All things were made for man's salvation: the deceits, the wickedness, and the apostate power of the antichrist. These are all prefigured at the Deluge - and again, later - at the persecution of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego...

1.   In the previous books we mentioned for which reasons God tolerated things to take place as they did, and have shown that all of them took place for the salvation of mankind.  God orientates man’s free will and self-government towards immortality, and He also prepares him to be more suitable for an eternal submission to God. And that is why Creation was made for man’s use. Man was not made for Creation, but Creation was made for man.

The nations - even those that had not lifted their eyes towards heaven, nor had thanked their Creator or wanted to see the light of truth but are hidden like blind mice in the depths of foolishness - were aptly characterized by the word of God: “as a droplet from a waste bucket and as the movement of a scales and as nothing.” Isaiah 40:15

They are as useful and as suitable for the righteous, as is the benefit that a straw provides for the growth of wheat, and the stubble that is burned for the refining of gold. That is why - when the Church departs from here – “there shall be tribulation - such that has never been seen since the beginning, nor shall there ever be.”  Matthew 24:21

This shall be the last contest for the righteous, in which they shall be victors and crowned with immortality.  

2. And that is why every injustice and every deceit shall be recapitulated in the beast that is to come, so that all the power of the Apostasy that had flowed into and was sealed inside it, will end up in a blazing furnace.  Rev.19:20

Rightly, therefore, shall his name contain the 666, given that in that number is recapitulated all of its pre-Deluge malice, which took place with the apostasy of the angels.  See Book 4 ch.16:2 and 36:4

Noah was 600 years old when the Deluge Rev.7:6 came upon the earth to eradicate sin, because of the corrupt generation that existed in his time. Rev.6:4

But it also recapitulates the entirety of idolatry from the era of the Deluge PG 96,525Β and the murder of the Prophets and the burning of the righteous. Furthermore, that image which Nebuchadnezzar had created had a height of 60 cubits and a width of 6 cubits Daniel 3:1 ; because of it, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael who had refused to worship it, were cast into a blazing furnace Daniel 3:20; and with what had befallen them, they also prophesied the burning of the righteous, which shall take place at the end. That entire image was a prefiguring of the presence of the antichrist, who will expect to be the only one to be worshipped by all of mankind.

Thus, the 600 hundred years of Noah - in whose time the Deluge had taken place because of the Apostasy -  and the measurements of the cubits (60 and 6) of Nebuchadnezzar's image, for which those righteous men were thrown into the blazing furnace, together signify (as we said) the number of the name in which is summarized the entirety of the Apostasy of 6000 years.