What it isn't
Nov. 3rd, 2025 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseOn one of my Discord servers just now, there was a discussion about Hobby Lobby. I don't know a great deal about them, as we don't have them in this country, but apparently they are very "Christian" in a certain sense that you don't normally tend to find anywhere outside the USA. There were several things said about them which I can neither confirm nor deny, but they certainly didn't sound good; one particularly astonishing thing that was said, however, should be pretty easy to check. And this is that they don't use bar codes.
There is a reason for this. Apparently bar codes might conceivably have the number 666 in them. Therefore they must be avoided at all costs.
My immediate reaction to that was "that's not Christianity, that's superstition". It's pretty much on a par with refusing to walk under any ladder at any time, even if there isn't someone at the top of it with a bucket of paint. The reference, of course, is Revelation 13, specifically verse 18, which is the last verse in the chapter. Apocalyptic literature, which is what Revelation is, is probably best thought of as a series of unusually colourful extended metaphors (see, for example, Daniel 7, where Daniel has a vision of various beasts and it is then explained to him what the beasts represent); so Revelation 13 is probably not talking about literal creatures, but earthly powers of some sort, as in Daniel. But, to summarise the chapter very briefly, John has a vision of two powerful beasts, one from the sea and one from the earth, who are both evil and in league with each other; and verse 18 (NIV) reads, "This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man*. That number is 666." The asterisk indicates a footnote reading "or 'is humanity's number'."
We're told earlier in the passage that the beast has a name; and, just as today, it was quite popular at the time to code words by numbering the letters according to their position in the alphabet and then adding up, or occasionally multiplying. This clearly isn't multiplication, because 666 = 2 x 3 x 3 x 37, and there aren't 37 letters in the Greek alphabet, so it must be addition, in which case the beast clearly has a very long name (at least if you spell it in Greek). It is, of course, not 100% certain that this is what is going on, but it is the most likely explanation given the context.
Whatever the explanation, though, the point is that outside this very specific context, 666 is just a number like any other; so avoiding anything that might conceivably contain it is kind of ridiculous.
I find it frustrating. It's not just the USA which has a cultural shell that goes by the name of Christianity; every country with any kind of Christian heritage has one, though it's different in different places. In the USA it involves extreme right-wing politics and ignoring everything Jesus ever said about caring for those who are poor, vulnerable, or disadvantaged; over here it's a bit more subtle but no less dangerous, in that it is very easy to mistake for actual Christianity among those who don't know. In this country, it's all about "if you're good you'll go to heaven" (when, in fact, the Gospel has it pretty much exactly the opposite way round), and ignoring everything Jesus ever said about not judging others. It was what I grew up with. I even went to a church school and never heard the Gospel there. Instead, we got the whole "if you're good you'll go to heaven" thing (where "being good" was mainly understood to mean "not inconveniencing adults"), and, in an attempt to reinforce that, everyone in the Bible got a whitewash job. We weren't supposed to know that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the rest of them messed up at times; but I could, and did, read my Bible, so I was very puzzled that all this was so carefully left out. Indeed, they left out the single most important verse in the Bible about Abraham, which is this: "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness".
Even in the Gospels, it was all about how good Jesus was (yes, 100%), but almost nothing about his compassion and acceptance towards all kinds of seriously messed-up people, except to demonstrate that The Pharisees Were Bad. As a matter of fact, the Pharisees weren't bad in any way that would have been recognised by the people who taught us; they were diligent lawkeepers of exactly the sort that we were all supposed to become. What most of them (not all!) were doing wrong was the very fact that they thought that would save them. They thought they were all right. They didn't think they needed Jesus because they reckoned they were already righteous enough, thank you very much. Jesus had quite a few words to say about that. And when we got to the Crucifixion, it was always emphasised that this was really important but nobody seemed to have the faintest idea why. The best anyone could do was to say that he couldn't rise again if he hadn't died, but not why he should have to die in that peculiarly horrible way, and even less why he should have spent so much time predicting that that would happen (that, again, was skated over).
So, after all that, the actual Gospel came as a revelation. No more of this business of trying to be good and eternally wondering if you were good enough (and strongly suspecting you weren't; I wasn't even good enough for my parents, so I didn't see how on earth I could possibly be good enough for God). It's fine. I'm not good enough. Nobody's good enough. The Gospel says we don't have to be. Jesus does all the being-good-enough that anyone needs, no matter what they've done. All I had to do was trust him to do that and ask him to help me do things better in future - not because I need to do that to earn favour, but because if God is going to do all that for me then I want to do the sort of things that he likes. And that's what I mean about the Gospel being the other way round; it's not "if you're good, you'll go to heaven," but "if you're going to heaven (because you trust in Jesus), then you'll gradually become good".
That doesn't mean Christians don't slip up (witness all those folks in the Old Testament, who were clearly chosen by God at the time even though Christianity as such didn't yet exist), and it doesn't mean people who aren't Christians don't do good things; I'm very thankful that they do. It is a process. Nobody's perfect this side of eternity.
