If it were, it could be forced upon someone. The context of Revelation suggests those with the mark of the Beast willfully accept it.
Depends on what you mean by force. I'm guessing you mean strapping someone to a table and physically injecting a microchip into their hand? Sure, that's possible, but it's both unnecessary and unrealistic.
The other kind of force is more abstract; an engineered situation in which people have been taught to believe that they have no other choice but to buy and sell if they want to put food on the table, pay the bills, care for their family etc.
If we talk about Jesus' teachings on working for love vs money and the things money can buy, you'll quickly see this engineering come to the surface. People will say things like, "But we can't live without money", "money makes the world go round", "we'd all starve", "the world would fall to chaos" etc. After thousands of years of manipulation, we've come to firmly believe that we cannot survive without buying and selling, which means when the Mark comes, there will be a lot of panic.
People who have never considered what it means to seek God's kingdom first won't know what to do without buying and selling because they've rarely, if ever, been encouraged to believe that something outside of the monetary system is impossible.
These people will feel forced into making a decision, and their reliance on buying and selling will almost certainly cause them to come up with an array of convenient doctrines to legitimize their choice to continue with buying and selling.
Isn't that what you're doing by saying, "Let's be pragmatic...Everyone gets caught up in how it affects buying and selling and wrongly assume this must mean something physical"?
Look at the key point being made here; there's no problem with buying and selling. Confronting our reliance on the monetary system is frightening because we don't have any alternative (or at least, it's difficult for us to imagine a reliable alternative). "God will provide" is fine for Sunday morning meetings, but it's hard to imagine an invisible God providing for us when it comes to real-world needs like food, clothing, and shelter.
Those who follow the Antichrist will be made apparent by their evil words and thoughts (forehead) and evil actions (right hand).
This probably sounds very soothing to you, but the bottom line is that it shrugs off any consideration of our reliance on the Beast's system for our daily bread.
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