Who Is Like the Beast?

On the island of Patmos, exiled, an old man sees a vision that cuts through the ages, and part of it is a parody so brazen you would almost miss it. John sees a beast rising out of the sea, the old chaos-sea this book began with, and the beast is a monster of borrowed power, for the dragon, the ancient serpent, gives it his throne and his authority. One detail is a mockery of the gospel. One of the beast's heads has a fatal wound, and that wound is healed. A counterfeit death and resurrection. The whole earth follows the beast in wonder and worships it, and the world sings to it a song you recognize from somewhere, from very far away: who is like the beast, and who can wage war against it?

There it is, stolen, twisted, put in the wrong mouth. The question "who is like You?", which has echoed through all these pages and belongs to God alone, is here shouted over a beast. It is the deepest ambition of evil, as old as the fall, to steal away the worship that belongs to God and to be sung to with the song that should sound only over the Creator. The dragon has never been able to invent anything new; he can only copy. What he has always wanted most is for the world to point to him and say of him what it may say only of YHWH: there is no one like him.

Behind the beast stands the dragon, and with the dragon comes the oldest lie. Right at the beginning, in a garden, that same serpent crept up to two people who had everything and whispered to them a promise he himself could never make good on: you will be like God. So runs his offer from Eden to the beast. Become your own god, seize the throne. He promises freedom, greatness and divinity, and he delivers slavery.

To sell that offer, he first has to give God a different face. The dragon is called the accuser. Day and night he accuses the believers before God (Rev 12:10), but before humanity he reverses it and accuses God. His insinuation in the garden was nothing else: God is holding something back from you, God does not want you to have freedom, God is afraid you will become too great. In this way he pins the envy, the lust for power and the smallness that mark him onto the One who is free of them. God's jealousy he twists into envy; where God burns not to lose the human being, he makes Him look like Someone who begrudges the human being everything. The tyrant disguises himself as a liberator and accuses the Liberator of tyranny. The beast can force you with a mark. The dragon wants something worse; he wants you to come to hate God for what he himself is.

Deeper than all power and all marks lies this: the dragon hates. He builds nothing out of love, for he loves nothing. Because he cannot touch God, he touches what God loves, humanity. His entire campaign is destruction with a purpose. He wants to drag as many people as possible into his own downfall, so that the Father's heart would have to miss as many children as possible. He knows where God can be wounded. A God who felt nothing could never be hurt; that the dragon tries so doggedly betrays what he knows about Him. "I take no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies," says YHWH through Ezekiel, "so turn, and live" (Ezek 18:32). Every child the dragon drags away is a child the Father grieves over. Over against him stands a Father who gives everything to bring even one child home, while the adversary stakes everything to pull even one child away from Him.

The beast can compel, and nothing more. It imposes a mark on the hand or the forehead, and without that mark you cannot buy and cannot sell. No bread, no work, no place in society. Join in, or starve. Bow, or die. Pressure, threat and coercion are the only register the counterfeit god commands. The beast can brand a mark but cannot win a heart. The real God did the opposite throughout this whole book. He dragged no one to Himself; He drew them with cords of love. On the same forehead where the beast brands its mark, those who follow the Lamb have His name and His Father's name written (14:1), the sign of those who are known and wanted. The idol must force you because he is not worth your love; the living God lets you go free because only love freely given is worth anything.

The vision also shows where all that coerced worship ends up. A city rises, Babylon the great, the showy pinnacle of humanity without God, built on the economy of the beast, drunk on luxury and on blood. She sits like a queen and says in her heart: I sit enthroned here, I am no widow, I will never see grief. Then she falls, in a single hour. Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, cries an angel, and the smoke of her burning rises. Off to the side the merchants stand weeping, over their trade and not over the people. No one buys their cargo anymore, their gold and silver and silk and purple, their horses and chariots, and right at the end of that showy list, as if it were the most ordinary merchandise, stand the bodies and souls of human beings. That is what the system ran on. The safety of the mark (join in, buy, sell, belong) turned out to be a city that collapses in a single hour.

The world had sung it in awe: who is like the beast, and who can wage war against it? The answer came faster than anyone thought. Within a single hour it lay in ruins. So it goes with every stolen formula. Every kingdom, every tyrant and every false security borrows, at its height, the language that belongs to God alone. Untouchable, incomparable, eternal, it proclaims over itself, and every time it proves to be borrowed, and every time it must be returned. The beast could imitate the wound, force the worship and build a world city, but it could not make good on what it let be sung over itself. When the smoke of Babylon has cleared, One is still standing, and He has never had to force anyone to love Him.

A note on the source text. The beast from the sea and the worship "who is like the beast?": Revelation 13:1–4; the mark and the buying and selling: 13:16–17; the seal and the name on the foreheads of God's own: 7:3; 14:1. The accuser: 12:9–10. The fall of Babylon "in a single hour" and the wailing merchants, with "human bodies and souls" as the last item of cargo: 18:2, 7, 10–13, 17. The serpent's promise: Genesis 3:4–5. "I take no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies": Ezekiel 18:23, 32. The ambition of the adversary: Isaiah 14:13–14. Cords of love: Hosea 11:4. The divine Name as YHWH.