Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:45:39 -0400

This is a test post.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:45:22 -0400

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lead people in prayer using lines from Pulp Fiction, apparently, believing them to be Scripture.

Followers of Christ, are you seeing it now or not? Aligning oneself with powers such as these is not the narrow road.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:27:56 -0400

#Wordle 1,762 3/6*

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One would think a 3 would get the job done. Indeed no. The #OldGal is too crafty!

Wordle 1,762 3/6

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@wordle@piefeed.com

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:07:46 -0400

A sweep of the Royals is always fantastic!

FIVE WINS IN A ROW ‼️
Detroit Tigers :verified_business: 🤖 https://twitter.com/tigers/status/2044582235009896683

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:06:43 -0400

Baseball is fun. Bless you boys! #RepDetroit

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:36:20 -0400

This Tigers team is a fun watch.

Also? CF Javy Baez must be protected at all costs.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:58:26 -0400

Promises kept. Boundaries broken. On Jackie Robinson Day we remember a man whose importance transcended baseball.

For our family, we will never forget a day spent with Jackie’s daughter, Sharon, after Ethan won MLB’s Jackie Robinson essay contest in 4th grade.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:25:51 -0400

#Wordle 1,761 3/6*

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The #OldGal could not quite hang today.

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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 “Shot myself in the foot again! Geez”

@wordle@piefeed.com

Revelation 10 - Following the Lamb: Hope, Harvest, and the Gospel in Revelation 14

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:17:45 -0400

A reflection on Revelation 14:1–20

To listen to the unabridged audio subscribe to the podcast: Following the Lamb: Hope, Harvest, and the Gospel in Revelation 14

One of the easiest traps to fall into when reading Revelation is forgetting that we are reading symbols. It happens subtly — we encounter a passage that seems straightforward, one that aligns neatly with our expectations, and we quietly decide that this part must be literal. But Revelation doesn’t give us that option. John is telling us throughout: these are images. These are symbols. A principled reading of the text means we stay consistent, even when a passage seems to confirm what we already believe.

With that in mind, let’s walk through Revelation 14.

The Lamb and the 144,000 (Revelation 14:1–5)

After the darkness of Revelation 13 — the dragon, the two monsters, the mark of the beast — we turn the page and find something entirely different. The Lamb stands on Mount Zion, and with him are 144,000 people who bear his name and the name of his Father written on their foreheads.

This is a deliberate contrast. In chapter 13, people are marked with the sign of the enemy. Here, the followers of the Lamb are marked with something deeper: the name of the Father and the Son written on them. This isn’t incidental. When someone’s name is written on you, it speaks to ownership and identity in the most fundamental sense. These people belong to God. They are defined by him.

The 144,000 are described as celibate — a detail some make too much of. Read in its Jewish context, this points to a military image. In ancient Israel, soldiers on active duty were expected to abstain from sex during battle (recall Uriah’s refusal to sleep with Bathsheba while his troops were in the field). The imagery here depicts the 144,000 as warriors always ready for battle, always prepared to defend the name of the Lamb.

Two phrases stand out. First: “They follow the Lamb wherever he goes.” This echoes the Gospel of John, where following Jesus is a central, recurring theme — which leads some scholars to suggest a connection between the author of Revelation and the author of the fourth Gospel. Second: “No lie has been found in their mouths.” This is the exact opposite of the dragon and the monsters, whose defining characteristic is deception. The followers of Jesus are marked by truth; the followers of the dragon are marked by lies.

As N.T. Wright puts it: “Following the Lamb means rejecting the lie, always and forever.”

Three Angels and the Eternal Gospel (Revelation 14:6–13)

The first angel carries “an eternal gospel” to all nations, tribes, languages, and peoples. This is worth pausing on.

We often think of the gospel as a transaction: I confess my sin, God forgives me, the deal is done. That understanding isn’t wrong, exactly — but it’s far too small. At its heart, the gospel is a proclamation of victory. When a Roman emperor conquered a foreign territory, a messenger was sent back to announce the news: Caesar has won. The empire has expanded. Everything has changed. That was called gospel.

The eternal gospel John describes here is this: God has acted. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the very nature of existence has been transformed. Everything is different now. This is not fire insurance. This is a new way of living in a world where God has already won.

