Tag Archives: prophet Daniel

Fighting the War Within Myself

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The Sacrifices of Cain and Abel depicted in 12th-13th century mosaic
(Cathedral of the Assumption, Monreale, Sicily). The text portrayed is Genesis 4:3-5. The flame before the altar represents the idea of sacrifice, but God’s acceptance of Abel’s specific sacrifice is signified by the tongue of fire that has descended onto the lamb from God’s hand. For Cain, there is no hand, no divine fire. Jealous of his brother, Cain lures him into the wilderness and murders him.

Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but you do not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. (James 4:1-2)

War. Conflict. The collapse of the natural order began with the Fall, when our first parents deliberately chose to do something they knew was wrong and their expulsion from the Garden into “this world,” this fallen state where everything is falling apart—brother kills brother from the beginning. Cain murders Abel (see a 12th century mosaic here) and many early theologians identified that as the definitive human sin rather than Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Conflict and death have defined human existence since the Fall, however we choose to understand what that “fall” was. (Listen here to what St. Cyprian of Carthage thought about Cain killing Abel.)

The human race was created with a will which was naturally inclined toward God. We naturally want to be with God and want to live in harmony with God’s desires, God’s choices. This natural will is inherent in each of us. Some people call this natural will our conscience. But since the fall, our wills have unraveled and disintegrated. Now, in addition to our conscience, we each also have a personal will—the fancy jargon is “gnomic will”—that is in conflict with our conscience, in conflict with that natural will which is naturally inclined toward God. Our personal will is always in conflict with God, debating, struggling, taking time to think and argue with ourselves before choosing whether to follow our natural inclination, our conscience, or not.

To be truly and authentically human, we must bring our personal will into harmony with our natural will. To act based on our conscience. Our personality—each and every one of us—has to be knit back together again. That restoration of harmony between our conscience and our personal will, that knitting back together, can be aided and abetted—fostered—in a way most people never think of.

We can heed the warnings, the guidance and suggestions of our guardian angels. All too often we want to think angels are make-believe or fat babies with wings, roly-poly kids with curls and diapers and harps—new age-y figures in books about “angel healing,” more likely to appear as porcelain figurines on a shelf or on a Christmas card than in real life. But we each have a guardian angel, yoked to us as Michael is yoked to Israel in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. We each have an angel who is assigned to look after us, to prod us to make the right choices—to whisper in our ears what we ought to choose.

We can heed our angels at all times, whether we are facing particular tribulations or not. We can add a line to our daily routine: “Guardian angel, help me to hear your voice, help me to pay attention to your guidance. Help me to make choices that align with my conscience, with the choices and desires of God.”

666 is the Number of the Beast

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Dragons and beasts abound in the Apocalypse and always attack the Church in some way, whether by martyrdom or financial and economic constraints. The number 666–which is used to impinge on Christian economic activity—has been interpreted in a variety of ways.

Then I saw another beast rising out of the land; it had two horns like a lamb’s but spoke like a dragon…. This calls for wisdom. Let anyone who has intelligence figure out the number of the beast for it is the number of a human being; and it’s number is six hundred and sixty-six. (Apocalypse 13:11, 18)

“This calls for wisdom.” That’s probably one of the greatest understatements ever! The debate about the identity of the Beast and the meaning of the number 666 is ongoing and seemingly endlessly fascinating.

One beast arises from the sea. Another beast arises from the land. The sea monster Leviathan and the land-monster Behemoth are a team, symbolic of a nation-state or political system-regime intent on destroying the Church. Some preachers say that the first beast is the political system that wants to destroy the Church while the second, land-based monster is the religious opposition to the Church: it is a mockery of the Lamb as it attempts a masquerade, looking like the Lamb but speaking with the voice of the dragon who attacked the woman clothed with the sun.

The land-monster causes all the people under the dominion of the first beast to “have a mark put on the right hand or on the forehead and no one was allowed to buy or sell unless one had the mark, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” (Apoc. 13:16-17) In order to participate in economic and social life, people had to be marked with the number or the name of the beast–the beast commonly identified as Nero as the numeric value of the letters in his name add up to the infamous “666.” This mark is an official stamp. Perhaps a tattoo. Certainly a travesty of the sign of the cross marked with chrism on the hands and forehead of the newly baptized.

Some modern evangelicals say “the mark of the beast” is a certain credit card or identification card. In the ancient and medieval world, membership in business guilds was an important–sometimes necessary–aspect of economic life and in the Roman world such guilds often expected members to participate in pagan religious rites. Ancient commentaries say the mark of the beast were the coins issued by the emperor with his image on them. If the early Christians could not use coins in the market, they would be effectively marginalized and exiled to rural communes where they lived “off the grid” and supplied all their own goods. But that was just as highly unlikely to be a functional way to live in the first century AD as it is in the twenty-first century AD.

How to navigate the demands of mainstream culture is a constant question in the Church, even if that mainstream culture has been formed in large measure by the Church–the most superficial study reveals that Byzantium or Holy Russia or Christian Europe were societies that often opposed the most basic Christian teachings and practices. The most overtly Christian regimes were often the most oppressive, rigid, and cruel. How to avoid receiving the mark of the beast today?