Who is the Antichrist-Beast ?
Nature of the Antichrist
The
original Greek word for ‘Antichrist’ is ‘Antichristos’ – anrikristoz which
literally means an opponent of Christ or one who is against Christ. The word 'Antichrist' appears in the Scriptures only four times, and all of them are in
the epistles of the apostle John.
Although the word 'Antichrist'
do not appear anywhere else in the Bible but John wrote about the ‘Beast’ in the book
of Revelation. The apostle Paul further
described the character of the ‘Antichrist’ and
the ‘Beast’. In his
epistle to the Thessalonians Paul called him the ‘man
of sin’, ‘son of perdition’, and ‘lawless one’.
Let
us first study about the ‘Antichrist’ and
see what the apostle John wrote about him.
"Little
children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the 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).
1.
John's first century readers knew the
'Antichrist' was coming. The teaching of
the 'Antichrist' is not new.
2.
At the time John was writing in the first
century it was called the "last hour". The 'last hour' continues to today until the end of the age.
3.
There were "many
antichrists" during the first century just as there are many today, and there will also be "many antichrists" until the Lord Jesus Christ's Return.
4.
These 'Antichrists' were
former church members who had left the faith.
Although the 'Antichrists' were of Christian origin but they had never been true Christians at all. After severing relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ they were regarded as enemies of Christians (2 Jn. 7-11).
"Who
is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who
denies the Father and the Son" (1 John 2:22).
5.
The 'Antichrist'
is a liar who denies that "Jesus is the Christ."
6.
Antichrists also deny "the Father and
the Son"..
"and
every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is
not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was
coming, and is now already in the world" (1 John 4:3).
7.
The terminology ‘Antichrist’
not only refers to a person but also refers to the ‘spirit
of the Antichrist'.’
8.
The ‘spirit
of the Antichrist’ already existed during the First
Century. The ‘spirit
of the Antichrist’ can
exist in any age.
"For
many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as
coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist" (2 John 1:7).
9.
The ‘Antichrist’
is a deceiver.
10. There
are many deceivers in the world who do not confess
Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh.
From
John’s epistles we have learned ten important points about the 'Antichrist’ .
One of the things we learned is
that we cannot call anyone who openly confesses Jesus as the Christ to be an ‘Antichrist.’. We may
disagree with many things the Catholics believe and teach, but from the scriptural standpoint we cannot call
the Pope an ‘Antichrist’ because
he has never denied that Jesus is God or the Christ, never denied the Father
and the Son, and he has never severed relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to be biblically accurate, unbiased, fair and objective in our
discernment on the identity of the ‘Antichrist.’.
Historical Antichrists
There have been several extremely powerful and wicked non-Christian men in world history who fit
the description of the ‘Antichrist’ because they have opposed Christ and Christianity. There are numerous ‘Antichrists’ in different ages.
Antiochus
Epiphanes He lived in
175 B.C. and is described by many scholars as a prototype of the ‘Antichrist’ who profaned
the temple and terribly persecuted God’s people. Daniel prophesied this man’s mighty power and wickedness (Dan. 8:23-25).
Roman
Emperor Nero reigned between 37 A.D. and 68 A.D. One of the first and most wicked persons to fit the role of the ‘Antichrist’ Nero had killed many Christians, and even murdered his mother and other members of his own family.
Tradition has Nero playing the fiddle
while Rome was burning. He blamed the fiery
disaster on Christians and had them tortured to death. When he learned the
Roman Senate was plotting against him, he died by poisoning himself.
Roman
Emperors The Emperor Caligula committed
the great sin of the ‘Antichrist’ when he commanded everyone throughout his
empire to worship him as a god. Because
of his claim to a deity, two temples were built for him in 40 A.D. .
The
Jews and the Christians refused to obey him. Hence there arose more religious persecutions, one succeeding
another. The Emperor Vespasian stormed and sacked Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was a
very brutal and merciless slaying of the Jews. According to Josephus, 1,100,000 Jews lost their lives in the
attack that lasted from April to September (War, 5.10.5; 6.9.4.).
