TXAB’s 2016 Presidential Antichrist Watch.

Every presidential election year in the United States, we get doomsayers who claim this or that candidate is probably the Beast of Revelation 13, or as popular Christian culture calls it, the Antichrist. Or wannabe prophets claim one of the candidates is Jesus’s personal choice; if he held American citizenship (and I’m surprised one of the parties hasn’t voted him an honorary one by now) he’d totally pick that guy.

Of course none of these folks have any insight, supernatural or not. They’re proclaiming their own personal politics. Some of ’em do it every election. In the process, any such “prophets” unwittingly expose themselves as false ones, even when their favored candidates win. Because God’s will is for Jesus to reign, not some party, nor some politician. Lucky for them, we no longer stone false prophets to death. Man would that be satisfying.

I will point out it’s totally possible to determine which of these contenders might actually be the Beast. Seriously. Because at the end of chapter 13, John stated the Beast’s number is that of a human, and it’s 666. Rv 13.18 Meaning if we know what John meant by “its number”—and we do—we can calculate it.

Ready to find out which of the candidates are devil-spawn? Wait, lemme rephrase that: Ready to find out which of these folks are the ultimate devil-spawn? Well then you’re ready for TXAB’s 2016 Presidential Antichrist Watch.

The 2016 list.

The tricky part was trying all the variants of each candidate’s names. ’Cause Revelation doesn’t offer instructions: It’s not necessarily one’s full name, first ’n last ’n middle ’n maiden. It’s one’s name… which, I figure, could mean any reasonable configuration which adds up to 666. So I tried all the possibilities: Full names, nicknames, Hebrew-equivalent names, initials. Whatever jiggery-pokery got us closest to 666. Because if I didn’t, some conspiracy-theorist would, so I figured I’d beat ’em to the punch. Hey, if any reasonable-enough variant hits 666, maybe we do have something. And maybe not. I’m just the messenger.

Below are the closest results: It’s no coincidence they’re in the 500-700 range, ’cause that’s the range I was aiming for. I included candidates, potential candidates, and drop-outs, just in case. Nope, didn’t include third parties; they don’t win.

REPUBLICAN	IN HEBREW ALPHABET	NUMBER
Jeb Bush	יוחנן אליס בוש (Yochanan [John] Ellis Bush)	533
Ben Carson	בנימין ס קרסון (Benjamin S. Carson)	638
Chris Christie	כריס כריסטי	599
Ted Cruz	רפאל א קרוז (Rafael E. Cruz)	625
Mark Everson	מארק אוורסון	670
Jack Fellure	לואל ג'קסון פאללור (Lowell Jackson Fellure)	633
Carly Fiorina	קארלי פיורינה	702
Jim Gilmore	ג'יימס סטיוארט גילמור (James Stewart Gilmore)	707
Lindsey Graham	לינדסי אולין גרהם (Lindsey Olin Graham)	509
Mike Huckabee	מיכאל דייל האקבי (Michael Dale Huckabee)	273
Bobby Jindal	פיוש "בובי" ג'ינדאל (Piyush “Bobby” Jindal)	514
John Kasich	יוחנן ר קייסיק (Yochanan [John] R. Kasich)	614
George Pataki	ג'ורג' אלמר פטאקי (George Elmer Pataki)	683
Rand Paul	רנדל הווארד פול (Randal Howard Paul)	622
Rick Perry	יעקב ר פרי (Yaqov [James] R. Perry)	672
Marco Rubio	מרקו רוביו	570
Rick Santorum	ריק סנטורום	681
Donald Trump	דונלד יוחנן טראמפ (Donald Yochanan [John] Trump)	548
Scott Walker	סקוט קווין ווקר (Scott Kevin Walker)	659

 

DEMOCRAT	IN HEBREW ALPHABET	NUMBER
Joe Biden	יוסף רובינט ביידן (Joseph Robinette Biden)	509
Jeff Boss	ג'ף בוס	151
Lincoln Chafee	לינקולן ד צאפי (Lincoln D. Chafee)	461
Hillary Clinton	הילארי ר קלינטון (Hillary R. Clinton)	711
Lawrence Lessig	לורנס לסיג	449
Martin O’Malley	מרטין יוסף אומאלי (Martin Joseph O’Malley)	553
Bernie Sanders	ברני סנדרס	636
Jim Webb	יעקב הנרי ווב (Yaqov [James] Henry Webb)	461
Robby Wells	רוברט ולס (Robert Wells)	513
Willie Wilson	וילי וילסון	218

So there we are: None of the candidates appear to hit the relevant number. Now, whether their behavior or policies are Beast-like is a whole other ball of wax.

