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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1091 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
666 - What Does it Really Mean? - Wisdom Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1091 of our Trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God’s Word.  Especially in our western cultures, we do not fully understand the Scriptures from the mindset and culture of the authors.  In order to help us all have a better understanding of some of the more obscure passages in God’s Word, we are investing Wisdom Wednesday reviewing a series of essays from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser.  He has compiled these essays into a book titled  ’I Dare You Not to Bore Me With the Bible.’

The number 666 in the Bible is recognized by believers and non-believers alike as the “Number of the Beast.”  In today’s essay, we will explore passages that cover:

 
666 – What Does it Really Mean?
If there's one part of the Bible virtually everyone has heard of, it’s 666—the “number of the Beast.” If there's one thing no one can agree upon, it's what that number stands for. We see 666 in Revelation 13:18: Wisdom is needed here. Let the one with understanding solve the meaning of the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666. The wording here is important: John tells readers that the number must be “calculated,” which means there must be a hidden meaning behind it. But how do we calculate it?
·       Calculating Symbolism
One option for solving this biblical riddle is gematria, the idea that numbers have symbolic meaning. While some have called gematria a tool for speculation, it actually derives from an ancient convention in languages like Greek and Hebrew where letters of the alphabet are used to represent numbers. But gematria is not limited to just Revelation: the New Testament contains several other symbolic figures. The 153 fish of John 21:11 could be interpreted as ancient symbolism for the Church, the body of Christ, and the Old Testament sons of God as analogous to believers in the Church. The Greek word for “dove,” like the dove that descends on Jesus at His baptism, has a numerical value equivalent to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, thus symbolizing the Alpha and Omega as recorded in Revelations 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega—the beginning and the end,” says the Lord God. “I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come—the Almighty One.” 


·       Calculating 666
When it comes to 666, one gematria explanation is that the number represents Nero Caesar. The Greek Xeron Kaisar adds up to 1,005, but when the name is transliterated into the Hebrew letters nrwn qsr, the sum is 666. Nero Caesar also would explain the variant number of the Beast (616) found in some New Testament manuscripts. Transliterating the Latin Nero Caesar into Hebrew, nrwn qsr, yields 616, suggesting John may have been thinking of the well-known Nero Redivivus myth when writing about the Beast (i.e., that Nero would rise from the dead to destroy Christians).

The gematria solution presents three major problems: It could be viewed as cheating with the spellings (the usual Hebrew spelling for Caesar is q’st, not qsr,