7/16/2025

Hexakosioihexakontahexaphobia - do you have it?? It’s the (irrational) fear of the number 666.

I’m here to give you the cure. 

On Sunday I spoke about the mysterious number, 666, and I’ve had a couple of people ask me for that explanation again.  What is 666? But what does it mean? Who does it refer to? It’s the number of a man, Revelation 13:18 tells us.  

The obvious answer is that 666 is 1 short of 777, the number of absolute perfection. Why three sixes? The Hebrews didn’t have a way of expressing the superlative. We would say that God is the Holiest God, but the Hebrews didn’t have a word for “holiest”; instead, they would pile up the holies and say God is “Holy Holy Holy.”  

Here, three sixes point to the absolute imperfection of the Beast – unholy, unholy, unholy. He claims to be a god, but he’s just a man – not 777, but, despite his blasphemous claims, he’s no more than 6 – and not just 6, but 666. Completely imperfect, despite his claims of divinity. 

But wait! There’s more! 

The way John writes, he clearly has someone specific in mind! Is it a future being? An antichrist? I think, given the reason Revelation was written (to give hope to the persecuted people of God), that we would start by looking backward to the time Revelation was written. 

The Bible cannot mean what it never meant. 

To really understand the Bible, we need to look at it like the first readers who have looked at it, and from there we can see how it speaks to us in 2025. 

As I said, Revelation was written to a people facing a time of persecution. They needed to know who and what they were up against. So John tells them who to watch out for . . . but, of course, if he were to plainly spell it out, if the authorities got hold of the book of Revelation, it would have been treasonous and everyone caught with it would face execution. So instead, John both conceals and reveals the identity of the blasphemous persecutor with these words : “This calls for wisdom,” John writes, “let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number for a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.”

“Calculate the number.” When I was a kid, I remember seeing a little illustrated end times tract showing people with the literal number 666 branded on their hands and forehead. That’s reading a number, not calculating a number.Even as math-challenged as I am, I know that’s not right. 

So how do you calculate the number of the beast, the “number for a person”?

The ancients had a practice called gematria (related to our word geometry). This was before we had numerals (1,2,3, etc), so letters of the alphabet had a numerical value (like our Roman numerals: I=1, IV=4, V=5, etc.).  If you added up the letters of a person’s name, the sum would tell something about them. A famous example was found in the ruins of Pompeii:  “I love her whose number is 545,” meaning, my girl’s name adds up to 545. For the Jews, King David was the ultimate King. The Hebrew spelling of his name, DVD (no vowels), added up to 14 - that’s twice perfection! 

And John includes a couple of other examples of Hebrew word-play (9:11; 16:16), so we shouldn’t be too surprised that he would be at it here. With 666, John is using the Hebrew spelling of the name of the tyrant who first persecuted the Christians, Nero Caesar. 
 
The Hebrew spelling of Nero is Neron (that’s the spelling in the famous Dead Sea Scrolls). So if you take the Hebrew letters and give them their numerical value, we end up with:  
 
                                    N = 50                 Q = 100
                                    R = 200               S =  60 
                                    O = 6                    R = 200
                                    N = 50            Total:  666

Most modern translations will have a footnote for Revelation 13:18 that says some manuscripts have 616 instead of 666. If you take the second “n” off of Neron, you get Nero . . . 616. 

Nero was dead by the time Revelation was written. But the spirit of the Beast was still alive, and was being revived with the current emperor, Domitian. He was the tyrant who insisted on being worshiped as a god, and was building a temple for himself in Ephesus, when John preached. If you take a coin bearing the inscription declaring Domitian to be the son of god and add the letter up in it, you again get 666. The coin was blasphemous and the believers didn’t want to use it to buy and sell.

John is warning the people, “Beware, it is Nero all over again.” John sees a new persecution looming on the horizon, and pictures the advent of the new Roman oppressors as the “return of Nero.” 

So there’s no need to be afraid of a number, it’s simply a clue to discern someone through whom the Dragon worked. But our concern is to be able to discern who the Beast is for our day – and it might be more than one! It was a very effective tool of the Dragon, and you can be sure he’ll use that same tool over and over against the people of God. You can find the spirit of the Beast at work on the world stage, on the national stage, and in local politics. And it doesn’t have to be in politics.   

The Beast can rise up in the church world as well. We’ll talk more about that and how to discern the Beast at work on Sunday. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry