n a recent scroll through Instagram, American journalist and music critic Toure’ popped up, commenting about his firsthand knowledge and work with the late music icon Prince. Toure’s 2013 book “I Would Die 4 You,” in addition to seeking insight and comment from musicians, friends, even psychotherapists, also examined the subliminal and overt religious messaging in Prince’s work. Toure’ attributed these themes to Prince’s upbringing as a Seventh-day Adventist and later, a Jehovah’s Witness.

“The Seventh-day Adventists, SDAs, it’s an end-time faith,” Toure’ says in the post, and claimed that apocalyptic forecasting in “Let’s Go Crazy,” “1999,” and other songs stemmed from Prince’s childhood experiences with the faith. Toure’ wasn’t the first or last to sleuth some sort of connection.

“Escalating gun violence, street crime, and drug use are all interpreted as signs of growing Satanic influence,” wrote Jonathan Downing in an African American Music Month feature for U.S. Studies Online in 2016.

“Prince pleads with his listeners, ‘don’t kiss the Beast, be superior at least,’ invoking the vision of the seductive beast deceiving Earth’s population in Revelation 13. In light of Christ’s impending return, Prince takes the opportunity to urge his listeners to pick the correct side in this ‘great controversy’.”

While it may be true that Seventh-day Adventism was conceived in the womb of apocalypticism and last-day prophetic understanding, the question for us all today is how to approach these significant and prophetic biblical passages in light of contemporary events? Adventism emerged in the reality that the message must always be relevant, that it is “present truth.”

Without denying the use of the continuous historical method, students of Scripture must look for a contemporary, existential understanding of symbols in the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation. In so doing, many a sermon and devotional on the messages to the Seven Churches in Revelation 1-3 are not expositions on the historical interpretations of those churches; rather, they are contemporized and made relevant to situations facing the present-day hearers.

What is true for Revelation 1-3 should also be true for Revelation 13. The beast is not only a symbol of a fallen, corrupt historical church and system; but it can and should be interpreted as a symbol of anything that is corrupt and falls short of God’s ideal.

Let’s take, for example, the number 666. In apocalyptic symbolism, six is one short of the perfect number, seven. Thus, the basic understanding of 666 should be triple imperfection, very short of the absolute triple perfection, 777.

To contemporize this, we must look at the evils in our society that are beast-like.

Early Seventh-day Adventists followed a distinctive biblical analysis. They not only interpreted Revelation historically, but existentially as well. They attacked the social issues of the day — slavery, racism, militarism, exploitive capitalism —and other immoral practices from an apocalyptic perspective. These were demonstrations of the beast with lamblike horns that spoke like a dragon.

Their pioneers such as Joseph Bates, Ellen and James White, Uriah Smith and others were, for example, vociferous in their attack on racism and supported the abolitionism movement. Bates made it clear that as a good Christian he could not stand with oppressors and verbally condemned the USA as a “slave-holding…murdering country.”

Uriah Smith, in 1853, wrote a 35,000-word poem published in one of the church’s main papers, “Review and Herald,” titled, “The Warning Voice of Time and Prophecy.” In it he called for justice, liberty and equal rights. He further used the pages of the official paper of the church to chastise President Lincoln for “following this present conservative, not to say suicidal, policy” in his attempt to win the war without working to free the slaves.

In 1869, James White, as editor of the “Advent Review and Sabbath Herald,” allowed the following to be published:

“it is the Anglo-Saxon race which boasts of being the great apostle of the principles of righteousness and just government, and yet poisons millions of the Chinese annually, enforcing the infliction with armed fleets; takes America from the Indians, and the Scinde from its lawful possessors, by robbery and murder; kills races of men to get territory to which it has no claim… The Anglo-Saxon race gives itself out as the missionary of heaven, and the evangelizer of mankind; yet it is earth’s most successful propagandist of atheism, infidelity, and resistance to lawful authority; the educator of nations in rebellion and supreme selfishness….”

Ellen White was also vociferous in her condemnation of slavery. She called it a national sin, and dubbed it “a sin of the darkest dye.” She made it clear that “God is punishing this nation for the high crime of slavery…He will punish the South for the sin of slavery and the North for so long suffering its overreaching and overbearing influence.”

White went even further to advocate civil disobedience. There was the second fugitive slave law and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 in which Congress and the Supreme Court determined that slaves were property and all were obligated to return slaves to their owners.

White made it very clear that those laws and rulings must not be obeyed.

“The law of our land requiring us to deliver a slave to his master, we are not to obey; and we must abide the consequences of violating this law.”

That law clearly stated that anyone who disobeyed it would be fined $1,000 and spend six months in jail. And when some of the Congressmen were issuing proclamations for national days of fasting and prayer that God would bring the war to an end, she proclaimed something else.

“I saw that these national fasts were an insult to Jehovah. He accepts no such fasts. . .. Oh, what an insult to Jehovah!”

White used Isaiah 58 to strengthen her position attacking those who have the yoke of slavery on the neck of the slaves, and she called upon the nation to let the oppressed go free.

Have we lost the spirit and wholistic message of this urgent, apopcalyptic message? We are in the midst of a time when racism is mainstream, and those who speak up are silenced. Adventists saw it as a national sin. They did not see it as a personal sin problem, but as a sin that made the nation a beast power.

To limit the proclamation and interpretation of Revelation and the beastly power to the past and the unfulfilled future is to commit an existential mistake. Many avoid social issues, putting them in, and compartmentalizing them into a box called “politics.” Another Seventh-day Adventist pioneer, J. N. Andrews, addressed this when a similar debate was at its height in 1864:

“How do such men expect to escape the fate of the oppressor when God shall bring him into judgment? By one of the most ingenious devices imaginable. This sin is snugly stowed away in a certain package which is labeled ‘Politics.’ They deny the right of their fellow men to condemn any of the favorite sins which they have placed in this bundle; and they evidently expect that any parcel bearing this label, will pass the final custom-house, i. e., the judgment of the great day-without being examined.”

We must reject the view that social evils are not a part of the gospel message. Social evils were national sins – beast-like behaviors. Sins and evils entrenched in the institutions and the social structures of society were beasts that needed to be preached against then; and so it must be now.