Beware of 666

This morning my radio alarm clock woke me up with the ANP report that "Christians worldwide are praying against the devil, because today, 6 June 2006, 666 will execute his plans to spread evil." How silly and reactionary we can get... We're giving this fallen angel way too much credit, and bringing these kind of activities into the media is always counter-productive for our credibility and effectiveness. If I were the devil I would have rescheduled the project to 5 June without telling the Christians. No doubt some of his followers will use this symbolic day to perform their rituals, but this doesn't concern me as much as believers pulling their shofars everytime the devil is making some noise. Btw, the official term for the 666 hype is hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia and according to Technorati over 130,000 blog posts are mentioning it.

Comments

[scott]

We're celebrating our daughter's 2nd birthday today. We're having a party with little devil horns and inflatible fireballs...

[Peter]

Strange how Christians can think differently about a clear subject as this. We are still far away of being one body, one mind, one spirit. The biggest enemy is not the devil these days... It's the Christians itself... the devil doesn't have to do anything, we are doing it for him...

[Marc]

Hey Peter, are you implying that as Christians we should all join the prayer hypes that some charismatics create? Or that we should all shout YES and AMEN when Ana Mendez comes up with her next 'revelation'?

I don't agree this is a clear subject. If it was, more people would have responded to this call to prayer. But on the various pictures and videos I only see a handful of people. Quite different from the Global Day of Prayer on June 4, in which 200 million people participated.

The bottomline is of course: it's always good to pray and worship Jesus, so why not on 6 June? Let those who sense God's leading to pray please do so, no matter the reponse of others. As such I have no problem with that. What I'm addressing here is the reactionism that speaks out of this report. Maybe it's just an issue of communication, that the way the press picked it up was different from the original intention.