Yeah, well again, my name's Sam.
I'm a student pastor here.
Uh and yeah, I have the super thrilling task of talking about the mark of the beast with you.
So sorry, uh I think is the right thing to say there.
Uh and yeah, happy moral day.
You're probably thinking, man, I almost went to the lake today, but instead I came to church.
Uh and yeah, here we are.
So welcome.
And also, I had a little bit of a cold this week, so my throat kind of lost itself for two days, which was perfect timing to preach in Revelation.
So I have a little water bottle, tiny water bottle, that I will be sipping periodically.
Uh, and I just want to say, when I sip it, it will be quiet for a second, which might make you feel awkward.
But I want you to know I don't feel awkward when I take this sip, so we'll be good.
There'll be a couple sips throughout the sermon, all right?
So we'll be we'll be great.
Um but yes, so in 2003 there was a man named Jay Spores who uh was drafted by the Detroit Tigers as a pitcher.
Uh he worked his way through the minor league system, pitching several mediocre seasons, but then in 2008 and 2009, he killed it.
Got his ERA down to like 2.27 uh one of those years, which is really strong for those of you that don't know baseball.
That's real good.
Um then he was finally moved out to AAA, which is like the section right below Major League.
So he was working his way up, made it to AAA, and then wasn't pitching particularly well, but kind of got lucky and got a slot to come pitch in his first Major League game.
So it's June 22nd, 2010, and the Tigers were heading up to Queens to play the New York Mets.
The Tigers were coming out strong with Justin Verlander as their starter.
Um, but after several iffy innings from him and an hour-long rain delay, they said, Okay, let's bring in our big guy Jay.
All right, so Jay's coming in.
It's the third inning, okay?
And at this point, the Tigers were down 3-0, okay?
So Jay just needed to come in, get him out of this hole, not give up any more runs, maybe, maybe pitch two, three innings, right?
Just get him out of this hole, and then we'll get the relievers in, right?
So it didn't go as planned.
So Spores got his first batter to one ball and two strikes, and then pelted him in the shoulder, uh, as a nervous pitcher does, right?
Next batter, Jeff Francor, hits him right in the hand.
Not only putting him on first base, but then bringing a run in, right?
So after that, next batter, Ruben Tejada, hit a shot down the third baseline that scored two runners.
Okay?
Then Reyes hit a single up the middle to score another run.
He struck a guy out somewhere in the middle of that, and then Angel Pagan hit a two-run single to finish at 8-0 Mets.
So instead of letting Spores finish the inning, he was pulled, resulting in probably one of the worst pitching debuts in modern history.
Uh here's his stat line.
Uh so for my people that don't know baseball, he hit he faced seven batters, he hit two of them on the body, he uh gave up five earned runs, he did strike out a brother, uh, and then pitched a third of an inning-ish, and finished with a 67.5 ERA, uh, which is yeah, about the worst pitching debut in modern history.
Uh so now this morning, you might be thinking, what on earth does this have to do with revelation?
Glad you asked.
So we have our resident 24-year-old student pastor getting his revelation debut.
And so the prayer is that he does not get uh 67 ERA.
So if y'all just want to pray with me, uh, and then we'll dive in.
So let's pray together.
Father, we love you.
Uh, thank you for the gospel.
Thank you that our sin has been placed on the shoulders of Jesus and that your righteousness is placed on us in the Lord.
Because of that, we're now fully, freely, and forever forgiven by the blood of your Son.
So, Father, I pray this morning that as we open your word, uh, you would speak to us.
Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would be poured out uh in this room today to give us clarity and understanding and conviction about the gospel of Christ preached through Revelation.
Father, I pray that you would stir our hearts to love you more.
Pray all this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, we've been studying Revelation for a few months now.
Uh, and so just to catch you up a little bit, uh, we have a few things that I just want to remind you of before we really dive in.
So I got four things for us.
So, first, Revelation is a letter written to a specific group of people at a specific time and in a specific place.
So, what that means is that we don't read into it our 21st century uh situation, but we read out of it the way that it was supposed to be written.
Um, and then number two, Revelation was written by John to set the Christians on fire with courage and confidence that Jesus is victorious.
That's a big, that's a big point.
It's not written to scare them or make them question their faith, and therefore it's not written to make us afraid or make us question our faith.
So he, John is reminding them and us that Jesus is coming back soon.
That we don't need to fear, that Satan has lost, and it's a call for us to continue walking in this faith that we have known.
Third, this book is not a code to be cracked.
We don't need uh scientists from NASA to come crack this cipher of revelation for us.
