This is a follow-up to a post from July 5th of last year. You can see that post here. In that post I compared the "sign" of Deuteronomy 6 with the "mark" of Revelation 13. Over the past year, I've continued to reflect on this idea, and today I thought I might offer an update.
What was Israel to bind on their hands and have as frontlets between their eyes?
The Great Shema, or, as Jesus referred to it, the Greatest Commandment.
"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might" (Dt. 6:4-5).
One thing that I failed to notice and therefore mention in my original post is that this statement is not only at the center of Jewish and Christian piety, but it is also the very heart of monotheism - particularly, the belief that the One and Only True God is Yahweh.
In other words, the Shema, the "sign" that was to mark Israel, was a worldview that centered on worshiping the One and Only True God.
And that sets us up nicely to contrast this sign with the mark in Revelation. Chapter 13, verses 16-18 describe this infamous mark, and this passage states that the mark "is the number of man, and his number is 666."
I'm not into numerology, and I also don't want to speculate about the significance of the hand and the forehead either for Israel or in the case of the Mark of the Beast, but one thing does seem clear to me:
Where as the sign of Dt. 6 is a worldview centered on worshiping the One and Only True God, the worldview of those who accept the Mark of the Beast is centered on worshiping the Beast, and the number corresponding to this Beast is "man's number."
To the point. Could it be that the Mark of the Beast is the secular humanistic (man-centered) mindset that exalt's man's reasoning, man's ability to understand the created order, man's power, and man's "morality" over and against the reasoning, explanations, power, and morality attested to by the One True God in Scripture?
What do you think?
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