Antichrist

It comes as a surprise to many that the word “antichrist” is used only four times in Scripture, all in John’s Epistles (1 Jn. 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 Jn. 7). So, the word is not even used in Revelation, where one might most expect it.

There are other phrases used, and one of the immediate questions becomes whether, or how, to relate the different labels to each other, if at all.

For example, Paul uses the expression man of lawlessness, or son of destruction.

“For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction” (2 Thess. 2:3).

Must the false christs of the Olivet Discourse be subject to the same either-or thinking of the preterist-futurist debate?

“For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders” (Matt. 24:24; cf. Mk. 13:22).

Phases of Antichrist

Anti, at first, means “in the place of.” The very nature of evil, sin, and its personal head (Satan) necessitates an advance of incrementally opening of evil.

“For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way” (2 Thess. 2:7).

After all, how does Satan tend to oppose or replace Christ? Is it a frontal assault? Not at all, since Satan cannot match Christ’s power. Then again, neither can he outwit the Lord. Perhaps he can attempt to deceive Christ’s people.

“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).

In reflecting upon our common ideas of evil people, it is easy to define the embodiment of evil not so much as the anti-christ, but the “anti-people,” the anti-moment, or what the spirit of the age has no trouble recognizing as a villain. But this is out of step with how Satan has always operated. Riddelbarger wrote, “when the Antichrist comes, all this will be turned upside down. The good guys will become the bad guys.”1

Only once deception builds its critical mass, does Anti spell outright opposition. One of the clearest passages moves in this direction; and it comes from Paul to the Thessalonians:

“For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4).

Another important passage comes from the Old Testament.

“After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots. And behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things” (Dan. 7:7-8).

This is important because of how it prefigures John’s reference to the beast in Revelation 13. But for our purposes, the interesting point has to do with the “man-like” qualities of its final representative. Now he is out in the open. Now he demands that all worship him instead of Christ, and he actively oppresses God’s people.

Historical Positions

As with all of the other issues we have examined, so it is here. There are the Preterist and Futurist extremes

Riddlebarger summarizes this well:

“Both preterists and dispensationalists find the tension between the already and the not yet to be intolerable. Both camps cut through this tension just as one would cut through a stretched-out rubber band. When cut, the rubber snaps back in opposite directions … Thus, for dispensationalists, Antichrist is yet to come. But for preterists, Antichrist has already come and gone.”2

The Idealist suggests that antichrist be treated more as an adjective, as in a “system of thought.”

Riddlebarger gives three points about John’s use of “antichrist” in his first letter. In addition to saying that antichrist is “already present” and that “there are many antichrists, not just one,” Riddlebarger allows that John may be telling us “that antichrist may not even be an individual person or persons at all. Instead, antichrist may represent a system of heretical thought, specifically the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.”3

The Reformed view, and especially in the earlier times of the Reformed church, was that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist. So the Westminster Confession of Faith (XXV.6) states:

“There is no other Head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God.”

B. B. Warfield challenged what he called “the composite photograph”4 that slaps the name in John’s depiction with the parallel notions of false christs in the Gospel and the man of lawlessness in Paul. This, he argued, is unwarranted. Instead, John was correcting popular misconceptions in his day. The four verses in John, taken together, are actually replacing the misconception of antichrist as individual with the “spirit of” idea, which can apply to anyone who embraces or teaches the heresy. 

The Realist Position

There is unity (essence) and diversity (instances) concerning the antichrist, just like everything else we have seen in the realm of eschatology. We have already set forth some essential attributes. For instance he,

“opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4).

“This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (1 Jn. 2:22).

Yet it is necessarily the case that the antichrist is not only one, but many: “so now many antichrists have come” (1 Jn. 2:18).

Objection: “In that text, John makes even these many antichrists a sign of the very end!” He says, “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” (1 Jn. 2:18).

Reply: We must remember that summary by Hoekema and others, that the New Testament will use this concept of last days and last hour in a qualitative, and not merely quantitative, way. So the antichrist, as well, is more essentially qualitative rather than quantitative. John says,

“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” (1 Jn. 4:3).

“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” (2 Jn. 7).

Can we say that John’s corrective applies to the unity of the beasts? It depends what we mean. Equating the antichrist to “the beast” begs the question of which one. False Christs and Men of Lawlessness could “embody” either beast, but the descriptions of John tend more toward false religion. 

Since the two beasts are animated by the same dragon, and (as we will see), are like two pillars to the wicked city of Babylon, it may be best to see antichrist as either the spirit of Babylon or some head of both.

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1. Kim Riddlebarger, The Man of Sin (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 22.

2. Riddlebarger, The Man of Sin, 35-36.

3. Riddlebarger, The Man of Sin, 79-80.

4. B. B. Warfield, “Antichrist” (1921) quoted in Riddlebarger, The Man of Sin, 80-81.