Speaker: Greg Sanders

Passage: Revelation 13

REVELATION 13 PT. 1

All right, go ahead and find your seat, grab your Bibles. We’re gonna go to Revelation 13. We were privileged and blessed to do a Men’s conference here this weekend. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was amazing. So, I’m definitely good and warmed up for teaching. 

TIMELINE FOR OUR REVELATION STUDY

I want to talk about our goals and our timeline in this Revelation study. A few questions have come like, Hey, how long are we going to be in this book? I’m like, Till Jesus comes back. Just deal with it. 

I don’t know about you, but for me, privately, this study has been life-altering. Just as a man, my theology is very different at chapter 13 than it was at chapter 1. I think it’s interesting when we consider that there’s a danger in– how many in here grew up in church, at some level? Let me see your hands. Okay, so let me talk to all the church kids. 

One of the dangers of growing up as a church kid is there’s all these concepts in the church that you just take hook, line, and sinker, and you never actually go study. What we’ve done in this study is we’ve kind of stripped all that back and began to ask questions: what does it actually say? What’s actually being communicated here? 

I will tell you, if you’re at Vintage and you’ve been at Vintage for a while, what we’re doing and trying to do here doesn’t get done. Churches don’t systematically study the Book of Revelation verse by verse on a Sunday morning. And there’s a reason why they don’t: because it’s really tough, it’s really hard to discern, and there’s oftentimes a little bit of pushback, like, Well, it doesn’t really feel like it’s relevant as a takeaway. 

See, and that’s where I have a major problem because all Scriptures is God-breathed. And if we 

are in the secret place gaining intel from the Lord privately, then when we show up to study the Scriptures together, we’re doing it as a collective for the purpose and the discipline of being the family of God to study the Scriptures. But it’s not our life source. Your life source has to be your study time. Has to be my study time. 

The hardest thing for me to learn in ministry was how to study the Scriptures and not want to preach because it became really easy as a young pastor to every time I’d open the Bible, I would think about how it was applicable to where I was going to teach. And it instantly took me out of being a disciple. What I have fallen in love with that we do here, we study the Scriptures together just to study. 

So, I am aware if you’re one of those people that are like, This has been a slog. Let me give you the four challenges that I see in this study for us.

Number one: time– it takes a minute to do this kind of study, and we generally only have about thirty of those on a Sunday morning. 

Relevance– keeping application high for healthy takeaway each week is really hard to do when you’re slogging through apocalyptic literature. 

Theology– the study of Scripture is intended to shape our theology. Yet, being shaped as you study is highly unnerving. Anybody else feel that? 

How many have been wrestling with their end-times theology a touch as we’ve been working through this? Yeah? Me too. Pastor Gary, been my pastor for a long, long time, getting ready to turn sixty-nine this year? Sixty-eight? Sixty-nine, dude, you’re looking fantastic. You’re wearing it well. 

But watching my friend, who’s nearing seventy, be able to say to me, Man, this is like flipping me on my head. I’m like, Okay, if it’s happened to somebody who’s been in the text for forty-five years plus, wow. What about the rest of us? 

And then completion– long, extended studies sometimes become really hard to stay engaged with. They really do. 

So here’s the goal,  and here’s the timeline: where possible, I want to finish out the Book of Revelation. My goal is to take no more than two weeks per chapter. 

Now, here’s the way we might do this: we have to be able to look at the history, the context, what was being said to the original hearer? We cannot just do what the modern church has done for fifty years, which is look at Revelation and ask what it means to our end time. If we do that, we will end up errant, believing things that are crazy and having people go, Huh? How’d you get there? I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be part of that. 

I’m also not willing to sacrifice any growth or understanding for us as a family. I’m not just going to plow through it because last time I checked, Jesus is the Lord of the church, the clock is not. I didn’t get as many as I thought, but that was good. 

I think the Lord led us to this book for this time. And I think if my journey and my history with Jesus is any indication, I will say that He always seems to lead us where we need to go before we need to be there. Like, i.e., what’s coming, we’ll look back and go, Oh, this was good that we went through that. 

