Who is the antichrist? - part 1

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. -- 1 John 2:18


The word "antichrist" appears a grand total of five times in the scriptures; four times in 1 John, once in 2 John. It never appears in the book of Revelation. Most of what modern theologians think they know about the antichrist comes from Paul's description of "the man of lawlessness" found in 2 Thessalonians 2 and are based on the assumption that the man of lawlessness and the antichrist are one and the same. This is not quite true. But I can't simply tell you how it is false. It's a bit like Matthew 24, where I can't just give the answer because you don't yet understand the question. Let's look at the history of the antichrists, first remembering two things: 1) an antichrist is someone who denies that Jesus is the Christ (ie: the savior), they do this to prop themselves up as savior and take for themselves the worship that rightfully belongs to God. 2) a spike in "antichrist" activity is a sign of the "last hour".

The first time -- I've already told you that historians are aware of at least forty so called "messiahs" that went around claiming to be the chosen one, or at least not denying the title when it was foisted upon them, during the Roman occupation of Israel. That's an average of about one every four to five years. That's not how they came, of course -- spread out I mean. Most times a decade would pass and then three or four would pop up all at once.

What is interesting about this is the way these "messiahs" came and the way they were treated by the religious authorities. Now let me tell you up front, there's not a lot of information on any of the first century messiahs other than Jesus, so I'm having to make certain assumptions, but apparently the other "messiah" rarely if ever claimed to fulfill any of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the long awaited savior. Does that not strike you as odd? Remember that one of the knocks on Jesus was that He came from Galilee, which the religious authorities believed was a violation of prophecy. So Jesus was given a hard times because He fulfilled some, but in their eyes, not all of the Old Testament prophecies. Yet forty others gained followings (which sometimes included those same religious authority figures) without ever seriously attempting to defend their messianic claims. How?

The other "messiahs" were rebels, military leaders claiming to be the one who could cast off the yoke of Roman rule. If I'm understanding it right the Pharisees, Saducees, Herodians often treated these messiahs like modern day political candidates, backing the one who they believed could benefit them the most. Let me state that again: they treated God's plan of salvation like something they could control, like it was a contract, the terms of which they should rightfully be able to dictate.

So the first flood of antichrists occurred because of the messianic expectations built into the Old Testament prophecies as well as the peculiar aspects of the Roman occupation -- and by that I mean that not only were the Roman Pagan culture totally at odds with Jewish culture, but prior to the Roman invasion the Jews had recently thrown off another Pagan regime, the Seleucids. So for another Pagan regime to conquer you so soon after you believed that you had been "saved" from paganism, the Jews naturally turned to and took solace in those messianic prophecies as being the only things that could truly save them (ie: "it's going to take a miracle if we're ever going to be rid of these pagans forever").

In general terms, the first rise of the antichrists took place due to a preexisting set of expectations and a surrounding backdrop of worldly hardships.

The second time -- As I wrote in History isn't what you think it is it became quite fashionable in the 12th-14th centuries to foist messianic expectations on the kings and emperors of the age. Now understand something: a sense of longing, of something unfulfilled, is every bit as much a part of being human as awkward puberty years and opposable thumbs. We all have a sensation of need, although one person's belief on how the need can be remedied may be very different than another's. For medieval man, Christianity was something that you did (through recitations in Latin, giving of offerings, ceremonials performances, etc.) but it was not something that you understood, and certainly not something that, for most, shaped your identity or -- here's that word again -- your expectations.

During that age the kingdom of Heaven was just too remote, and I mean "kingdom of Heaven" in both the sense of a future place of promise as well as God's spirit reshaping your life and identity right here and now, the very same way that Jesus means it when He begins a parable with the phrase, "The kingdom of Heaven is like..." For the medievals who did not own a Bible, who did not have a "personal" savior, but rather subcontracted out their spiritual needs to a professional priest, those needs I mentioned earlier naturally focused on the one agent that they could conceive of as being both willing and able to deliver them from that needy state -- their worldly rulers. Because of this several generations of Kings like Frederick Barbarossa would be worshipped as gods.... and some of them liked it.

Again, the second rise of the antichrists was caused by a preexisting set of expectations (those being the messianic qualities placed on human rulers) and a surrounding backdrop of hardship (this time a complex mish-mash of economic decline, disease, and the encroaching Muslims).

Next post, we finish with the third rise of the antichrists and I begin attempting to explain how the man of lawlessness is certainly an antichrist, but an antichrist is not necessarily the man of lawlessness.