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The Current Scene – The Usual Suspects
All Scripture . . . is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good
work.
- 2 Timothy 3:16-17
Why should we care what the Bible says anyway? George Orwell rightly said that some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual can believe them. In the same way, there’s no doubt that some ideas are so absurd that only Bible teachers can believe them. This might explain the reputations of intellectuals and Bible teachers!
The intellectuals can work it out with Orwell. But we Bible teachers must answer to God and to those He sends us to serve. We need to understand how we can be so foolish.
Someone will certainly say that that’s no mystery – the Bible is full of nonsense, and therefore so is anyone who believes it. Still, when the vacuum cleaner doesn’t work and we blame the vacuum cleaner, we feel kind of foolish when someone points out how we’ve paid no attention to the instructions. We really don’t know whether the vacuum cleaner is any good until we try following the instructions, do we? Do we actually handle the Bible according to the instructions?
What is the Bible good for? Paul says that it is for doctrine (teaching), for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness (justice). Its stated purpose is to make us complete, thoroughly equipped to do every good work. The prophets and Moses taught that its purpose is to make us holy as God is holy and to circumcise our hearts. In short, the instructions tell us to use the Bible to find out what’s wrong with us, and how to fix it. When instead we use the Bible to show that we’re really OK and that the problem is in other people, we are grossly abusing it, and we have its promise that we will walk in darkness and become thoroughly deceived. When this happens, it reveals nothing wrong with the Bible, because it’s working exactly as we’re told to expect. People who are seeking to be deceived are finding what they seek, just as Jesus said. To those that enjoy such self-deception and empty conceit, the prophecies about Antichrist prove to be among the most convenient in Scripture. Let’s briefly consider some of the most popular candidates.
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism
500 years ago, it was perfectly clear to Martin Luther and
the Protestant Reformers that the Roman Catholic Church was
But the Protestants mostly prostituted themselves to worldly power in the same way and walked in the same spirit. Hiding their eyes from their own sins, they were thereby blinded concerning others. They missed some vital details.
The popes never came close to ruling the whole earth, as the Antichrist does. The abuses which the Protestants identified with the popes were equally prevalent in Russia and Byzantium, where papal authority had no place, and where the Church was equally prostituted to worldly rulers in exchange for the same positions of luxury and privilege at the expense of the poor and of the truth. Obsession with creedal orthodoxy – how best to call Jesus, “Lord, Lord” in mouth while paying little attention to actually doing what he says - was a big problem everywhere. In this most fundamental heresy, there was nothing unique about Roman Catholicism or the popes as the Reformers imagined, flattering themselves that they were wholly different.
The Roman Catholics likewise found ways to equate Protestants with Antichrist. Seizing on John’s statement that “had they been of us, they would not have gone out from us” (1 John 2:19), they forgot that “us” meant not necessarily them but the apostles and those who abide in their teaching as John defined it, those who walk in the light and not in darkness (1 John 1:5-10). Sometimes it grew ludicrous, as when someone thought he was proving something by showing that Martin Luther’s name could be made to add up to 666.
In place of the pope, Protestants frequently had little popes of their own - often much more dictatorial. For the most part equally conformed to the mind of this world, they flattered themselves that they were the light of the world and a city on a hill, as opposed to benighted Christians of other kinds. So far as they exalted themselves in this way, they did indeed entertain a spirit of antichrist - as we shall see, with deadly consequences in our own day.
What both sides agreed on was that the Catholic-Protestant divide was the great conflict of the ages between good and evil. You can still find Protestants and Catholics who think that way, but they look a lot like people who are still afraid of the international Communist conspiracy. People have moved on to other candidates, but if they had it this wrong back then, might not this year’s fashion look just as ridiculous a few years from now?
Islam
Islam has been a popular candidate for the position of Antichrist
almost from its beginning. Especially in
the
Let’s consider some areas in dispute.
The strongest case against Islam from a Christian viewpoint is that it strongly denies that God could have a son or be a Father, and 1 John 2:22-23 says, “Who is a liar but he who denies the Father and the Son? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son denies the Father also; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.”
The doctrine that Muhammad rejected, however, is the idea that God had sex with Mary to beget his Son. This is to Christian teaching as horrible a notion as it is to Muslims, but many Christians clearly believe it, since they argue that Mary remained a virgin forever because she would have been committing adultery if she had sex with her husband. This makes no sense, of course, because if Mary was God’s wife and God had sex with Mary, she would not have been a virgin as we claim. But when Muslims see such reasoning tolerated among us, why shouldn’t they think it’s what we believe?
The question, “Who is a liar but he who denies the Father and the Son?” is frequently misunderstood by those combing John’s letter for condemnations of others who disagree with us over points of doctrine, because that’s not why John was writing. He is not trying to help us prove that we are right and others wrong because our religious patter is better than theirs. He plainly tells us his purpose - he wants us to know that real fellowship with God is walking in the light, confessing our sin continually as the light reveals it. He is not calling people who deny the Father and the Son liars. They may not be. The disciples of Jesus in the gospels took quite a while to decide that Jesus was the Son of God. They were not liars before the moment when Peter made that confession, which only happened after Jesus had shown some solid evidence that it was true. Have Christians shown Muslims that sort of evidence?