The second angel announces the fall of Babylon — a symbol every Jewish reader would have immediately understood as exile and oppression. When Babylon falls, the people come home. The land is restored. The temple is rebuilt. In Revelation, Babylon is Rome — but Rome is also a principle. Any oppressive power in history can be Babylon. And the good news is that God brings justice against every Babylon.

The third angel warns of God’s wrath against those who worship the monster. Here again, we must resist the urge to abandon the symbolic framework. This is not primarily a treatise on eternal conscious torment. It is a message to persecuted Christians: Hold on. Your suffering is seen. God will set things right. The imagery is meant to bring comfort, not to satisfy our desire for vengeance.

Wright puts it plainly: in passages like this, John is working with symbols, and the task is not to literalize them but to probe through to the reality they point toward. That reality is this — God is going to sort it all out.

The Harvest (Revelation 14:14–20)

Then comes the famous harvest passage — and its disturbing ending: blood flowing from the winepress as high as a horse’s bridle for about 200 miles.

Our instinct is to read this as judgment. But here’s the thing: throughout the New Testament, harvest imagery is consistently good news. Harvest means the people of God are being gathered in. The “Grapes of Wrath” phrase entered popular culture with a dark connotation, but that’s not what John is describing.

Wright writes: “There should be no doubt that this passage describing the harvest and the vintage is meant to be an occasion of great uninhibited joy.”

We’ve lost touch with what harvest means. We no longer live in agricultural societies where the harvest determined whether you ate through the winter. Harvest was joy. It was celebration. It was the culmination of everything you had worked and waited for.

So what about the blood?

Consider this: where is Jesus taken to be crucified? Outside the city. And in this passage, the winepress is trodden outside the city. This is the path of the followers of Jesus — those who follow him wherever he goes, including outside the city gates.

And consider what happens to grapes. Grapes are good. But grapes find their greatest value by being crushed into wine. The suffering of persecution, the crushing by the powers of the dragon and the monsters — this is not the end of the story. It is transformation. The grape becomes wine. The suffering becomes something far greater.

Not a single grape is lost.

This is the whole message of Revelation in miniature: Persevere. Press on. Follow Jesus wherever he leads. Though the dragon and the monsters may crush you, Christ transforms you. You become wine. You will be brought in.

The Thread Running Through It All

What holds Revelation 14 together is a single call: follow the Lamb.

Follow him in truth — no lies on your lips, no compromise with the methods of the dragon.

Follow him in perseverance — not by fighting on the enemy’s terms, not by chasing power or manipulating outcomes, but by walking in self-sacrificial love.

Follow him outside the city — into suffering, if that is where he leads, trusting that the winepress is not the end.

The way we fight the dragon is not to become like the dragon. The ends do not justify the means. The only means truly available to the followers of Jesus are the means of Jesus himself: truth, love, and the cross.

Press on. The harvest is coming. The wine will be worth it.

This reflection is part of an ongoing series through the book of Revelation here at Beyond Sunday School.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:36:45 -0400

#Wordle 1,760 4/6*

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The #OldGal manages a tie today. I think she feels pretty good about it.

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@wordle@piefeed.com

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:28:26 -0400

The sitting President of the United States posted this picture. He claimed today in public statements that it is him as a doctor supporting the Red Cross. He said only the media could come up with the idea that this was him as Christ.

Mr President, that sir is a lie. It is evident to any and all what this is. You are mocking the risen Christ. To claim otherwise, is nothing more than cheap gaslighting.

My fellow Christians, if his call for the commission of war crimes didn’t sway you. If his call for genocide didn’t sway you. If his dehumanizing behavior and rhetoric over the last decade hasn’t swayed you.

Perhaps, the open mocking of Christ during the season of Easter will move you.

The man is deceitful, unrepentant, and utterly abhorrent. He openly mocks our shared faith.

I am studying and preaching Amos and Revelation right now. There are parallels beyond parallels in both texts that ought to concern the follower of Jesus who aligns themself with one such as this.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:49:43 -0400

#Wordle 1,759 3/6*

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The #OldGal came up just short today, like the Red Wings and their playoff chances.

Wordle 1,759 4/6

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@wordle@piefeed.com

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:05:32 -0400

Amos wasn’t a prophet. He was a shepherd and a fig tree pruner.

God sent him to tell his people the truth nobody wanted to hear: looking good on the outside means nothing if the inside is rotten.

