The Antichrist is Not a Person

We mustn’t confuse the people who manifest the antichrist spirit with a person called the Antichrist.

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Misconceptions

Many believe today that the Antichrist will be a person whom satan himself will possess before the end of the world. They believe that he will become a dictator who will come to power during a seven year period called the Great Tribulation after the Church has been raptured the from the earth.

But is this what the Bible actually says?

In this article, I want to explore how this idea came to be so popular today and also to offer to my readers a different perspective.

How antichrist is used in the Bible

The word itself only appears 4 times, and only in the epistles of John, who identifies antichrist as a spirit that has gone into the world to deny Christ:

1 John 2:18-19 (KJV) Little children, it is the last time: and as you have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

1 John 2:22 (KJV) Who is a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denies the Father and the Son.

1 John 4:2-3 (KJV) Hereby you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof you have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

2 John 1:7 (KJV) For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

According to these verses

The antichrist is a spirit that is in the world to convince people to deny that Jesus was actually God and that He had come into the world as a human being.

But how has this changed from an antichrist spirit that is already here in the world causing people to deny Christ to a future person coming to rule the world, who is not here yet?

To believe such a thing completely changes our expectations of the last days.

As we will see, confusion about this is having a massive affect on the Church of Jesus Christ.

Origins of the belief that antichrist is a person

Most people are unfamiliar with how the biblical concept of the antichrist has developed historically and the forces that began to influence it during great persecution of the early Church.

Roman emperors looked upon Christianity as a threat to their authority because they claimed allegiance to Jesus as their king. Even though Constantine had also persecuted them, in order to unify his kingdom against external threats, he officially ended his persecution and legalized Christianity, as well as other religions, in the 4th century by the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. Christianity actually became the official state religion in 380 A.D. by the Edict of Thessalonica.

By the time Christianity was legalized, most of the leadership of the early Church had either been imprisoned, exiled, or martyred. They had suffered immense persecution. For several hundred years, like Paul their predecessor, notable Church fathers wrote to instruct the Church during these persecutions. Because it was the Roman Emperors who authorized their suffering, they began to change from John’s concept of antichrist as spirit, to the possibility that antichrist may actually be a person. They began to identify some of the emperors as the Antichrist.

Notable Church Fathers

If my readers are unfamiliar with this information, you will be very surprised to learn about the source of our modern beliefs about it.

(Though I have documentation from other sources, I found a useful presentation of it from another Substack author, probablyalexandra.)

Polycarp (60 to155 A.D.)

Polycarp was a disciple of John and used the term antichrist exactly as John did. He did not identify antichrist as a person, but rather that it was a spirit in the world that was on display through people and circumstances that reflected the character of the antichrist spirit. He was the only early church father who used the word to mean exactly what the scriptures said it meant.  The others after him; Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus, took more liberty with the scriptures by adding their opinions.

Irenaeus (130 to 202 A.D.)

Irenaeus was one of Polycarp's students and wrote extensively about gnostic heresies infiltrating the new church.  He is the first one who equated antichrist with a human, and tried to assign a person's name to the number 666.

He wrote the book Against Heresies (Book V, Chapter 30):

“Moreover, another danger, by no means trifling, shall overtake those who falsely presume that they know the name of Antichrist. For if these men assume one [number], when this [Antichrist] shall come having another, they will be easily led away by him, as supposing him not to be the expected one, who must be guarded against.”

Tertullian (155 A.D to 255 A.D.)

Tertullian was the next Church Father to continue the error by capitalizing the word Antichrist, in his notable work Apologeticus, where he refers to the Man of Lawlessness as a person, thus turning the concept into a human.  Note that even though antichrist is not capitalized in John 2:22 in most modern translations of the Bible, the King James version does not include the article the in front of it at all, while the rest do.

Hippolytus (170 A.D. to 235 A.D.)

After Tertullian, Hippolytus identified the second beast of Revelation 13 in his writings as a human Antichrist.

From there, the concept of antichrist as a person began to grow.

Something happened in the 16th century

The the idea that antichrist is a person began to dominate in the 1500’s. It began when the Catholic Church was losing power due to the Protestant Reformation of 1517.