So, all that to say, I think we have probably about sixteen more weeks in this book, that puts us probably end of spring. There may be some ways we go a little quicker. One of those ways is we’re talking about maybe filming the more contextual historical parts, putting them up on the website and just saying, Hey, we did a lot of work. We slogged through it, but we’re just going to show up and give you the application stuff. I don’t really know. My answer at the end of the day is I will promise to ask the Lord. That’s it. I’ll just promise to ask Jesus, and we’ll go from there. 

BOUNDARIES FOR UNDERSTANDING REVELATION

So, boundaries for understanding. Here’s why this is important. There’s a couple things that I want to lay out as boundaries as we head into these passages. Now I know this feels like I’m declaring a syllabus for a class, but really, as we head into this back half of the Book of Revelation, it kind of becomes a class. 

Our first priority in studying the Scripture is to discern– and this is for every place we study– if you’ve ever picked up the book of Psalms and the first thing you did was read the Psalm and ask what it meant to you, you didn’t do it correctly. 

When we study Scripture, our first priority is to understand and discern what the original hearer or reader would have understood. In order to do that, we got to dig into history, we got to dig into the regions they were in, and we have to do our best to find what their primary application was. That’s baseline studying of the Scriptures. 

I would offer this: in the charismatic circle that we live in, by and large, we’re terrible at this. If you go into the Anglican world, you go into some of the other disciplines, they’re really good at this because they’re never asking, What’s the Lord actually saying right now? The both/and is the balance, not the either/or. 

Our second priority then becomes to discern, How does it apply to us? And what applications are relevant to us? If we don’t know the prior, we’ll never properly attach the secondary. You gotta know what it meant to them first before we can know what it means to us. 

Here’s an example: let me bring up the very low-hanging fruit from last week’s teaching. Pastor Dustin shared a concept last week on the Rapture that might have stirred a few thoughts. He shared what we’ve been discovering in our study team sessions. 

Because the word Paul uses that we will take conceptually as rapture, that has become a theology on rapture, the word that Paul uses has a very specific meaning in Greek. He uses a uniquely Roman term, and it was a term that was used to describe a formal process. 

How many of you have ever watched the Gladiator movies? How many watched the second one just recently? There’s a scene in the second one where Caesar’s coming to the city with all this military might, and they march out to meet him, and then they flip around, and they go back into the city, and they throw a party.

That’s the word Paul uses, that there was this concept that the people of the city would come and greet the king, coming back in in his victory, they would have this meeting outside of the city, they would join together and return back into the city. That theology, through the years, began to be communicated as, Jesus is going to extract us from the earth, and we’re gone. 

If we’re willing to look at the Scriptural word that Paul uses and apply the original concept, it gives us a different picture, which I actually think is more baller, that the saints get pulled out, up into the air to meet with Him. 

Okay, can I give you a piece of Greg Sanders’ theology that is not Bible? Number one, I think Jesus could look like a Transformer. We don’t know. You’re like, What? Think about it. Go through Ezekiel. Look at all the metallurgy and all the things. I’m just saying. It’s just a fun sci-fi thing to do. It’s just a good brain hustle. Have fun with it. I’m not espousing any heresy or anything, just Jesus might look like Optimus Prime. That’s all I’m saying. 

Think about when He’s transfigured. He gets pulled up into the air, and He is supernaturally changed, image-wise, to the point where they don’t even know what they’re looking at, they’re freaking out. They’re like, We got to build a temple right now. We got to build a monument right now. He’s gleaming. 

All I’m saying is, if we just allow the two angel wings and the robes to disappear for a minute– because those don’t show up in Scripture either, how do we believe that? If we go back to the original idea, what I thought as we’ve studied this, I went, Whoa, wait a second. What happens if, when we get pulled up into the sky to meet Him, we’re instantly transfigured like He was, and then we return back in a glory-form that we didn’t even understand was possible? And the rest of the world’s walking around looking at glory-formed believers and humans, and you’re like, Whoa, there’s a disparity. Now, I think that’s pretty cool. 

