Revelation 13:1-4

The Rise of the Beast

A sermon by Pastor Joe Haynes

Preached on March 17, 2019 at Beacon Church

In John 21, Jesus asked Peter 3 times, “do you love me?” Peter’s reply was passionately felt. Jesus gave him a mission then, to be a pastor, to feed the sheep, not out of duty but out of love. But over the centuries it seems rare to find a pastor who feeds the flock because he loves Jesus. What happened to that love for Jesus as the motivation for obedience, for our mission, for enduring suffering? 400 years ago, one pastor said that the reason the Christian religion turned into something formal, and institutional, was because people no longer had a personal experience of the power of the Gospel.[i] Do you know what I mean? When you know your sins are piled high, but the Word of Jesus Himself promises you it is forgiven! When you know you deserve eternal punishment because of how you have spurned the Holy One of God, and still He hears your cry for mercy and gives you love you don’t deserve! That kind of love changes a person. When you deny Jesus not just three times, but 30,000 times, and He reminds you He died for your sin so that you can now live and follow Him. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! (1 Jo 3:1) But God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us! (Rom 5:8) The love of God changes a person. But somewhere along the way, that genuine faith went missing. Men hired to feed their flocks could not understand how the mere preaching of Good News has power to save souls and change lives.[ii] Though John 1 says that to all who believe in Jesus’ name, He gives them the right to become children of God; though John 20:31 says that it is through the Good News John wrote, by the words themselves that you can believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and by believing have life in His name! Though Romans 10:17 says that saving faith comes from hearing the Word of Christ; and Galatians 3:3 says those people were foolish to forget that it is hearing the Word with faith that saves and that makes believers holy--Yet for centuries pastors and priests who had never experienced that “hearing the Good News with faith,” and who could not understand what the Scriptures mean by that, came up with all kinds of other ways to reproduce the appearance of faith they read about but had never felt for themselves. So they turned away from the preaching of Good News, to making images and icons and idols so that people had something to worship, and they called that “faith.” What about you?

Revelation 13 is part of the same single vision as chapter 12. It is a continuation of the story that began with the Woman and the Dragon—the true spiritual Church and her enemy, the Devil. We saw in chapter 12 that the fulfillment of those predictions in church history, brought us up to when Christianity was legally established as the official state religion of the Roman Empire shortly before the year 400. But we saw in chapter 11, that there were always true Christian churches preaching the Gospel and following Jesus, even though the state Church became more and more hostile toward those troublemakers. And we saw that in the year 1514, after a brutal war of oppression, there were no more churches opposing the ruler of the Roman Catholic Church. Rev 11:7 said “the beast that rises up from the abyss will make war on them and conquer them and kill them.” That word, “abyss” is especially used in the Old Testament of the depths of the sea.[iii] (Gen 1:2, the Spirit of God hovered over “the deep”—that’s the word.) The Beast rises from the deep. Rev 13:1-4 predicts this using four key verbs: the beast rising; the dragon giving; the people worshipping. The purpose is stated in verses 9-10:

9 If anyone has an ear, let him hear:  10 If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.  (Rev. 13:9-10 ESV)

Do you hear? Or have you already “shifted from the hope of the Gospel” (Col 1:23) Are you sure you worship Christ from your heart? Like Jesus asked Peter, do you love Jesus? To help you have vv9-10 faith, let’s see how the beast rose in 3 stages: a) Rome rose up from the chaos of the nations; b) a pastor rose up to rule a kingdom in Western Europe; c) the bishop on the throne rose to rule all churches.

Stage 1: A Beast rose from the chaos of the nations

In chapter 12 we saw there was a spiritual war going on when in history, the pagan emperor Licinius warred with the Christian emperor, Constantine, for control of the empire. Paganism lost, and the devil lost his control over the government of the Roman Empire. The “dragon” was thrown down “to the earth” (11:10); he was “thrown down to the earth” (v13). Where? “to the earth.” So if the earth is the Roman Empire, in verse 17, the Dragon goes off to the edge of the earth, on the shore of the sea and waits for another opportunity to destroy the true Church of Jesus. In 330, Constantine moved the capital of the Empire to the edge of the sea, in Constantinople, the frontier of the Roman Empire, far away from the city of Rome. And within 150 years, Rome was overrun by foreign invaders. “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads,” (Rev. 13:1 ESV). Often in the Old Testament, the nations of the earth are called “the seas”[iv]—picture the waves of the sea breaking through the walls of that city.

