- Kingdom Alive
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For anyone who seeks answers about what is happening in this world, we can say that the Sacred Scriptures (the Bible) offer clarity. Just as water quenches thirst, the Divine Word will calm uncertainty and we will be able to understand the events of daily life. We can say that what we are experiencing what is already written in the Sacred Scriptures by men inspired by God, and we must understand it in this way because it is impossible to interpret it in any other context. For example; it has been said that the following passage from the book of Revelation, chapter 13 supports the claim that the barcode had 666 embedded in it. Verse 18 states: “This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.”
In the Supermarket today, most people unload their groceries from the trolley and watch as the cashier scans item after item. It just makes sense that older generations hardly remember the days when products were stamped with prices to be rung up manually, and younger ones rarely consider a world where that was the norm. That's because the barcode used on every product in grocery and retail stores all over the globe changed everything 50 years ago. Barcodes are scanned billions of times each day. “…many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” - Daniel 12:4 In summary, we must recognise that in the last half century, there has been an explosion of inventions or, we can say that “knowledge has increased.”
According to George Laurer, the inventor of the UPC/EAN barcode, “There is nothing sinister about this nor does it have anything to do with the Bible’s mark of the beast. Each character is a fixed length, 7 modules and composed of two spaces and two bars. From the outer ends toward the center, the character starts with a space and therefore a single bar is required to ‘close’ the character. The other bar is used to allow the level setting (gain) circuitry to adjust to the contrast of the particular symbol. The center pattern is narrow space, narrow bar, narrow space, narrow bar.This pattern is 4 modules wide and distinguishes it from the a 7 module character thus giving direction and end information to the logic.”
Engineer Paul McEnroe, who spent more than twenty years at IBM, assembled and led the team that transformed the technology from an idea into the reality that endures. It is interesting that when you search on Wikipedia for who invented the barcode, someone named Norman Joseph Woodland appears. Paul V. McEnroe, who led the team that created the barcode, expected the invention to take off but says he couldn’t have imagined its long-lasting impact. “We didn't have a real feel that it would be as big as it was for as long as it was,” he says. George Laurer was a key part of that and proved fundamental in the barcode’s invention. Laurer (who died in 2019) later wrote that there was an initial push to develop the bull’s-eye barcode but he knew that wouldn’t work. “It was obvious to me that that approach would never satisfy all the requirements over the long run,” he wrote. Instead, he pushed for linear bars and an X on the scanning window. “With a simple ‘X,’ linear bars could be read no matter how they were oriented in the scan window,” he wrote.
A literal biblical translation tell us “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond , to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.” - Revelation 13:16
From the perspective of the creators of the barcode and the opinions of thousands of people, barcoding has nothing to do with what is written in the Bible.
However, some time ago I went to a supermarket to buy a bottle of cleaning liquid. When I went to the checkout to pay, the clerk told me I couldn't take that bottle because it didn't have the barcode and therefore couldn't be registered with the barcode reader. I had to search the shelf again for one with a printed code. A large number of people have found themselves in the same situation, with different products, in different businesses, and in different countries around the world.
Taking into account all the above, we could say that the barcode has nothing to do with what is written in the Bible, but we must recognize that approximately two thousand years ago, the apostle John, while imprisoned in Patmos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, received the visions described in the Apocalypse, Revelation 13:17 (Interlinear Greek-English New Testament by Jay P. Green) and it is significant and makes us meditate that in one way or another, if the barcode (666) is not there, what is written is fulfilled…” even that not any could buy or sell “.
