Stephen Terry, Director

 

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Still Waters Ministry

 

 

 

 

The Seal of God and Mark of the Beast: Part 1

Commentary for the June 10, 2023, Sabbath School Lesson

 

 

"Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. " Revelation 19:19-20, NIV

A question I was often asked as a young pastor was "What is the Mark of the Beast?" This was because either someone had come across Revelation, chapter 13, while reading their Bible, or they had received something in the mail telling them to beware of receiving the Beast's mark. I was always uneasy about answering that question because those asking were typically doing so for one of two reasons. First, they wanted to know who had the mark so they could point them out, or second, they wanted to be sure they had not received the mark so they could consider themselves among the saints. However, apart from Revelation, when we go into the gospels, Jesus makes no mention of such a mark as a way of determining who is saved or lost. He sets an entirely different criteria, one that we would do well to learn.

Since the last half of the 18^th century, Seventh-day Adventists have taught that the Beast power is the Papacy. As one can imagine, this has resulted in little love between Catholics and Adventists. While it was before my time, in the 1980s I was told by older members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the city where I attend church, a city with a Jesuit university, that when a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist would come to town and preach this perspective on the Mark of the Beast, sometimes dead animals would be left on the front steps of the church as a warning. But far from intimidating the speaker, this was pointed to as the type of persecution the papacy was famous for and was seen as confirmation of the evangelist's message.

This attitude toward the Catholic Church may have some foundation with Martin Luther's "Ninety-Five Theses" publicly nailed to his church door. It certainly spared no effort in pointing out evils present in Catholicism. His efforts to reform Catholicism were opposed by the papacy and contributed to the Protestant/Catholic schism. Hundreds of thousands died in the resulting bloody wars that followed as the Papacy sought to re-establish supremacy and Protestantism resisted. The strife was further aggravated by the contesting parties being backed by civil governments and the armies they controlled. Civil government began enforcing religious dogma as far back as the 4^th century. After more than a millennium of doing so, they were not amenable to solving things any other way. This had a profound impact on the Western mindset. Because of all the bloodshed, the hatred between Catholics and Protestants ran deep. Religion allied with government became suspect, and when the United States Constitution was written a prohibition against the government enforcing religious dogma was included. That it was listed first in the Bill of Rights reveals how important the new American nation considered it to be. When North America was colonized some of the colonial governments were enforcing religious belief to the extent that the Puritans of New England were known to jail and even murder Quakers who came within their domain. The state of Rhode Island was founded in the 17^th century because the Puritans drove out Roger Williams for his non-conforming religious toleration. In response, he established a colony based on religious toleration and separation of church and state, setting the precedent for that First Amendment.

A leopard cannot easily change its spots, however. When a flood of Irish immigration washed upon the shores of the United States in the 19^th century, and the number of American Catholics increased proportionately, the old animosities were rekindled. Often disguised as a thin veneer of racism where they were refusing to hire, rent to, or feed the Irish, the reality was that it was their evident Catholicism that made them the targets of good, Protestant Americans who were here before them. The new immigrants quickly learned that things in America were more like the Old World than many Americans would admit, and that those with political power made the rules. As they learned how to achieve and maintain power in America, more or less of a truce came about in the civil arena, with invectives limited to weekend homilies. Most were able to relegate these tirades to church affairs and maintained their distance from such ideas during the rest of the week when civil government and laws held sway.

It was in this milieu of Irish immigration and the ensuing anti-Catholic turmoil that the Seventh-day Adventist Church came into being. It would be unnatural to expect them to not be shaped by that when they witnessed on American streets battles that they had heard of in the religious wars of Europe. Here was the Beast raising its head again. It must be the Time of the End. The Apocalypse must have seemed very imminent to them a hundred and fifty years ago. When we couple this with Adventism's Shut Door Theology which taught that the door to salvation had been shut to everyone except Adventists, it must have looked like the whole world was wondering after the Beast. This appeared especially true when Seventh-day Adventists adopted the biblical Sabbath, something which almost all of Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, had tossed into the dust bin. This made it easy to see the entire world in black and white, those who honored the Sabbath and those who did not. This continues to be a line of demarcation between those who follow the Beast and the faithful for many Adventists.

It did not help when some civil governments, ignoring the Constitution, established Blue Laws that prohibited businesses from opening on Sundays. When I was in the Army in Texas in the 1960s, that state had Blue Laws that prohibited the sale of certain items on Sunday. Department stores set aside certain aisles for the banned items and covered those shelves on Sundays to prevent sales. That is no longer the case as many of those laws were set aside because of court challenges based on the First Amendment. However, in Adventist minds, when they saw the Blue Laws going into effect, it seemed the next logical step would be to outlaw observance of the biblical Sabbath. The Beast was about to reign and put his Sunday mark on everyone. But instead, everything went the other direction, and except for a few murmurs now and then about re-establishing those Blue Laws, there is not imminent apocalyptic persecution of Sabbath keepers. Does that mean there won't be? I think everyone will answer that question for themselves. Those who want to believe that there will be a national Sunday law with transgression being a capital crime will continue to believe that despite any evidence to the contrary. But I believe Jesus sets up a far more likely scenario for deciding between the saved and the lost in a parable in Matthew, chapter 25.

The essence of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats is the contrast between those who are self-centered and those who are selfless. Of course, it is not as black and white as the parable paints it. As with all things the normal distributions is a Bell Curve. A minority will fall at either extreme of the curve. Some will be narcissistically selfish, while some at the other end will be sacrificially selfless. So, what happens to the majority of us who fall in between those two extremes? Jesus makes it clear that selfless love for others is the goal, but how much selfishness is allowed in the mix to still be saved? Will being mostly selfless be enough? There is an answer, but we need to realize what that answer is whether we are looking at this parable or the Seal of God versus the Mark of the Beast.

We tend to see the Mark of the Beast only as black or white. People with the Seal of God, the Sabbath for Seventh-day Adventists, are saved, but people who either have the Mark of the Beast in their foreheads, meaning they agree completely with the Beast, or that have the mark in their hands, meaning they are going along with the Beast for expediency while not really agreeing with the Beast's agenda, those are all lost. The problem with that view is it makes no allowance for grace. It seems perfectly natural for someone exiled to the barren island of Patmos to respond with a tome that says, "God is going to get you for that!" But it doesn't seem to fit with Jesus who taught that love is the highest good. John certainly picked up on that in his epistles. Its absence from Revelation causes it to look like someone else was writing it. Martin Luther did not want to include it in his German Bible, because he felt it didn't belong, later relenting and including it. That decision leaves the rest of us to struggle with the dissonance of John's "God is love" and the bloody death and destruction of Revelation. The symbolism of that book is cryptic which allows leeway in interpreting it in such ways as to impugn and vilify one's enemies, real or imagined. But if we use that flexibility to hurt others socially or physically, God's love does not cease and his grace continues to offer us a better way.