But I will say this. If you're frightened of bar codes because they might contain the number 666, you maybe need to trust God a bit more.
There is a reason for this. Apparently bar codes might conceivably have the number 666 in them. Therefore they must be avoided at all costs.
My immediate reaction to that was "that's not Christianity, that's superstition". It's pretty much on a par with refusing to walk under any ladder at any time, even if there isn't someone at the top of it with a bucket of paint. The reference, of course, is Revelation 13, specifically verse 18, which is the last verse in the chapter. Apocalyptic literature, which is what Revelation is, is probably best thought of as a series of unusually colourful extended metaphors (see, for example, Daniel 7, where Daniel has a vision of various beasts and it is then explained to him what the beasts represent); so Revelation 13 is probably not talking about literal creatures, but earthly powers of some sort, as in Daniel. But, to summarise the chapter very briefly, John has a vision of two powerful beasts, one from the sea and one from the earth, who are both evil and in league with each other; and verse 18 (NIV) reads, "This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man*. That number is 666." The asterisk indicates a footnote reading "or 'is humanity's number'."
We're told earlier in the passage that the beast has a name; and, just as today, it was quite popular at the time to code words by numbering the letters according to their position in the alphabet and then adding up, or occasionally multiplying. This clearly isn't multiplication, because 666 = 2 x 3 x 3 x 37, and there aren't 37 letters in the Greek alphabet, so it must be addition, in which case the beast clearly has a very long name (at least if you spell it in Greek). It is, of course, not 100% certain that this is what is going on, but it is the most likely explanation given the context.
Whatever the explanation, though, the point is that outside this very specific context, 666 is just a number like any other; so avoiding anything that might conceivably contain it is kind of ridiculous.
I find it frustrating. It's not just the USA which has a cultural shell that goes by the name of Christianity; every country with any kind of Christian heritage has one, though it's different in different places. In the USA it involves extreme right-wing politics and ignoring everything Jesus ever said about caring for those who are poor, vulnerable, or disadvantaged; over here it's a bit more subtle but no less dangerous, in that it is very easy to mistake for actual Christianity among those who don't know. In this country, it's all about "if you're good you'll go to heaven" (when, in fact, the Gospel has it pretty much exactly the opposite way round), and ignoring everything Jesus ever said about not judging others. It was what I grew up with. I even went to a church school and never heard the Gospel there. Instead, we got the whole "if you're good you'll go to heaven" thing (where "being good" was mainly understood to mean "not inconveniencing adults"), and, in an attempt to reinforce that, everyone in the Bible got a whitewash job. We weren't supposed to know that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the rest of them messed up at times; but I could, and did, read my Bible, so I was very puzzled that all this was so carefully left out. Indeed, they left out the single most important verse in the Bible about Abraham, which is this: "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness".
Even in the Gospels, it was all about how good Jesus was (yes, 100%), but almost nothing about his compassion and acceptance towards all kinds of seriously messed-up people, except to demonstrate that The Pharisees Were Bad. As a matter of fact, the Pharisees weren't bad in any way that would have been recognised by the people who taught us; they were diligent lawkeepers of exactly the sort that we were all supposed to become. What most of them (not all!) were doing wrong was the very fact that they thought that would save them. They thought they were all right. They didn't think they needed Jesus because they reckoned they were already righteous enough, thank you very much. Jesus had quite a few words to say about that. And when we got to the Crucifixion, it was always emphasised that this was really important but nobody seemed to have the faintest idea why. The best anyone could do was to say that he couldn't rise again if he hadn't died, but not why he should have to die in that peculiarly horrible way, and even less why he should have spent so much time predicting that that would happen (that, again, was skated over).
So, after all that, the actual Gospel came as a revelation. No more of this business of trying to be good and eternally wondering if you were good enough (and strongly suspecting you weren't; I wasn't even good enough for my parents, so I didn't see how on earth I could possibly be good enough for God). It's fine. I'm not good enough. Nobody's good enough. The Gospel says we don't have to be. Jesus does all the being-good-enough that anyone needs, no matter what they've done. All I had to do was trust him to do that and ask him to help me do things better in future - not because I need to do that to earn favour, but because if God is going to do all that for me then I want to do the sort of things that he likes. And that's what I mean about the Gospel being the other way round; it's not "if you're good, you'll go to heaven," but "if you're going to heaven (because you trust in Jesus), then you'll gradually become good".
That doesn't mean Christians don't slip up (witness all those folks in the Old Testament, who were clearly chosen by God at the time even though Christianity as such didn't yet exist), and it doesn't mean people who aren't Christians don't do good things; I'm very thankful that they do. It is a process. Nobody's perfect this side of eternity.
But I will say this. If you're frightened of bar codes because they might contain the number 666, you maybe need to trust God a bit more.