The Reformation leaders, like Luther, Wycliffe and Tyndale, and even the Muslims and Jews, believed that the Catholic Church and the Papacy was the antichrist system because of their centuries-long inquisitions that killed hundreds of thousands of people that it believed to be heretics.

The Papacy began fighting back

The Order of the Jesuits began in 1540 led by a Spanish knight named Ignacios Loyola. The Pope commissioned the Jesuits to develop a new interpretation of Scripture that would counteract the Protestant's claims that the Roman Catholic Church fulfilled the Bible's prophecies of an antichrist.

They were given the specific assignment of bringing Protestantism back to the Mother Church. This was to be done not only through the Inquisition and through torture, but also through theology and deception. They were told to develop authoritative teaching that would move the blame off the Papacy. During the Council of Trent in 1554, they began countering the accusation.

Who they recruited

Francisco Ribera (1537-1591)

They recruited Francisco Ribera, a Jesuit, to infiltrate Protestantism and to spread Dispensationalism placing the Antichrist in the future, thus taking the blame off the present and the Papacy.

In 1590, Ribera published a 500-page Latin commentary on the Book of Revelation.  His commentary was never translated into any other language and was for the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy only.

Ribera said that all of Revelation was in the future and that since the Papacy was timeless, it couldn't be the antichrist since the Antichrist had to be a single, identifiable human being who would come during the tribulation.

He also claimed that the destroyer would be a Jew and appear in Jerusalem. He would rebuild Jerusalem, be worshipped by the Jews, abolish Christianity and persecute Christians. Then he would take over the world until Jesus returns.

Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621)

This Jesuit Cardinal added to Ribera's writings stating the Antichrist would be an evil man who would reign for 7 years at the end of time in the distant future.

Luis Alcazar (1554-1613) 

They also recruited Luis Alcazar, a Jesuit, to also infiltrate Protestantism and spread the belief that all or most of Revelation was fulfilled in 70 A.D.  Unlike Dispensationalism, Preterism placed the Antichrist in the past, thus also taking the blame off the present and the Papacy.

Manuel Lacunza (1731-1801)

In the early 1700's, another Spanish Jesuit, Manuel de Lacunza compared his own views on the identity of the Antichrist with Ribera's views, and wrote the controversial book, The Coming of the Messiah in Majesty and Glory, under the pseudonym of a converted Jewish Rabbi Ben-Ezra'

The migration into the ecumenical world

Edward R. Irving (1792-1834)

Lacunza's book was a big influence on Scottish minister Edward Irving. He translated his book from Spanish to English and published it in 1827. Irving called Ben-Ezra Manuel Lacunza his worthy master (a Free Masonic term) in the preface of the book. He was fascinated with the new idea of the antichrist. Irving was charismatic and drew large crowds to his Caledonian chapel in London.

Margaret MacDonald (1815-1840)

A young Scottish girl, Margaret MacDonald, an acquaintance of Edward Irving, had a vision and shared it with him in 1830. Irving quickly influenced her to believe that this was a vision of a secret rapture that would occur before the Second Coming of Christ.

Unlike the Left Behind teaching of today however, MacDonald’s vision went on to speak of great testing to befall the Church rather than an escape from the Great Tribulation. 

The Migration began to take hold

Henry Drummond (1851-1897)

Lacunza's ideas, spread through Irving, would not have become the most popular theory without the aid of a wealthy banker named Henry Drummond. He is listed as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Freemasons.

He was a politician and member of the Catholic Apostolic Church.  After his education at Harrow and Oxford, he joined the family bank.  Following travels in Europe, in 1819 Drummond co-founded the Continental Society to provide protestant teaching in Catholic countries.  He purchased an estate, Albury Park in Surrey, where, in 1826, he set up the first of 5 annual conferences to study unfulfilled biblical prophecies. He became a central figure in the Catholic Apostolic Church, part of the ecumenical prayer movement of that period.

It was Drummond who financed and organized an Albury conference for Irving who admits that he preached the doctrine of Dispensationalism from Lacunza's book at that conference.