Mohammed arose in the 7th
century in the Arabian peninsula. He
claimed to be the true and last prophet of Allah who is his god. He claimed to receive from an archangel the
revelation of Allah which was written in the Quran and the religion which
became Islam. He also claimed that
Islam was the true fulfillment of the Old and the New Testaments. He claimed that the Christians and the
Gospels had perverted the real truth, but he was restoring it. That is the
basic claim of Mohammed. He first believed that because he rejected idolatry
and because he rejected the claims of Christianity, the Jewish people would
follow him. And when they did not
follow him, he turned against them—and became a persecutor of them.
Islam
bears most of the marks of the spirit of the ‘Antichrist.’ Islam absolutely denies that Jesus is the
Son of God. The Quran acknowledges
Jesus as a prophet—even as a Savior, even as a Messiah. But when you say He is the Son of God, you
bring out the most intense, bitter opposition. In the famous mosque in Jerusalem that is called the Dome of the
Rock—built on the site of what was the Temple of Solomon at one time—the Arabic
inscriptions around it twice say, “God has no need
of a son.”
Islam
claimed to be the outworking of that revelation of God. But it denies certain
basic fundamentals of the Christian faith, like the atoning death of Jesus on
the cross. Mohammed taught that Jesus
did not die, but that an angel came and spirited Him away before He died. Because there is no death, there is no
atonement and because there is no atonement, there is no forgiveness. And no
Moslem has the assurance of sins forgiven at any time. Mohammed is the archetype of the ‘Antichrist.’
While
it is true that Islam has not been guilty of anything so terrible as the
Holocaust, it has a long record of 13 centuries of suppression and contempt for
Christianity and Judaism.
Nature of the Beast
Of all the subjects concerning the
End Time the mark of the beast is the one that most Christians like to
study. First of all we need to
understand the nature of the beast that has the mark. The beast is distinguished from man who is created in God’s image
(Gen. 1:26-27; 2:7; Ecc. 3:21). The
beast has no spirit therefore has no God consciousness. In Scripture it is figurative of the
sensual, ferocious and brutal natures that belong to the wild and untamed
animals (Ezek. 5:17; 14:15, 21). The
word “beast” is used figuratively of brutal men (Ecc. 3:18; 2 Pet. 2:12; Jude
10). Hence, the apostle Paul wrote: “I have fought with beasts at Ephesus” (1 Cor. 15:32). A wild beast is the symbol of a selfish,
tyrannical monarchy. The four beasts in
Daniel 7:3, 17, 23 represent the four kingdoms (Ezek. 34:28; Jer. 12:9). In the book of Revelation the beasts
obviously mean worldly powers, whose rising out of the sea and the earth
indicate they owe their origin and power to the commotion of the people (Rev.
13:1; 15:2; 17:8)
Please
go to this web site: Mark of the Beast
:à
http://www.geocities.com/revmark_ark
Go to “Saddam Hussein:
the Last Great Tyrant” à
http://www.geocities.com/revmark_ark/saddam.htm
Revelation of the Man of Sin
“Let
no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling
away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who
opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped,
so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. (2
Thess. 2:3-4)
The
“falling away” (Greek -
‘he apostasia’
h apostasia) that is
mentioned in the above passage refers
generally to the abandonment of the original apostolic faith by the Church (1 Tim. 4:1-3; 2 Tim. 2:18; Gal 1:6-9). Apostasy had already begun in the First
Century as is evidenced by the condition of the seven churches in Asia Minor
(Revelation chapters 2 and 3).
Jesus
Christ had prophesied the temple building in Jerusalem would be destroyed (Mt.
24:1-2). In His Olivet discourse Jesus
warned the disciples about the “abomination of
desolation, spoken of by Daniel, standing in the Holy Place.” (Mt. 24:15)
Daniel prophesied:“And after the
sixty-two weeks Messiah shall be cut
off, but not for Himself; and the people of the prince who is to come
shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.
The end of it shall be with a flood, and till the end of the war
desolations are determined.” (Dan. 9:26)
This prophecy was fulfilled when the “Messiah” was “cut
off” by His sacrifice on the Cross. The “prince” was none other than
the Roman general Titus whose army besieged Jerusalem in 70 A.D..
