Control, Money, and the Question of Trust

Part of the inspiration behind Twelve Words came from watching how much modern life depends on invisible systems most people never see. Financial networks, digital identity, institutional trust, automated decisions—these structures can feel abstract until they suddenly become personal.

That tension fascinated me. Money is often treated as neutral, but systems are never purely technical. They carry assumptions about human nature, authority, permission, punishment, and belonging. Once money becomes programmable—once buying, selling, freezing, or excluding can be automated at scale—the spiritual questions become harder to ignore.

That was one of the sparks behind the book.

More Than a Technology Story

But Twelve Words is not simply reacting to technology. It is interested in something older and deeper: humanity’s recurring temptation to build towers of coherence that promise peace apart from God. Kolarov’s vision is compelling precisely because it sounds rational. He offers order, predictability, and relief from chaos. Yet beneath that offer is a demand for trust that begins to look like worship.

That was the real story impulse for me. Not just, “What kind of money might exist?” but, “What kind of world does that money create—and what kind of human being does it require?”

Why Revelation 13 Felt Newly Relevant

Part of that question inevitably led me to Revelation 13. I do not mean that Twelve Words is an attempt to decode biblical prophecy or turn current events into a neat prophetic chart. I am less interested in speculation than in moral and spiritual plausibility. What struck me is that the world described in Revelation 13 no longer feels merely symbolic or unimaginable to modern readers. For the first time in human history, the infrastructure exists—or is beginning to exist—for systems of buying and selling to be monitored, restricted, and conditioned on a truly large scale.

That does not mean every new technology is inherently sinister, nor does it mean every digital payment system is a fulfillment of prophecy. But it does mean that Christians now live in a world where the technical feasibility of economic exclusion is easier to picture than it once was. That mattered to me as a novelist.

Ancient Coercion, Modern Scale

There were ancient foreshadowings of this kind of pressure. In the Roman world, there were moments when civic loyalty and emperor worship could be publicly certified, and refusal could bring serious consequences. The libellus practice is one historical reminder that governments have long sought visible signs of allegiance. But those older systems were limited by scale, distance, and administration. What makes the present moment different is not the existence of coercion itself, but the possibility of implementing it with unprecedented reach, speed, and precision through digital systems.

That possibility sharpened the inspiration behind Twelve Words. If identity, money, compliance, and access can all be integrated, then Revelation 13 begins to feel not merely like a strange ancient warning, but like a text whose economic imagery has become newly legible. The issue is not only persecution in the dramatic sense. It is the quieter and more modern possibility that participation itself—buying, selling, moving, giving, surviving—could become contingent on alignment with a system’s moral and political demands.

When Money Stops Being Neutral

That is one reason the novel is so concerned with trust. Every financial system asks for trust of some kind. The deeper question is whether that trust remains properly limited, or whether it begins to ask for something closer to allegiance. When a system promises safety, efficiency, and order, the temptation is to treat it as salvation. But Christian faith has always insisted that salvation cannot be engineered, and peace cannot be secured by surrendering the soul.

The Deeper Question Behind the Novel

So while Twelve Words is full of cryptography, blockchain, digital currency, and hidden architecture, its deepest concerns are not really technical. They are theological. What do people do when security and conscience begin to collide? What happens when provision becomes a mechanism of control? How much of the self will people surrender for the promise of order? And how does a believer remain faithful when the systems around them begin to demand the kind of trust that belongs only to God?

Those were the questions that stayed with me as I wrote. They are also why the novel’s conflict is not simply between old technology and new technology, or even between one form of money and another. It is between rival visions of human flourishing, rival understandings of freedom, and rival objects of trust.

That, for me, was the deepest story inspiration behind Twelve Words.