6. The Beast
– Strong but Fragile
And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and
partly of clay, the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile.
- Daniel 2:42
The beast brings to fulfillment a quality seen in every antichrist – great and intimidating power concealing a core of insecurity and weakness. In Job, chapters 1 and 2, we see this in Satan himself. Satan answers back against God with insolence and bombast. But whenever God says, “Have you considered my servant Job?” Satan answers back fast enough to let us know that yes, indeed, Job has crossed his mind, and not pleasantly. The ferocity of Satan’s onslaught against Job arose from this insecurity. It turned out that Satan had good cause to feel that way.
The Beast Arises out of Satan’s
Defeat
Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having
great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.
- Revelation 12:12
The rise of the beast in Revelation 13 comes right out of Satan’s calamitous defeat in Revelation 12. We completely miss the significance of the beast if we forget that it arises out of its master’s last despair. The world wonders at the beast and says, “Who can wage war with him?” But Satan himself knows better.
200 years after the Revelation was written,
this regime was prefigured in Diocletian, who established a dictatorship in
which all economic activity was minutely regulated, with the most thorough
persecution of the Christians up to that day, just as Revelation 13 predicted
concerning the beast. This tyranny did
not arise from strength but from the
This pattern has been seen often since. Hitler’s aggressive dictatorship arose
out of
Violent aggression is a symptom of decay and defeat, just as Revelation 12-13 teaches. Likewise, the need to control everything, what the Pentagon today calls “full spectrum dominance,” comes from being out of control and trying to resolve this by managing everything and everyone else. Recognizing this, the first of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous reads, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.” To escape from slavery, the alcoholic starts by resigning the place of master, even of his own life.
How the Sword Kills Those Who Live By It
There is a way that seems right to a
man, but its end is the way of death.
- Proverbs 14:12
Lots of those who live by the sword live long and prosper, dying peaceably in bed. Jesus was not such a fool that this escaped his notice. He said himself that those in soft clothing are in kings’ courts. He knew that kings generally live by the sword. But Jesus knew too that God had told Adam, “In the day you eat of it you shall die,” and yet God was not surprised afterward to see Adam running around as lively as you please, and for a long time. Jesus knew that those who live by the sword, like Lamech the son of Cain, prosper in the world and are admired by it, but he still said, “All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). So what is he talking about?
Jesus certainly has in mind the sword in the swordsman’s hand, not that of his enemy, because Jesus had read in the Psalms, “The wicked have drawn the sword and have bent their bow to cast down the poor and needy, to slay those who are of upright conduct. Their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken” (Psalm 37:14-15). The most obvious effect of living by the sword is to cause us to become arrogant and careless. This warning from Psalm 37 finds no place in such people, even if they think that they believe in the Bible and read it carefully every day. Their self-righteousness assures them that they are not wicked, no matter what they do, and that they are using the sword only for noble purposes. Thus their sense of righteousness protects them from the accusations of anyone, including their own consciences. Seared in conscience, they can’t see who they really are in their Bibles either. It feels great for this death to fasten upon them and pluck out their eyes! They know in their hearts that they can trust in their sword when persuasion won’t serve, so their sword flatters them that they can shut their eyes and ears. If we don’t like what people tell us, we can shut them up with a cruise missile or disappear them into a torture chamber as a warning to others. We can shut our ears to the cry of the poor, and so we do.
We see in the letter to Laodicea (Revelation 3:14-20) just how this works. Because they said in their hearts that they were rich, increased in goods, and in need of nothing, the word of truth was shut out, and so was the Lord, standing outside and knocking, and ready to vomit them out. The sword is effectively a form of money, buying you favor, protection, and the world’s admiration just as money does. The love of money and the love of the sword are really the same lust, and indeed these two forms of Mammon are easily interchangeable. What Paul wrote to Timothy about the love of money therefore fully applies to the comfort we find in military force: “Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of every evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:9-10).
The sword is a substitute for courage, taking the place of courage in us as lead displaces calcium in our bones and blood, and so the sword promotes in us the growth of cowardice. Being better armed, we can comfortably kill others in large numbers without fear and without needing courage. Military might banishes fear, therefore making us feel courageous, by eliminating the need for valor. Because we don’t need to count the cost, this promotes recklessness, which is counterfeit boldness. And we love that, because in it we can avoid seeing the worm of cowardice within. We thoughtlessly kill people when we would otherwise have to think more carefully. Because they are easy to kill, it is easy to despise them, and we are greatly motivated to despise them, because how else can we live with so thoughtlessly killing them?
