The Mark of the Passover and the Mark of the Beast, a biblical observation

The other day during my devotional reading I happened to read Revelation 15:1-16:11 for my New Testament passage and Exodus 13:11-20 for my Old Testament passage. I just read a little bit of the New Testament and a little bit of the Old Testament each day, so these two passages had not been hand picked to go together or anything.  Even so, I noticed a fascinating connection between the two that I’d never seen before.

In Revelation 16:2 you get a reference to that most notorious of biblical images, the “mark of the Beast,"  a symbolic number that anyone who "followed the Beast" received to indicate their allegiance (Revelation 13:11-18). The specific identity of the Beast has dogged interpreters for millennia, but for today, let's just say that whatever else it is, the Beast in Revelation represents the idolatrous genus of the Roman Empire. By extrapolation, the Beast stands as a symbol for the diabolical impulse underlying every idolatrous empire-building project ever concocted by the human heart, from well before Rome, to millennia after it.

There’s far more going on here than can be unpacked in a 400 word blogpost, of course, but let me put it like this, at least: to receive “the mark of the Beast” is to offer unquestioned, unequivocal service and devotion to the “power structures” of this world (economic? political? technological? etc.), offering them the service and devotion that’s rightly due to God, and doing it, in particular, because of the personal benefits and/or power they give you in exchange.

But here's where it gets interesting, because the “mark of the Beast,” in Revelation’s imagery was a number you received specifically “on your hand and on your forehead,” indicating that you belonged to It. This is old news for some, maybe, but here’s the fascinating connection: in Exodus 13, God is rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt (Egypt, you might say is an earlier manifestation of the same Imperialistic Beast that Revelation has in mind).  But in Exodus 13:9, as he's breaking his people free from Egypt, God gives them the Passover feast as a memorial of their liberation, and then he says: "This observance (the Passover) will be like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead” (13:9).

The human author of Exodus, of course, didn’t have Revelation in mind when he wrote that, but it’s all kinds of likely that the author of Revelation had Exodus in mind, when he suggested that choosing to serve the power structures of the World is sort of like taking an evil Beast’s “number” on your hand and your forehead. Because for the people of God, that space—the forehead and the hand—was reserved exclusively for God's mark of liberation.  And when we hold these two passages up together like this, we are profoundly reminded that the space on our hand and our forehead (symbolic maybe of our thought life and our actions?) is never blank. Either the world’s name is written there or the Lord’s name is written there, but it can’t be both and it can’t be neither.