The Devil doesn’t care if people believe in God. There’s a reason hardly anyone is an atheist. He is entirely content to have all of us on a spiritual journey looking for transcendence. The Devil is perfectly happy to have everyone searching for God. The bad news is the human heart is an idol factory. There is something hard-wired in all humans that compels us to search after the divine or find something spiritual. We all feel the need to experience something bigger than ourselves. Religion is at its worst when it does nothing but lends credence to and encourages support of the corrupt and blasphemous state. They encouraged, and sometimes made mandatory, the worship of the state. There were priests and sacred rituals and officials insisting on the deity of the emperor.
In the first century there was a large imperial cult. He acts on his behalf and leads people to worship him. The second beast is an accomplice to the first. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed (v. The beast may look a lamb, but if you are discerning, you will hear that the voice is the voice of a dragon. We should expect similar religious language and themes, which is why we must be wise. We should expect them to talk about the cross. We should expect false Christian cults and perversions to speak highly of Jesus. We should expect there to be many similarities, some real and some perceived, between true Christianity and false Christianity. We should expect other religions to talk about love and morality. We shouldn’t expect false religion to appear immediately and obviously false. Remember, the first beast is the perversion of the state, and the second beast is the perversion of Christianity. This beast looks like Christ, the lamb, but speaks the lies of the dragon, that is, the Devil. That’s where the picture comes from, but what it points to is a counterfeit Christ. This imagery comes from Daniel 8 where Daniel sees a vision of a ram with two horns. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon (v. Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. With that as a basic outline, let’s go verse by verse through the second half of the chapter.