The Dragon and 666

From my book with Cody Matchett, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple (Zondervan Reflective). [As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.]

Babylon presents itself as the powerful order of strength, but behind Babylon are the Dragon and the Wild Things. We’ve offered a brief introduction to each of these characters in the Playbill, but here we want to unpack that further. Babylon, in short, is the systemic order of power created by the Dragon and the Wild Things.

The Dragon enters Revelation 12 to attack a Woman with a son, and that Son is none other than Jesus, God’s Son. No good reading of Revelation will ignore the Dragon as the sinister force behind evil, the one who attacks the Son of the Woman. In John’s Old Testament, the dragon was a symbol for the monstrous, hostile powers that oppose God (Jer 51:34; Ezek 29:3; 32:2-3), and the Book of Revelation will explicitly identify the Dragon as Satan (Rev 12:9; cf. 2:9, 13, 24; 20:2, 7). This includes Genesis 3’s serpent, and as the Bible rolls onward, Leviathan and Beelzebul and other demons that serve as henchmen for the Dragon. John will also call the Dragon the “devil” (12:9; cf. 2:10; 20:2, 10). In bringing the Dragon on the stage, John wanted our imaginations fired with all sorts of ideas about the shadow side of God’s good creation. He wants his hearers to envision a cosmic battle between good and evil, between God and the Dragon.

         Notice that John calls the vision of the Dragon in Revelation 12 a “sign,” and the sign is “in heaven.” He describes a great fire-red sea Dragon. Like Babylon in chapter seventeen, the Dragon has seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns. Its tail is so big that it sweeps a third of the stars, which is probably John’s language for political rulers (or perhaps fallen angels of heaven or the saints), and they are flung down to the earth. The Dragon’s mission is clear: it wants the Woman’s baby boy, the Son of God who is to rule, and it wants the Son dead.

The war is on between Team Dragon and Team Lamb.

For those who were sorely tempted to make their peace with Rome, Revelation unveiled truth about empire. It revealed empire as both a seductive whore who offered the good life in exchange for obedience and a ravenous beast that devoured any who would dare oppose it.

Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther, Unveiling Empire, xxii

         Notice the astounding opening in verse seven of chapter twelve: there is a war in heaven! One can’t read that and not think of John Milton’s battles in Paradise Lost, or those of J.R.R. Tolkien’s or C.S. Lewis’ between good and evil. This is the stuff of the world’s great stories and myths. The Dragon goes toe to toe with Michael and his army of angels, and the Dragon is defeated in heaven (12:8). John often interrupts readers and hearers with callouts from the deep reality of heaven, and this time he announces through “a loud voice in heaven” that the Dragon, “the accuser of our brothers and sisters” (12:10), has been tossed from the divine courtroom and its day of accusations are over. But that heavenly defeat spells problems for the earth, because God now hurls the Dragon to the earth.

The Dragon immediately prowls for the Woman, but with God on her side she is protected from the Dragon’s gushing stream of water, his attempt to drown her. God rescues the Woman and the Dragon loses this battle too. This should remind us of the words of Genesis 3:15:

And I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

The escape of the woman strikes the heel of the Dragon-serpent, so the Dragon turns to attack a third enemy: the faithful of “her offspring.” These are those who observe the commandments of God and hold to the witness of Jesus (12:17).

All seven characteristics of Babylon in the previous chapter dramatize the deathly realities of the work of the Dragon and the Wild Things. That last verse we cited, Revelation 12:17, speaks of going to war with the offspring of the woman. The seven characteristics of Babylon manifest the Way of the Dragon, which battles against the Way of the Lamb. One can’t read Revelation well without embracing the cosmic, even mythic, battle between Team Dragon and Team Lamb.

[The Dragon loves war; war is the Dragon. War is Babylon.]

Dissident disciples are the first to realize they are in a battle—not with flesh and blood—but with the principalities and powers that snake their way into the seven churches. Some readers of Revelation, however, turn Revelation 12 into little more than a symbolic battle between abstract good and abstract evil. But the Dragon can’t be reduced to a symbol of evil. The Dragon is the ultimate agent of evil. Cities matter, politics matter, and governments matter, and Babylon is the public face of the Dragon’s dominating power. But how does this happen? The Dragon works its evil way into the land through the Wild Things of Revelation 13.

