Matt Chandler, lead pastor at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, took time this week to share his views on the “mark of the beast,” which is mentioned in the Bible in Revelation 13. Despite what some believe, Chandler does not believe the mark is some type of advanced technology.
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Matt Chandler Explains the Mark of the Beast
Revelation 13 describes a beast coming out of the earth followed by a second beast coming out of the sea. The second beast performs miraculous signs, makes people worship the first beast, and causes those who refuse to worship the first beast to be killed. Verses 16-18 say:
It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.
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Chandler said that if people are close to his age, they’re familiar with the idea that the mark of the beast could be a credit card, a phone, or a chip embedded in people’s hands. However, the pastor said that to think the mark of the beast is one of these types of technology is “to miss the point that’s being made” in Revelation.
“The perfect number is number seven, and so if seven is complete, six is incomplete,” said Chandler. “We also know that the number three means complete. And so 666, the mark of the beast, is really to show that the work of the enemy is completely—three sixes—incomplete. And so this is, really, what the enemy produces: complete incompleteness.”
The mark of the beast “is not Elon Musk putting something in our brains or something like that,” Chandler said. Rather, the number 666 on people’s foreheads symbolizes “ideological belief,” and the number on people’s hands depicts “the practice of that ideological belief.”
Chandler believes the mark of the beast is currently being lived out in our society. “I think the way you’re even seeing this today,” he said, “is there are certain, especially in the business community now, ideological beliefs you must have in order to participate in the economy. And I think we’re going to see this get worse.”
“That means I believe the mark of the beast is active even now in this moment of history that we’re in,” he concluded.
