The Antichrist

THOUGHTS FROM JOHN’S LETTERS

THE ANTICHRIST

Our Christian faith is not faith in a vacuum. Faith exists in the context of opposition, in the context of those who deny truth and faith and those who seek to corrupt and/or destroy faith and all that faith believes. Faith exists in the presence of darkness and deception, in the presence of the evil one, in the presence of ‘the world’, and in the presence of ‘antichrists’.

John is the only biblical writer to use the term ‘antichrist’, and he does so only in his first and second letters:

1John 2:19 – ‘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.’

1John 2:22 – ‘Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist – he denies the Father and the Son.’

1John 4:3 – ‘but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.’

2John 7 – ‘Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.’

From these texts we learn:

[1] There is an end-time individual figure called ‘the antichrist’.

[2] John and his readers, and we also, are already in ‘the last hour’, because of the presence of many ‘antichrists’, in and through whom the deceptive ‘spirit of the antichrist’ is working.

[3] The central evidence of this presence of ‘the antichrist’ is a denial that the real man, Jesus, is also the Christ, the Son of God.

John understands that the ‘antichrist’ is present in the ‘many antichrists’ that had already come at the time that he was writing. He tells us about these people in verse 19:

They used to associate and identify with the fellowship of people who believed in Jesus Christ – ‘us’. But they have since left the company of believers – ‘they went out from us’. John sees that as clear proof that they had never really belonged, because if they did belong they would have stayed. The fact that they left exposes their unbelief.

The fact that they have turned their backs on Jesus Christ and his people means that there is in these people something of the nature of the ‘antichrist’. But that is not the only thing that makes John call them ‘antichrist’.

In verse 22 John identifies anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ, anyone who denies the Son and the Father, is both ‘the liar’ and ‘the antichrist’, and no such person ‘has the Father’ or the Son. In calling such a person ‘the liar’ John is connecting that person to Satan, of whom Jesus said: ‘there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44). As a ‘liar’ he has led ‘the whole world astray’ – which was what people in the church, who had now left the church, had been trying to do to the believers (1John 2:26).

John here identifies the false teachers, and the people who had left the church having believed their teaching, as ‘the liar’ and ‘the antichrist’. They have been doing Satan’s work for him – corrupting the truth, attempting to deceive people with their erroneous perceptions of Jesus Christ. They have taught and acted against the real Christ, and they have also promoted an alternate Christ.

The word ‘antichrist’ is antichristos. When we see the prefix ‘anti’ our minds usually think ‘against’. We almost automatically think of ‘the antichrist’ as an end-time person who actively opposes Jesus Christ, actively setting himself against Jesus Christ. And that is certainly true.

But while ‘anti’ does mean ‘against’ it can also mean ‘in the place of’, inferring the concept of being ‘instead of’ or ‘alternate’ or ‘opposite to’ - ‘a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached’ (2Corinthians 11:4) or ‘a different gospel’ (Galatians 1:8).

Ultimately, any ‘christ’ figure, who sets himself up, or is promoted, instead of, or ‘opposite to’ Christ is also against the real Christ.

So John readily identifies as ‘the antichrist’ these people who have denied Jesus. They had come into the church and were preaching an alternate ‘Christ’ – a ‘Christ’ who was less than the real Christ.

It was the presence of these people and their teaching that necessitated John’s letters and his many distinctions between true and false believers. Their denial of the real Jesus, and their promotion of an alternate Jesus, was the reason he stated his strong affirmations in 1:1 – 3 of the apostles as eye-witnesses of the real incarnation of the Son. (For a longer study on the antichrist click here. )