Maybe the church was never meant to think of “Antichrist” as an evil, world-ruling baddie of the End Times.
And maybe we should question the assumption of so many modern-day
preachers that “the Antichrist” is “the Beast” of Revelation, the “man of lawlessness”
of Paul, and the “little horn” of Daniel.
Wait, wait – don’t click the little X up there in the right-hand
corner to close me out just yet. Even if
those two sentences triggered you – even if you grew up in a church that printed
impressive diagrams of apocalypse timelines with ripped-from-the-headlines
annotations -- you may be interested in a couple of the facts that scripture has
to offer.
THERE IS NO SINGULAR “ANTICHRIST”
The term “antichrist” appears only in the epistles of John. I realize there’s a lot of insistence that an
antichrist appears throughout the book of Revelation (more on that later), but the
term itself pops up in only three places in John’s letters. Read these two hundred words carefully. They’re everything the Bible has to say about
antichrists:
1 John 2:18-22 – Children, it is the
last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists
have come. Therefore 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 it might become plain that they all are not of us. But
you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you,
not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie
is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This
is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.
1 John 4:3 -- By this you know the Spirit
of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from
God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit
of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
2 John 7 -- For many deceivers have
gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in
the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.
John starts his discussion of antichrists by reminding readers that they’ve heard an antichrist is coming. He doesn’t mention the source of this idea. John immediately shifts his readers’ anticipation of a singular, future antichrist to the reality of many antichrists in their own present time. Those antichrists are the immediate concern.
Where did those antichrists come from? From the church itself. They “went out from us” (v. 19), having
started as false believers who lacked God’s anointing and true knowledge of Him
(v. 20). Here are the markers of the
antichrists:
- They are liars (v. 22)
- They now deny Jesus is the Christ (v. 22)
- They deny the Father and the Son (v. 22)
- They deny Jesus came in the flesh (1 John 4:2 and 2 John 7)
- They are spirits already in the world in John’s time (1 John 4:3)
- They deny he came from God (also 1 John 4:2)
- They are deceivers who went out into the world in John’s time (2 John 7)
What I find intriguing about John’s discussion is that he
seems to be clarifying a misconception.
“You have heard an antichrist is coming, and I’m telling you it’s
many, many antichrists, and they’re already here. You have heard he is coming from
somewhere, and I’m telling you it is a spirit that came from among us,
spreading out from our ranks as false teachers and deniers of the incarnation
of Christ in the flesh.”
Ekousate, John writes in Greek, “you have heard
…”. The format reminds me of Jesus’ use
of the same term four times in Matthew 5: “You have heard it said you
shall not murder … you have heard you shall not commit adultery … you
have heard you shall not break your oaths … you have heard you shall
love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”
For each of those points, Jesus had clarifications. He had new information to make His listeners’
understanding more detailed and profound.
John seems to be using a similar technique. “You have heard about a future
antichrist, and I tell you … they are plural, they are here now, and they are
everywhere.”
Antichrist is not, for John, an individual. It is a class of individuals.
Missing from John’s discussion: any mention of a world
leader promoted by a False Prophet whose domination of nations portends the Second
Coming. That isn’t what John wants his
readers focused on when they hear the term “antichrist.”
BUT ALL THOSE OTHER ANTICHRISTS!
All right, fine – no one else in the Bible writes down the
word “antichrist.” But that doesn’t mean
the concept isn’t there, does it? After
all, that movie The Omen had three sequels, and Tim LaHaye squeezed out
a dozen core Left Behind novels.
Where’d they get all that material if there’s nothing about an
antichrist in the rest of the Bible?
Simple answer: From a guy named Irenaeus of Lyons. In 180 C.E.
Question answered.
But that’s not very satisfying, so let me break it down a
little more clearly.
The Little Horn
Way back when, well before Jesus was born, the writer of the
book of Daniel talks about “the little horn,” the symbol of a figure who
oppressed the Jewish people by halting their sacrifices, set up profane, pagan
abominations in the temple of the Jews, and ultimately was destroyed by means
of divine judgement. For millennia, scholars
universally understood this figure to precisely match Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the
oppressor whose story is told in the intertestamental books of the
Maccabees. Antiochus becomes, for Jews,
a symbol of all future oppressive conquerors.