The God of the Bible inspired the Bible by the power of the Holy Spirit to be clearly understood by even the most common person.
So this isn't some crazy code, uh, Da Vinci code per se that we need to figure out.
Last, there are a lot of views on this book and what it means.
There's been a lot of ink spilled, and a lot of churches uh that have suffered trying to figure it out.
But so we want to just kind of give you the view that we're gonna be teaching through because it informs every single passage in Revelation.
So we're we're doing these three words that are big, so it's called the Covenantal Amillennialist View.
Um, didn't think you'd get that on Memorial Day weekend, did you?
Uh so covenantal amillennialist view, and here's what we believe.
And here's what this says The end times are not some far-off future event.
But this view, and what we believe, is that the end times began at the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ and are going on presently until he returns.
So, what that also means is that there isn't a literal thousand-year reign that we see in Revelation 20.
There isn't some weird code we need to crack before your friend gets sucked up to heaven and you're like, oh, where'd my friend go?
Right?
And there isn't a weird tracker or tattoo that we need to watch out for, and that's good news.
But what it does mean is that we are presently in what the Bible would say are the end times.
And what that means is that there is a spiritual reality all around us, that there is a war going on that the Bible speaks of, and we most importantly believe that Jesus has won.
So therefore, there's no fear for the Christian.
And since Jesus has won, since Jesus has the victory, that means that you have the victory.
And that's the good news.
And hey, if you hold a differing belief than us, we want to say, we're glad you're here, and we welcome you to hold that belief.
This is a secondary issue, which means you don't have to believe a certain thing to get into heaven.
Praise the Lord.
So this morning, we're gonna go all the way from Revelation 12.1 to Revelation 14, 6.
So here we go.
Are you ready?
Here we go.
So here's the basic outline: my type A's.
Here we go.
This is my one, two, three where we're going.
All right, so we got two signs, two beasts, and one victorious lamb.
Amen?
Amen.
So, in any high-level sport like soccer, basketball, football, or strategy is vital, watching game film is paramount to success.
So, my wife, who played soccer at Kennesaw State, I married up, sure did.
Uh, she said that they would have film meetings throughout the week to figure out the strategies and schemes of their opponent.
So, what they would do is a couple hours each day, they'd watch game film to understand how the offensive strategy of their opponent would look like.
In the NFL, many players watch as much as two to three hours a day getting ready for their upcoming game.
But no one matches the GOAT, Tom Brady, right?
Tom Brady credits so much of his success to his literal obsession with game film.
Even Gronk, kind of joking, kind of serious, said that uh Brady would watch as much as 40 hours a week of game film.
Why?
Because he wanted to master his opponent.
Watching game film is what took Brady from good to great, and even further from great to probably the greatest quarterback of all time.
So we're in an interesting part of Revelation here, what a lot of scholars call the interlude of Revelation.
And it falls right in the middle of the letter, and it's three chapters, uh, right in between the trumpets that we saw last week, and then what you're all really excited about, the seven bowls of God's wrath, right?
So that's coming.
So we get this nice little middle passage.
And here's why John gave us Revelation 12 through 14.
Here's the point to understand our enemy.
Understand our enemy.
See, here's what's true about all of us.
All of us, and especially those who follow and believe in Jesus.
We have a very real enemy who hates us and is seeking to destroy us.
And gosh, he's good at it.
He's got 2,000 years of practice.
And so, my goal for us today is just to get to know him a little better, to figure out kind of some of his schemes and strategies so that we can continue to walk freely in the gospel of Christ.
And we'll see some game film of Satan as we kind of see.
Uh, and so, like, and John writes in Revelation 13 and 14, we can walk in endurance, right, to the end, even though uh there are attacks all around us, right?
Paul in 2 Corinthians 2, 11, uh he writes this so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs.
So, let's watch some game film together, church.
So, Revelation 12, we have our first sign.
Remember, we got two signs, two beasts, one lamb, right?
So, first sign.
This is a woman who gives birth to a son.
It's a crazy nativity story, right?
We don't see this much on Christmas Eve.
Uh, and he gives birth to a son, and this son will rule over all the nations with a rod of iron.
So clearly, this woman's Mary.
But she's not only Mary, as we'll see.
John sees a woman who is no ordinary woman.
She showed up, you would be afraid.
Uh, and she is clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and with a crown of twelve stars.
Now, if you know your Old Testament even a little bit, you you might be thinking of a story that's coming to your mind right now.
Remember our boy Joseph, back in Genesis, right?
Big Joe, he had this dream uh that he had this dream and told his brothers, bad move, and sent his brothers into a frenzy, selling him into slavery, right?
