Wisdom can perhaps best be described as the awareness that everything we know ultimately comes to us from God almighty. Solomon put it like this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10; see also Psalm 111:10). A person can become competent in how to do life well only by taking God seriously and so building on God’s revelation concerning himself. In our present paragraph, no one less than the Lord himself showed to John the strategy the dragon uses throughout the new dispensation in his battle against the seed of the woman (Revelation 12:17): the dragon uses the first beast from the sea (= humanity’s hell-bent urge to align with the dragon) plus the second beast from the earth (= masterful communication techniques to cajole earth’s population to worship the first beast). Taking God’s revelation seriously concerning the second beast (and, of course, the first) is a display of wisdom. With such wisdom one need not be led astray by the sweet talk of the second beast but is able to test the spirits to see whether they are of God or not (1 John 4:1–6).
18 This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.