The Warning Everyone Has Heard

You have heard of the mark of the beast.

So had I, long before I ever opened a Bible. I was fourteen, just getting started into drugs and getting into trouble, when my brother and I got home late one night and climbed out of the car. We looked up, and the moon hanging over us was as red as it could be. Dustin said something about the end of the world and the mark of the beast. That was all it took. I went to bed that night full of fear over a mark I couldn’t have explained to a single soul.

The words find almost everybody. People who have never opened a Bible in their lives can tell you there’s something in there about a mark, and a beast, and a number. Maybe they’ve heard it’s a barcode. Maybe a chip under the skin. Maybe a number stamped somewhere it can’t be washed off.

Ask them what it actually is, though, and watch what happens. The confidence drains away. “Nobody really knows,” they’ll say. “It’s all symbols. You can make it mean anything.”

I want to tell you something before we go one page further. That answer is wrong. And by the last page of this book, you will know exactly what the mark of the beast is, who the beast is, and — far more important — how to be absolutely certain you never receive it. Not from my opinion. Not from anybody’s church. From the Bible alone, verse by verse, where you can put your finger on every step and check it for yourself.

That’s a big promise. Let me show you why I can make it.

The most severe warning in the Bible

Open the book of Revelation to chapter 14, and you’ll find words that have no equal anywhere else in Scripture:

“If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand, he himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation” (Revelation 14:9, 10).

Read that again slowly. Full strength. Everywhere else in the Bible, God’s judgments are mixed with mercy — always diluted, always tempered, always holding back. Here, and only here, the mixture stops. This is the strongest warning God ever gave to the human family.

Now think about what that means. If you receive the mark of the beast, you’re lost. It’s not a mistake you correct later. It’s not a bad week you pray your way out of. The warning is life and death, and God states it in the plainest terms He has ever used.

So here is the question that started me down this road years ago, and I want it to start you down the same road: Would a loving God attach the most terrifying warning in His whole Book to something He refused to explain?

Imagine a judge sentencing someone to death for breaking a law that had never been published, explained, or made available to the public. Everyone would recognize that as unjust. A righteous government makes its laws known before it holds people accountable. If God warns the world about receiving the mark of the beast, then He must also clearly reveal what the mark is and how it can be avoided.

And God is fair and just. “Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). If God says do not receive the mark, then the mark can be known. It must be knowable, or the warning means nothing. The God who went to the trouble of writing the warning went to the trouble of writing the answer, too.

The answer is in the same book as the warning. We’re going to find it.

The book with a blessing on it

Somewhere along the way, Christians got the idea that Revelation is a sealed book — too strange, too frightening, better left to the experts. I believed that once myself. Then I read the first three verses, and I had to stop and shake my head. It had been sitting there the whole time!

“Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near” (Revelation 1:3).

Blessed is he who reads. Of all sixty-six books in the Bible, only one opens by pronouncing a blessing on the person who reads it — and it’s the one book we’ve been told to leave alone. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? The very name tells you the same thing. Revelation means an unveiling — a curtain pulled back. If the book were meant to be a mystery, it would be called Concealation. God named it the opposite.

And read the title all the way through: “The Revelation of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:1). Not the revelation of the antichrist. Not the revelation of the beast, or of the mark, or of Armageddon. Of Jesus Christ. This book will show us dragons and locusts, but it exists to show us Him — and any study of prophecy that loses sight of that has already gone wrong. Hold me to it as we go.

And notice the blessing isn’t only for reading. It’s for those who read, hear, and keep those things which are written. The same promise closes the book: “Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book” (Revelation 22:7). From the first to the last chapter, the same word: keep. That tells you what kind of book this is. Revelation wasn’t given to satisfy our curiosity about beasts and numbers. It was given because God is asking us to do something — and He put a blessing on finding out what — and actually doing it!

When I finally understood that, it changed how I read the whole book. It was less important what every symbol meant, and more important what God was asking me to do.

So let me hand you the first challenge of this book right here: read Revelation itself in one sitting. It takes about an hour, and it is the one book this book most wants you to open.

Fair warning

Now I owe you honesty about the road ahead, because I’d rather lose you here than deceive you anywhere.

Some of what this book uncovers is going to be uncomfortable. Prophecy names names. It identifies powers and systems that millions of good people love, and if one of them turns out to be yours, some pages ahead may sting. I take no pleasure in that. But the Scriptures never promised that truth would be comfortable — they promised it would be true. Jesus Himself is called “a stumbling stone and rock of offense” (Romans 9:33), and Paul had to ask a church he loved, “Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?” (Galatians 4:16).

So let me ask you what I once had to ask myself. Would you rather hear a truth that hurts your feelings and helps your soul — or a sweet lie that keeps you comfortable all the way to the end? I know my answer. I made it a long time ago, in circumstances I’ll tell you about later, when everything I thought I knew about God was tested against what the Bible actually says. The Bible won. It always wins.

That doesn’t mean you should take my word for anything. I mean that. Don’t accept what I believe. Challenge it. Test every claim in this book against an open Bible, the way the believers in Berea tested the apostle Paul himself: they “searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11) — and the Bible calls them fair-minded for doing it. That’s all I ask of you. Not to agree with me necessarily, but to investigate with me.

The rules of the road

Since we’re going to investigate together, let’s agree on the rules before we start. There are only three.

First, the Bible explains itself. When Revelation shows us a beast or a woman or a sea, we won’t guess at what it means, and we won’t reach for the news headlines. Peter said it plainly: “no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). We’ll let Scripture define its own symbols — because it does, every time, somewhere in its own pages.

Second, we read everything, not something. Any teaching can be propped up with one verse read alone. Flip open to “Judas went and hanged himself,” flip again to “Go and do likewise,” and you can stitch together a sermon nobody should ever preach. Truth stands when you gather all the verses on a subject and read them together — “precept upon precept, line upon line… here a little and there a little” (Isaiah 28:10). That’s how we’ll work — and when we’re done with a question, you’ll know there’s no verse left in the drawer.

Third, everything gets tested. “To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20). That test will judge every claim in this book — including mine. We may not always get the answers we’re looking for, or the answers we want. But I can promise you this: if we search the Scriptures, we will get the answers we need.

Here’s a way to hold all three rules at once. I call it the desert-island test. Imagine your plane goes down and you wash up on an island, with a little amnesia which holds back any preconceived religious ideas. You have nothing in your hands but a Bible — no church, no preacher, no tradition you grew up with, no website, just the Holy Book. Then read it cover to cover on that beach, and ask of any teaching: would a person come to this conclusion from the Bible alone? Some of what we’ve all been handed survives that test beautifully. Some of it, as you’ll see, would never have occurred to a soul who had only the Scriptures. That island is where I want us to hang out for the rest of this book.

That’s the whole method. No hidden keys, no secret knowledge, no expert religious elite. A Bible, an honest heart, and the patience to take it one step at a time.

Where a story like this begins

One more thing, and then we begin.

You might expect a book about the mark of the beast to start with the beast — to rush straight at the monster. We’re not going to do that, and here’s why: you cannot understand a war by walking in on the last battle. You’d see the smoke and the armies and have no idea who started it, or why, or which side is which. And that’s exactly the mistake most people make with Revelation. They start at the crisis and wonder why nothing makes sense.

The mark of the beast is the final move in a war — the oldest war there is. Before we can see the last battle clearly, we have to go back to the first shot.

And believe it or not, that first shot wasn’t fired on earth.

It was fired in heaven.

One Dragon: The War in Heaven