One of the really classic cheesy lines from a movie is spoken by Charlton Heston at the end of the movie Soylent Green. This movie is about a dystopian future where the population explosion threatens the future of life as we know it. In order to supply the huge population, food is manufactured synthetically.
A new food supply is being put in place called Soylent Green. The movie involves Heston’s character gradually finding out the truth behind Soylent Green. As he is carted off at the end of the movie (probably to die), he shouts out, “Soylent Green is people!”
In reading Revelation, we have been exploring the beasts that play such a significant role in the second part of the book (chapter 13 and onward). These beasts correspond to kingdoms or empires (as described in Daniel 7). The truth about the beasts in Revelation is that … the Beast is people!
In order to understand this, we need to explore a concept called reification. This is the process where some more-or-less abstract property becomes embodied in an object in the real world.
A splendid example of this is found in The Lord of the Rings. The Ring of Sauron is a reification of Sauron’s power. That is, Sauron poured his power into the Ring so that it could become strong enough to dominate the other Rings. As a result he gained power over them.
However, we see that one of the consequences of reification is that the object that results, while enhancing one’s power, also proves to be a vulnerability. Before Sauron made the Ring, his power was totally under his control — it was a part of him. By pouring it into the Ring, he lost control of it, and eventually the Ring itself became the means whereby he was destroyed.
In a more subtle way this is what worship does. When we worship something, we endow it with our power. We do this so that we can be part of something of immense power. But in the process our worship gives the thing we worship power over us. And in the case of the demonic powers behind idols, they make us into their slaves.
A good example of this is Money. It is the reification of value, of wealth. We do this so that we can conveniently make exchanges. If we are bakers, for example, we don’t have to find someone who needs bread and makes shoes to get a pair of shoes. We can sell our bread to anyone who is willing to give us money for it, and then use the money to buy shoes from anyone who will sell us shoes in exchange for money.
However, by reifying value and wealth like this, Money itself gains power over us. Instead of just representing wealth, it becomes wealth. And it becomes a necessity, something that we must have. Some are so caught up in this slavery that they become misers, unable to spend the Money that they value so highly. The reason for having Money — to facilitate economic exchanges — is swallowed up by the power that Money has.
In the parable of the Unrighteous Manager, Jesus shows us how to break the power of Money (which he calls unrighteous Mammon). We break the power of Mammon by giving money away. Since Money is all about value received for value given, to give it away is antithetical to its power and breaks its hold on us. Jacques Ellul discusses this idea in a book called Money and Power.
But perhaps the most powerful idol in our time is the idol of political power. Jacques Ellul, in his book The Political Illusion, calls it the main idol of the 20th century. He describes the political illusion as the notion that all problems are political problems and all solutions are political solutions. (Note that I define a political solution as one that depends on government for its implementation.)
But notice that every political solution is ultimately based on the notion of force. A quotation (wrongly attributed to George Washington) says, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.” The quotation may be spurious but it is certainly correct.
Thus political solutions to problems depend on force. To the degree that we empower politics for the sake of solving problems, to the same degree we empower politics as an instrument of force. But just as Sauron’s Ring, once it became reified, could be used against him, so political power, reified in the form of the bureaucratic, militarized State, can be used against us.
At the same time this political power is fundamentally dependent on the “worship” and allegiance of the people who are ruled by it. Politics is a spiritual power, one of the powers described in Ephesians 6:12. This is shown by the way it is vulnerable to a word: Ronald Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union spiritually by calling it an “evil empire.” And it faded away — amazingly with almost no bloodshed. This, along with the other bloodless revolutions of that time (such as the overthrow of Fernando Marcos in the Philippines), is possibly a foreshadowing of the way Christ’s victory in Revelation 19 will be by the sword coming out of his mouth: not based on violence but on truth.
And this lands us in the territory of the Beast of Revelation.
Chapter 13 of Revelation describes an interplay between power, authority and worship. The Dragon is worshiped on account of the Beast (v. 4) because he had given his authority to the Beast. And the Beast is worshiped and empowered in the minds of its worshipers because of his power.
This Beast seems to carry all before him, even to the point of making war on “the saints” and conquering them (v. 7). But since the Beast is an empire (as we learned from Daniel 7) then the Beast is composed of — people! As people give their worship and power to the Beast, he becomes the ultimate reification of worship and power.
While the Beast is clearly a demonic supernatural power, he gains physical reality because of the worship of his followers. This worship is of the same nature as the kind of allegiance that people give to their country. Even in the US there is a quasi-religious flavor to our patriotism: we “pledge allegiance” to the flag; we sing hymns to our state (i.e. the Star Spangled Banner) at public events; people fly the flag at home and at their business as a reflection of their patriotism; and so on. All of these things embody the notion of what the Bible calls worship — outward acts that signify inner submission or allegiance.
Of course this is not to say that the US, or any currently existing political entity, is the Beast of the Revelation. But we must be clear: to the extent that we place our hope in the spiritual power that is reified in the form of the all-powerful State, to that extent we prepare our hearts for the day when the Beast will come.
The famous Milgram experiment (see the movie The Experimenter on Netflix) shows that people will obey authority — apart from any coercion — even to the point of harming others. Over two-thirds of subjects were found to obey instruction to inflict life-threatening shocks at the behest of an experimenter who simply told them, “You must continue the experiment.” This shows how “good people” can be made to do horrible things, including the kinds of horrors that the Nazis inflicted during WWII. Many who were put on trial gave as their defense, “I was obeying legitimate orders.”
Thus we see that who we worship is of utmost importance. There is only one who is worthy of the kind of life-or-death allegiance that the Beast demands: and that is the Lamb of God who gave his own life for us.