What does the Bible teach about a one-world religion?

Question 10106.

The Bible teaches that a one world religion will exist during the Tribulation, that it will centre on the worship of the beast and be enforced by the false prophet, and that it will be destroyed before the return of Jesus. It is not a conspiracy theory bolted on to Scripture. It is what Revelation 13 and 17 describe.

I want to handle this carefully, because the subject attracts a good deal of nonsense. Every generation identifies the one world religion with whatever institution it happens to dislike, and every generation has so far been wrong. So let us look at what the text says, and then at what it does not say.

What Revelation 13 describes

John sees two beasts. The first rises from the sea and receives authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. The second rises from the earth, speaks like a dragon, and exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, making the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast.

That second figure is the false prophet, and his function is religious rather than political. He performs signs, he erects an image, he gives breath to the image, and he causes those who will not worship it to be killed. Then comes the mark, without which no one can buy or sell. Religion, economics and government are fused into one system.

Revelation 13:8 says that all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written in the book of life. That is a one world religion in the most literal sense: a single object of worship, universally enforced, with a defined penalty for refusal.

Babylon the great and the religious system

Revelation 17 gives us the other half of the picture. A woman sits on a scarlet beast, arrayed in purple and scarlet, holding a golden cup full of abominations, and on her forehead is written a name of mystery, Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes.

Prostitution is the standard prophetic image for religious unfaithfulness, so the woman represents a corrupt religious system rather than a nation as such. She rides the beast, which suggests that for a time the religious system directs the political one, until the beast and the ten kings turn on her and destroy her.

The name Babylon is not accidental. Babulon takes us back to Genesis 11 and the tower, the first organised attempt to unify humanity in worship without God. The one world religion of the end is the last attempt, and it fails in the same way. I have written more fully on Babylon in Revelation.

Why a one world religion is not a surprise

Human beings are incurably religious and incurably political, and the two have been trying to merge since Babel. Nebuchadnezzar built an image on the plain of Dura and required everyone to bow. Rome required a pinch of incense and the words Caesar is Lord. Neither demanded that you give up your other gods; both demanded that you add theirs.

That is the shape a one world religion always takes. It is not usually the abolition of all faiths but the subordination of all faiths to one. Tolerance of everything except the exclusive claim of Jesus, which is precisely the claim that cannot be subordinated.

So the pattern is old, and the final version is the perfection of a very familiar idea rather than an invention. What makes the coming one world religion different is scale and enforcement. Babel was one plain, Dura was one province, Rome was one empire. Revelation describes every tribe, people, language and nation, with a mechanism for excluding dissenters from the economy itself. The ambition has not changed; the reach has.

What is happening now

I am wary of identifying current movements with the coming one world religion, and I would encourage you to be wary too. Interfaith initiatives, ecumenical declarations, the vague spirituality of the modern West and the rise of a moralistic public creed with its own sins and sacraments are all worth noticing and none of them are the thing itself.

What they may be is preparation. The New Testament speaks of a mystery of lawlessness already at work and of a coming apostasy, and a culture that has learned to treat all religious claims as equally valid and equally private has been well trained for what is coming.

But the one world religion of Revelation 13 belongs to the Tribulation, and the Church will have been removed before it. That is worth saying to anxious believers who see a headline and assume the mark of the beast is being fitted next Tuesday.

The false prophet and the counterfeit

Satan does not innovate; he imitates. There is an unholy trinity in Revelation, with the dragon in the place of the Father, the beast in the place of the Son, complete with a mortal wound and a resurrection, and the false prophet in the place of the Spirit, glorifying the beast and drawing the world to worship him.

That is why the one world religion will be attractive rather than crude. It will have miracles, and the miracles will be real enough to deceive. It will have a charismatic figure who appears to have conquered death. It will offer peace, security and an explanation for the chaos.

I have written separately on the false prophet and on the identity of the Antichrist, and the two answers belong alongside this one.

Religion, government and economics together

One detail deserves more attention than it usually gets. The mark controls buying and selling. This is not a purely spiritual arrangement. The one world religion arrives bolted to a system of economic exclusion, which is how compliance is secured without persuading anybody of anything.

That is a chillingly modern touch for a first-century book. John had no framework for a cashless society and yet he describes a mechanism that requires one. I do not say the technology proves the timing, because I have watched too many people embarrass themselves with that argument. I do say that what was once dismissed as impossible has become administratively trivial.

The political dimension runs alongside it, and I have set that out in my answer on a one world government.

How the one world religion ends

It ends badly and quickly. The beast and the ten kings hate the prostitute, make her desolate and burn her with fire, and Revelation says God has put it into their hearts to do so. The system devours itself, which is what every attempt at unity without God eventually does.

Then Jesus returns. The beast and the false prophet are seized and thrown into the lake of fire, and the worship of the whole earth is directed to where it always belonged. What follows is not the abolition of religion but its purification, with the nations coming up to Jerusalem to worship the King.

So there will be a unified worldwide worship in the end. It simply will not be the one the beast organised.

How Christians should respond

Not with panic, and not with the fascination that treats prophecy as a hobby. The right response to the coming one world religion is a settled loyalty to Jesus that would rather starve than bow, cultivated now, in ordinary conditions, long before the pressure arrives.

Daniel’s friends did not decide in front of the furnace. They had already decided, years earlier, in the small matter of what they would eat. Faithfulness under pressure is the fruit of faithfulness without pressure, and there is no shortcut.

It also means knowing your Bible well enough not to be deceived by signs and wonders. The test is never the power on display. The test is what is said about Jesus. John gives us the criterion directly: every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not is not. Notice how unimpressed the apostles are by miracles as such. Pharaoh’s magicians could do miracles. The question is always who is being glorified, and a religion that can accommodate everyone has already answered it.

So, now what?

If you find this subject frightening, read Revelation 19 before you read Revelation 13 again. The book is arranged so that the beast is always on his way to the lake of fire, and knowing the ending changes how you read the middle.

If you find it fascinating, be careful. Prophecy is given to make us holy and hopeful, not to make us clever. Anyone who can name the Antichrist but cannot forgive his brother has misused the material entirely.

And if you have never settled the question of who has your worship, the coming one world religion makes it rather urgent. Everyone will worship something. Whose name is on you?

And all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.

Revelation 13:8, ESV