If you've had a dream like that, I haven't.
Uh but this is his dream, Genesis 37, 9 and 10.
Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, Behold, I have dreamed another dream.
Behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.
But when he told it to his father and his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, What is this dream that you have dreamed?
Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?
So in this passage, the son is Jacob, his father.
The moon is Rachel, his mother, and the stars are his brothers who represent the people of God.
So we have two conclusions to this.
This woman that we see in this first passage here is Mary, but again, it's not only Mary.
She also represents the people of God.
In other words, she represents us.
Right?
So Revelation is written primarily in the genre of apocalyptic literature, which means that it's not necessarily supposed to be taken literally.
But what the point is, is that these signs that we see, this woman, and we'll see the dragon here in a second, we don't just see them as literal.
We see them as signs, which means they're pointing to something else.
The signs are not the point, they point to something else, they point to a message.
John wrote in this way to hook us, right?
Just like a good movie intro, it's to hook us and grip us emotionally, in a way far deeper than just, hey, look, it's Mary, right?
These signs are supposed to point us to the point.
And here is the point from this first sign, two signs.
We have an enemy who is seeking to devour us.
So the first sign is this woman who represents both Mary giving birth to Jesus and also the people of God.
And we see that this woman is the primary target of this mad red dragon, right?
And last note, we we still we saw in the passage that Russ read this kind of 1,260 days.
I don't know if you remember seeing that.
We've seen it all throughout the book.
We see 1,260 days, 42 months, another phrase is a time, times, and time and a half, right?
All that means is the idea of the short period of suffering before Christ returns.
It's not a literal 42 months from our view.
It's not a literal 1,200 days, but it's symbolic of the time from Jesus' resurrection to his return.
And John's all that John's saying is, he's coming soon, man.
He's coming soon.
So in 1996, the Denver Nuggets were playing the Utah Jazz on a brisk November night in Salt Lake City.
The Jazz had won seven in a row and were coming in hot uh into this game.
They were hype, they were connecting shots, they were connecting plays, but the Jazz came out cold.
So cold, in fact, that they were down 36 points at halftime.
So bad that their own fan base booed them into halftime.
Uh pretty rough.
But during halftime, I don't know what happened, but something switched pretty severely.
The Jazz were in fighting mode now.
So much so that they were taking shots from everywhere.
They were just going for it, right?
Don't hold back, take shots, make shots, right?
So they came back swinging.
Long story short, and what is considered to be probably the most impressive comeback in NBA history, the Jazz outscored the Nuggets 71 to 33 in the second half, ultimately winning the game 107 to 103.
So a couple verses down from where we see the woman giving birth to the son, we see this dragon, right?
This red, angry dragon.
And this is the second sign.
So I got two thoughts about this dragon.
Number one, this is what we see about him.
There's gonna be a war in heaven where the devil, the dragon, is defeated and literally bounced out of heaven.
I love that.
And then number two, the urgency of the devil to go down swinging and bring down anyone he can since he knows he lost.
This is the second half for him.
The second, the last quarter, even.
He knows he lost.
He knows his time is short.
And he's gonna go down swinging.
He's not going out without a fight.
So the questions that we're left with is why is there so much injustice in the world?
Why is there so much pain and depression?
Why is there racism, slavery, sex trading, school shootings, cancer?
Because we have a very real enemy who knows his time is short.
And he is doing everything he can to take our allegiance and affections away from Jesus and place it on him.
There's one major way I think John explains the attacks of the devil in this passage.
And I think it's one primary thing, and it's accusation.
We see it in verse 10.
It says this, and I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come.
For the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.
Now, before we continue, I'm gonna take my sip, all right?
Sip one.
You can tally if you want.
That's fine.
I think there's three ways the devil tries to accuse us.
So we're just gonna work through them here.
And they're all rooted in deception or lies.
So, number one, guilt.
The devil wants us to feel that we have outsinned the grace of God, and in doing so, that we would run away from God rather than toward him.
He wants us to feel that we are still guilty before a holy God.
He wants us to feel it even though we're innocent, even though the courtroom has announced us innocent.
And then number two, God's goodness.
He wants us to not just have wrong beliefs about God, but he wants us to feel that God's not good enough.
He wants us to feel that God won't be enough in the day of trouble.
Kind of like Eve in the garden.
And number three, access.
He wants us to feel in our gut that spiritual maturity, a good prayer life, understanding the Bible, whatever all that means, is only for the spiritual elite and not for the common person.
And so, because of that, he fills us with lies that, man, we I just won't ever be able to understand the Bible.
I'll never know how to pray, I'll never know how to, whatever.
