Jesus truly speaks to you all today saying,
“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me”
There is a second command we have from God: “You shall not
misuse the Name of the Lord your God.” This means that we not to curse, swear,
use satanic arts, lie, or deceive by His Name, but call upon it in every
trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks.
God has many names. So which name, when misused, gets us
into hot water? Is it just God? Is it Lord? Almighty? Wonderful? Counselor?
High? The Name? Jesus? How many of God’s “names” do you use day in and day out
and not even think that it applies to God? In other words, you break the 2nd
commandment without even knowing it.
There is one name that everyone is way more obsessed about
and spends ungodly amounts of energy on. You are all thinking about it because
of our hymn of the day which was hymn 666. A funny hymn to be using during such
a high feast time as Easter, however there is a point.
That point is two-fold: 1) having that hymn is to reveal
your deep sin in regards to that number and what it is associated with and 2)
it is to show that not even a lowly, pitiful number can dim the Light of
Easter.
All that time spent thinking about the anti-christ and the
mark of the beast and nothing has come of it but false and failed predictions
and proclamations. Every single time someone is labeled as the anti-christ, it
turns out to be wrong and the world continues as it had been before, albeit a
little worse.
Even the number of the mark, 666, is so twisted by movies
and sensationalism, that we hardly have any biblical knowledge of it. Yes, in
the book of Revelation, the number 666 is given as the number of man and the
number of the mark of the beast, and something ot be avoided, but that is the
only place it is mentioned in the entire Bible.
What does that mean? It means that it is insignificant. Let
me explain. There are only a few times that 666 is mentioned in the Bible
elsewhere and it has nothing to do with the anti-christ or his beast mark. In
Ezra, there is a man named Adonikam who had 666 relatives come with him back to
Israel
Some get so excited over this because there is finally a
name closely attached to the number 666 so obviously, the anti-christ will be
called AdoniKam, which means “the Lord raises”, by the way, so its not really
an evil name at all. But that’s like saying, if you name your kid Judas, or any
variant of it, he will go to hell or if you name your child Jesus, he will save
people and that’s not true at all.
There is also the passage in 1 Kings where God says that “The weight of gold that came to Solomon yearly
was 666 talents of gold…” This is more significant than Adonikam, because
King Solomon also had a throne built that had 6 stairs, with 6 lions on one
side and 6 lions on the other. So we have the man, the beasts, and the number.
Was Solomon the anti-christ?!
Or is it going to be Adonikam? No, because according to
Nehemiah, Adonikam brought back 667 of his kinfolk, not 666.
Repent! The amount of time expended and the amount of energy
and money wasted on discovering why 666 is so important and who it might be in
the future would be better spent in the Church of Christ and would be a boon to
any church. Besides, if you think that a silly number, written on paper or forehead
or hand, would cause the Almighty to reel back from you in disgust, you are not
paying attention to Jesus, but to men.
God is not tricked by a number anymore than He is tricked by
your good works. He knows His own and His own know Him. If not even death or
life or angels or principalities, or things present, or things to come, or
powers, or any other created thing can separate us from the love of God that is
in Christ Jesus our Lord, then what is so scary about 666?
I’ll tell you what: unbelief. It is the fear in the you that
your sins will overpower you and mislead you. It is the fear that some thing,
even a silly thing like a tattoo or a number, could be the thing that rips your
fragile faith away from you. It is not the number. It is not the mark. It is
not even the beast on the outside. It is the beast inside.
The reason there is nothing special about the mark or the
beast is because we are already marked and we are already in league with the
beast. Ash Wednesday preaches this to us when we smear ash on our foreheads. We
are marked with sin. We are marked with death. This is the lot of the sinner.
We don’t always see those marks, neither do we always see
the marks of salvation that we have been given. Jesus bears those, in His body,
from the nail, spear, and thorn. We bear our marks in the same way: the body.
For what the Lord does to the soul, He also does to the body.
What is that, that is done to the body in Church? It is
washed, it is subdued, it is fed. The Lord does not leave out the body when
dealing with salvation, which is part of the reason why getting the mark is
such a big deal. It means you do not believe that what the Lord has done to
your body is enough.
But let’s look at some more 6s in the Bible. Moses led
600,000 men on foot out of Egypt
Noah was 600 years old when the earth was flooded and he was
saved too. There are angels called Seraphim, means “burning ones”, that serve
the Lord night and day. They have six wings and are associated with God, not
the beast. In the parable of the Sower, the seed that fell into the good ground
produced 60-fold.
Finally, 6 is the number of labor, for in 6 days God created
the whole earth and the heavens and all the host of them. While, in the Sower,
the sixes are swallowed up in the good seed and the good soil, in Creation the
six days are swallowed up by the 7th, the Sabbath, and finally
brought to completion in the 8th day: the Resurrection.
Jesus, the Good shepherd, knows us. He is cognizant of us
and, by virtue of His faith given to us, we are cognizant of Him. Which simply
means, O little flock fear not the foe, who madly seeks your overthrow. For it
is faith that overcomes the world the one who believes by faith.
For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is
the victory that has overcome the world – our faith and belief that Jesus is
the Son of God. So while 666 is a name and a mark to be avoided, it simply does
not hold a candle to the Name of Jesus and the marks of His Church in the
Sacraments.
In keeping the 2nd commandment, then, we should
not over-sensationalize or blow up the meaning and significance of 666, because
it is not worth it. Jesus hardly places emphasis on it. In fact, its quite similar
to how He describes the Last Days, when He says if you’re out in the field,
don’t go back for your cloak or if you’re on the roof, don’t go inside for your
shirt, when the Abomination of desolation comes.
He says to just run away from it. It doesn’t matter what it
is or who it is, just run. Run in the opposite direction, which is towards the
Name of Christ, given to a man, Who has purchased and won a new name for you,
with His precious, innocent Body and Blood.
666 is the scarier number because of our sin and our own
doubts and unbelief. But the Name of Jesus the Christ is stronger still.
Because of this, the church flees to it every Sunday and every other chance she
gets. She knows that god’s Will and promise are directly tied to the Word and
Sacraments and that “…it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God Who has mercy"; the God Who has mercy on us through His Son, on the cross.
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