…Who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples, (Ps. 65:7 ESV)

Ah, the thunder of many peoples; they thunder like the thundering of the sea! Ah, the roar of nations; they roar like the roaring of mighty waters! (Isa. 17:12 ESV)

2 Daniel declared, "I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea.  3 And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. (Dan. 7:2-3 ESV)

In chapter 8, in the first four trumpet judgements, we saw that Rome fell as wave after wave of barbarian attackers brought that ancient city to its knees: Alaric and the Visigoths, Genseric and the Vandals, Attila and the Huns, Odoacer and the Herulis. By 500, Rome was no longer ruled by Latins. And those foreign invaders divided up Western Europe among themselves and ten new kingdoms arose: Sir Isaac Newton wrote a whole chapter tracing the history of each of those ten kingdoms as they rose and fell, but he noticed that from that time forward, the old Western Roman Empire was normally divided among ten kingdoms.[v] E.g., Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Allemani, Burgundians, Visigoths, Suevi, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Bavarians, and Lombards.[vi] It’s important to note that in chapter 12, the old Roman Empire was symbolized by the dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and diadems on his heads. Here the beast symbolizes the new Roman Empire, with a difference: the horns come before the heads, and the diadems have been moved to the horns. At this time, Rome wasn’t ruled by one of the seven forms of government from the past, it was now ruled by the ten barbarian kingdoms. And on its heads, “a blasphemous name” (the KJV rightly translates “name” as singular, as the Greek has it).

Remember those verses in Daniel 7, about the lion, bear, and leopard rising from the sea—those ancient empires before Rome? “And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear's, and its mouth was like a lion's mouth,”  (Rev. 13:2 ESV). Rome was the fourth Gentile empire to rise up out of the sea and fulfill Daniel's prophecy. This new beast is described as a composite—the ESV Expository Commentary says, "John sees these beasts consummated in Daniel's fourth beast, which is the beast he describes here (probably Rome...)."[vii] That beast, in Dan 7:25, speaks against God. So the question is, when and how did the new 10-kingdom commonwealth of Rome come to be led by a blasphemous king?

Stage 3: A pastor-king was worshipped

Verse 4 predicts the way people would come to worship the Beast, but verse 3 tells us why: it says people “marveled as they followed the beast” because of the way one of his seven heads came back to life: “One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast,” (Rev. 13:3 ESV). 

And instead of following Jesus, European Christianity followed the Popes, for over a thousand years. John Gill writes with a kind of amazement and says, “they ascribe deity to him, calling him our Lord God the pope, God, and a God on earth…”[xiii] The canon law of the Roman Church decreed that the pope is above every secular king or power on the grounds that Constantine called the pope “God”—“…and it is manifest that God cannot be judged by men.”[xiv] So people called the Pope, “our Lord God the Pope.”[xv] Listen to what the prophets of God said about God:

• "Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?" (Exo 15:11 ESV)

• "Who is like the LORD our God, who is seated on high," (Psa 113:5 ESV)

• "To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?... To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One." (Isa 40:18, 25 ESV)

Now see how shocking verse 4 is: “And they worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?’” (Rev. 13:4 ESV).

It is a heart-breaking irony, isn’t it? that the Roman Popes claim the right to rule on the grounds that they are successors to the Apostle Peter. When Jesus asked Peter, “Peter, do you love me?” And Peter said, “Yes Lord, you know I love you.” And Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.” The impostor in Rome claims to hold Peter’s office. The impostor also claims to be our Pastor and King. Peter told pastors, in 1 Pe 5, “shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory…” and, “…clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’,” (1 Pe 5:2-5). Do not give him your worship. We have a Shepherd in Christ the Lord, one who did not come to be served, but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). Are you still attracted to the large buildings, and gold, and expensive clothes of the priests and popes of Rome? Are you impressed by the ceremonies, and incense, and rituals in their cathedrals of earthly glory? Or is your heart captivated by the personal sacrifice, and mercy, and love, and grace of the Creator Himself who humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, and died in humiliation in order to impose His own body in between the wrath of God and your guilty soul? The Saviour ransomed your life with His. Follow Him. Love Him because He first loved you.

“9 If anyone has an ear, let him hear:  10 If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints,” (Rev. 13:9-10 ESV). Do you have ears to hear? Would you rather die than denounce the Saviour you love? Do you believe in Jesus? Have you tasted how good His Gospel is, and experienced the joy of His salvation? Or do you need to repent today of a Christian religion that has the form but no substance? Has your faith been unhinged from the Word, from the promises of Jesus Himself? Is your Christianity only a copy of the real thing?