Back in 2012…

Some years ago I got into a political discussion (seldom a wise idea) with a fan of Pat Robertson. So for fun—hey, maybe I’d hit the magic number and horrify him!—I calculated Robertson’s name. No dice. Oh well.

Out of curiosity I tried a few of the front-runners’ names. Then I plugged in Mitt Romney’s name… and stuff got serious. Well, semi-serious. ’Cause Romney’s full name (Willard Mitt Romney, וילארד מיט רומני in Hebrew) came up 616. And I just so happen to know that in a few ancient copies of Revelation, the Beast’s number isn’t 666. It’s that number: 616.

Now, 616 is a textual variant, which means it’s not what the best ancient copies of Revelation have. And since Romney didn’t win the 2012 election, any worries people might’ve had, have (thus far) gone unfounded. Still…

Really, that’s the whole point behind calculating people’s numbers. It’s so Christians can watch out for them. That’s all. It’s not divine determinism: Anyone whose name adds up to 666 is foreordained to be the Beast. Just because your parents didn’t stop by the local Kabbalist to make sure they named you something benign, doesn’t make you the Beast. Being the Beast makes you the Beast.

In other words: Pursuing power instead of surrendering it, lying instead of seeking the truth, being a hypocrite instead of being transparent… basically if you’re in politics at all, you’re a much better match for the Beast than the average citizen who covets none of those things. (Or, better, who follows Jesus.)

I was a little surprised some news outlet didn’t pick up on Romney’s number and have a little fun with it. Then again, maybe they knew all along and squelched it… or maybe that’s just paranoia talking. ’Cause paranoia will come out with all this Beast-talk. Gotta keep our heads, folks.

Synchrobloggery.

Really, this is a story, not a non-sequitur: Back in 2007 my mother took a college course on Christian apologetics.

Since I’m the seminarian in the family, Mom kept picking my brain. And I’m really not the brain you wanna pick. Thanks to my Fundamentalist upbringing, I spent years studying apologetics… and trying it out on Dad, who’s atheist. Then I spent a few more years inflicting it on various other pagan skeptics. After some years working with real evangelists, who share the gospel instead of arguing it, I came to a rather heterodox view of apologetics.

Bluntly, apologetics are cessationists’ thoroughly inadequate substitute for testimonies. You don’t tell people about what God’s done in your life, ’cause as far as you believe, all his acts are theological, spiritual, invisible, and largely hypothetical. You don’t talk about what he’s shown you through your faithful obedience, ’cause you’ve not done a lot of that either. Don’t bother to develop any fruits of the Spirit. Instead, indulge one of the more self-gratifying works of the flesh: Argue. Verbally tear those pagans a new one.

You give ’em logical arguments for the existence of God. Explanations why the bible is historical and believable. Reasons the resurrection has to have happened. Ideas to believe, rather than a Person worth believing in. And most useless of all, reasons why evolution isn’t true—which tells pagans faster than any T-shirt slogan, “I don’t believe in science, and am therefore an idiot. Trust nothing else which comes out of my mouth.”

If you object to that characterization, I’ll deal with you later.

Obviously I don’t have a lot of use for apologetics. From the sound of it, neither did Mom’s professor: He was only teaching the class because somebody had to; it was a required course if you sought ordination. When Mom started sharing some of my conclusions in class, and revealed where she got ’em from, he decided maybe he and I oughta become “friends,” as they call ’em, on Facebook. His name’s John. Blame him for getting me into synchroblogging.

Why we gotta have freedom of expression.

And in this age, we have Blog Action Days.

I’m participating in the Blog Action Day thingy, an attempt to get bloggers and their readers to focus on a particular worthy issue. This year it’s #RaiseYourVoice, an attempt to speak up on behalf of journalists, photographers, bloggers, writers, and pretty much everyone who’s not allowed to speak up for themselves.

In the United States, freedom of expression is pretty much the content of our Constitution’s first amendment: A guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, the press, and to petition government.

Among us Christians, freedom of expression is a tricky thing. Because not every Christian is agreed we have freedom of expression. Or should have.

