What does 666 mean - part 2

Money? It can't be money. If it were money then the passage would literally read "no one could buy or sell without money." But they couldn't buy or sell without money back in Biblical times either, right?

Wrong. Coin money first came into use in the 7th century BC in one of the Eastern Greek provinces. By the first century AD coins were everywhere; but the old system was still everywhere too. The old system was barter, and if they had wanted to, someone in the first century AD could have gone their entire life without ever touching a coin. That's because first century merchants still accepted trade in kind (a bushel of grain for a skin of wine, etc.) as well as gold and silver by weight in the form of bars, ingots, or dust.

Money today is a radically different animal than the coins they slung around in ancient times. Our money is called 'fiat' currency, from the Latin meaning "let it be". It has no intrinsic value. Gold, on the other hand, had value to the ancient apart from its use as a trading instrument. It was shiny and malleable and you could make an idol out of it that looked more worshipful than some oddly shaped lump of clay. Basically, everyone wanted it. That made it valuable.

Fiat currency has value because we say it has value. There's no gold or anything else supporting its worth. It works like a share of stock. One dollar could be likened to a single share of the company called the United States of America. If the country somehow becomes less valuable than the shares become proportionately less valuable. Also, if the number of shares (dollars) increase, then they become less valuable since each one represents a tiny percentage of the overall nation. The more shares, the smaller the proportion that each dollar represents.

A "mark" is another name for a unit of currency, like the dollar. You and I can't buy a thing without some form of a "mark". Ah, you say, but I could still sell something without a mark. Actually no, you can't. Not legally anyway. if you traded for something else like a sofa you would still have to report the transaction as "barter income", with the sofa equalling the fair market value of the item in dollars.

With that in mind, the riddle is now solved -- almost. There's only one piece of the puzzle left and it's not specifically addressed in the passage. It has to do with what makes the beast so wickedly ravenous. Careful now. Like it says, this calls for insight.

An empire is an economic construct. It's a machine designed to take wealth from outlining areas and transfer that wealth to a central core. In Roman times this meant that the provinces were taxed with the proceeds going to a geographic center: the city of Rome. In modern times this means that the current empire draws wealth away from the majority and transfers it to a wealthy elite. But that's not the last the puzzle piece. It's background information.

The Mosaic law forbade Jews from charging interest to other Jews. Charging interest was called usury and it was looked upon as morally sinful by the church for ages after the Bible was written. Oddly, Jesus used the earning of interest as an analogy of a for the faithful use of one's resources in his parable of the good and bad stewards. And the Mosaic law itself rarely possessed double standards for Jews versus non-Jews, and never for issues of moral rightness. Jews were not allowed steal from, kill, or otherwise abuse foreigners. The only variations had to do with practical issues of society and economics. In this case, if Jews had been able to charge each other interest, the nation of Israel would have been left with a peculiar problem -- how to pay for it. Israel was a small nation bound on all sides by the ocean and well-established, often hostile, nations. This is a difficult concept to our modern minds, but without understanding it, a proper understanding of the mark of the beast is impossible.

For the last century and half or so our world economy has grown dramatically. We have been able to charge interest without causing widespread poverty because every year we produced more goods and services than the year before. You see, if you charge someone 8% interest you are saying in affect, "I expect you to create 8% more goods and services every year." As long as that's possible, through factors such as improved technology and a growing population (more workers to make more stuff), then you can pull the trick off. When that fails you have a problem. The Israelites could not have afforded to charge each other interest without forcing the majority of its people into debt slavery. After the reign of King David the country never grew, and technology in that day improved by only the tiniest of increments. It's people could not have sustained interest payments because the country itself had no good way of sustaining economic growth.

And there it is. The key element that makes the beast so detestable in God's eyes. Did you see it?

We are so deluded by images of a red devil with horns and a tail (images taken mostly from Greek paganism) that we can't recognize true evil when we see it. Israel couldn't grow because it's size was limited. It wasn't realistic. But Israel isn't the beast. The beast is a different kind of nation. It cares nothing for limitation or issues of so-called "reality". It wants what it wants. And what it wants, it takes. The beast wants to grow and expand and cover every corner of the earth. A God who calls a promised land good but then fixes boundaries on how large it can be? No! there is no God to the beast. No one tells the beast to stop. No Mosaic law. No law at all. The beast obeys no law but one -- that the beast must be given what it desires. And just as the Jews attached tiny parchments with the ten commandments in leather boxes called phylacteries then tied the phylacteries around their right arms on on their forehead, so the beast calls everyone to take its mark on the arm and the head. For the Jew, the phylactery was a visible symbol of the call to bind the law to their head (their thoughts) and their arm (their actions). To us it's called the American dream.

Many modern students of the end times believe that the mark is a sort of tatoo that can cause even a believer to go to hell. But the passage never says that the followers of the beast "lose" their salvation, only that they don't have it. It says this because saving faith and being marked by the beast are truly and completely incompatible with one another. You cannot worship the beast and God. You cannot make monetary wealth the sum goal of your life and still accept Jesus as lord and savior. yes, we all want to prosper, but if that is what defines you, if it's the most important thing in your life, then you may as well make a phylactery stuffed with money and credit cards and tie it to your forehead. The beast owns you.

No, the beast of the apocalypse is not the United States. The beast of the apocalypse is what the United States is about to become. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Right now my explanation for the beast is still a somewhat flimsy thing. You may think the US is corrupt to the core and already fits the beastly mold, or you may love the US and think that such a thing could never happen here.

But that's only because you don't understand Babylon.

Next we look at the Genesis chapter 11 and the question, what does Babylon mean?.