I am on a fascinating journey right now that I need to stay at. (Which would be a first for me.) A few years ago I wrote a lot of notes for a would be book I would call, Living in Babylon. I still have that stack. It’s impressive. At least looking at it impresses me.

This current one is something I am compelled to in our current time. It is a parallel reading of Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship and the Book of Revelation. With our current fresh wave of White Christian Nationalism cresting, the Spirit has me looking at these texts together and it is fascinating… and slow. (Well, slow for me.)

But I pause in the middle of my study to announce: I know who the anti-christ is.

Okay… so I don’t. But one of the most well known verses out of Revelation is about the mark of the Beast. His number is 666… and OH! the books that have been published, purchased, partially read and then sent to thrift stores! That number is as the sand of the sea!

So, NT Wright helps me with perspective (as usual) on “the number”:

The final verse of the chapter is one of the most famous in the whole book. It offers the greatest parody of all. It is more or less certain that the number 666 represents, by one of many formulae well known at the time, the name NERO CAESAR when written in Hebrew characters. (Many peoples, and many languages, used letters as numbers, as we would if we devised a system where A=1, B=2 and so on.) The monster who was, is not, and is to come looks pretty certainly to be Nero.

But the number 666 isn’t just a cryptogram. It’s also a parody. The number of perfection, not least for John, would be, we assume, 777. Some have even suggested that the name JESUS comes out, in some systems, as 888—a kind of super-perfection. But for John there is little doubt. Nero, and the system he represented and embodied, was but a parody of the real thing, one short of the right number three times over. Jesus was the reality; Nero, just a dangerous, blasphemous copy. We do well to recognize this, but we also do well to search our consciences and our own societies and enquire to what extent we, too, have been deceived by fakes posing as the real thing.

 Wright, T. (2011). Revelation for Everyone (p. 122). SPCK; Westminster John Knox.

This work has really caught my attention. I truly want to stay at it, fill up my notebooks, then somehow cull through all this and see if there is a discernible message I need to articulate. Then, one day, it will be a stack of notes in a file next to my first not written book, Living in Babylon.