I know many a Christian who’s outraged, outraged, by some of the stuff on television. It’s just filthy. So, they tell anyone who’ll listen, they got rid of their TV. They threw it right out. They don’t watch it anymore.

…Well okay, they watch stuff on the Blu-ray player. And off Netflix. And sometimes they’ll reconnect the cable for sports. And they’ve downloaded every episode of Little House on the Prarie from Amazon, but watching old TV doesn’t count as “watching TV,” does it?…

Anyway. Some things, many of us Christians insist, shouldn’t be so freely expressed. “Let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth” Ep 4.29 and “Touch not the unclean thing” 2Co 6.17 and all that. We practice self-control, or at least we fake it really well. So others should practice self-control. And if they can’t, maybe we oughta pass some laws. Or, if doing so bothers our sense of libertarianism, we can just do as we usually do: Boycott them, boycott their sponsors, boycott their business partners, shout ’em down, hack their websites, slander ’em widely, and otherwise try to ruin them. ’Cause it’s our duty as good citizens and devout Christians.

But when other people do all that stuff to us—why, we’re being persecuted.

It’s a blind spot. A big black hole of a blind spot, where the inconsistency falls in and gets squashed into a singularity: “Those are entirely different things. They’re promoting evil. We’re promoting Jesus. (And our politics, which are Jesus-approved, so they’re part of the package.) Evil needs to be fought. And it’s evil to fight us, ’cause we’re on God’s side.”

So when I talk to my fellow Christians about freedom of expression, they’re all for it—for us. Not so much for others.

Introducing the Book Pile.

There’s this well-known pastor in my denomination. I’ve heard him preach, and found it impressive. When I found out he had a blog, I decided to subscribe to it. At the time it was mostly things he’d discovered in the process of writing his sermons, and the occasional rant about his politics. But two years ago it turned into nothing but book reviews.

Y’see, once your blog starts racking up the viewers, book publishers find out about it, and start offering you books for review. They hope your readers might wanna become their readers. And they’re not wrong; I’ve come across some really interesting books through some of my favorite blogs. So when they contacted me, I figured why not.

But lest you worry, Christ Almighty! is not gonna turn into a book blog, like that pastor’s site did. He began with books on Christian discipleship, branched into novels (and his novels aren’t my cup of tea), and doesn’t bother to write about Jesus anymore. I really need to unsubscribe from his blog sometime.

I’ll keep it to once a month. (Less often, if I haven’t found anything good.) No, not every book was sent to me for review, ’cause I’m gonna include the books I get on my own, and liked enough to let you know about. And no, not every book is gonna get a four-star review, ’cause if publishers send me something I don’t care for, I’ll say so. Too many bloggers seem to take the attitude of, “If you can’t say anything nice, be really vague or they’ll stop sending you books”—forgetting that if they send you nothing but crap, maybe you kinda want them to stop sending you books.

On hearing from God. Or not.

In this story I’m gonna bounce around in time a bit. Bear with me.

So much easier to hear God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Ten years ago. My pastor and I were discussing church stuff, as we did. We were chatting about the reasons why people join or leave a church. I casually mentioned that when there’s no obvious reason to quit a church (i.e. abusive people, leaders who won’t lead, heretic teachers, false prophets running wild, it’s a cult, etc.) people have no business leaving unless God tells them it’s okay.

“You know,” he blurted out, “in 20 years I’ve never heard a person say ‘God told me’ as much as you do.”

Yeah, it was a bad habit I was in. I’ve since got out of it.

No, not because God wasn’t really talking to me. Nor because he’s stopped. He still does. I just don’t point it out as often. Because people get the wrong idea, like my pastor did.

See, in his experience, Christians tend to use the line “God told me” for two reasons, both bad. The most obvious one is they’re showing off. “Look at me! God talks to me. Lemme tell you what he said.” They’re like name-droppers who wanna let everyone know they know celebrities, or important people, as if this makes them important too. As if God doesn’t talk to every Christian (though not all of us are listening). Now, I knew God talks to everyone, so I wasn’t saying “God told me” because I believed he was talking to me more than others. I wasn’t trying to show off. But if that’s what it looked like, best I stopped it. So I did.

The other, bigger problem are those Christians who say “God told me” in order to end a conversation. ’Cause God, they believe, gets the final word.

Introducing Jesus. Well, his gospels. Well, him too.