2,800 years later, the mirror still works.

Mandat of Mishpat - When God Turns the Mirror Around

Mandate of Mishpat - When God Turns the Mirror Around

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:52:24 -0400

An Introduction to Amos A sermon series on the Prophet Amos — Week 1

To listen to the full unabridged audio of this message: Mandate of Mishpat - When God Turns the Mirror Around

Let me be honest with you: the minor prophets get a bad rap.

It’s right there in the name — minor — as if Amos and Hosea and Micah were somehow second-tier voices. But the only reason they’re called minor is because they were concise. They didn’t ramble on like Isaiah or Jeremiah. My seminary professors taught me that to be concise is to be skilled. So maybe we have it backwards. Maybe the minor prophets are the real majors.

And if that’s true, Amos deserves to be at the top of the list.

Who Was Amos?

Amos was the first. He preached before Isaiah, before Jeremiah, before Ezekiel. Isaiah likely knew of Amos’s prophecies and built upon them. When you hear resonances between Amos and Isaiah, it’s because Isaiah was standing on Amos’s shoulders.

He preached roughly from 788 to 750 BC — probably thirty years of ministry.

And here’s what I love about him: Amos was one of us.

He wasn’t a professional prophet. He wasn’t wealthy or powerful. Chapter 1 introduces him as “one of the shepherds of Tekoa.” Later, in chapter 7, when a priest named Amaziah challenges him, Amos responds simply: “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore fig trees.”

He was a middle manager, essentially. Not the owner of the farm, but the one who oversaw the other shepherds. He had some authority, some responsibility — but he wasn’t at the top.

And that second job — tending sycamore fig trees — is more interesting than it sounds. These trees required a specific kind of pruning. Done wrong, they’d catch disease and die. Done right, the cuts ensured health and growth. Amos’s whole life was about making careful, precise interventions to keep living things from dying.

Then God called him to preach to Israel.

The World Amos Walked Into

To understand Amos’s message, you have to understand the world he was walking into.

Israel was at the height of its power. The great empires of the ancient Near East had receded or not yet risen, and under King Uzziah in the south and King Jeroboam II in the north, Israel had expanded its territory — perhaps even beyond the boundaries of Solomon’s kingdom. Politically, it was the top of their historical game.

The economy was booming. A new merchant class had emerged — people who could make money with money. A rising upper-middle class was ascending fast. Wealth was being generated.

But not for everyone.

The top tier of society had figured out how to trap people in debt. Can’t pay what you owe me? No problem. Just sign over your family land. You can keep working it — I’ll own it now. The rich got richer. The poor got poorer. The wealth gap was staggering.

And yet — the temples were full.

When people have extra money, they give more to church. When life is good, religious festivals multiply. More feast days, more worship gatherings, more offerings. From the outside, Israel looked like a nation firing on all cylinders: expanding territory, booming economy, thriving religion.

This is the moment Amos arrives.

The Sermon Nobody Saw Coming

Amos opens with a rhetorical masterstroke. He begins preaching judgment — but not on Israel. Not yet.

“For three sins of Damascus, even for four, I will not relent…”

The phrase “for three sins, even for four” is worth pausing on. It’s God saying: I’ve given you grace upon grace. I’ve been patient. But there’s a limit, and you’ve crossed it. Think of it like a parent who has asked their child 150 million times to do something — and finally reaches the breaking point. That’s the “three sins, even four” moment.

And the crowd loves it.

Damascus thrashed Gilead with iron-toothed threshers — a scorched-earth strategy that destroyed farmland and caused famine. A crime against humanity.

Gaza took entire communities captive and sold them into exile. Genocide by another name.

Tyre made peace treaties, built trust — then betrayed their partners and handed them over as slaves. The ancient Near Eastern equivalent of playing someone in Risk until you can wipe them off the board.

Edom pursued his brother with a sword, slaughtering the women of the land in unrelenting rage.

Ammon ripped open pregnant women to eliminate future generations and expand his borders.

Moab burned people’s bones to ash — dehumanization taken to its furthest extreme.

Each oracle lands like a punch. And every Israelite in the crowd is cheering: Yes. Get them, God. They deserve it. Hold them accountable.

Then Amos turns to Judah — the southern kingdom, Israel’s rival. And something shifts.

