To the Christians of the first century, this may well have called to mind the myth that the Emperor Nero had not in fact committed suicide, as he was reported to have done, and that one day he would return to lead the Roman empire again. Certainly the experience of the early church was that they seemed to be rid of one persecuting emperor only to get another. Nero had scarcely gone before Domitian was on the throne and the persecution continued. The beast was healed from the deadly blow he seemed to have received.

To us in the twenty-first century, it is a sobering commentary on the way that revolutions seem so often to result in worse tyrannies than those they were intended to overthrow. Russia loses the Tsar to gain Lenin; Germany loses the Kaiser to gain Hitler; Africa overcomes colonialist oppression only to experience Marxist oppression. In his book, Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler relates the story of an old Bolshevik who fights the good fight of Marxism, only to find in the hour of victory that he himself is imprisoned as an enemy of the people. It is always thus; the beast is smitten only to recover. It has demonic recuperative powers. This is why you can't defeat the beast by force of arms. The best you can achieve militarily is a brief respite from its tyranny; but it will be back, uglier than ever. Invincible – that is the first characteristic in John's description.

Secondly, John tells us that the beast is, surprisingly, popular:

I guess there is no greater political mirage than the illusion that democracy is a cast-iron barrier against the abuse of power. Sadly, people are neither as astute nor as upright as our political idealism would have us believe. The general public are quite capable of voting the beast into power, as indeed of course the German people voted for Hitler in the 1930's. Indeed, one of the astonishing ironies of modern history is the way that our obsession with elections has repeatedly legitimised the rule of tyrannical individuals and parties who thereafter dignify their regimes with the title 'Democratic Republic'. The fact is that people admire power more than they admire righteousness. They will gladly worship Satan and his allies in exchange for military security; hence the rhetorical question, “Who can make war against him?” People are much more afraid of terrorist attack or nuclear war than they are of Satan – more concerned to save their skins than their souls, and for that reason the beast never has a problem making himself popular.

But the most distinctive thing about the beast is that he is totalitarian.

Notice the key word that occurs both in verse 4 and also in verse 8 – men worshipped the beast.

That is the clue to the beast's identity. A government can be mighty militarily and popular democratically, without necessarily being demonic. The characteristic by which the beast gives itself away is the attitude of total obedience which it demands of its citizens. It is not satisfied that men should “fear God and honour the king” (I Peter 2); it wants total and unconditional submission of the will. In a word, it wants “worship”.

In this connection, it is possible to distinguish two quite distinct theories of government flowing right through human history. On the one hand, there is the constitutional model of government. In this view the state exists to serve the interests of the individual members of society; very often a constitution is drafted defining the rights of those individuals which the state must defend and clearly expressing the limits of power which the state must never exceed. Such a government sees itself as accountable ito a higher law than itself. It may not explicitly identify that law with the law of God, but it acknowledges that it is limited by a moral boundary ; there are certain things that are uItra vires, that is beyond its legitimate powers. It cannot make arbitrary decrees; it can govern only in accordance with those principles of justice enshrined in the constitution.The United States is perhaps the clearest example of such a constitutional model of government.

On the other hand, there is the totalitarian model of government. In this view, each citizen abdicates their individual goals for the superior good of society as a whole. It is as if the state is conceived as a living organism with a will of its own. In fact, the eighteenth-century French philosopher, Rousseau, called it 'the general will'. This collective purpose legitimately overrules the private conscience of any individual within society. A government mandated by the 'general will' sees itself as absolute, above any law except its own. Citizens of such a state may perform any kind of atrocity and yet be immune from moral responsibility if they are simply following government orders; for they are like the limbs of a body obeying the brain. A good recent example of such political theory in action was the Nazi government in Germany.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, I am prepared to argue that these two types of government identifiable in history, constitutional and totalitarian, are the same polar alternatives which Romans 13 and Revelation 13 represent within the biblical theology of politics: government as God wills it versus government as Satan perverts it.

In the Old Testament, we find an archetype of both. An early model of totalitarian government is Egypt, where Pharaoh was adored as god. His will was the will of god, and people were enslaved as a result. A very clear opposite is provided by the constitutional government of Israel. Significantly, Israel's king had no statute-making power. All he was there to do was to enforce justice as defined in the national constitution, of which he was the custodian (see Deuteronomy 18).