The four different perspectives on Jesus.

Mark 1.1 • Matthew 1.1 • Luke 1.1-4 • John 1.1-18

Mark 1.1 KWL 1 The start of the gospel of Christ Jesus, son of God.	Luke 1.1-4 KWL 1 Because many attempted to compose a narrative about the things which had been fulfilled in our religion, 2 just as the first eyewitnesses handed things down to us and became servants of the word, 3 I also thought, having closely, accurately followed everything from the start; I wrote you, honorable Theófilus, 4 so you could know about what you were taught. An accurate word.
Matthew 1.1 KWL 1 The book of the genesis of Christ Jesus, bar David, bar Abraham.

These are the introductions to the synoptic gospels, the three gospels in the New Testament which tend to sync up with one another. Obviously there are differences in their intros. Mark starts abruptly, and in the very next verse gets straight away to John the Baptist, who leads into the story of Jesus. Matthew refers to the genesis of Jesus: His ancestry and birth. From here we go to a big list of who begat whom, stretching all the way back to Abraham.

Unlike the others, the author of Luke (what the heck, we’ll assume it’s actually St. Luke, same as the other traditional authors) explained to his recipient exactly why he wrote his gospel. Others have done gospels, but Luke did an extra-thorough job to find the truth and present something accurate we can base our religion upon. So here’s the real history of Christ Jesus. Theófilus might be the recipient’s real name, but in those no-freedom-of-religion days there’s just as much a chance it’s an alias: Theófilus means “God-lover.”

John tends to go its own way, so its introduction is a bit longer and more theological.

John 1.1-18 KWL

1 The word’s in the beginning. The word’s with God. The word is God.

2 He’s in the beginning with God. 3 Everything came to be through him.

Nothing that exists came to be without him. 4 What came to be through him, was life.

Life’s the light of humanity. 5 Light shines in darkness, and darkness can’t get hold of it.

6 A person came who’d been sent by God, named John, 7 who came to testify.

When he testified about the light, everyone might believe because of him.

8 He wasn’t the light, but he’d testify about the light.

9 The actual light, who lights every person, was coming into the world.

10 He’s in the world, and the world came to be through him.

Yet the world doesn’t know him.

11 He came to his own people, and his own people don’t accept him;

12 of those who do accept him, those who put faith in his name,

he gives them power to become God’s children.

13 Not by blood, nor bodily will, nor a man’s will, but generated by God.

14 The word was made flesh. He encamped with us.

We got a good look at his significance—

the significance of a father’s only son—filled with grace and truth.

15 John testifies about him, saying as he called out, “This is the one I spoke of!

‘The one coming after me has got in front of me’—because he’s first.”

16 All of us received things out of his fullness. Grace after grace:

17 The Law which Moses gave; the grace and truth which Christ Jesus became.

18 Nobody’s ever seen God.

The only Son, God who’s in the Father’s womb, he explains God.

It’s deep, so I’ll analyze John’s intro in more detail another time.

Gospel, gospel music, and the gospels.

GOSPEL 'ɡɑs.pəl noun. Good news. Specifically the good news of God’s kingdom; or the revelation, teaching, and saving work of Christ Jesus.

2. A record of a great person’s life, teachings, and works. (Specifically a record of Jesus, namely the four included in the New Testament.)

3. adjective. Something meant to share good news, such as a book, tract, or song.

GOSPEL MUSIC 'ɡɑs.pəl 'mju.zɪk noun. Black contemporary Christian music.

The gospel, the good news of Christ Jesus, you know already. Or at least I hope you do. If not, I wrote all about it. Give it a read.

Gospel music used to refer to Christian music performed by church choirs. Nowadays in the United States, it just refers to Christian music performed by African Americans. Might be R&B, hip-hop, rap, or rock; but if it’s Christian and the artists are black, it’s gonna be lumped under the category “gospel,” and you’re as likely to find it on K-LOVE as you’d find a black artist on MTV before Michael Jackson broke through. Because culturally, the Christian music business is still 40 years behind the times, so it’s still segregated—which is still sin. But that’s a whole other discussion.

As for the gospels, these’d be the records of Jesus and his teachings. In the New Testament we find four of ’em. They were written anonymously—but we Christians weren’t having that, and gave credit to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew and John were members of the Twelve, and Mark and Luke were members of Paul’s ministry team.