The charges against Judah aren’t war crimes or atrocities. They’re this: “They have rejected the law of the Lord… they have been led astray by false gods.”

Wait. God is placing spiritual unfaithfulness on the same level as genocide and ethnic cleansing?

Yes. Because to God’s people, more is expected. A higher standard applies. The crowd from the northern kingdom is still nodding — that’s right, those dirty southerners — and then Amos turns one more time.

The Punch Nobody Saw Coming

“For three sins of Israel, even for four, I will not relent.”

The record scratch heard across the ancient Near East.

Now he’s talking about us.

And what does he charge Israel with? Not military conquest. Not ethnic cleansing. Something that, on the surface, looks far more mundane:

They sell the innocent for silver — the justice system is rigged; the wealthy bribe the judges.
They trample the heads of the poor into the dust — the marginalized are not just neglected, they are actively ground down.
They deny justice to the oppressed — not passive indifference, but active denial.
They visit pagan temples — for all the religious activity, the heart is divided.
They exploit the vulnerable — the poor aren’t just ignored; their poverty is leveraged for profit.

Two Hebrew words sit at the heart of Amos’s message: mishpat and tzedakah — justice and righteousness.

Righteousness (tzedakah) is the condition of the soul. Justice (mishpat) is righteousness expressed outward in action. You cannot have one without the other. Amos’s indictment is that Israel’s actions — their injustice — is revealing something true about their souls: that for all the religious activity, something is rotten at the core.

Everything looked good. Territory expanding. Economy booming. Temples full.

But the poor were being trampled. The vulnerable were being exploited. The justice system was for sale. And some were hedging their bets at pagan temples on the side.

Why This Matters Now

I want to be careful here. We are not standing in judgment over the broader church. That is not the point. The point is to hold up a mirror — to let Amos’s words do what they were always meant to do: make us look at ourselves.

When I read Amos and then look at the American church in 2026, the parallels are uncomfortable. A nation of enormous wealth and expanding power. Churches that are busy and active. And yet — questions about whose interests are being served, whose voices are being heard, whose justice is being sought.

Amos doesn’t let us off the hook with good attendance and generous giving.

He asks a harder question: Is the grace you’ve received actually transforming you?

Because here is the thing — Amos is preaching before the cross. Before the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that changes everything. The grace we have received is greater, not lesser. It is not cheap grace. It is costly grace. It is a radical, reckless grace rooted in self-sacrificial love — and that kind of grace doesn’t leave you the same.

If grace has truly landed in your soul, it wakes you up to the brokenness of the world. It makes you unable to look away from injustice. It moves you.

The question Amos puts to us — the question we’ll be sitting with for the next several weeks — is simple and searching:

Are you being transformed on the inside in a way that shows up on the outside?

Or are we content to play the game — attend the services, make the donation, sing the songs — while the shape of our lives tells a different story?

That is the question Amos brought to Israel.

It is the question he brings to us.

This is the first installment in a series on the Prophet Amos. We’ll be wrestling with his message together over the coming weeks.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:46:30 -0400

Good morning! Victory is ours today #YoungPups…

#Wordle 1,758 3/6*

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The #OldGal made a valiant effort but fell short…

Wordle 1,758 4/6

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@wordle@piefeed.com

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:21:54 -0400

This interview with Ben Sasse is remarkable. I think it is worth an hour of your time. How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He is Dying

@faith@piefeed.com

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:57:10 -0400

#Wordle 1,757 3/6*

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Once again the #OldGal goes toe to toe with me and refuses to lose!

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Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:16:27 -0400

#Wordle 1,756 4/6*

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I thought had her beat. She thought image had me beat. In the end, nothing but a tie from the #OldGal.

Wordle 1,756 4/6

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@wordle@piefeed.com

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:46:45 -0400

“A good reputation is acquired by many actions; and can be lost by one. Be upon your guard, therefore, against those weaknesses which may risk it. Nothing can be more unjust than to judge a person by one single action; but the world is seldom just.” - Philip Dormer Stanhope

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:04:25 -0400

I’ve launched a community for faith discussions on piefeed.com, you can follow the community @faith@piefeed.com and you can tag your posts about faith with that account to send them to the community!

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:26:26 -0400

“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:36:15 -0400

I begin preaching Amos Sunday! The trepidation is real. This is not going to be a lighthearted or easy series to preach. 😮‍💨

@faith@piefeed.com

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:53:21 -0400

#Wordle 1,755 4/6*

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The #OldGal came down off her high from the last couple days and merely tied me.