Those are the lies from the devil, and they are accusations that go right against what God says is true about us in Christ.
So those are lies, and so I'll just say those things so we know these are some of the ways he comes after us.
And this leads us right into chapter 13, the two beasts, just what you were waiting for.
So here's what I think John is doing in chapters 12 and 13.
He's giving an image of a false trinity of Satan.
And the goal of this false trinity is to mimic the true trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because that's all the devil can do is mimic.
He can't come up with anything new.
All he can do is mimic what is true and good.
So here's the counterfeit trinity that we see.
We see Satan, which is in verses 1 through 17 of 12, the Antichrist, which is chapter 13, 1 through 10, and the false prophet, which is 13, 11 through 18.
So again, this whole unholy trinity is meant to take each person of the trinity we believe in, mimic them, make them evil and wicked, and take our affections away from Jesus in the Trinity we believe in.
That's the goal.
So here's how they work.
Satan mimics the uh Satan, the dragon, mimics God the Father.
He has some level of power and authority.
The first beast, the Antichrist, mimics God the Son.
His object is to capture the loyalties of men and women and take them away from Christ.
And then lastly, the false prophet, the second beast, mimics God the Holy Spirit.
And his object is to show off the beauty of the Antichrist.
Alright, sip two.
Ready?
Struggling, can't lie.
Alright, let me be really brief here.
There's been a lot of ink spilled about chapter 13, as you can imagine, because we have the mark of the beast.
But I'm gonna keep this really simple, as simple as I can.
So, with our view, in the amillennial view, we don't believe there will be a literal dragon that's gonna come one day and pour and rain fire upon us.
We don't believe there will be a literal beast that will come up out of the sea or out of the earth to destroy you.
But we do believe there is an actual enemy of ours, right, Satan, who is seeking to pull as many Christians away from Jesus as he can.
And these two beasts that aren't literal beasts, but figurative symbolic beasts, are meant to take us away.
And these are the two schemes.
So these two beasts are not some future scary thing we watch out for, but they are a present reality that we need to be aware of.
And that's what I think John is getting us to.
So, beast number one.
This beast looks almost identical to the beast in Daniel 7, back in the Old Testament.
This beast in Daniel 7 and in Revelation represent the nations that rule over the known world.
So in the Old Testament, it would have been like Babylon, Assyria, etc.
Now, to these churches that received this letter, Revelation, it would have been Rome so clearly to them.
They would be thinking, Rome, Rome, Rome, when they hear about this beast.
Because these people had witnessed some of the most brutal persecution any people group has ever seen under Emperor Nero in the 70s and 60s.
Christians under Nero were thrown inside the carcasses of dead animals, sewn up and fed to dogs.
These Christians were dipped in wax and oil, put on poles, and set on fire to light the parties of Nero.
So as John talks about these beasts, the Christians are just thinking Nero, Nero, Nero.
Rome.
And while it does signify Rome, again, for us, it's not only Rome.
The beast, to a certain extent, is political power.
Whether that's a nation, a people group, some sort of weird Illuminati type thing, right?
I don't know.
But the whole purpose is this the beast is trying to get us to bow the knee to anyone except for Jesus.
That's the whole goal.
And Rome at the time, the Caesars and the other emperors like Nero were truly so narcissistic that they believed that they were to an extent divine.
And so what they would do in Roman law, every citizen would have to go stand before a picture of Caesar, burn a pinch of incense, and say, Caesar is Lord, including the Christians.
So we see some political things here that John is getting at.
And so we can't say the Bible's not political because it's explicitly political for this people group.
When Paul in his writings says Jesus is Lord, that's a political statement against Caesar.
So John here is saying the world is going to try to steal your affections and allegiance away from Jesus.
And it's going to be convincing.
It's going to sound right.
So the whole point.
We just have to be discretionary where we place our hope.
That's the whole point.
No president, no man or woman can heal our nation or our world.
No broken person can do that.
Only an act of the living God can.
And that's something we have to figure out.
So we don't bow the knee to a president or a political party.
We bow the knee to Jesus.
Number two, the beast's main job, the second beast, is to make the first beast look better, right?
Just like the Holy Spirit, whose goal is to make Jesus look beautiful.
The second beast's main goal is to make the first beast look beautiful.
So as we see in this passage, this beast can perform signs.
Whatever that means, I don't know.
I'll be honest with you.
I don't have a clue.
This beast can deceive in a very convincing way.
And this beast ultimately is really good at getting people to worship the first beast.
He's really good at it.
Which again, get our eyes off of Jesus and onto the beast.