The
historian Josephus recorded that 2,500,000 assembled
at the last Passover just before the city was taken by Titus. 1,000,000 perished in the siege, 347,000
perished in other places. Of the
remainder, 97,000 were carried into captivity and 11,000 starved through
neglect or sullen refusal of food. On
July 17th the daily sacrifices were interrupted (Dan. 9:27).
The
prophecy of Jesus Christ was fulfilled when the destruction of the temple
occurred on the Sabbath day of August 10th, 70 A.D. (Mt. 24:20). When Jerusalem was captured, the temple was
burned and scavengers would turn over every stone to retrieve the melted gold
(Mt. 24:2). The Jewish people were taken into captivity, and ever since the destruction
of the temple in Jerusalem no sacrifice has been offered up to God on Jewish
altars (Dan. 9:27).
Jerusalem
was taken and burned, and the Tenth Legion encamped in the ruined temple. The temple was leveled to the ground and
utterly destroyed. Only the Roman
garrison was left. Josephus states that
the Romans, having taken the city, brought their (eagle) standards into the
court of the temple, and placed them opposite the east gate, then offered sacrifices to them. The seven-branched candlestick, the golden
table of the shew-bread and the golden trumpets were carried through the
streets of Rome in triumph. The Emperor
Hadrian dealt the final blow in 132 A.D., as a result of another revolt led by
a false Messiah, Bar Cocheba (son of the star), the Jews were again massacred
leaving another million victims. From
then on, the Jews scattered over the face of the earth, became the wandering
people, without temple or sacrifice, as predicted by the prophets.
History
records that emperor worship was pervasive throughout the Roman Empire long
before the first advent of Jesus Christ.
Julius Caesar was worshipped in the provinces. Octavius was called Augustus (\Sebastos\,
Reverend). The crazy Emperor Caius
Caligula not simply claimed to be divine, but actually demanded that his statue
be set up for worship in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. He was killed in January A.D. 41 before he
could execute his dire purpose. But the madcap Nero likewise demanded worship
and in 64 A.D. blamed the burning of Rome on the Christians, though guilty of
it himself. He set the style for
persecuting Christians who had slumbered on while Rome burst into flames again
under Domitian, who had himself commonly termed _Dominus ac Deus noster_ (Our
Lord and God). The prophecy of the
apostle Paul had, no doubt, been fulfilled by the Roman cult of emperor worship
during the time of the apostasy after the original Apostolic Christian faith
had been compromised.
Ancient Antichrists
Please note that this list is
only for information
and it is not an endorsement or verification
The Antichrist - Have
you see this man? à
http://www.raptureready.com/rap666.html
Emperor Nero, the Beast à
http://www.preteristarchive.com/StudyArchive/n/nero_emperor-antichrist.html
Antichrist Indentified à http://home.online.no/~lgullbe/antichrs.htm
Abuse of the Number
666 à http://users.iafrica.com/l/ll/lloyd/7-EndTimeIssues/666.htm
Modern Antichrists
Please note that this list is
only for information
and it is not an endorsement or verification
Adolf Hitler is the antichrist à http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1246.cfm
Hitler’s Clone will be the antichrist à http://www.prweb.com/releases/2000/9/prweb17464.htm
Clinton’s Family Tree à http://www.triumphpro.com/clinton_s_nero_connection2.htm
The Antichrist and a cup of tea à http://www.bookmasters.com/marktplc/00240.htm
Prince Charles – Savior of the
world statue à http://www.stargods.org/FallenCharles.html
Prince Charles, Antichrist - debunked à http://www.revelationwebsite.co.uk/index1/occ/charles.htm
Urban Legend: “Bill Gates is
the Antichrist” à http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blgates2.htm
Bill Gates is the Antichrist legend debunked à http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blgates2a.htm
Netscape Launches
new Antichrist Suit against Bill Gates
May God bless you
This Research Article is the response of Paul Wong
to a Discussion in the ARK Forum on December 7, 2003
For comments please write first to: arkpw@sbcglobal.net
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Paul Wong is a Christian minister and the
President of ARK International. |
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