Our growing cowardice makes us swift to shed blood. It takes courage to let someone hit you and to let him hit the other cheek too. Retaliation makes us feel strong because it hides from us our inner weakness, and as the sword promotes this in us, our valor dries up, and our cowardice increases. Being terrified, and having found in the sword the means to conceal this from ourselves, we increasingly terrorize others to keep them from terrorizing us.
But dealing out terror only numbs our own terror instead of curing it. The world may dismiss Jesus when he says, “The measure you measure will be measured to you again,” but it declares truly that, “What goes around comes around,” which is exactly the same statement. As we deal out terror to cow others into submission our own terror grows as we know in our hearts what we deny, that to receive back what we have dealt out to others is just what we deserve.
The only way to cure cowardice is to humble ourselves and admit it, along with the brutal things that our cowardice has led us to do, and all the shame that we’ve been hiding under our bombast. The sword, by making it easy to avoid this appointment with the light, draws us further into darkness. We die by means of the death we deal out to others, even though they die at our hands and we live in luxury and die old in bed.
God says, “Let everyone be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger, because the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:19). This path does offer pain, which is why it is seldom taken. We might hear things that we fear to hear, and have to leave unsaid and undone things which might protect us from having to face our fears truthfully. Without our anger, how can we chase away those that discomfort us, feeling righteous in so doing? The sword allows us to get away with shutting our ears. Like Lamech the son of Cain, we can quickly answer as we please with no regard for unpleasant truth, swiftly inflicting wrath on anyone that pains us. The sword works for us exactly like a rich man’s wealth or an alcoholic’s bottle, and the blood that we shed by it makes us drunk – stupid, reckless, immune to reason. We build a pile of bodies to reach heaven, and the wrath of the God of justice and mercy mounts against us in equal measure. When we finally stand before the judgment seat of God, where spin will have no place, and every drop of blood shed by our hands or with our approval will have its say, we will find that we have written quite a story. Indeed the sword kills all who live by it.
How Those Who Lead into Captivity Go into Captivity
He has dug a pit and hollowed it out
And has fallen into the hole which he made.
His mischief will return on his own head,
And his violence will descend upon his own pate.
- Psalm 7:15-16
Maybe the clearest example of falling into bondage by chaining others is how we are enslaved and tormented when we do not forgive. Countless people can testify that they found freedom the day they forgave someone that did them wrong. And we’ve all seen people whose obsession with some wrong done to them leads them to ruin their lives, like Captain Ahab pursuing to his own death the great white whale Moby-Dick. When we release the one who wronged us, we’re the ones who get set free.
More generally, although it’s not as obvious, we always get tangled in a hedge of thorns when we pressure and manipulate people to live up to our standards, or intimidate them into complying with our wishes. Indeed, withholding forgiveness in order to dominate is really just a special case of the more general practice of dominating people through guilt – and by being more righteous than others, setting ourselves free from them in our own imagination. All this manipulation leaves us vulnerable to being treated the same way by others, including those we dominate. If people have to be a certain way to please us, they have the power to make us miserable simply by not going along. If we need for them to understand us, they can get their kicks by just being dumb, and if they’re afraid of our domination, that’s exactly what they will do.
Once we elect ourselves to run other people’s lives, they can get weaker and weaker until they run the whole show. They make us responsible for their failures, and just by falling apart, they can make us do anything. Kids do this to parents, husbands and wives do it to each other, and congregations do it to their pastors. If we get our kicks by how well they do because of us, they can make us do anything by never learning our lessons. Many alcoholics run their families by just continuing to screw up and keeping them hopeful that just a little more indulgence will help him get his act together at last.
Nations get into the same trouble. The Soviet Union installed puppet regimes in Eastern Europe after World War 2 to protect itself against invasion from the west. But the Soviet Union was the slave of these captive regimes, because they constantly had to be propped up and subsidized. Far from being a shield, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia at various times humiliated the Soviet Union by revealing it to the world as a great oppressor. Real disaster overtook the Soviet Union when the local Communists seized power in Afghanistan. Feeling the need to come to their rescue, the Soviet Union was caught in its pride, which eventually proved fatal.
Having to control South Vietnam, the United States found itself helpless in the hands of its client. By threatening to collapse, South Vietnamese governments could make the United States give them whatever they wanted, and they could ignore American advice because they knew that the Americans could not stand to look bad by losing. Feeling that they had to control Vietnam because they could not endure the thought of losing control, the Americans found themselves imprisoned in Vietnam. Incompetent South Vietnamese generals who were punching bags to the Vietcong were leading the Americans around by the nose. The Americans were caught in their pride.