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882)

His middle name is from a family friend, British Navy hero Lord Nelson. He was a Theosophist who became both a lawyer and a priest in the Anglican church in 1825. In 1830 he published his 7 dispensations work and included the idea of a secret rapture. In 1878-1880 he and his followers split off from Plymouth Brethren church. He was an Irish aristocrat who adopted Irving's Dispensationalist (originally Jesuit) teachings and preached them extensively. Thanks to Drummond's funding of the prophecy conferences in Albury, Darby heard Irving preach at that conference and would go on to become known as the Father of Dispensationalism. According to his own words, Darby saw himself as a student of the mysteries.

He used occult language throughout his doctrinal writings and letters. Many of the phrases are found in Cabalistic/Theosophical literature.  He didn’t learn these esoteric terms from the Bible but none-the-less, integrated them into his theological treatises and letters. His doctrinal writings often used theosophical terms like divine architect, divine intelligence, or the coming one. He lived in what is known as IRELAND'S MOST HAUNTED CASTLE complete with many bizarre stories of skeletons inside walls and sightings of an elemental creature (demon).

Darby simply popularized Catholic Jesuit eschatology.  His ideas were further promoted and accepted in the United States in the early 20th century when Cyrus Scofield published his Scofield Reference Bible.

Cyrus Scofield (1843 - 1921)

Scofield was a scandal-ridden ex-lawyer who became an American theologian, minister, and writer whose best-selling annotated Bible popularized futurism and dispensationalism among fundamentalist Christians.

Funded by Zionist Samuel Untermyer:

Samuel Untermeyer was a Zionist who found Scofield through a network of contacts, like Mordecai Kaplan and Louis Marshall in the Jewish Theological Seminary, which he helped build and support financially. Untermeyer was given the job of injecting political Zionist beliefs into Christianity, thus creating Christian Zionism.  To do this he knew he had to find someone who could be used as a spokesman for the movement.  He found his mark in Scofield.

He began by introducing Scofield to the ideology of Zionism and to socialist world leaders. Even with Scofield's shady past, a criminal record, and the fact that he had never been to seminary, the Zionists were able to control the press, do some public relations work, and along with their international network, he became one of America's leading theologians, despite his dubious unqualified nature.

It was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes that dispensational premillennialism became influential among fundamentalist Christians in the United States, and these notes became a significant source for popular religious writers such as Hal Lindsey. Through these notes the masses were introduced to the ideas like, the secret rapture of the Church and the rebuilding of a third temple in Jerusalem.

According to Joseph Canfield, who wrote the biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Scofield's theology was most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back Untermeyer's  project of promoting international interest in the Zionist Movement.  The Scofield Bible was published by Oxford University Press in London, which is owned by Freemasons.

Scofield’s Reference Bible introduced many to Christian Zionism who believe that the return of the Jews to the state of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy. One of the Jesuit ideas Scofield popularized is that Daniel 9:27 refers to The Antichrist. Before Scofield, most theologians believed the he in that verse was Jesus but, according to Scofield, he in Daniel 9:27 is referring to The Antichrist.

The occult inverts the truth, and the Jesuits and Freemasons who created the theory of Dispensationalism have always seen Jesus as The Antichrist, because they see themselves as God.

The reason for the popularity

The Jesuits in the Catholic Church created a lie that went viral with the help of Freemasons and is believed by many today. They are responsible for eventually infiltrating Christian institutions and for distributing it throughout the world.

Criticism is not directed at the masses inside those institutions but at occultists like Samuel Untermeyer and John D. Rockefeller who used them over the last century as a smokescreen to instruct the instructors with their sorcery.

John D. Rockefeller Sr. claimed to be a Baptist and was a master at establishing monopolies, both in business and in institutions. As a freemason, he was a major financial contributor in founding our modern education school system and medical schools and monopolizing what was taught through them.

He also had a major influence in establishing seminaries:

He and an unnamed donor gave $2,333,334 to establish Union Theological Seminary.

He funded $1,000,000 to the University of Chicago Divinity School 1892 and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave $65,000 to Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York in 1924.

Also, thanks to John D. Rockefeller Jr., two schools merged to become Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1928. He later established The Sealantic Fund to support theological education and this was a major source of financial support until 1959.

From these seminaries come some of the teachings passed throughout churches via the occultists influence (Jesuits, Freemasons, Zionists, etc) and believed as doctrine.

This may explain how the Man of Sin could infiltrate the imagination of modern day Christianity and render it powerless in the last days:

2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 (CHV) Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sits in the temple of God (not talking about a building but the people), showing himself that he is God.

