1. We Don't Know When, but Today Is Always the
Day
Little
children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that Antichrist is coming,
even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last
hour. They went out from us, but they
were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us;
but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of
us.
- 1 John
2:18-19
The supreme
religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man
glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time
the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only
be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The
Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to
come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically
perverse” political form of a secular messianism.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs
675-676
Antichrist is not the invention of American Bible teachers fascinated by end-times prophecy. The Muslim statesman and writer Ibn Khaldun, writing in the Muqaddimah in the 14th century, explains that after the Mahdi comes and sets things right among the Muslims, the Antichrist (Al-Masih ad-Dajjal) will arise, and then Jesus Christ will return and kill him and judge the world[1]. The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, in the quotation above, makes the point that the Antichrist is the culmination of a deception that faces us all the time, just as Jesus and the apostles teach. The passion for a savior of our own invention, whom we can adore as God’s chosen servant or a worthy replacement for Him, smolders uneasily in every anxious heart – including those who nominate themselves.
In our own day, who is antichrist? If we ask this because we want to know who to point the finger at, it's worse than a waste of time. Since the sand pile in kindergarten, life has taught us all that finger-pointing has nothing to do with truth.
Jesus explained that we do not know who the wheat and the
weeds are, and life certainly proves him right.
If we forget that, none of what follows makes any sense. Once we identify an antichrist, all we know
is who he is if he does not come to his senses, and that we should not believe
him or follow him – for our sakes and for his too. Especially if people see through him and deny
him his lust to be worshipped and followed, he might recognize that he is
condemned, and humble himself as
We need to recognize antichrist in any time and any place, because every antichrist promises salvation, but he delivers destruction to those who believe and follow. To remind us that we need to see through them all and not just to spot a particular one, John the apostle warned us that there are many antichrists.
It’s like any crime. If just one individual named Slick Phish wanted to steal my credit card information, then I would need to know just who this gentleman is and make sure not to trust him. But in fact the internet is full of people who want to steal my credit card information. I don’t need to know exactly who each one is. I need to know the type, so that I can see though any one of them. In the same way, it is pointless to try to identify a particular individual as the Antichrist. We need to know how any one of the many will deceive us – in the truest sense stealing our identities as servants of God and even as human beings.
Christians and other religious people are not the only ones
who should care. Antichrists lead into
calamity whole nations that believe their promises of salvation - as we have
seen in revolutionary
A spirit of antichrist makes anyone whom it deceives able to
do and approve the most hideous crimes while feeling brave and noble in the
very act - suspecting nothing amiss until he arrives at God's judgment seat and
hears, "Depart from me, you workers of iniquity!" Such people
will drive their tanks over any number of innocent people to follow their
ideology and not even see their corpses, because such realities do not fit into
their ideology, which is their object of worship.
Jesus warned us that false prophets and false Christs would arise and show
signs that would, if possible, deceive even those chosen by God. Because
antichrists go out from Christians as John the apostle wrote, they know the
talk which makes them sound especially good to Christians. Those who think they believe in Jesus are most
vulnerable; non-Christians may well be less deceived by any particular
antichrist than Christians are. In their
undeceived human decency the “unbelievers” can often correct us,
just as tax gatherers and sinners in the gospels were frequently saner than the
religious experts of their day. To warn their readers of this one point,
the gospels drive it home over and over. Those who believe the gospels know
that it still applies day. To many who
don't believe the gospels, it is equally obvious, just as it was to Pilate when
he saw through those that wanted to kill Jesus.
The Bible can help us now just as it helped people when Jesus taught it, but
“experts” in it today are often just as deceived as the scribes and
Pharisees were in the days that Jesus walked in the flesh. Since they have appointed themselves its
interpreters, its wisdom is for any practical purpose denied to the world which
needs it. As in the days of Jeremiah, the modern scribes say, "We
are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us," but their poison pen has
turned it into a lie (Jeremiah 8:8).
When people construct lies from the Bible, you need to know
how to refute them. It is a fact of
history that in 400 years attacking the authority of the Bible in the
There are difficult sayings in the Bible, but in Jesus and the prophets we see
that when it is taught properly, it becomes clear to the hearers. You don't have to trust that the teacher is
an expert in order to believe him. The woman at the well in
Biblical prophecies are designed to confuse those who just want to know who
will fulfill them by and by, as though their only use before they are
completely fulfilled is to tickle our ears or help us point the finger.
The Bible writers don’t use them that way. For instance, Paul famously wrote that
“all Scripture is . . . profitable for reproof, correction, and
instruction in righteousness.” But
he wrote this knowing that much of this profitable Scripture was prophecy whose
fulfillment could not possibly be known at the time to its readers – but
it was still profitable. Elsewhere, he
explained that these things were written to us as a warning, so that even if we
have no idea who will fulfill a prophecy of disaster, we can learn right now
not to imitate the one who will meet that trouble - and if we see future
blessings promised, now is the time to learn how to be like those that will
receive them.