The Wild Things: #1 and #2

One of the biggest mistakes we can make in reading Revelation is spending too much time speculating on the precise predictive identity of the Wild Thing, the mask of the Dragon. Who will it be? Luther and Calvin thought it was the Pope, as have many zealot Protestants since (and some still today). When I was in college, I (Scot) read a book that proclaimed with certainty it was Mikhail Gorbachev, and his birth mark excited much speculation. Others thought it was Henry Kissinger, and then it was Saddam Hussein. These speculators were all wrong, and they’ve all been wrong because they lack the kind of imagination a faithful reading of Revelation requires, wanting to reduce everything to literal predictions. But as we have seen, we should not look for one, single end-time Wild Thing. Instead, dissident disciples should discern the Dragon behind the Wild Things of every age, including our own day. We are not looking for figures by predicting specific persons in the future, rather, we are looking for images of Dragon-like leaders at work in all societies and all times. They are puppets, whose strings are pulled by the Dragon. Remember, these images are not about predicting the future, but about shaping our perceptions of the present.

There are two Wild Things in Revelation 13, one from the sea and one from the earth. Wild Thing #1, emerges from the sea, a picture of chaos and the ancient abyss (see 11:7). Wild Thing #1 is all about Power while Wild Thing #2 is about Propaganda. Both of them do their work behind closed doors in the Dragon’s Babylon, creating a propaganda machine to control and dominate. Participants on Team Dragon include the famous enumerated figure, 666, and corrupted leaders in the church, whom John refers to using names like “Jezebel” and the “the Nicolaitans.” We do not dismiss these characters, but the focus of the Book of Revelation falls on the Dragon and his masked bandits, the two Wild Things.

666

Many readers of Revelation today get snagged in the 666 web of speculation (Revelation 13:16-18), wondering what such a number means, how numbers like this worked in John’s world, and to whom 666 might apply today. The NIV’s number “666” at Revelation 13:18 in Greek reads “the number is six hundred sixty-six.” It’s wise to begin with the undeniable: if 777 is triple perfection, 666 is triple imperfection or falling short. It is the number of a human (vs. God). In Greek there were no numbers; letters were used both as letters and numbers (think of how Latin writes its numbers, what we today call “Roman numerals.”) That number in Greek would be chi/xi/sigma (cxß). Letters easily became numbers and the art of turning them into numbers is called “gematria.” So 666 is the numerical value of three letters. This means the reader is encouraged to play with the numbers to find something suitable, usually a name. Who will it be? is not the right question to ask, though. Rather, we should ask “Who was it for John?” and “Who might it be for us?”

To begin, we go back to the time when the Book of Revelation was written. Nero Caesar, in Greek Nerōn kaisar, adds up to 666 when translated into Hebrew: 50+200+6+50+100+60+200 = 666! Some manuscripts of Revelation here do not have the number 666 but instead 616, and if one drops off the second “n” in Nerōn that name then totals 616! So it seems clear that 666 is gematria for emperor Nero. But Nero is not alone in satisfying such a calculation, because 666 is also the numerical value of the word “thērion,” which is the Greek word for “Beast” or “Wild Thing.” This was likely all great fun for the first readers of Revelation.

Calling someone 666 requires imagination—as well as flexibility. That number can be used for any of the anti-god beastly powers that design strategies for death and destruction. Like Babylon, 666 does not point to one person at one future moment in history but to all political tyrants who have the powers to establish the Way of the Dragon and oppress Team Lamb.

But what about the “mark”? Just what the “mark” (charagma) was physically is now hard to know (Revelation 13:16), but it is something placed, like the law of God referred to in Deuteronomy 6:8, on both the right hand and the forehead. That mark also permitted commercial transactions (13:17) – and it obviously represented allegiance to 666. The mark could be a branding, like coins stamped with the image of the emperor, or it could be more metaphorical than physical. Regardless, the mark seems to be a parody of the seal of the living God (7:2-3; 14:1) and to function, as David deSilva says it, as “the beast’s stamp of approval, [which] provides access to participation in the Roman economy and the enjoyment of physical security.”

So that’s Team Dragon.  Team Dragon dwells in Babylon, plotting the destruction of the Lamb and his followers—Team Lamb. This team is headed for the New Jerusalem, and that’s where we turn in the next chapter.