According to the Bible, then, political liberty is not a question of monarchy versus democracy, of privileged elite versus universal franchise. The way in which a government is selected is really of only minor importance; the vital thing is how that government perceives itself and is perceived by the peop!e. The “mark of the beast” is the demand to be worshipped, to have absolute power, to be answerable to no-one. The beast represents the deified state.As John puts it:

There is no doubt that John could see the Roman empire here. It was Julius Caesar who abolished the republican constitution of Rome and made it into an absolute dictatorship, and the emperors that followed him, increasingly arrogated divine titles to themselves. Domitian, at the end of the first century, even went so far as to demand that men should address him as Dominus et Deus – Lord and God. No wonder John speaks of the beast uttering proud words and blasphemies – you can just imagine how Domitian's edict was viewed by the Christians!

But the beast doesn't have to use religious language in order to blaspheme; it doesn't have to call itself 'god' in order to give expression to this deification of political power which it represents. So long as the obedience it receives is unquestioning and unconditional; so long as its authority is absolute, acknowledging no constitutional or moral limits, then what it is called is irrelevant; what matters is that the beast is playing God, demanding that individuals surrender their private consciences to the will of the state.

The question must be how do people fall for it? Surely this kind of tyrannical system can be sustained only by the most vicious coercion? But John is shrewd enough to realise that that is not so. People, in the main, voluntarily submit to the beast's authority, even though it represents the most exploitative imperialism imaginable.

There is no room for any individual self-determination; no room even for a little bit of nationalistic independence when the beast rules. Yet people voluntarily submit to it. No-one who has seen the films of those adulating masses before Hitler in the 1930s can doubt the insight that John is demonstrating. But how is it done?That brings us to the second part of the vision.

2. The techniques of godless politics

In chapters 19 and 20, this second beast is also called the false prophet, and that gives us a clue to his identity. If the first beast from the sea represents the totalitarian state, this beast from the earth represents the state religion that bolsters the beast's regime and persuades people to yield their allegiance to it.

No doubt, to John's contemporaries, this meant the paraphernalia of the emperor-cult, with its impressive priesthood, ceremonial and pagan hocus-pocus. A later generation of Protestant martyrs would identify it with Roman Catholicism, a religion that kept the papacy in its position of unparalleled political influence during the medieval period.

It is perhaps a little more difficult for us today to identify what this second beast represents, because over the last few centuries we have tried very hard to secularise politics. This was motivated by the desire for toleration. The experience of religious wars and persecution taught us that peace could be maintained only when religion was kept out of politics. In America, religion was excluded by law; in Britain a sentimental attachment to tradition led us to retain the established church, but in a typically British compromise we made sure that the bishops were consigned to a convenient corner of powerlessness called the House of Lords. Either way, what has emerged in the last couple of centuries in the West, is the secular state – politics with no religious banner to wave.

At least, that was the theory. But what has actually happened is not that religion has been banished from politics, but that new godless incognito religions have grown up instead – humanism, socialism, fascism, marxism, capitalism. These ideological systems of thought may not use religious terminology, but they fulfil religious functions. They provide people with a world-view and a value-system. They are the modern ideological counterparts of the official Roman religion of John's day, the philosophies by which the false prophets of totalitarianism in the twenty- first century seek to rationalise their tyrannies and commend their systems.

John gives us some interesting insights into the sort of techniques that the false prophet uses, whether or not he has an outwardly religious form.

The first is a deceptive public image:

The ideology of the beast always has to work hard at PR; not surprising, given how ugly a beast it is! So the beast has a front man, who looks harmless and respectable enough on the outside – like a lamb. It's the words, rather than the image, that is so pernicious. Doesn't that ring bells? There are plenty of books in university libraries across the world that fall slap-bang into this category; academic-looking, respectable books, but what they say has led to totalitarianism.

The second is a propaganda campaign:

Yes, he will use advertising too: an impressive display of power. In an unsophisticated age this may consist of supernatural wonders, conjured by magic. In an age like ours, where supernatural power is usually viewed with suspicion, the miracles of modern technology no doubt take its place. But the purpose is always the same; to convince the public at large, by carefully staged advertising stunts, that the beast can deliver the goods. It can solve the energy crisis; it can equip the army and defend us against the menace of international terrorism; it can revive the economy. Whatever you want done, it can do it, The beast is omnipotent – Vote for the Beast!

