The beast from the earth

Image: The Apotheosis of Washington (by Constantino Brumidi, 1865)

The beast from the earth is the sea beast’s religiously oriented accomplice. This false prophet’s lying wonders support the sea beast’s arrogant boasts and slanders against God, luring those who dwell on the earth into worshipping the beast. What does this earth beast/false prophet symbolize? Just as the beast from the sea is Rome and yet is much bigger than Rome, so the beast from the earth is the imperial cult indigenous to Asia Minor but also a larger phenomenon that continues in our day. As we saw in the background of the letters to the seven churches, several of those ancient Christian congregations found themselves in cities that competed vigorously for the honor of building a temple or shrine to the ruling Roman emperor and/or to the empire’s patron goddess, Roma. A city that bore the honored designation “temple warden” (neocoros) had enhanced its social prestige and its political and economic status. In the decades following John’s reception of the Apocalypse, religious devotion in the form of burning incense to the emperor would be made the test of political loyalty to Rome and its ruler. The worship of rulers as gods, descendants of the gods, or gods in the making (after death—apotheosis) is less overt in Western culture today than it was in the ancient world. Even in so-called secular states, however, governments can arrogate to themselves quasi-divine powers and issue quasi-divine promises of salvation to their loyal and believing subjects. Such states have no qualms about exploiting religious establishments in the interests of civic loyalty and cultural conformity. But people who, in allegiance to “another king, Jesus,” resist the state’s claim to ownership over forehead and hand, mind and deed, are seen as threats to good order and the common weal—and must be eliminated.

Dennis E. Johnson, Triumph of the Lamb: A Commentary on Revelation (pp. 196-197)