Here’s what I would love to tell you: you can’t prove that doesn’t happen any more than you can prove the other does. Neither can I. So we have to have this gentleness with how we approach these things. Is my point to debunk Rapture? No. My point is to say we got into this and started studying, and I think all of us– Steve Anderson, Gary, myself– were sitting in a room, and it was kind of like, Guys, pump the brakes, what are we saying? And the point was we’re letting the language of the Scriptures teach us what’s going on. 

I would just submit that that simple tactical misunderstanding of what that word meant could have possibly led to theology that might not be true. My dad said this thing all the time I love: he’s like, I’m a pan-millennialist. A pan-millennialist. Because you got your pre-tribbers, you got your post-tribbers, you got your millennial-reigners, all these end-time theologians. 

Here was my dad’s answer: You know why I’m a pan-millennialist? Like, Why is that? Because it’s all going to pan out in the end. He’s like, I’m not in control of it, Jesus is. As long as I love Him, I should be okay. 

I think that’s the central message of Revelation. As long as I’m in love with Him, and my desire is for His appearing, I don’t care how He shows up. I don’t care if He yanks me and I go flying cosmic miles into Heaven, I don’t care. What I care about is Him. 

But the danger if I have this raptured-out mentality is we walk around living with this mindset, I just can’t wait till He takes us out of here. What if He’s not going to? What if we got it wrong, and His answer was, No, I want you to be in love with where you’re at because I put you there to shape it?

This is why it’s vital that we study this correctly because that just-holding-on-till-Jesus-takes-us mindset is kind of where the church has lived for about fifty years plus. When it comes to this book, we’ve treated the Book of Revelation like it’s a different thing. You have the Bible, and then you have Revelation. I think that’s a mistake. 

So we’re going to study this with these dual approaches: mining original context first, and then application. We’re going to learn the history– how we choose to do that, how we choose to communicate that, we’ll make sure it’s clear and understood. I want us to fall in love with Jesus and fall in love with studying the Scriptures. 

I also blatantly just cannot stand the pop culture pressure of, Here we are now, entertain us. And I love that we don’t have that. But sometimes to not have that means we gotta be adults and be like, All right, let’s dig in and study Scripture. Let’s go. 

REVELATION 13

So with that, let’s go. Revelation 13. “And now in my vision I saw a beast rising up out of the sea. It had seven heads and ten horns, and ten crowns on its horns. And written on each head were the names that blasphemed God. The beast looked like a leopard, but it had bear’s feet and a lion’s mouth! And the dragon gave him his own power and throne and great authority. 

“And I saw that one of the heads of the beast seemed wounded beyond recovery– but the fatal wound was healed! All the world marveled at this miracle and followed the beast in awe. They worshiped the dragon for giving the beast such power, and they worshiped the beast. ‘Is there anyone as great as the beast?’ they exclaimed. ‘Who was able to fight against him?’ 

“For the beast was able to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do what he wanted for forty-two months. And he spoke terrible words of blasphemy against God, slandering his name and all who lived in heaven, who are his temple. And the beast was allowed to wage war against God’s holy people and to overcome them. And he was given authority to rule over every tribe and people and language and nation. And all the people who belong to this world worshiped the beast. They are the ones whose names are not written in the Book of Life, which belongs to the Lamb who was killed before the world was made. 

“Anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand. The people who are destined for prison will be arrested and taken away. Those who are destined for death will be killed. But do not be dismayed, for here is your opportunity to have endurance and faith. 

“Then I saw another beast come up out of the earth. He had two horns like those of a lamb, and he spoke with the voice of a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast. And he required all of the earth and those who belong to the world to worship the first beast, whose death-wound had been healed. He did astounding miracles, such as making fire flash down to earth from heaven while everyone was watching. And with all the miracles he was allowed to perform on behalf of the first beast, he deceived all the people who belong to this world. He ordered the people of the world to make a great statue of the first beast, who was fatally wounded and then came back to life. He was permitted to give light life to this statue so that it could speak. And the statue commanded that anyone refusing to worship it must die. 

“He required everyone– great and small, rich and poor, slave and free– to be given a mark on the right hand or on the forehead. And no one could buy or sell anything without that mark, which was either the name of the beast or the number representing his name. 

“Wisdom is needed to understand this. 

