In this article we are going to look at who is the beast.
Before the beast comes, there must be a platform set for him. I believe we are witnessing the early stages of that platform being set. You see, artificial intelligence, also known as AI, can see and identify objects. It can understand and respond to human language.
A few years ago, I was on a mission trip in Mexico. I went to a remote village and preached, and the locals said I was the first white man to ever preach in that area. I felt like I had gone back in time. I had never, in my lifetime, seen people living in such poverty. It was heartbreaking. Most of the people in the village lived in grass huts with just a dirt floor. The unusual thing was that, even though they lived in such poverty, a lot of them had cell phones. There is a force behind getting AI and technology to the world.
In Genesis chapter 11, some time after Noah’s flood, a king named Nimrod began to build a city and a tower in Babel (Genesis 11:1-10). In verse 4, they said, “Go, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach to heaven, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” Verse 5 says the Lord came down to see the city and tower which the children of men built. Verse 6 says the Lord said, “Behold, the people is one, and they all have one language, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
They rebelled against God, saying they would build a tower so high that nothing would touch them. God said that nothing they imagined doing would be restrained from them, in other words, their rebellion would only intensify. They had no regard for what God wanted. In verse 4, we find the seed of all rebellion against God. The Lord had told Noah and his sons to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth.
In Genesis 9:1, the followers of Nimrod are doing the very opposite. The Lord wanted mankind to be scattered over the Earth, but these rebels were determined to defy what God desired. In Genesis 11:4-9, verse 9 says the Lord confounded their language and scattered them abroad upon the face of the Earth.
Now, with technology, the world is becoming one again. From the days of Nimrod until the Third Industrial Revolution, the world did not change much until the last 125 years. Now we are entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term for a technological, economic, and social revolution connected by IT networks throughout society.
In Daniel 12:4, Daniel saw the coming expansion of knowledge in the end time. I believe this is a sign of the coming of the beast empire, by whom this technology will be used to track the world’s population. The beast is the coming Antichrist and his kingdom. The world will embrace him. Jesus said in John 5:43, “I am come in my father’s name, ye receive me not.” The Antichrist spirit was at work in the Apostle John’s time, as seen in 1 John 2:18, 2:22, and 4:3, and in 2 John 7. The term Antichrist, however, is also the title of a man, a man who is identified by the pronoun he.
Revelation 13:2-7 describes the beast. Him who forged an eighth and final kingdom at the end of the age shall bear the symbol of a beast, as in Daniel 7:7-11, Revelation 11:7, and Revelation 13:1-2. In chapter 13, verse 1-2, John stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads, ten horns, and ten crowns, and upon his head the name of Blasphemy. He will rise up out of a sea of humanity.
In Revelation 17:9-13, we are given insight into who the seven heads and ten horns are. The seven heads are seven kings, five have fallen before John’s time, and one is, John was living in the sixth head, and another has yet to come, which is the seventh head, must continue for a short space. The ten horns are the seventh. In Revelation 17:12, the ten horns which thou saw are ten kings which received no kingdom as of yet, but they receive power as kings one hour with the beast. Verse 13 says these have one mind and shall give their power and strength into the beast.
On the World Economic Forum website, the world in the future is shown divided into ten world regions, each with a leader. Could this possibly be the future ten kings? Only time will tell. Verse 11 tells us the beast is the eighth and is of the seven and goes into perdition. Revelation 13:16 says he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bound, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their forehead. Verse 17 says they cannot buy or sell without the mark.
Revelation 14:11 tells us that all who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receives this mark of his name, shall be lost for eternity. The Fourth Industrial Revolution provides the technological support that will allow the Antichrist to do this. I believe we could be the generation that Luke 21:32 is talking about, the rapture generation that will escape all these things that are to come upon the Earth. Luke 21:34-36 tells us to watch and pray that we may escape these things to come. The Watchman
