Who is the Beast of Revelation 13? Ben Witherington

gyum atria what is it no it's not any kind of pizza it's a Hebrew word for the use of symbolic numbers one of the things you learn when you study not only Biblical prophecy but you still study early Judaism as Jews were fascinated with symbolic numbers and there are a variety of numbers that were symbolic numbers the number three number seven was the number of perfection the number ten the number twelve multiples of 12 like 144,000 gematria is not only the use of symbolic numbers but it's when you are actually assigning a numerical value to letters of the Hebrew or the Greek alphabet okay so let's deal with that famous number 666 in the book of Revelation though we have some variant texts that have it as six one six I'll explain that in a minute the way that gematria works is that you've assigned a numerical value to each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet okay and so let's take a name like the name David you would add up the numerical value of D and then of the equivalent of the letter V and then again of D and that would be the number of David the name David would have a certain numerical value based on the numbers you've assigned to the alphabet well that's what we're actually dealing with when we're dealing with 666 and here's the most interesting part there were plenty of coins minted by the Roman Emperor in the 1st century AD that had the following inscription which said things like nay Ron Kaiser Divi Philly a gusty and what that means is Nero Caesar the son of the divine now if you were to add up the numerical value of that particular inscription in Latin you would come up with the number 666 so who's mr. 666 well according to the author of Revelation he's a Nero like figure whether it's Nero in particular or or he's just the symbol for the persecutor of Christians the Antichrist figure who persecutes Christians or not but here's the other interesting bit the other inscription you might have in the eastern part of the Empire would read Nero Kaiser Divi fili Augusta in other words there would be the letter what we would call the letter n that's not there well if you add up the numerical value of that that's six one six okay that's where the textual variants come from from the eastern end of the Empire so either way whether it's six six six or six one six the numerical value of this adds up to a name and the name it adds up to is the name of Nero the emperor of the Roman Empire in the 60s it was the first famous persecutor of the church when Christians thought of an anti-christian figure they thought of Nero of course they did and some of them when Domitian at the end of the first century AD started doing the same thing they thought always Nero back from the dead here's Antichrist part 2 the sequel what we're being told is that this is a world ruler who is systematically persecuting prosecuting and executing Christians and that that is a very bad thing now the author of Revelation John of Patmos believes that human history in the future is not going to be rather different from human history in his own day he believes that probably human history is going to culminate with a really wicked ruler who looks a lot like Nero in his behavior towards Christians this is a description of the character of the person it's not naming the actual human name of the person it's describing the character of that final wicked ruler of the world and saying you better watch out because he's coming Christians you need to be prepared to be persecuted one of the things about the book of Revelation that makes it so actually incompatible with the dispensational interpretation of all this is that the author of Revelation is going to say to us be prepared to go through the tribulation be prepared to be persecuted and even executed Revelation is the book of the martyrs it's it's it even uses the Greek verb Nicolle which means to conquer or to overcome to refer to being faithful unto death and into death to the faith of Jesus Christ it's the book of the martyr so mister 666 one more time who is he he's a world ruler that's bad to the bone wicked through and through and looks a lot like the behavior of Nero or the character of Nero and what we know about him is he's going down for the count once and for all when the rider on the white horse Jesus comes

Channel: Seedbed

Views: 74,820

Rating: 4.5796766 out of 5

Keywords: Seedbed, Christianity, Asbury Theological Seminary, The Beast (Book Character), Ben Witherington III (Author), Religion (TV Genre), Book Of Revelation (Religious Text)

Id: B6TKrcTSf0A

Length: 5min 55sec (355 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 22 2014