That's the goal.
Alright, now this is the moment you've all been waiting for, I know.
The mark of the beast.
Here we go.
Revelation 13, 16 through 18.
Also, it causes all the beast, uh, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.
This calls for wisdom.
Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
Whew, awesome.
I'm going to begin by talking about what the mark of the beast isn't, in order for us to understand what it is.
Mark of the Beast, the number 666, is not a code to be correct, a special number that only the spiritual league can figure out, the COVID-19 vaccine, and your cell phone.
Okay?
It's not a tracking device that Elon Musk is going to put in your forehead, okay?
So we see where the mark is put in this passage, right?
In the forehead and on the right hand.
So if we look in biblical terms, what those two things mean.
The head symbolizes ideological beliefs, right?
So it's something that we believe actively.
And then the hand is the way you live out these ideologies.
Action based on belief.
So, with the mark of the beast, here's the whole point.
Here's the whole point.
If you are living in the light of the gospel, resting and growing in the grace of Jesus and growing in your beloved identity as a son of King Jesus or daughter of King Jesus, you have the mark of the Lamb on you.
But on the flip side, if someone is walking in obedience to the world, in rebellion against the God of the universe, and in submission to their sin, that's the mark of the beast.
In other words, this mark is not a literal mark.
It's not a literal tracking device or tattoo we need to watch out for.
That'd be the enemy's way smarter than that.
Way smarter than that.
It is the defining feature of our beliefs and actions.
That's what the mark is that he's talking about.
So, you can breathe.
If you believe in Jesus, you don't have the mark of the beast on you.
Thank the Lord.
Now we're gonna land with our one victorious Lamb here in Revelation 14.
So Revelation 14, one through five.
Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand who had his name and his father's name written on their foreheads.
And I heard a voice from heaven, like the roar of many waters, and like the sound of loud thunder.
The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders.
And no one could learn that song except the hundred and forty-four thousand who had been redeemed from the earth.
It is these who have not defiled themselves with women for their virgins.
It is these who have followed the Lamb wherever he goes.
These have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.
This is our hope.
The victorious Lamb, the one Lamb who rules and reigns over all kingdoms, who every president bows their knee to, to whom every knee will bow one day, and to whom, and upon whom your sin, your shame, your guilt, your past, your addictions, your present sin was placed on his shoulders.
And as he died on the cross, the righteous requirement was satisfied.
So that now, as he rose from the grave, your sin is now fully, freely, and forever forgiven by the blood of Jesus.
So now there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
There's no fear of revelation that we need to watch out for a kamikaze fighter pilot coming down and raining fire on you.
We don't need a fear.
But we see it in verse 1 there, right?
Where is Jesus' name and the Father's name written?
On their foreheads.
We don't avoid the mark of the beast by fear or by calculation or not getting a vaccine.
We avoid the mark of the beast by walking in the grace of Jesus, knowing the truth of the gospel, and submitting to the truth of his word.
That's the mark of the Lamb.
I want to close with this quote from Charles Spurgeon.
He was preaching from this passage that we just listened to.
And this is what he said.
As the needle, sorry, last sip, gotta do it right.
Can't do my boy Spurgeon wrong.
As the needle once magnetized continues to seek the pole, so they who are once touched with the love of their dying Savior are sure to remember it and cannot long be turned in any other direction.
As for the dragon's horns of power, the blood, the power of the blood is far greater.
Since we have been redeemed by Christ from under the power of Satan, he cannot regain his hold of us.
His power is broken.
As to the crowns which he wears, what care we for them?
We are delivered from under his power by being redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, and Satan can never again have the rule over us.
As for the energetic influence which is figured by his tail, he may quench the very stars of heaven and pull down the most brilliant professors and make them fall to the earth as apostates.
But he cannot harm us, for because of the blood of Jesus, we are secure by the power of God through faith unto salvation.
Cling to the cross, dear brethren, for there you are out of the reach of the old serpent's venom.
He may hiss, but he can do no more.
Let's pray together.
Father, we bless you in the name of Jesus.
Thank you for the cross.
Thank you for the victory.
That's ours by the blood of Jesus.
Father, I pray that man, this would speak to us.
Pray for the one who is anxious or weary in this room that they would be comforted.
Pray for the grieving, Lord, that they would be comforted.
Pray for the addicted and those stuck in sin, Lord, that they would find freedom.
That the chains of those have been set free.
Father, pray that you would stir our love for Jesus and that we would see the ways that we bowed up the knee to things other than you.
I pray that you would stir our hearts to bow the knee all the more to Jesus.
I pray this by your grace and for your name.
Amen.