This is a post about the beasts of revelation but I have given it the title, "The Machine" because, in many respects, the beasts are akin to machines, unconscious automata. However, first, a little diversion, a brief story.
Many years ago, while in my late twenties, I went on a camping trip with some friends, not all that far away but to the high plains and alpine region of Victoria. We camped by a river and, on one particular day, we decided to visit one of the local mountains, Mt Buffalo, to walk up to its summit and watch the sun set from there. After that, we began descending along the path we had come and, as the light faded, thousands of Bogong moths had come out of their hiding places. I say thousands but really I think it was more like hundreds of thousands. It was a veritable sea of moths, one could not see more than half a metre ahead and the dimming light of dusk immediately turned into pitch black. Fortunately, I had brought a flashlight with me so that I could still just make out the path right near my feet. It was an absolutely astonishing sight!
However, something really struck me about this event, the kind of thing a curious mind notices. In spite of all the moths flying in all different directions and having no synchonisation of the movements of their wings, there was a loud and unvarying hum, a very distinct low frequency note, heard against a background of a much fainter sound of rushing air, what one would call "white noise". It was as if there was one giant moth.
It is actually the result of a statistical phenomena, slightly analogous to wind in which, although individual air molecules are all rushing about at incredibly high and highly varied velocities in all directions, an underlying similar bias in the direction of a majority of air molecules combines in the sum of all their motions to create an overall gentle breeze. A clearly distinct and quite strong note was heard from the mass of moths even though they were not flapping their wings unidirectionally in unison, much like a large number of trumpet players all blowing similar notes and doing so in every conceivable direction. Since the sounds are pressure waves moving through gas, they each have a temporal component, but the apparent paradox arises as a result of the common note which stands out amidst all the chaos and which also must have a well defined temporal variation to be a note at all. How can thousands of randomly phased waveforms, despite their similarity, combine to produce a temporally defined pattern? It seems strange but that is the nature of the summation of a large number of randomly phased and randomly directed, temporally similar energy waves, the well defined note shows up in calculations as a significant statistical artefact amid the randomly combined waveforms. We do not perceive amplitudes of waves, but we perceive their power, that is, their rate of energy transference.
Now, this phenomena may seem trivial, since it is so commonplace, everywhere we listen and observe, that we tend not to think about it in any real depth, but it gives a rather interesting insight into the phenomenon of the "beasts" of Revelation.
Consider any nation or, more specifically, a human culture, and this principle also applies to any human collective, such as large corporations, oversized governments, etc, but here we will focus on national cultures. The nature of a culture is that it has traits which result from commonly accepted beliefs and practices and it lacks traits connected to uncommon beliefs and practices even though such beliefs and practices exist within the culture. The culture's characteristics are essentially statistical artefacts arising from the more widespread tendencies of belief and action.
Now, consider what happens when, despite all the members of a given culture going about their daily lives relatively unsynchronised with each other and doing different things, going to different places, holding many differing views, what happens when there is a view or a practice with a common, dominant (in frequency of occurrence) characteristic, even something seemingly innocuous born of what could rightly be called idolatry? I should point out that a person's idol is that around which his or her life mostly revolves, the dominant "centre of gravity", especially in one's thought life since action is consequential to thought, and it need not be something a person is conscious of. We often behave in ways we are not aware of until it is brought to our attention. If the primary concern of a culture lacking the Spirit of God is money, the earning, saving, investing and aversion to the spending of it, if most of what people in a culture do engages in monetary transactions in spite of such having an apparently low level or background role, something to which we are mostly relatively unconscious, would not the sum effect of their actions result in an overall cultural trait of lusting after wealth in spite of the fact that all the individual actions of individual people are different and seemingly unrelated? Is it not the case that almost all that we hear about from western governments is "the economy this" and "the economy that" as if there was little or nothing else in the world that mattered? The Lord warned us specifically on the sin of the love of money for a reason. He knew it would become an ever greater idol, a means used by the powerful to control the masses, as it already was back in the day.