Japan has used its status as a client state to similar advantage. Japan has always gotten its way in trade negotiations by bringing up the status of American military bases. Because they suppose that they need their bases to keep that part of the world in line, the Americans find themselves in such negotiations being led where they don’t want to go. The results are clear in any American parking lot.
For individuals and nations too, the proverb proves true: “He that raises his gate high seeks destruction” (Proverbs 17:19). Those who make themselves the lords of all find themselves enslaved by all, not least their own fears. Stalin could torture, imprison, and kill whomever he pleased – but by the end of his life he was being served three breakfasts to make the odds 2 to 1 against any poisoner. American slave owners could beat, rape, and kill whomever they pleased on their plantations – but they could not be free from the fear that one of their victims would arise in the night and slit their throats. Safety is for those who take the lowest place. Freedom is for those who strive to learn whom they have by the throat, and find out how to let their captives go.
From Weakness to Weakness, by Means of Strength
How you have fallen from heaven,
O shining one, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the earth,
You who weakened the nations!
- Isaiah 14:12
When Paul had been an apostle for some fifteen years and had certainly learned a few things, he complained to God about the various troubles that plagued and weakened him. After hearing him three times about this, God answered, “My strength is sufficient for you, because my strength is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). If Paul was that long getting this point, we can expect to be a bit slow in the uptake ourselves.
But we have lots of evidence in life for this truth. The student who exposes his ignorance by asking a question learns; the one who conceals his ignorance stays ignorant. The athlete who confronts his weakness and trains grows stronger; the one who fakes it with steroids wrecks his body. One who toughs out the pain of appendicitis until his appendix pops winds up with peritonitis; the one who listens to it and goes to the emergency room is fine within a week. In general, if we rely on our strength to lie to ourselves and others about our weakness, we end up losing that strength which we corrupted in the service of self-deception. But if we let our weakness drive us to needed help, our strength will increase. So then, the Bible says that through faith, “out of weakness they were made strong” (Hebrews 11:34). Power is safe only in the hands of those who know how to be weak.
As Habakkuk says, pride is the opposite of faith. When we confront guilt or any other weakness, we may respond in faith – that is, we may trust that holding to truth, however bad it seems, works best. There in the truth is our hope. If we don’t believe that, we will have to deny or justify the problem, brazenly asserting that things are not what they are. That’s pride. So Habakkuk is quite right to say that the great opposites are pride and faith, and that the soul of the proud is not right within him (Habakkuk 2:4). Pride is always self-deception, the love of darkness and the abhorrence of light. John the apostle put this choice starkly as follows (1 John 1:6-10):
If we say that we
have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the
truth.
But if we walk in the
light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood
of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is
not in us.
If we confess our
sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and the truth is not in us.
Here we decide whether we follow Christ or an antichrist. Self-justification is to make God a liar – to deny him. A little further on, John makes it clear where that leads (1 John 2:18-22):
Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that they were not of us. But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things. I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and that no lie is of the truth. Who is a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist that denies the Father and the Son.
To “make God a liar” is certainly to deny Him. John is stating clearly that to claim that we have not sinned, in this way to become “a liar,” is to become one “that denies the Father and the Son” – an antichrist. “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things” applies “if we walk in the light as He is in the light.” But if we say that we have no sin - deceiving ourselves so that the truth is not in us – then when John says, “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things,” are we the ones he is writing to?
John puts it to us straight - whether we humble ourselves and tell the truth about our sin decides whether “we have an anointing from the Holy One,” or whether in our self-imposed darkness we join those who “went out from us, but they were not of us.”
Let’s see how this works in two modern examples – Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini.
1)
We see now that the Germans would have done better to look
honestly at their history, facing squarely the insecurities caused by centuries
of disunity encouraged by their neighbors, and the frailty of their new-won
unity, established by Bismarck through aggressive war against his
neighbors.
2)
In short, Satan weakens the nations, as he weakens individuals, by inciting them to behave arrogantly in order to feel strong. The fatherless kid gets to feel strong by joining a gang and doing drive-bys, and he ends up dead or in prison. The frightened nation gets to feel strong and secure by terrorizing other nations, slaughtering, robbing, and dominating them – until drunk with blood and glory, it reaps the terror it has sown, as God fulfills his word by abasing such pride.