1 billion, uses for everything. Or take its NSA the USA National Security Agency, once so secret that NSA was said to mean No Such Agency. It warns that no internet address is completely safe. The only way to stay undetected in this world is to join an as yet unknown tribe in Brazil or somewhere in Papua New Guinea. As soon as a person is connected, is wired, has an e-mail address, the cover is blown.
And here is where the number 666 makes its debut.
Governments now argue that to guarantee our security we have to sacrifice some rights. This is an invalid argument. By shifting from targeted to mass surveillance, governments risk undermining democracy while pretending to protect it.
Already we live in an age when your supermarket’s software knows who you are from your buying choices; where your email provider can send you advertisements matched to key words in your supposedly private messages. Fact is that we slowly lose our rights to privacy and our commitment to democracy. Canada’s former Prime Minister was well on the way to become a dictator. Will Justin Trudeau be different? Economic necessities and environmental constraints will be stronger than any good intention.
Already individual supervision is in place. More than 2.5 billion people, mostly urban dwellers, voluntarily wear a tracking device – their smartphone. It can tell you the nearest coffee shop, order you a taxi and even find you a nearby potential sex partner because it knows where you are. Hire a bike and the city transport system knows where you start and finish. The privacy issues here are dealt with by limiting the flow of data between public and private sectors, and by making the individual the centre of the information flow.
But in a smart city, you need data to flow freely across sectors that, in the commercial world, would normally be separate. The energy system needs to know what the transport system is doing. And the whole thing needs to be run like a “God game”: the government, not the individual, must exercise control.
For this reason, early on, the technology companies realized smart could only be built with a new kind of government. You would have to run the entire state as an integrated system, where every recorded change reconfigures activity elsewhere – so, a traffic incident at point A can temporarily reroute buses, redraw cycle lanes and send additional public transport to affected suburbs. Right now, at every conference and jamboree, mayors and council leaders are being bombarded with marketing pitches for smart-city technologies.
I recommend you read Chapter 13 of Revelation the last few verses. There it says that the mark of the beast- the Anti-Christ – is either on the forehead or on the hand. Only when this is visible can people buy or sell.
Today there are two technological ways to identify people: fingerprints and an eye scan, now widely used in airports before you board. With the power of computers doubling every year, the entire world population can be registered at a central point. Only the poorest of the poor in Africa and Asia escape detection: commercially they don’t count anyway.
Revelation, chapter 13, ends with a call for wisdom. That means that this passage can only be understood when it actually takes place, when reading the signs of the times. When Bavinck wrote his commentary some 60 years ago, computer power was negligible. The most powerful machines, made by IBM, occupied an entire room. Today a laptop has more capacity. “If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.” So ends this chapter.
We are approaching the end of this world. Already everything is under threat: all of nature, the food supplies, whatever moves and lives and has a being. Still humanity will not turn to God, with churches closing everywhere and people abandoning ‘religion’ in droves. Has the church become a failure?
The Evil One, having the world solidly in its power, will persist till the bitter end and use all tricks of the trade to subject humanity to his evil intentions. The Evil One will use the powers of technology to make sure that everybody will comply with his wishes. For that end our SIN- Social Insurance Number – or our Social Security Number will be used, a number symbolized by 666.
Yes, that number 666 means more than a valiant attempt to reach that perfect stage.
P.S. “Hiel” is a Hebrew word meaning: god lives. The ending –ema, indicates ‘son of’. The name “Hielema” could mean: “son of the living God”( See Psalm 82: 6).
Next week: Fires, fires everywhere.