The third thing is a cult of personality:

One of the most fascinating features of totalitarian government is that it always needs a face. People cannot worship a political theory, so when a political party wants to gain total and unconditional obeisance from a people, it must have a charismatic leader. In the Roman empire, this was done by making statues of the emperor and leaving them all over the place, as archaeologists have discovered. More recently, it has been gigantic wall-posters, like those of Stalin, Lenin and Marx that used to adorn Red Square. Nowadays it is television; the leader must be good on the box, because now the beast's image can come alive and talk to the people, even in their own homes. Never before has the false prophet had access to such intimate and effective methods of propagating the personality cult of the beast. It is almost irresistible.

But some people do resist it. Some are not fooled by the propaganda and don't submit to the brain-washing of the media. To bring them in line, more old-fashioned techniques are still available, Cruder, maybe, but nevertheless effective:

Here is the reign of terror. Once failure to conform to political orthodoxy becomes a capital offence, then you really know the beast is in the driving seat. And if that does not work, then there is the 'starve them into submission' method:

Personally, I think of all the characteristics of the ideology and methodology of the beast, this is perhaps the most disconcerting to us in the West today. For what John is describing is the bureaucratic control of the economy The beast not only holds the reins of political and military might, it monopolises the market-place too.

I wonder if socialists, in their mad rush to nationalise everything and centralise economic power, really understand what a beast they may be creating, all in the interests of distributive justice, of course!

I wonder if capitalists, with their vast corporations, always seeking growth, mergers and take-overs, realise what a beast they are creating, all in the interest of economic development, of course!

I wonder if modern governments, with their huge computers, processing men and women by social security numbers and income tax numbers, realise how many people are being controlled today. No-one may buy or sell without the mark of the beast. Yes it's true! Without a trading licence or a union card, they cannot even earn their daily bread.

John is not talking about something remote from our experience then, or something that was only true of fascist Germany or marxist Russia; this leviathan is growing even within our democratic structures of constitutional government. The dehumanising tyranny of capitalist big business politics, and the paternalistic tyranny of socialist big brother politics: these are the products of the beast's techniques. Big is beautiful, it says; till it turns humans into the pawns of its economic planning, and scientific theories of management. It is the cunning and the subtlety of the false prophet that makes us think that it is the other people who have got a problem with totalitarianism, not us. The beast may be a lot closer than we think, and the false ideology that convinces us of its right to rule is far more impregnated into our subconscious mind than we dare to admit.

That brings me to the third point that I want us to look at in this chapter.

3. The Christian response to godless politics.

I mentioned earlier that one of the characteristics of the West, in the last few centuries, has been the attempt to separate religion and politics in the name of toleration. Most of us will have imbibed that idea with our mother's milk. That is why we find it so difficult to understand a Khomeini in Iran, or a Paisley in Ulster. It seems so incomprehensibly unenlightened to us, so reactionary, to make a political issue out of religious preferences. Why can't they live and let live, we say.

However, without wishing to endorse fundamentalist extremists, it is not quite as simple as that. It may be very convenient to keep religion and politics in watertight compartments, and some religions may be content with such an arrangement; but for other religions, Christianity among them, it is impossible. Christianity cannot possibly accept a situation in which it is denied the right to comment on political situations or regimes.

The reason for this is quite simple: the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith is that 'Jesus Christ is Lord'. Not merely 'Jesus Christ is my Lord', as if Jesus' dominion was restricted to the private lives of Christian believers. No, Christians confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord – the King of everything and everybody. If people are ignorant of his rule, they must be told – that is evangelism. If people reject his rule, they must face the consequences – that is judgment.

There is no way that such a creed can avoid having political implications. In particular, it is impossible for Christians to surrender to totalitarianism without denying to Christ that proper authority within the civil sphere which their confession of the Lordship of Jesus demands.

The Roman empire persecuted the Christians precisely because they would not say, 'Caesar is Lord', and insisted on confessing instead, 'Jesus is Lord'. That's why the beast always persecutes the church. If Christianity were a religion that could keep its nose out of politics, it would be quite safe. But it cannot, not if it is true to its creed. Authentic Christianity must be a politically aware religion. Others may surrender their will to the totalitarian state, but Christians cannot, for they know the rule of the beast is illegitimate.

Oddly enough, I suspect that is the significance of that strange number 666. Enormous quantities of ink have been spent trying to work out what 666 signifies. Mostly it has been assumed that it had something to do with the fact that the characters of the Greek alphabet act not only as letters but also as numbers. So, any word could be added up and a numerical value assigned to it. We know that people in the period of the early church liked to play this game – its technically called gametra. There is an interesting example found in the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, where some young lover has written, 'I love her whose number is 545' – so much more romantic than just carving one's initials, and much more intriguing!