If we believe that prophecies are all about who and when, we will go down one of two false ways. We may force the conclusion somehow that this is the day of their fulfillment, and it's amazing what kind of stupidity this leads to. Or we can figure that since they are not happening today, it's best just to blip over them because they don’t apply to us.
A few experiences with foolish date setters can easily make that look like the right way to go, but then those who do not blip over them will be the only ones that seem able to explain them at all, and many will believe them, with disastrous results for the rest of us.
Either approach is presumption, and even in traffic school
we learn that we should expect damage and injuries. How then do we read without being
presumptuous? For sure we can’t
get it right if we treat prophecies like stock market tips, or somebody
else’s story and not our own. In
fact, they are examples from which we’re supposed to learn about
ourselves in any day that we read them, because the issues of good and evil, life
and death, are always the same. If we
act like
Why should this surprise us? The Revelation says right at the beginning, “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep the things written in it, for the time is near” – and that includes those at the time it was written who could not possibly know the identities of the beast, the ten kings, or all the others that “teachers” speculate about today. Those who do obsess about such questions – far from being blessed – have consistently made fools of themselves for the past 2000 years and never gotten it right, not even once. That is simply because instead of reading, hearing, or keeping what is written in the prophecy, they are paying attention only to their own imaginings about the prophecy - and there’s no promise that anyone will be blessed for doing that.
Let’s consider a specific instance of sound teaching,
Paul’s reasoning about the promise that “whoever calls on the name
of the Lord will be saved,” applied by Joel specifically to the day of
the Lord.
Concerning the time of the end, Joel the prophet said the following (Joel
I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth: blood and fire and
pillars of smoke.
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood,
Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord.
And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be
saved.
Referring to this, Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans (Romans 10:12-13):
There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is
rich to all who call upon Him, for "Whoever calls upon the name of the
Lord shall be saved."
Paul is clearly claiming here that Joel's word is true at the moment that Paul
is writing and whenever his letter is read, not just in the day of the Lord
that Joel is speaking of. How can he stretch Joel's word like that?
Is he really stretching it?
Here's the reasoning. God is just and not capricious, and He doesn't
change. If we know that He rescues anyone who calls on Him while He is
executing wrath, He will certainly do so when His anger is not aroused.
It's really like that with people too. If you know that Dad will rescue
you when he's angry, won't he rescue you when he's not? So far from
abusing the words of Joel the prophet, Rabbi Paul was just connecting the dots.
Another striking biblical example is the great invasion at the time of the end by Gog and Magog. Revelation 20:7-8 says very briefly that after the thousand years, “Satan will be released from his prison, and will come out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for the war.”
Ezekiel 38-39 gives a far more complete account, which tells us just how Satan deceives the nations and gathers them for the war (Ezekiel 38:10-12):
It will come about on that day that words will come into your mind and you will devise an evil plan, and you will say, “I will go up against the land of unwalled villages . . . to capture spoil and to seize plunder . . .”
We do not know when this will happen, or who Gog and Magog
are, so what is this prophecy good for?
Well, it tells us that when thoughts arise in the minds of the mighty
that they can fall upon the helpless and plunder them, those thoughts are
evil. Those thoughts are from Satan, and
those who act on them provoke God’s wrath. Knowing nothing about Gog and Magog - having
no idea when his invasion takes place - we can still learn from this prophecy
what to expect God to do with our clever plans to fall upon the helpless and to
rob them. No one who lays to heart
God’s wrath against Gog and Magog can be amazed at how things have gone
wrong for the invaders of
If we reason in the same way concerning what the Bible teaches concerning Antichrist, we realize that whatever is wrong with Antichrist when he appears in the last day is wrong in any day in any antichrist. As John wrote, no matter when Antichrist is fully manifested, that spirit is in the world right now, and people are obeying it and receiving its mark. We don't need to identify someone as the Antichrist in order to determine that his ways are evil in anyone who acts like him, especially ourselves.
Since we learn from the description of Antichrist what any antichrist is like, then whenever the behavior fits, in any age, we know we're looking at an antichrist. If calling upon the name of the Lord gets you saved at any time if it gets you saved in the day of the Lord's wrath, and if falling upon the defenseless to rob them like Gog and Magog always incites God’s wrath against the aggressor, then be sure that taking the mark of the beast or the number of his name gets you condemned in any age if it gets you condemned in the day that the beast is fully manifested. Let us consider the mark, the name, and the number of the beast, that we may recognize, reject, and overcome them in our own day.