“Let the one who has understanding solve the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666.”

JOHN’S VISION

So, what’d you learn about in church today? The mark of the beast. The first thing I want to call out is context. John makes a statement that I think we blast past, and it’s dangerous if we do: his statement is, “Now in my vision.” 

It has to be a groundwork concept for us because he’s having a vision or a dream. If we just step back and allow common sense to prevail, we understand that very few visions are fully or completely literal. Correct? They’re not even intended to be. 

How many of you have ever had strange dreams? How many have had really strange dreams that you think meant something? Most common place for us is to assume that what we saw in the dream wasn’t actually something we were seeing; it represented something. That is a psychological process in us as people. 

John saying, “Now in my vision,” is like a tell. He’s saying, I had a vision. Every Hebrew reader that read that would have known John is seeing something apocalyptic, he’s seeing something from another realm, I am not to discern this as direct and literal. Because throughout the Scripture, visions had attributes of symbolism through sign and picture. 

Consider the almond branch that buds and the question the Lord asks is, What do you see? He wasn’t asking for an almond branch that buds. He was asking, Do you understand the meaning of what you’re seeing? 

Consider Ezekiel. The Lord shows him a valley with a bunch of dry bones. And He says, What do you see? He’s like, I see dry bones. And then all the sudden, the bones begin to assemble, and they rattle together, and, you know, Elevation made a great song about it. That’s a worship pop culture joke, sorry. 

But did Ezekiel, at any level, expect that he was going to cross a mountain at some point in his life and see a valley full of dry bones actually happen? No, he understood what the Lord was saying is, I can do anything I want to do. How far do you want to push what I can do? There was symbolism in it. 

What I think John is declaring here, I think this declaration is intended to help set the reader into a similar mindset that they were to consider elements of the vision but mine it for greater meaning, which is we can take that and use that. 

THE TWO BEASTS

There’s two beasts that are revealed, who epitomize the kingdom of darkness on the earth. If we just take a step back, the most obvious thing the two beasts are dealing with is the kingdoms of darkness on the earth. 

I want you to consider five ideas that we see in here: these entities, or these beasts, seemingly mock and mimic the two witnesses that showed up in chapter 11; it’s almost like they’re the paradox to it. They receive authority from the dragon. I think the dragon– just going to go on a limb– think it might be the enemy. They perform signs and miracles, they seemingly resurrect from the dead, and like the two witnesses of chapter 11, they resemble figures that we find in the Old Testament, which are Leviathan and Behemoth. These are two beasts that show up in Hebrew culture. 

What would the early church have understood? I think, when we’ve been studying it, what we believe, is they would have seen this vision and understood that the beasts simply represent the assembled powers of darkness in the earth. 

John will do something from a literary point of view, where he’ll combine the many beasts and empires of Daniel’s prophecy– if you go back to Daniel 7, you can see that– into almost like this mutant representation of the enemy’s kingdom. And from an apocalyptic literature perspective, anyone familiar with Hebrew culture would have recognized that. 

So the beasts are therefore, in one sense, an institution– a superpower which exercises authority throughout the whole world– but yet the beasts are, in another sense, pointing to a person. What do I mean? In verse 18, John says the number of the beast is what? The number of a man. 

THE NUMBER OF A MAN

How many of you grew up in enough Pentecostal culture that you were terrified of the number 666? Like when you went to the store and they handed you $6.66, you’re like, Hand it back, keep a penny, please. I can’t take that. That’s marked money. 

I was in the stock market, I play stocks a lot. It’s my retirement job I’m working towards. The other day, one of my stocks was sitting at $6.66, and I almost got rid of it because there’s still this thing where it’s like PTSD from growing up to where I’m like, Oh, I don’t know what to do with it. 

You see, the most logical and direct understanding of what we see here in Revelation would be to discern that the beasts are representing real human persons. It would appear that John expects his reader to recognize who these men are. He says, “Wisdom is needed to understand this.” Wisdom in Scripture is always supernatural intelligence from Heaven. It’s never talking about demonic agenda. It’s always talking about the Lord needs to give you insight. 