The result of much economic activity is an unconscious but strong, residual force, like wind, with an overall well-defined characteristic, in this case an unconscious force for the pursuit of monetary gain (although that is not the only evil trait we see) and woe betide anything or anyone which stands in its way as such will be utterly crushed by the sheer weight of millions of tiny actions pressuring motion in an overall dominant direction which, although all of the actions are for many apparently different purposes, all pulling in myriad different directions, their effects mostly tend to cancel in their sum except for the common residual component resulting in one powerfully dominating characteristic. Such a notion well defines the means by which are manifested the characteristics of a "beast". It is not a conscious entity, not an individual as many incorrectly posit, it is not "the antichrist" as so many ignorantly declare, though it could well be called a spirit of antichrist, depending on its nature. It is simply a collective entity with a set of dominant behavioural characteristics defined by the dominant near-unconscious desires of the members of the collective. With regards to this phenomenon, one cannot point at any one individual and make accusations of an evil nature without being a hypocrite. The wild and destructive characteristics of the beasts of Revelation are the resultant statistical artefacts of the massive combination of the dominant inclinations of millions of individuals when their moral centre is, for the most part, not anchored in the true Ever Living God. Naturally, this only grows worse as apostasy takes ever increasing hold on people throughout the world, as the moral centres of rapidly increasing numbers of people deviate ever further from a right focus, God, to a wrong one, money and self. Our mass media bombards us with this pernicious influence every day, every night, relentlessly promoting every kind of something which, in its background at the very least, if not blatantly, involves monetary transactions. Not love for your neighbour, not the pursuit of justice and righteousness in accordance with the eternal law, not caring for the downtrodden, not freeing the oppressed, and most definitely not the pursuit of a relationship with God, no, none of that. Only the pursuit of wealth and pleasure. Bread and circuses.
The beasts of Revelation are unconscious, collective entities, not unlike monstrous machines, whose heads are the primary governing groups in power and whose bodies are the body politic, and which gain their distinctiveness, their definition, their apparent manifestation into existence by the various statistical artefacts resulting from millions of incremental non-God-centred actions with some similar traits, even though all those actions are largely seemingly unrelated to each other, and the resultant characteristics of the beasts tend to revolve around the common evils of mankind. It is the more-often-than-not common attributes that give a beast its collective characteristics and it is called a wild beast because it "behaves" in a manner not unlike a mindless, wild beast. Naturally, in understanding this, we would expect these beasts to wax worse, more powerful and more destructive, as the world mostly moves further away from Christ and the Judeo-Christian basis of our western civilisations and, well, that is exactly what is happening.
We have no need of global conspiracies, even though it is arguable (and I do believe) that such things exist, but it takes a lot of influence to redefine the more common tendencies of entire cultures, the near unconscious thoughts of most, if not all, of the people, thus the need for billionaires, powerful financial corporations and governments driven on by their own lusts, as facilitators of the devil's plan to turn mankind entirely away from God. The fullness of this scheme will be realised at the appearing on the world stage of the one who, in the holy scripture, is called "that Wicked" and "the son of perdition". It is already clear to me that the restraint God had on the growing evil in the world is almost entirely lifted, in order to bring about the end of the age. In this age of the Internet and global social media now controlled almost entirely by a handful of corporations and increasingly constrained and censored by godless government bureaucratic busy-bodies and assorted evolution-deluded NGO's and global organisations, it is no surprise that the evil plan is manifesting at an alarming rate. Such overwhelming influence would have been nigh on impossible only a few decades ago.
We may have advanced technologically but the world is still mostly bereft of sound morals and, with such technology at its disposal, it will only result in one thing; self annihilation. Thus the need, according to the Lord's own words, to "cut that time short for the sake of the elect." Nuclear war is a certainty as far as I can tell, because many in high places would rather unleash it instead of letting go of power. After all, too many of them are where they are as a result of their pursuit of power over others. Righteous people do not seek such, but the wicked invariably do. The righteous seek only to correct that which is unjust.
The only true safety we have is in Christ, and in nothing and nobody else. Trust God, not man, for goodness sake, not man. Choose to trust God, and God alone.
