When the handwriting is on the wall . . .

The more confusion abounds in a society, the more people want to latch onto some system, book, guru, celebrity, music genre, entertainment outlet, etc., to guide them into a restored state of well-being and control.

Also, the more people deceive themselves, the more they generate in themselves a certain energy and vitality that wants to impose their deception on others. It’s an interacting process of self-deception.

As the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans 1:32, they “not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.” He says in II Timothy 3:13, “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.”

Preacher Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church) says with the level of spiritual deception from biblical truth being what it is now in America, “We’re back in a 1^st Century kind of situation.

“I think it’s a wonderful day to be preaching the gospel, you just got to understand the world you’re preaching it in . . . I look at Paul and I say, ‘Whoa, what he was doing is what I am doing!’

“We live in an age where unless you go out of your way for your children to learn the Word of God, they’re not going to be exposed to it.

“When I was growing up, we learned it in school. We didn’t study the Bible as a textbook, but we studied it from a perspective that taught us the stories of the Bible, and when I was a young man 40 years ago, if you’d talked to me about David and Goliath or Noah in the Ark, I’d know who you were talking about because I’d heard the stories.

“Kids today don’t know the stories; they’re completely detached from the heritage that we have as part of Western civilization and that’s part of the undercutting and destroying of our culture.

“The institutions of a culture that are assigned the responsibility of passing on the values of a culture—the home, the churches and the schools—have all abandoned their jobs.

“Homes let the school do it, and schools are now socialistic conclaves trying just to socialize people and homogenize them.

“As for the churches, why it’s been so long since you could find a church that had enough spiritual power—if spiritual power were gunpowder they couldn’t blow the wax out of their ears. That’s why they’re all in politics because the only choice they have is to go to the political realm to have some power and influence in the culture and the community they live in.

*****

From the Book of Revelation, we know that six hundred and sixty-six is the number of the beast, meaning it’s the number of the Antichrist, who will come on the scene as a political leader. It is not the mark of the beast, as people are incorrectly told.

There are 18 major types of the Antichrist given in the Bible, and in at least some of these pictures of him, the number six hundred and sixty-six can be readily identified.

Goliath, for one, is a type of the Antichrist who is reported in I Samuel 17 as being six cubits tall. He had six pieces of armament and “his spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron.”

In II Chronicles 9, King Solomon has built himself a house with six steps leading to a throne. On each side of the steps are six lions.

Also, in II Chronicles 9:13, we read, “Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred and threescore and six talents of gold.”

Displayed in the passage is a change from a type of Jesus Christ (presented in the first half with the Queen of Sheba) to a type of the Antichrist. If you know anything about what happened to Solomon, he turned from good to evil during his 40-year career as Israel’s king.

Solomon’s Old Testament book, Song of Solomon, in fact, shows a type of the Antichrist trying to seduce the daughters of Israel into adultery.

Yet another appearance of 666 can be found in Ezra 8. If you look in the dictionary for the name Adonikam, mentioned in Ezra 8:13, it literally means “the lord of rebellion.”

As Jordan explains about the Bible’s intrinsic numeric codes, “One of the issues of prophecy is typology. Modern computer terminology would call it ‘macro-codes.’ These are pre-established patterns for future behavior so when the future behavior comes along, you can look back and see how somebody way back there laid a pattern, knowing about the reality that’s coming.”

*****

The number “666,” as well as variations of the numbers 6 and 9—such as 69, 66, 96, 99— have been used since ancient times as code by people who align themselves with “the god of this world,” i.e., Satan. In pagan Eastern religions, the numbers 6 and 9 are considered lucky (a word derived from the name Lucifer).

Consider, for one example, Aleister Crowley, the world-renowned Satanist now widely followed by all kinds of groups involving every realm of society. Crowley so inspired The Beatles they put his mug on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club album that pictures all of their "heroes."

In the early 1900s, Crowley christened himself “The Beast 666,” and literally believed he was the Antichrist. In 1928, he was dubbed by a popular tabloid as, “The Wickedest Man in the World.”

"Before I touched my teens, I was already aware that I was THE BEAST whose number is 666," Crowley confesses in his infamous “Magick” book.

In his book, “The Confessions of Aleister Crowley,” he writes, “I have never lost sight of the fact that I was in some sense or other The Beast 666.”

In another passage, he even admits, “I simply went over to Satan’s side; and to this hour I cannot tell why. But I found myself passionately eager to serve my new master. . . I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff."

Crowley’s influence has been widespread in rock music, witchcraft, Satanism, Neopaganism, the New Age movement, the Occult, secret societies, etc.

The website www.rbc.org (from the publishers of Our Daily Bread) informs, “Although a number of Neopagan groups claim that their rituals and traditions were passed down in an unbroken line from ancient times to the present, there is no realistic basis for believing an ancient tradition of Paganism survived. Historians of the modern Neopagan movement agree that a handful of 20th-century occultists invented the primary principles and rituals of modern Paganism. Well-known historian Jeffrey Burton Russell documents that the two primary ‘inventors’ of modern Neopaganism were occultists Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley.”

Amazingly, the use of 666 as satanic code can even be found in the emblem on the cover of the New King James Bible! It’s the same triple six, interlocking symbol you’ll find used to identify all sorts of New Age materials, including on the cover of the popular book, The Aquarian Conspiracy.