“Let the one who has understanding solve the number of the beast.” When we say solve for a number, what discipline of education are we talking about? We’re talking about math. How many of you, even when I said that, thought of college again and went, Ugh. And he says, “Solve the number of the beast., for it is the number of a man. His number is 666.” 

So here we encounter the number, and throughout church history– more recent, let’s say– let’s call it throughout the last couple of hundred years. Let’s give the first one hundred and fifty years a pass, it’s really been the last fifty, maybe eighty, Christianity has put forward countless candidates for the identity of this beast. Whether it’s a Pope, or dictator, an American president, doesn’t matter. Google it. Wow, there’s a lot of stuff out there. 

I just want to caution us in this because there are several and severe interpretive problems with those theories, that interpretive position bypasses the Book of Revelation’s own interpretive lens. John’s letter was addressed to seven churches in the first century. While I believe all Scripture is God-breathed and relevant, John’s letter wasn’t addressed to us. It was addressed to them. 

And as the addressees of this letter, the cleanest understanding, the most logical place to land, is to understand that in this passage, John expected them to be able to discern the identity of the beasts. 

I want you to consider something: based on the early readers reading what John gave them, if they weren’t able to identify the beasts, then what Jesus was giving them in this revelation was impossible to do. Do we think He’s duplicitous enough to say, Solve the number, oh, by the way, you can’t, nana nana nana. That doesn’t make sense. It’s not who He is. 

So, therefore, we now– twenty-first-century readers– cannot apply meaning to this passage until we understand what it meant to them. We can’t. No matter how bad we want to, no matter how much the books we’ve read teach us. We just can’t. So, let’s consider the number of the beast with the few minutes I have left. 

WHO DOES THE NUMBER POINT TO?

How many have ever heard of the term gematria? Me neither. Dustin taught it to me. Technically, Dr. Ian Paul probably brought this idea across the table. If you remember when Dr. Ian Paul was here last year, almost a year ago, he was here in April of ‘24, this unassuming– for the record, if you really know who that dude is, he is rarefied air in the theology world. And he carries it like just a normal dude. Sat in my house, had dinner, was just one of the most casual human beings I’ve ever hung out with. 

And I went and googled him and looked him up, and I went, Ah, this dude’s like, really smart, wow. He’s like heralded for his understanding of the Book of Revelation. I don’t mean heralded by a couple people, I mean, like, globally; he’s considered the second foremost expert in the Book of Revelation in the world right now. 

We had him on this stage, and he acted like a Vineyard pastor, just chill and hanging out and making crazy concepts so easy to understand. I just remember the feeling because what I said to myself was, I don’t like teaching, and I’m never teaching again. That’s what was going on in me when he was teaching. 

Gematria is the spelling of words with numbers. Unlike English speakers who use a Latin alphabet and an Arabic number system, Hebrew and Greek and Latin speakers would use the alphabet to both spell words and calculate numbers. That’s called gematria. 

We actually use gematria every time we use Roman numerals. If I put “VI,” what did that say? You sure didn’t say vi? You sure I didn’t name my sentence vi? And if I put “III,” did I just stutter? No. No, we’re using those as symbols for numbers. 

Archaeology will teach us that in the cities of Ephesus and Smyrna, they’ve unearthed graffiti that dates to the same time period that uses gematria. What they found was like, you know, anybody ever been to the bathroom in a restaurant where somebody else decided to write something on the stall door? 

It was that kind of graffiti, and here’s what it said: I love the woman whose number is 1266. It’s code. Why? Probably because they didn’t want somebody to know who they’re talking about. So you’d have to discern and spell that out to figure out the name. It was a common practice that was considered maybe cutesy, fun, or at some level protected, some measure of secrecy. 

Ancient manuscripts of Revelation provide two numbers for this man. Just so you know, as a Charismatic believer, you have more than one number to be scared of. You have the number 666 to be terrified of, and 616. All of a sudden now, all those area codes are going to get a lot messier. 

Chapter 13 tells us that this man and his power rise from the sea. They possess seven heads, sit atop seven hills, wage war on the followers of Jesus, exercise authority throughout the earth, receive worship as a god, wage war on believers, have a name spelled either 666 or 616, and hold a nickname or an epithet of “the beast.” 

Okay, here’s what I would love to report. Within the first century, there actually was a man that all of those things could be said about. He met all of those qualifications. If you spell his name with gematria, it either spells 666 or 616. Same guy because you can spell it either way. 

Now, let me show you how you can spell it because I want to make sure you don’t think I’m making this up. I’m gonna go out on record, just so you guys know, Greg Sanders isn’t this smart; this is Dustin Scott. But if you look at the numerical value for 666, I want you to notice that you get N, and you get E, and you get R, and you get this mathematical equation that comes all the way down, and you get 666.

Show me the next one. Depending on spelling, you end up with 616. 

Do you know the name? You could probably see it, you can probably figure it out. The name of the person was Caesar Nero. Is that name familiar to anybody? Nero was one of the most vile emperors in the history of Rome, and he had this deep hatred for the people of God. 

So, if we consider the making of a beast, Nero ordered the destruction of Jerusalem and Judea in 67 A.D. Could it be that the imagery of a beast arising out of the sea and another beast arising within and occupying the land could be understood as the Roman naval invasion of Judea in the first Jewish and Roman war? Am I saying that’s what it is? I’m not. I’m sure saying that we better understand that’s what it might be. 

The early Christian bishop Papias of Hierapolis will tell us that a significant portion of believers within the churches of Asia Minor were Jewish refugees from the fall of Jerusalem. Therefore, the beast could easily represent both the emperor and his military power. 

Another thing, the Romans– not the believers, the Romans– nicknamed Nero “the beast.” That was his nickname in common culture. Here’s some quotes from early church time; this was from Cassius Dio: “Nero would fasten… boys and girls to stakes, and then put on a hide of a wild beast and attack them to satisfy his brutal lust…” 

Philostratus will say this in the Life of Apollonius: “Moreover, in traversing more of the earth than any man yet has visited, I have seen hosts of Arabian and Indian wild beasts; but as to this wild beast, which many call a tyrant, I know not either how many heads he has, nor whether he has crooked talons or jagged teeth… And again there is no animal anywhere of which you can say that it ever devours its own mother, but Nero is gorged with such a victim…” 

Due to Nero’s cruelty and paranoia, the Romans would use code to speak about him, not just believers. Nobody wanted to say his name because the dude was nuts. The ancient historian Suetonius would remark, “…We have a new number–” this is his quote out of The Life of Nero– “…We have a new number. Nero has slaughtered his own mother…” 

So, Jews and Christians of this period referred to Nero as the beast, and they also believed that he was possessed by the spirit of Satan. Goes to figure. After Nero’s suicide in 68 A.D., widespread rumors broke out in the Christian community and pagan communities of Asia Minor; they believed that Nero’s wicked spirit was going to transfer to someone else. 

They believed that that demonic spirit had passed on to succeeding emperors. Domitian was the emperor at the time of John’s letter, was revered in those days as the second Nero, which could be a nod to the idea of Nero resurrecting. 

I think we pulled the veil back on this as a study team and came to this conclusion: I think it’s a pretty accurate understanding to consider that for believers in the seven churches, the beasts of Revelation 13 were men, very likely to be named Nero and Domitian. What we do know is that John expected his readers to calculate, discern, and know the identity of the beasts. 

Class dismissed. Stand with me, please. We got another half to it, but we don’t have another half of time. We have half and half and less than half a time, if we want to talk in Revelation style. 

I hope that what that lands on in our hearts is a place to go, Okay, this is a slog, but this is good for us to know this so we can have foundational understanding of what we believe and why. That’s my heart, and that’s my goal. 

I’m going to pray us out of here and let pastor Gary finish us up. Jesus. Thanks for today. Thanks for just the sweetness of Your presence today. Lord, I think it’s fun when we can approach the Scriptures with this intensity, but yet there’s a levity to it and a lightness. We don’t have to be stressed out. 

Holy Spirit, we trust You to shape our theology. We trust You to lead us and guide us into all truth. Lord, my heart cry will always be and continue to be, be the Lord of the church, keep us from error, protect us. We love You. We honor You, Jesus’ name.