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Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:54:11 -0400

Happy Rex Manning Day to all who celebrate!

Dragons, Monsters, and the Powers Behind the Curtain

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:16:18 -0400

A Study in Revelation 13

You can listen to the full unabridged audio here: Dragons, Monsters, and the Powers Behind the Curtain

We’re deep in dragon-and-monster territory now. If you’ve been following along in Revelation, you know we’re not exactly in cheerful, Hallmark-card Christianity. And that’s precisely the point.

Before we dive into the text itself, a quick note on Bible navigation: all those chapter and verse numbers? They weren’t in the original. They were added later to help people find their place — and the running joke among Bible scholars is that the divisions were made by a monk on horseback, because the breaks don’t always make sense. Case in point: N.T. Wright ends chapter 12 where the NIV begins chapter 13. If you want to experience Scripture fresh, try copying a passage into a plain document, stripping out the chapter and verse numbers, and reading it without those interpretive interruptions.

Now, on to the monsters.

The First Monster: Empire and Its Machinery

“I saw a monster coming up out of the sea. It had 10 horns and seven heads… The dragon gave the monster its power and its throne and great authority.” — Revelation 13:1–2

For the Jewish imagination, the sea was never just water. It was chaos. It was the unknown. The great terrors — Behemoth, Leviathan — came from the deep. Storms rolled in off the Mediterranean. The sea was fear itself. So when a monster rises from it, the symbolism hits hard.

This monster is a composite. It draws together all four beasts from Daniel 7 — the winged lion, the bear with tusks, the four-headed leopard, the iron-toothed fourth beast — into one terrifying figure. First-century Christians would have recognized this immediately. They’d been living with Daniel’s images for generations, asking: When will God overthrow the empires that oppress us?

N.T. Wright reads the first monster as Rome — the dominant political and military power of John’s day. And he makes a crucial observation: Rome was the obvious candidate in the first century, but “the phenomenon of heartless, dehumanized pagan empire sadly did not end with the decline and demise of Rome.” The monster changes outfits. It doesn’t change nature.

Behind the monster stands the dragon — Satan, the accuser, the one pulling the strings. But Satan is not omnipresent, not omniscient. He can’t be everywhere at once. So how does he multiply his influence? Through systems. Through empires. Through the structures of power that do the dirty work on his behalf.

We can trace this across history:

The Ottoman Empire
Nazi Germany
Any structure that systematically dehumanizes human beings made in God’s image

Wherever you see power being used to crush, to dehumanize, to sow chaos rather than order — that is the fingerprint of the monster.

Identifying the Monster in Our Own Time

This raises an uncomfortable question: How do we know when we’re looking at the monster?

It’s not always obvious. And we have to hold our conclusions with humility — we will not be right every time. But Scripture gives us tools for discernment.

Paul’s letters offer what you might call diagnostic lists. In Galatians, Colossians, and Ephesians, he describes both the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. We can use these as a lens:

Is this power fomenting anger, malice, chaos, fear? That aligns with the works of the flesh.
Is this power producing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control? That aligns with the Spirit.

We’re not asking whether a political movement is explicitly building the church. We’re asking: What is the general direction of this thing? What does it produce in people?

Sometimes it remains ambiguous. Sometimes — painfully — it becomes clear. Either way, our calling as followers of Jesus is to stay alert, to exercise discernment, and to push back against dehumanizing power wherever we find it. That’s not a political statement. That’s faithfulness to the One who said blessed are the peacemakers and love your enemies.

The Second Monster: The Local Face of Empire

“Then I saw another monster coming up from the earth. It had two horns like those of a lamb. It spoke like a dragon.” — Revelation 13:11

If the first monster is the empire, the second monster is the local enforcement apparatus — the provincial governors, the regional officials, the people who make the empire’s demands feel personal and immediate.

In Rome’s case, these were the governors assigned to newly conquered provinces. Men like Pilate. Their job was to keep the emperor’s cult alive at the local level — building temples, demanding worship, integrating emperor veneration into every trade guild and marketplace. They gained power by being loyal fanatics. The more devoted they appeared to the emperor, the more they rose.

