4. The Government of the Beast
It’s All About Lying
The coming of the lawless one is according to the
working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all
unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love
of the truth that they might be saved.
- 2 Thessalonians 2:9-10
The coming of the lawless one described by Paul is not
unique. As John wrote, “Just as
you have heard that Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen
(1 John
Jesus describes his message as the gospel (good news) of the
See in the prayer that Jesus gave us how foundational this
issue is. When we pray, “Your
kingdom come, your will be done,” that’s what we’re praying
for. Otherwise, the Father’s name
is not “hallowed,” the first thing we ask for in that prayer,
because to be hallowed – that is, set apart as holy - the Name must be
disentangled from our lying. In the
Christian life, we learn this on our own skins, not just from the Bible,
because only in the truth are we ever made holy – “Sanctify them in
the truth; your word is truth” (John
In parallel fashion, in a kingdom of antichrist people and
their ruler live and swim in the Lie, usurping the place of truth with some
anti-truth. For those not under the
spell, this principle is obvious in regimes like Nazi Germany, Stalinist
Russia, and
Just as the
As 1 John 1:6-10 teaches, our love of lying is founded on our wanting to justify ourselves. We love the lie of an antichrist because we love the offer of self-justification. This self-justification is indeed the essence of the phony salvation that any antichrist offers. We listen to him because he tells us we’re right and someone else is wrong – the Jews (Hitler), the class enemies and the American imperialists (Stalin), the “outside agitators” and “race mixers” (American Southern white supremacists), the Communists and the African National Congress (apartheid South Africa), the world out there who “hate us for our freedoms” rather than for the oppressions and bloody crimes that they tell us they hate (American messianism). We are so desperate to justify ourselves that when we must admit we’ve been lied to we keep lying, blaming our deception completely on the politicians or whoever else lied to us. But if we weren’t demanding to be lied to, could they tell us lies so absurd that only we are dumb enough to believe them? Does any politician tell us lies unless he knows we want to hear them?
When an antichrist deceives us, we are never simply innocent victims. We are co-conspirators in darkness. That’s why “all who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose name has not been written from the foundation of the earth in the book of Life of the lamb that has been slain.” People who are dead in sins can certainly wave the flag and shout “United We Stand!” with the rest. But only in true life do we embrace the truth about ourselves, no matter what it is. Then we find ourselves loved and in the light, and in that truth we find the strength to stand with God in the truth as Jesus stood before Pilate, and not to stand united with any mob of this world.
Dominion Through Rivalry
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made.
- Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for
the Devil”
Like the Hellenistic empire with its four heads that fought against one another, the kingdom of the beast is seven heads and ten horns, which are ten kings. In Daniel 7:7-8 we learn that they are rivals - indeed one horn arises and causes three others to be plucked out by the roots. A kingdom divided against itself will fall, and we would think that this weakness would cause the empire to fall. But although the kingdoms are weakened, the empire that rules them is strengthened and in fact rules by means of this mutual hostility. We often see this in the world. George Bush and Osama bin Laden were enemies, but they propped one another up, the way opposing political groups use the fear and hatred of one another in their fund-raising letters. These enemies need one another and find each other useful, an odd perversion of the command to love our enemies. It is much the way sports rivalries serve to bring in the fans and the money, or how boxers rage against one another behind a microphone and thereby sell more tickets. The real game is not the rivalry between the fighters but the promoter’s war against the wallets of the fans.
The Bible teaches that the beast is an empire of strife and rivalry because this is in the nature of its father the devil. The beast has seven heads and ten horns with ten crowns on his horns. The great dragon who raises him up has seven heads and ten horns, too (Revelation 12:3, 13:1).
Power through strife has been increasingly a defining feature
through each manifestation of the empire of antichrist since
More recently, “Christian” Europe rose to supremacy from its Roman roots through the constant bloody wars among its kingdoms, through which Europeans perfected weaponry and skill in war, like Lamech the son of Cain. They learned to dominate the rest of the world through their skill in violence against one another, thereby utterly corrupting the gospel of Jesus that they pretended to serve – accepting the kind of deal with the devil that Paul rejected when he first arrived in Europe (Acts 16:16-24). The United States arose across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe as Rome had arisen across the Adriatic Sea from Greece, overturning Britain, France, and Spain to become the leading power in Western civilization and claiming to occupy the place of Christ and his church – the “city on a hill” and “light of the world” that Jesus called himself and his people. Although the Civil War almost destroyed the American union, the result of this civil strife was a strongly centralized industrial economy free from secessionist tendencies and ready to rise to world domination.
Rivalry and enmity cause us to long for peace and order at the expense of liberty and the truth. Thus Satan rules the world, from the smallest family to the greatest nation.
There are indeed many antichrists, just as John the apostle wrote. When we find one, we can expect to find many more, and generally fighting one another.
When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he’s not talking about how nice it is to calm conflicts and help us all get along, because Jesus said again, “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth but rather division.” Jesus made peace by telling the truth about all the kingdoms of the world, his own Jewish nation most of all, as the prophets before him had done. As God had done in Genesis 1, Jesus by the word of truth separated the light from the darkness, calling his own out of the deceitful strife of the world to the real battle of the Lord.
The War of God and the Crusade of Antichrist
Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according
to the flesh. For the weapons of our
warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting
down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of
God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and
being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.
- 2 Corinthians 10:3-6
An antichrist is a false savior, so he needs a problem to save us from. He needs to save us from an enemy, so that we will love him and huddle around him to be rescued. But God certainly calls us to warfare as well. Evil exists and must be opposed. How do we distinguish between the crusade of an antichrist and the war of God?
It’s actually quite simple.
God’s judgment begins at the household of God, not with enemies outside. As Paul wrote, disobedience out there is dealt with by becoming obedient ourselves, the only way not to be hypocrites. So our warfare begins always with our biggest problem - to learn and acknowledge the truth about our own allegiance to darkness. By concentrating on the log in our own eye that we don’t see, we fight the good fight God has assigned us, and once we see that log and get it removed, we may then see well enough to remove specks from the eyes of others without putting their eyes out (Matthew 7:5). They have specks and we have logs, so we know that others are better than we are (Philippians 2:3). We love mercy because we need it ourselves. We want others to escape from darkness because we know how horrible darkness is in ourselves, not because we know that we are the light of the world. Seeing our own corruption and thereby receiving God’s mercy ourselves, we have good news for anyone, however corrupt, who will just admit the truth. We cannot save them, but we know a God who can save anybody who will just raise his hand when the Voice asks if there is an evildoer in the house. Knowing that the greatest evil in the world for us is our own, we grow contrite with the broken spirit that God does not despise, even if others do. We want to learn about our own sin – nothing is more interesting, because this is how we find ourselves both sane and loved. To see painful bad news and cry for help works out better than to follow pleasant delusions into sudden destruction. In other people at least, everyone knows that all of this is true!
By contrast, an antichrist and his disciples begin by
judging the “evildoers” out there, proving them to be evil in order
to justify whatever we do to them. As Eric Hoffer puts it, “The most
effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and
others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures,
deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have
wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them
or else leave the door open to self-contempt.” [1]. Habakkuk wrote of the Chaldeans (
The delight of following an antichrist is that without
facing anything wrong with ourselves we become good guys by joining his crusade
to save the world. We are made righteous
and significant by becoming agents of salvation ourselves just by trusting our
false savior and joining his crusade. In
this way the 11th century Crusaders “took the cross” to
free