Who is teaching those who claim to teach the Bible today?

In America, the Moody Bible Institute, Biola University, and Dallas Theological Seminary played important roles in spreading the concept that the antichrist is a person in a belief called dispensationalism.

Not to suggest that they were not sincere in what they believed or that they knowingly lead people astray, but many alumni from these institutions wrote best selling books that gave most Christians their understanding of the end times.

Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952) was mentored by C.I. Scofield and was founder of Dallas Theological Seminary which is considered by many as the headquarters of dispensational theology.

Many Dallas Seminary alumni have been some of the most influential evangelical leaders of the the last 50 years. They include names like: Charles Swindoll, G.K.Beale, J. Vernon McGee, Kenneth Taylor, Ray Steadman, J. Dwight Pentecost, Hal Lindsay, Harold Hoehner, and Robert Jeffress (one of the spiritual advisors to Donald Trump).

One of the more influential alumni today is Dr. David Jeremiah who replaced Tim Lahaye (Left Behind series) as pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church. An identical symbol used by Freemasons inside their Templar building was used by Lahaye on the cover of his 1998 book, The Power of the Cross. Not to suggest that he agrees with it, but the all-seeing eye and an inverted cross can also be seen in the stain glass behind the pulpit where Lahaye, and now Jeremiah, preaches every week.

Adrian Rogers, Charles Stanley, and W.A. Criswell were among the more prominent Southern Baptists dispensationalists. Before the 19th century, no one in the Southern Baptists movement held to their dispensational views.

Influential churches in America today

One form of these beliefs or another is now preached by major influential churches in America and has become a mainstream Christian belief. One of the more prominent is the Calvary Chapel movement that began in the late 60’s.

It is taught in Seminaries as if it is true.  It is then taught to the masses and the cycle continues. Lies are passed on generationally.  Traditions ensure each generation gets the same indoctrination as the previous ones.

Its roots started in the Catholic Church as a means to lie about the scriptures and now a majority of Christians believe that the antichrist is a person instead of a spirit and that he is a person of the future (Dispensationalists), or that he is a person of the past (Preterists).

These lies started out as a means to protect the Pope and the Catholic Church but now they are having a neutralizing affect on a majority of the Church today.

An experience I had during Bible College illustrates how:

I had a part-time job working in maintenance for the college I was attending and one day I was asked to do something that I thought could best be done by someone else at another time. In response, my supervisor asked me a few questions. He asked: If not you than who? If not now, then when? If not here, than where? His point was inescapable. If it was not about me, or about here, or about now, than the job would never get done. So I proceeded on to the do the assignment.

The Church today is in the same place as I was then. If it is about the nation of Israel, then it is not about me. If the Antichrist is a person of the future, then it is not about now. If the Church will be caught away before the tribulation begins, then it is not about here.

If Satan wanted to insure that the Church would offer little resistance to his last days attempt at a one-world government, he could not have chosen a better strategy.   If a person truly believes that it’s not about me, it’s not here, and it’s not now, that completely removes him or her in their thinking from any real consideration about what they should be doing in the last days.  We simply won’t be here.

Conclusion

Through their influence and money, the occultists have used their agents to distribute designer facts about the end times through key publishing houses, seminaries, and media personalities, who use television, the movie industry, and their ministries to speak to the world.  Together, they have created a simulated reality that isn’t anywhere near what is actually happening.  They have wrapped the truth about the last days in deception that is designed to placate the Church and completely neutralize resistance from them to their global plans.

Satan is working through the mind. One commentator put it this way:

The media, governments, elite bankers and influential people have all created a system that runs on wealth, sexual immorality, and the targeted destruction of God in the minds of people.

Is antichrist a person or a spirit?

A person or a person with the antichrist spirit, what’s the difference?

The difference is whether you believe that the antichrist is a person who is not here yet, but is still in the future, and that whatever is happening on earth right now is irrelevant to you because you will be gone before the tribulation begins.

The difference is whether you know that satan is attempting to take his place in the temple of God (you are God’s temple) by convincing you that it is not about you, not about here, and not about now, in order to placate you and keep you from queuing up for the battle of the last days Harvest.