Gospels have a lot in common with biographies, but they’re not really the same thing. They aren’t about the life of Jesus—’cause if you read ’em, you’ll notice the authors dropped a lot of biographical details. Like Jesus’s childhood, family and personal life, a precise chronology of events including exact dates… We have nothing about Jesus from birth to age 30—except Luke’s brief story about Jesus, the child prodigy, teaching in temple. The missing details are all the things historians care about, and they go a little bonkers that we don’t have it. But the gospels’ authors had a wholly different priority: They were trying to prove to their readers Jesus is Messiah, the King of Israel. Jn 20.31

How I got mixed up with the Assemblies of God.

The quick ’n dirty way to size up a Christian is to ask them their church. “What church do you go to?” Then you compare them with all the nutjobs in their church. Never the sane people who go to their church; never the sober-minded, thoughtful, kind, friendly types. (Assuming you know of any.) Just the crazies.

So when people ask my church, I know that’s what they’re up to. I’ll tell ’em anyway: I’m a member of an Assemblies of God church. And off they dig through their memories. If I’m lucky they know a nice person who happened to go to such a church; if I’m not they know some cranks. (Worse, some of our cranks.) Or of various televangelist scandals. Or they know some different kind of crank: The sort who’s anti-Assemblies, who tell anyone who’ll listen, “Do you know what those people teach?” and make us sound like raging heretics.

More often, people don’t know anything about Christian denominations. They know the one they’re in… sorta. They’ve heard of the bigger ones, like the Catholics and Baptists; or the older ones like the Lutherans and Episcopalians. The Assemblies is only a century old. So they don’t always know which prejudices they oughta have against me.

Not that all their prejudices fit. I didn’t grow up in this church. I started attending it only five years ago, less than a year after I moved to town.

Son of God and cheesy Jesus movies.

When Son of God hit the theaters February 2014, various people at my church were talking about it like it was the Second Coming of Christ. In fact, I got in some minor trouble ’cause I joked about this when I was presenting our church’s weekly announcements. Humor-deprived Christians merit a whole other rant. But not today.

From their website. Sorta.

A Jesus movie! In the theaters! In wide release!—not just playing in the hard-to-find specialty theaters in major cities and college towns. Produced by Hollywood producers! (Well, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, anyway; she got to play Jesus’s mom.) Public vindication of everything we Christians hold dear!

Meh. I’m not one of those Christians who are just thrilled to pieces every time Hollywood decides to pander to my demographic with a bible movie.

Largely because they get so much wrong. And y’know, they get it wrong even when they’re fellow Christians. Because—for the very same reason they so often get their theology wrong—they assume they know more than they do, never consult with experts, hire overeager over-actors instead of good actors, try to “improve” the story by padding it with stuff which is guaranteed to annoy the many, many purists among us… and the result is junk.

Burnett and Downey produced the awful History Channel miniseries The Bible, which had already done all this and more. Then they did it again, back round Easter 2015, with their awful NBC miniseries A.D.: The Bible Continues.) I saw just enough of it to realize Son of God was gonna be just as awful. So I didn’t bother to watch it myself till Netflix got it. There’s two hours, 18 minutes (less; I skipped the credits) I’m not getting back.

Wait, a new blog? What’s it about?

Introducing Christ Almighty!, your new favorite blog. Well, maybe in the top 10. Top 1,000 at least.

Yep, it’s a new blog. In full, it’s called The Christ Almighty Blog. In short, Christ Almighty! In even shorter, TXAB, or “T-Xab,” as the kids might call it, if kids ever got around to reading it, and of course we all know kids don’t read. Really, neither do adults. Not even sure what you’re doing here. Oh right; curiosity.

The purpose of Christ Almighty! is to talk about Christ Jesus. Or as Americans call him, Jesus Christ. In medieval times Europeans put titles after names, which evolved into last names, like Tom Butcher and Dick Baker and Harry Candlestickmaker. It’s why too many folks still think Jesus is Mr. and Mrs. Christ’s boy. We forget Christ means “anointed one,” an ancient Hebrew euphemism for king. Jesus is our king. He’s almighty. “Christ Almighty!” isn’t just a clever name based on a popular exclamation. It’s this blog’s point.

Authentic Christ-following is what I’m going for here. Hopefully you are too, and it’s why you’ve visited. Welcome. Sit a spell.