John did not write, “Whoever denies the Father and the
Son is a liar.” He wrote,
“Who is a liar but he who denies the Father and the Son?” Especially in light of 1 John 1:5-10, John is
not claiming that denying these doctrines makes you a liar. He is claiming that to be a liar is to deny
the Father and the Son. It’s
simple. If you believe that Jesus is the
truth, indeed that God is the truth as both Muslims and Christians affirm, then
to be a liar is to deny God Who is the truth.
If you are a liar, you are denying the Father and the Son because you
are walking in darkness, even though you claim to know God and offer the proper
religious patter (1 John
American evangelicals I speak to make a very big deal of Islam denying the divinity of Jesus. One would think that the nature of Christ is a crucial point to these people. But as soon as they quit thinking about Islam, they quit thinking about the nature of Christ, content to duckspeak empty slogans without thinking about them. Indeed they often profess and live by notions about the nature of Christ that are at least as hostile to orthodox Christian teaching as anything in Islam.
In practice, many professing Christians deny that Jesus was as human as we are, quickly saying when they find themselves in disobedience to his teaching that he could do it because he was God, and we’re not. Thus they reject orthodox Christian doctrine about Jesus in order to excuse their failure to obey him. By making him out to be a superhuman God-man they find it easier to call him “Lord, Lord” with their mouth, and they think that this flattery pleases him – supposing that he does not notice that they are just explaining away their failure to become like him and to learn to do as he says. But he said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” so if we don’t keep his commandments, we don’t love him, no matter what we say.
In the gospels Jesus never gave the impression that failing to obey him has anything to do with our being merely human or with his being super human. To him, it’s always because we just don’t believe him. Even when Peter walked on the water, when he began to sink Jesus said, “Why did you doubt?” Orthodox Christianity teaches – notably in John 1 - that in Jesus God became altogether human, and nothing more, while always remaining altogether God, and nothing less. Accordingly, the early Church Fathers affirmed that whatever Jesus did not take on of our nature would not be redeemed. Far from being in conflict, humanity and divinity must go together. Everybody knows that to become godly is to become human, and that ungodliness makes us inhuman. Thus the Iranian proverb: “To become learned, how easy; to become human, how difficult.” Indeed, apart from God it is impossible. We become human only as the word of God becomes flesh in our beings as we believe it, so that as it is written, “It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3).
The gospels make it obvious that believing in the divinity of Jesus is not how we learn to follow him. None of his disciples learned the life that way. They simply knew him as a man of God. We follow him in order to learn the truth about his divinity – learning that it is not a pretext to praise him without obeying him. Not reciting creeds but following him and learning to do as he says is how we learn who Jesus is. Nothing else works.
Now at this point, Islam affirms with the Bible and orthodox Christian theology that Jesus is altogether human, while at the same time it commonly refers to him as “word of God” and “spirit of God.” Since God is one, and His Spirit and Word are certainly not separate from Him or inferior to Him, Christians and Muslims have something here to talk about. But not surprisingly from the standpoint of the gospels, the Christians need to get the plank out of our own eyes concerning the nature of Jesus before we can expect to help Muslims with their theological specks.
Many self-righteously shout that Islam is a religion of violence – generally to give themselves a reason to drop bombs on Muslims! Who can but laugh, seeing who brings this charge?
Who brought the world centuries of religious slaughter including the Crusades and the Inquisition?
Who, to serve their greed, carried out genocide on the scale of Hitler on two continents in the name of Jesus?
Who brought us the crusade to “Christianize” the Roman Catholic Philippines in 1899 at the cost of over 200,000 innocent civilian lives?
Who celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945 by choosing that very day to incinerate Hiroshima with a light too bright to look at, like Jesus on the mountain, and three days later targeted St. Mary’s Cathedral in the most Christian city in Japan with another nuclear bomb?
Whose depleted uranium dust in Iraq will be killing people and causing birth defects and cancer forever – until the Lord returns and makes a new heaven and a new earth?
Won’t someone here remember Jesus and the log in eye
thing? Are these who condemn violence in
others completely without shame, unable to blush (Jeremiah
Is Islam a religion of violence? To handle that question in detail is outside my purpose in this work, but with such a log of wanton violence in our own eye, indeed with all this blood in our eyes blinding us, can we see clearly enough right now to think straight about Islamic violence?
The
Even among American evangelical Christians, who are
generally known to confuse the
Claiming for ourselves the attributes of Jesus Christ in
this manner is certainly the way of antichrist, but at a number of points,
The whole world wonders at the beast and worships it, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” That’s not true today. Many are intimidated to be sure, but large numbers armed with AK-47s, roadside bombs, and rocket-propelled grenades are willing to resist American domination. Far from wondering at imperial America and worshipping it, people all over the world fear its increasing propensity to lawless violence but regard it with contempt as a rogue state, and are willing to oppose it openly.
The beast has the power to enforce its economic will to the
point of requiring all who do business to receive its mark or the number of its
name. The
The religion that gives legitimacy to the beast has the
power to show great signs, as Jesus also warned us in Matthew 24. The religious system that teaches the worship
of
Finally, the beast is a seven-headed empire of the same sort
as the four-headed Hellenistic empire – rival kingdoms operating as
one. That certainly does not describe
the
Just the same, an antichrist need not be the Antichrist, as John the apostle points out. Jesus himself warned of false Christs and false prophets arising and deceiving many. It’s pretty obvious that we need to escape the deceptions of them all, because such deceptions will destroy our lives. From that standpoint, America presents some remarkable features from a biblical point of view, which we will now consider in detail.