Notice the description: horns like a lamb, but the voice of a dragon. This is mimicry. It looks gentle. It looks approachable. It looks almost like a sacrificial lamb. But what comes out of its mouth? The words of the dragon. It’s a counterfeit savior — a fake lamb with a borrowed voice.

Paul picks up on this same dynamic in Colossians 1. That magnificent passage about Christ — “the image of the invisible God,” “firstborn over all creation,” “in him all things hold together” — Paul is deliberately co-opting the language Caesar used for himself. He’s saying, in effect: You’re fake. This is the real Son of God. Your claims are hollow.

The second monster reveals how evil scales down. The dragon works through the first monster. The first monster empowers the second. The second brings it all the way to your neighborhood, your trade guild, your school board meeting. We’re watching the same downstream effect in our own time — decades of national-level chaos filtering down into local communities, neighbor distrusting neighbor, institutions losing their credibility, everyone shouting and nobody listening.

The media, in many ways, fits this pattern: outwardly presenting as trustworthy and authoritative — horns like a lamb — while increasingly speaking in the voice of the dragon, amplifying division, rage, and mistrust.

666: The Number of Falling Short

“This calls for wisdom. Anyone with a good head on their shoulders should work out the monster’s number, because it is the number of a human being. Its number is 666.” — Revelation 13:18

Every generation finds a new candidate for 666. Credit cards. Bar codes. Vaccines. Microchips. The paranoia cycles on. But once again, we need to think symbolically before we think literally.

There are two compelling interpretations worth holding together:

The historical reading: In Hebrew numerology, each letter carries a numerical value. The Hebrew spelling of Nero Caesar adds up to 666. Given that Nero’s face was literally on every coin — and you couldn’t buy or sell without using coins — “receiving the mark of 666” had an almost mundane literalness to it. You couldn’t participate in the economy without using Nero’s image.

The symbolic reading: Seven is the number of wholeness and completion throughout Revelation. Six falls short of seven. So 666 is the ultimate coming up short — the number of striving toward perfection and failing at every level. It is the number of humanity in its fallenness.

The monster isn’t superhuman. The monster is profoundly, catastrophically subhuman — comprised of fallen people, animated by fallen institutions, producing the worst of what we’re capable of.

Think of it this way: governments are made of people. Media is made of people. Empires are built and sustained by people. Our collective brokenness doesn’t just stay private — it accumulates, institutionalizes, and becomes monstrous. That’s what 666 points to.

The Hard Word at the End

“This is a summons for God’s holy people to be patient and have faith.” — Revelation 13:10

This is what we’re left with. Not a battle plan. Not a political strategy. Not a program. Patience. Faith.

It’s an almost brutally simple word. And it comes right after John has just told his readers that some of them will be taken captive and some will be killed. Be patient and have faith.

That’s not Pollyanna Christianity. That’s not the prosperity gospel. That’s the hard way of Jesus — the way of the cross, the way of turned cheeks and enemies blessed and suffering received without retaliation.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. Before the Civil Rights marches, protesters were reminded: You are going out to break unjust laws. You will be arrested. You need to receive that arrest. If you cannot love the people who are about to arrest you, don’t go. The means matter. The ends never justify the means for a follower of Jesus. The power of that witness came precisely from the willingness to face consequences with dignity.

We’re not facing active persecution the way John’s first readers were. We should be grateful for that. But the call is the same: identify the monsters. Name what we see. Push against dehumanizing power. Do it with love and without illusions. Receive the consequences if they come.

Because death doesn’t win. It already lost. That’s the whole point of Easter.

A Final Note on Where We Stand

Someone asked a good question: As believers, are we still 666 until we get to heaven?

Here’s the theological answer: positionally, no. Paul doesn’t address his letters to “you dirty, rotten sinners” — even in Corinth. He writes to the saints. Because of Christ, positionally, we’ve been made whole. We’re sevens.

Practically? We all know what’s going on in our own hearts. We’re in process. We’re being sanctified. And that means we hold our discernment with an open hand and genuine humility. We will not always get this right. We will sometimes mistake a lamb for a dragon, and a dragon for a lamb. The goal isn’t certainty — it’s faithfulness. Pressing on. Staying alert. Trusting the Spirit who leads us into all truth.

We are, as one person put it, at about 6.99.

Next week: Revelation 14.

This post is adapted from a teaching in our ongoing series through the book of Revelation.