Revelation 13:17

Revelation 13:17. The meaning of this verse can only be that the second beast aimed at denying a part in the intercourse of life, or the rights of citizenship, to every one who refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the first.

Having considered the particulars mentioned in these verses, we have now to ask what is denoted by this second beast, or third great enemy of the saints. In doing so it is necessary to call to mind the leading principle which seems to lie at the bottom of the apocalyptic conception of the Church's struggle. We have already had various illustrations of it, and more will meet us as we proceed. That principle is simply this, that the struggle of the Church is the counterpart of the struggle of Christ Himself. The Church is one with her Lord, is appointed to carry on His work in the world, is exposed to the same trials, and is destined to achieve the same victory. The enemies who rise against her are therefore substantially the same as those with which Jesus had to contend. Keeping this in view, we ought to have little difficulty in determining the meaning of the second beast. It was with three great enemies that the contest of Jesus was carried on, and by them His sufferings and death were brought about. These were the devil, the power of the heathen world, and the spiritual wickedness of the Jews. The two former have already been set before us in the dragon and the first beast. The last mentioned is the second beast. It is not worldly wisdom, or learning, or science, or art; not increasing civilisation, or the power of intellectual cultivation, even when most refined and spiritual. A fatal objection to all such views is that they not only draw no sufficient distinction between the first and the second beast, but that they fail to recognise the essentially religious character of the latter. Upon this point the indications of the passage are too numerous and precise to be mistaken. The second beast exercises its power not through the sword but through the word and signs. The lamb-like form of the horns reminds of Jesus the great Teacher and Prophet of his people. The speaking as a dragon takes us to the thought of those false teachers who come in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves (Matthew 7:15). The ‘great wonders' done by it are an obvious allusion to the words ‘There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect' (Matthew 24:24); while at the same time we are reminded by its whole appearance of that antichrist, whose coming ‘is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders' (2 Thessalonians 2:9). Add to all this that the second beast is expressly styled the ‘false prophet' in other passages of this book (Revelation 16:13; Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:10), and the conclusion appears to be incontrovertible, that it represents to us no mere secular or worldly, but a distinctly religious and antichristian, spirit. Further, this spirit is clearly in the first instance Jewish, for the second beast rises up out of the ‘land,' not like the first out of the ‘sea,' and the land is the emblem of Judaism, as the sea is of heathenism. More even may be said; for the action of the second beast corresponds precisely to that of the fanatical spirit of Judaism in the days of our Lord. It was ‘the Jews' who stirred up the power of Rome against their true King; it was they who ‘exercised all the authority of the first beast before Him;' they who by their cry ‘We have no king but Caesar' made an ‘image to the beast;' and they who gave ‘life unto the image of the beast,' that it should both ‘speak and cause as many as would not worship it to be killed.' Circumstances such as these lead directly to the belief that the fundamental spirit of this second beast is that of a degenerate Judaism in its most bigoted, fanatical, and antichristian form, that spirit which stirred up the Roman power against our Lord, which in after times was so often the means of unsheathing the sword of the civil magistrate against Christians, and which, down to our own day, has been ever working as a spirit of enmity and persecution to all that claims for the religion of Christ the immediate presence of the Divine.

At the same time we are not to imagine that this spirit of degenerate Judaism is to be found only in those who are Jews by birth. In the Fourth Gospel the spirit of ‘the Jews' is looked upon as that which most truly and fully exhibits the irreligious spirit of the world. The same is the case here. The spirit and rule of the second beast are as wide as those of the first. ‘The Jews' were men. Their nature was human. They exhibited the preference shown by human nature in every age for the seen above the unseen, for the outward and formal above the inward and spiritual. In this beast, therefore, although we have first the spirit displayed by them, we have also embodied that irreligious spirit which, especially in the Church, has no toleration for the unworldliness of the children of God. Tolerant of all else, it would here threaten and persecute and kill. The friend of the world is the enemy of God. Finally, the remark must be made, that this second beast is to be sought within rather than without the professing Christian Church.