So is 666 some cryptic representation of the name of one of the Roman emperors, like Nero, for instance? A lot of people have tried to force the connection, but unfortunately the arithmetic is not terribly convincing.

Those who consign all these prophecies in Revelation to the distant future interpret 666 literally and insist that its mysterious meaning will only become obvious when the time comes.

My opinion, for what it is worth, is that 666 is not strictly an example of gametra at all. It is a symbolic number. According to gametra, you see, the name and titles of Jesus can be made to total 888, and this was well known in the first century. In fact, we find in one of the apocalyptic books that John would almost certainly have known about, a reference to precisely this fact. It is not impossible, then, that 888 operated as a code for the name of Jesus within the circle of John's persecuted friends. And if that is so, then perhaps the number of the beast, 666, is simply a comment, interpretable only by those “in the know”, on the inferiority of the beast to Jesus. He is not 888; he is not even 777; he is 666! In other words, it is a kind of apocalyptic way of blowing a raspberry at the Roman emperor without risking immediate death! This is the number of a man, says John significantly, not of a 'god'.

Whether I am right or not about this, I have no doubt that John's primary purpose in this chapter was to make Christians aware of the spiritual implications of the politics of their day. You must recognise the beast, he says, and stand against its rule. You can't separate religion from politics; you can't confine your Christianity to some little orbit of personal freedom called 'My Private Life' .You must identify yourself publicly as one who does not wear the mark of the beast, but rather the seal of God's elect.

For you belong to the one, of whom the beast is just a crude zoological parody; your names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life.

Notice John does not urge believers to take up arms against the beast. That may be the meaning of verse 10, where one reading of the Greek is: If anyone kills with the sword, with the sword he will be killed'. This could be a direct reference to the non-violent strategy Jesus commended to his disciples just before the Cross (see Luke).

John does not even tell the believers to form an opposition political party. It is always tempting for a persecuted church to seek relief by attempting to gain a measure of civil power for itself, whether by armed resistance or by adopting some kind of political alignment. But whenever the church identifies itself with a particular political cause in that way, it takes a huge risk, as history has often proved. The state, at its best, is always a spiritually ambiguous institution. Any liaison between church and state is likely, therefore, to become an unholy alliance, in which the church either corrupts herself or finds her reputation compromised. Ironically, she may even end up playing the role of false prophet to yet one more manifestation of the beast, as happened in Europe during the medieval period.

But if the church is not to take up arms or become a political party, what can she do?

She can suffer; says John.

To refuse to worship the beast is civil disobedience, a treasonable offence in a totalitarian regime. As a result, there are times when the only place where Christians can maintain their integrity is either in prison or on the scaffold.

It is by thus enduring suffering that the church must make her stand in the days of the beast. This is not a pacifist ploy; it isn't, for instance, the kind of moral blackmail practised so effectively by Mahatma Gandhi, and rather less honorably by IRA hunger strikers. The suffering of the church is not a political strategem; it is a spiritual witness.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that such a witness has had an effect on history. The Roman empire was right to fear the growing Christian minority. By adopting the moral high ground Christians eventually won the day. Many anti-Christian governments today are right to be anxious about the growing number of believers in their countries too. Not because Christians have any political or military agenda, but simply because the confession 'Jesus Christ is Lord' exposes to public gaze the illegitimacy of the beast. It is a summons to the conscience; it reminds everyone of what they already know deep in their hearts, that there is only One who rightly demands their worship. The confession 'Jesus Christ is Lord' is the truth; and that is one thing that the Liar fears more than anything else.

But it takes nerve, when all else are worshipping the beast, to say 'No' and face the consequences. As John says:

There has been no more embarrassing failure on the part of the church in recent history than the silence of the churches in Germany in the days of Hitler's rise to power. The church, which under Luther had resisted the tyranny of the Pope, capitulated to the tyranny of Nazism. Why? The answer is that her nerve had failed. For some German Christians, faith had degenerated into mere religious sentimentality; for others, the divine authority of Christ had been eroded by critical theories of the Bible. At best, Christianity in the Germany of the 1930s had retreated into evangelical pietism; at worst, it had surrendered to liberal scepticism. It was not, then, the virile, red-blooded Christianity of the early church that co-operated so meekly with Nazism, but an anaemic weakling. That is why the beast took power unchallenged by the Christians with all but a few very courageous exceptions. My great fear is that it could happen again today, perhaps in the very democracies that so nobly resisted that Nazi menace sixty years ago.