A Year in Luke/ActsНамуна

Who is the Emperor he will face? Nero himself. The Emperor who is now infamous for his persecution of Christians (although this wasn’t necessarily the case at this point). Paul is going into the very center of the world’s power, into the beast’s den, to confront the ultimate worldly power with the message of Jesus.

When we read about the “mark of the beast” in Revelation the number is 666. If we use a system called gematria which takes numbers and finds their letter equivalent, we see that one of the words we can spell from 666 is “Neron Caesar.” John is writing to Christians who are being persecuted under Nero’s cruel reign. He is identifying rulers like Nero as taking on the way of the beast, the less-than-human mode of being that so many of the world’s empires eventually fall into.

Rather than obsessing on predicting what futural meaning the 666 might mean, we can see it as speaking to a “type” that powerful empires and their rulers fall into. The Way of Jesus has always confronted these powers with the gospel message and shown them up for what they are - evil parodies of God’s kingdom. As we saw in Luke’s gospel, the kingdom of God is not for the powerful elite, but for anyone who would repent and believe.