The Beast or the Best
Thinking about beasts is neither my favorite business nor
pastime. However, I recently found myself fascinated by the appearance and influence
of a beast John saw in Revelation 13. The beast turned communities away from
Christ, influencing them to instead place allegiance in godless human philosophies and
values that eventually proved self-destructive. The beast controlled religion,
politics, commerce, law, education, technology, entertainment, media and arts.
It used its sensuous appeal, and brutal force to achieve its ends.
We face similar worldly forces in our societies today. Paul
warns of a force that brings people into captivity through dominating how they
think (Romans 12:2). Like the beast, this force has many heads and faces making
it difficult to identify and defeat. It is like when one face is losing, more faces
suddenly appear. If you succeed in chopping one head off, the other heads only
seem to grow stronger. The force mutates like the HIV virus and assumes new
forms of the same species. As a result, it is resistant to drugs. Similarly,
solving problems in society is often elusive. Needs and ills are often increasingly
harder to eradicate. When effort is made to eradicate them, different ones
appear with new versions of the old.
The Church’s existence is a scourge in the domain of the
beast. One of the beast’s heads had a massive scar. Christ inflicted a
victorious blow on the beast at the cross (Genesis 3:15) and will eternally
displace it with His glorious
Kingdom. We are highly privileged to be
ambassadors of this Kingdom. The multi-faced beast culture has affected all the
dimensions of society. The witness of Christ must therefore be relevant, and
multi-faceted to influence every people group and sector of society (Mathew 5:14-16).
Ultimately, where the world’s ungodly culture brings to bondage, the Kingdom of God
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