The Man of Lawlessness
Enter Paul’s envisioning of the man of lawlessness (2
Thessalonians 2:1-12). This character
embodies utter rebellion against God, rejecting the rule of law (as his name
implies) and exalting himself above all other gods. He even sets himself up in God’s temple. He deceives his lie-loving followers, a
delusion permitted by God. He works
false miracles to assert his authority.
He’s a tool of Satan. Jesus will destroy
him “by the breath of his mouth” at His coming.
Most important: he is in Paul’s future, not in the past, despite Paul’s
extensive borrowing of imagery from Daniel’s little horn character.
The Beasts
And finally, from the Revelation, we have the two beasts,
one rising from the sea (this is the one who gets to reign over the Earth for
42 months) and one rising from the land who enforces worship of the sea beast and
who introduced the infamous number 666.
These two are so interconnected that it’s difficult to judge where one’s
atrocious actions end and the other’s actions begin. The difficulty isn’t in the text itself, but
in how later readers have collapsed the two figures into one. Some commentaries irresponsibly combine the
actions and attributes of both beasts into a single entity. That’s happened in ancient times (I haven’t
forgotten you, Irenaeus of Lyons) and it still happens today (hi again, Tim
LaHaye).
Revelation is no easy book to parse. I have four detailed blogs (1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
talking solely about how it’s been approached over the centuries, and I don’t even
get into interpretation of the text – hermeneutics versus exegesis for you
Bible-scholar nerds out there. Let’s
keep it simple here, though. If “the
antichrist” were a singular being identical to “the beast,” he’d have to be
just one of them.
- He must either be the one miraculously saved from a head wound who rules the globe for forty-two months while warring on the holy ones and blaspheming God,
- or he must be the one who works false miracles, enforces the worship of the sea beast, implements economic sanctions on those refusing the mark of the beast, and executes believers.
BADDIES IN A BLENDER
We’re humans. Life
gives us lots to think about. We get
pretty busy. So, we like things kept
simple.
When things aren’t simple, we dumb them down. Easier still, we let others dumb them down
for us, and we sit there quiescently absorbing their summaries. Perhaps that is what’s happened here over the
centuries: commentators have shoved all these biblical baddies into a blender
and turned out one “Antichrist” for our simplified viewing pleasure.
Full disclosure: This isn’t an original idea, birthed in the
imagination of a former-street-punk Latina New Yorker who’s learned a little Greek. A diverse group of evangelical biblical scholars
– for example, G.K. Beale [Reformed], I. Howard Marshall [Methodist], Craig S.
Keener [Baptist], and Ben Witherington III [Wesleyan] – all contend that blending
together all apocalyptic adversaries into a single End Times nemesis is just
bad Bible interpretation.
Yet blending them is exactly what Irenaeus of Lyons did in
his essay “Against Heresies,” scribbled down a century and a half after Jesus
rose from the dead and ascended. In Book
Five of that writing, he connects Daniel’s little horn, Paul’s man of lawlessness, and “the beast” (singular) of Revelation into a single entity and
then borrows the term “antichrists” from John to declare this merging “the
Antichrist” of an End Time.
To be fair, a number of other writers before Irenaeus had started this process, trying to tie together different bad guys from different ages of Hebrew and Christian eschatology. But it was Irenaeus who inserted all the ingredients, hit the high-speed purée button, and blended us a single, simplified Antichrist. It caught on, used thereafter as a linchpin of End Times ideologies. Writers in the early church continued to acknowledge the plural term “antichrists,” to be sure. But they added a new character about whom John never wrote in his epistles. This idea of a singular End Times “Antichrist” is a post-biblical construct, a later theological creation that is not a demand of the Bible text itself.
