Someone sent me a letter showing how a person can take the full name of Bill Gates, add up the ASCII numerical identifiers of the letters and come to 666. These are numbers for the characters sometimes used in programming. She neglected to include the spaces and the comma (before the III) which also have ASCII values. To get to 666 takes a couple of other contortions. The letters III (the Roman numeral for 3 meaning "the third,") is calculated 1+1+1 but the same letter in "Bill" is not. Also the name must be written in all caps (not the ordinary way to write a person's name -- lower case letters have different numbers). She mentioned several other things that programmers put into the older version of Microsoft's Excell and a few other wild things. I include a copy of my response to help us make sanctified sense in how we read the Bible.

Dear ________________
   Your musings are interesting. May I share my thoughts?
   When we read the Bible we pray and ask what the Holy Spirit is communicating to us. And of course we need to be consistent. Suppose I'm searching for a friend whom I have heard lives in a certain city. I know that cities have a system of street addresses, where streets are named and where numbers for residences attached to the street names are in order along the street. So I check the phone book and find a name that I believe is my friend's. What do I do? Knowing the system, I find the street and then go one way or the other watching the numbers until I find the one I saw in the phone book.
   The Bible is also logical and clear although, at first, it may seem confusing. God has given it to us because He wants us to understand. In Revelation we find this statement in the introduction: "Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand." (1:3) If we aren't interested in keeping the things, we can't expect God's blessing on our interpretations. And in 22:10 we find "Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book." It was written in symbols partly because the symbols lead us to wider truth as we see where they are drawn from and partly because people who didn't like its messages couldn't easily change it.
   So to learn the meanings, we first read the text carefully, then follow clues as revealed in the rest of the Bible. First the number 666 is not the mark of the beast. It's the number of his name. We are told to count the number. You can see how I understand this 1318. Also, the idea of the head and the forehead come from elsewhere in Scripture, so we need to study the connection between that mention and the reference in the chapter in Revelation. Counting is basically judging or evaluating. People living in the time Revelation was written also applied numbers to names. This was done in the contemporary languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin). Numerical identifiers of ASCII characters were not known then so this would not be a good direction to pursue any more than trying to convert a person's e-mail address into a street number when searching for the person. I showed the result of a couple of significant calculations in my commentary. Probably the fundamental meaning was taken from the magic squares that were used by the Babylonian priests.
   We realize, too, in studying Revelation 13 and other passages, that the beast is not a person, so we don't expect the number to be a person's name although it could be a characteristic of the beast system which is identified with a person.
   As for Microsoft, the programmers of Windows 3.1 (as I recall) also added a few cute things, which were not occultist, to entertain people who discovered them. And if we think Bill Gates is the beast, maybe we should pray for him rather than wasting time amplifying his faults.
   The Bible tells us the most important thing to hunt for in Jer. 29:13. See what you think.

In Christ,
Ted Wade