Vaccines and the Mark of the Beast

[haithabu]

The vaccine doesn’t meet the Biblical criteria for the Mark of the Beast but I would say that it is the mark of A beast simply by the deceptive and coercive way it is being promoted.

[PetrChelcicky]

This just in: The German State Hesse is now leaving it up to food stores on whether or not to ban the unvaccinated.

https://yournews.com/2021/10/14/2240387 ... accinated/

Looks to me like they're already trying to cross that red line. That didn't take very long, did it.

How is this substantially different from a Christian baker refusing to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple? For all a long time, I’ve been seeing the argument that businesses should be able to decide which customers they want to serve based on their values and beliefs. How is this any different from a business deciding it doesn’t want to serve customers who are unvaccinated?

The substantial difference is imho that the government of Hesse gives a strong incentive for the businesses to ban the unvaccinated - namely, in this case they must not force their customers to wear masks and keep distance. These rules are a great burden for the businesses who have to keep control over their customers. And it is obvious that if customers have to choose, most of them will go to the supermarket or shop where masks and distances are not demanded. So it is not as if the businessmen have much of a choice, I suppose.
I don't maintain that the government does this in bad faith (as a kind of deliberate "nudging"). To a degree, I understand their logic, but it is not as good as they think - because vaccination seems in general not to prevent a future infection, so even the vaccinated can "spread" the virus, and masks and distance are as useful as before.

[PetrChelcicky]

My idea about the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast is that people tend to err to both sides. Some have maintained that the Antichrist was meant to be Nero and thus a matter of the past. Others have maintained that the Antichrist is purely a matter of the future.- My idea is that even in the first century people understood that Nero was at the start of a development which would lead to a final catastrophe. So, all this is a gradual development in which the shots come closer until one day they hit everyone.

[Signtist]

You can always get vaccinated and then throw away your vaccine card and avoid "the mark" that way.

Except you can't buy and sell without showing your proof of vaccination. (And you could buy and sell if you forged a vaccine card, which shows this is really just about submitting to a mandatory regime, not actually about public health at all.)

Which is it? Is the vaccine the "mark of the beast" or is the CDC vaccine card the "mark of the beast" They are two separate things.

Maybe they are both antiChrist.

[Bootstrap]

All I will definitively say is that if you do something which goes against God willingly despite your conviction, you will take the taint of the evil one upon you.

Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. James 4:17

I would certainly agree with that. And the Revelation is certainly a call to be loyal to Jesus against evil.

I made a post related to this a while back and generally got flamed for suggesting any connection to the mark of the beast. All I wanted to discuss was Peter Hoover's idea about multiple marks.
I would say I don't know if there is a literal mark, or if the various things called 'the mark' over the years have been so for some people. Some commentators think the right hand/forehead reference are pointing to your thoughts/actions.

I was wondering if that was the reason you see it this way. To me, this feels like it can quickly go to "whatever I feel really strongly about is the Mark of the Beast". And that can make it really easy to write our own issues into the Revelation, with different people feeling strongly about different things. So that's a danger.

On the other hand, I like the idea that many generations of people have found strength in the Revelation when standing against wrongdoing and persecution in the name of Jesus. The types found in the Revelation can be applied to more than one situation in more than one day and age. I don't think we should regard the Revelation as a book that only becomes relevant when Hal Lindsey's prophesies come true ...

[gcdonner]

My idea about the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast is that people tend to err to both sides. Some have maintained that the Antichrist was meant to be Nero and thus a matter of the past. Others have maintained that the Antichrist is purely a matter of the future.- My idea is that even in the first century people understood that Nero was at the start of a development which would lead to a final catastrophe. So, all this is a gradual development in which the shots come closer until one day they hit everyone.

I never heard that perspective from the first century, certainly not from scripture.

[PetrChelcicky]

We can of course hypothesize that "Revelations" was purely and strictly "revelated" by Godly inspiration. But if there was some impact of human experience at all, then the idea of a worldwide religious persecution in an Empire would probably be an amplification of experiences with the Neronic persecution. (This does not necessarily imply that Nero personally was seen at that time as the Antichrist: this particular identification seems to have been worked out in Later Antiquity.)

[gcdonner]

We can of course hypothesize that "Revelations" was purely and strictly "revelated" by Godly inspiration. But if there was some impact of human experience at all, then the idea of a worldwide religious persecution in an Empire would probably be an amplification of experiences with the Neronic persecution. (This does not necessarily imply that Nero personally was seen at that time as the Antichrist: this particular identification seems to have been worked out in Later Antiquity.)

Nero was identified by the original readers who understood the impact of the number of the beast. If we let scripture interpret itself, we do much better than speculating, especially if we are using the modern newspaper as our interpreter.

[silentreader]

https://www.bedfordgazette.com/news/the ... 44567.html

[Bootstrap]

https://www.bedfordgazette.com/news/the ... 44567.html

The whole article is worth reading, based on a careful reading of Scripture. Here's the summary:

To recap:

1. The covenant is yet to be signed; therefore, the Tribulation has not started.
2. The mark does not come until “the midst;” sometime in the middle of the tribulation.
3. Anyone without the mark loses the ability to buy or sell immediately.
4. The mark of the Beast comes when the Beast (the Antichrist) rules the world.

As you can see, none of the four criteria mentioned are in place.

Nothing out there today is the mark of the Beast. Not the vaccine or some computer chip that a factory mandates on its employees. The world’s populace will know precisely the choice they are making when receiving the Beast’s mark. We will leave that explanation for another day.