CALMING THE STORM
If you have an End Times ideology that requires a Big Baddy,
I want to assure you that I haven’t taken that away. Even if I tell you that most Bible scholars consider
the beast of the sea to be the Emperor Nero (his name adds up to 666 by
gematria calculations of John of Patmos’s time), or that many feel Paul’s man
of lawlessness was Emperor Caligula (who ordered his image erected in the
Jerusalem Temple), I still haven’t deprived us (exegetically) of an embodiment
of evil for the end of our age. You don’t
need to agree with any of these scholarly identifications to follow my main
point. If the ideas here are making some
waves for you, allow me a moment to still the waters a bit.
A question: Ever notice how every modern decade seems to see itself
as a candidate for the End Times? For
you baby boomers it was Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for us
millennials it was the year 2000 and the follow-up 2012/Planet X nonsense, and for
you Gen Z-ers who might have tripped over this post, it was 2025’s Tik Tok Rapture
insanity.
A second question: Ever notice, historically, how every
generation also saw itself as likely to be living in the End Times? Christians confidently declared the imminence
of the End Times at the fall of Rome in the 5th century, at the end
of the millennium when the 11th century dawned, during the Black
Death of the 14th century, during the millennial craze of the
English Civil War in the 17th century, and countless more that I've skipped. The End Was Near! For All of Them! Every Single Time!
A third question: Ever notice how the authors of the New
Testament were convinced they were living in the last days, the final
hours? Paul thought so (1 Corinthians
10:11), as did the epistle writers John (1 John 2:18), Jude (Jude 18-19), James
(James 5:8-9), Peter (1 Peter 4:7), and our other John of Patmos (Revelation
1:1).
And a summary question: What if they are all right? Not about the Second Coming, of course, which
is a definite, single-event occurrence in our future (and which will probably occur anywhere from later next year to 14,000 years from now; just my guess). But what if the scripture writers, and the medieval Christians, and the baby boomers, and all believers right up through today are
absolutely right that we have been living in the last days, the last hours, for
about twenty centuries? And what if we, like
the wise maidens in Jesus’ parable, are called as a church to bring enough oil
to keep our lamps burning for thirty centuries more? Is it unthinkable that the life of the
church, its entire era of salvation by the loving sacrifice of Christ,
could itself be exactly what the epistle writers say it is – an era of last days, of final hours?
WHY HAVE A BOOK OF REVELATION?
Before the days of Martin Luther, there was a way of reading
the book of Revelation that endured more than thousand years and continues to
today: that it deals anew with every generation of the church, a continuous cycle of
hope overcoming persecution, each generation with its own plagues, its own
judgments, its own Big Baddies and men of lawlessness, its own falling away
from the faith – in effect, the spirit of antichrist gone out into the world (1
John 4:3), just as Paul’s man of lawlessness already had secret power at work
in the world (2 Thessalonians 2:7). The
cycle will continue, says this way of approaching Revelation, until the final
Coming of Jesus in glory, when every knee will bend joyfully and proclaim Him
Lord.
Maybe that ruins Left Behind for some of us (although
I’m more of a Good
Omens girl myself), but think about it: What did the book of Revelation
mean to a Germanic believer in the year 622 C.E.? What did it mean to a Celtic believer in 1066
C.E.? What did it mean to a Native
American convert in 1876 C.E.? And,
frankly, what does it mean to us if our Bridegroom tarries until the year 3526
C.E.?
This continuous-cycle hermeneutic – the oldest and most
enduring approach to Revelation in the church age – brings to life a part of
the Bible that’s otherwise irrelevant for 2,000 years of our fellow believers
and perhaps even for us. I can’t detail the
approach the way I did in my earlier blogs (again, found at (1)
(2)
(3)
(4)…
seriously, take a morning and read those some weekend). But I can invite you to consider the time-honored
idea more deeply.
More deeply?
Yes. Because, while our salvation
itself truly is a simple concept, there is much more to our growth in wisdom and
sanctification that requires harder work from us. Proverbs 2:4-5 says it better than I ever
could:
If you seek it like silver,
And search for it as for hidden treasures,
Then you will understand the fear
of the Lord
And find the knowledge of God.
Maranatha,
YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx
