Have you ever been around someone who is excited about a new thing in their life and all they could do is talk about it? You've probably been there yourself. We all are guilty of it. We talk about it a lot because it means a lot to us, it's what is most important at the time.
When studying Scripture, make sure to pay attention to what the author is concentrating on. All through the Bible, God and his people who wrote the text concentrated on the things that are most important.
In listening to and talking with people about end day prophecies today, I hear about this antichrist more than any other symbol of prophecy - I’m sure you would agree. The majority of prophecy of the End is in Revelation. Paul talks about the end some in Thessalonians and Jesus talked about it for a fraction of a moment in Matthew 24. Isaiah is like a mini-Bible and talks about the end a few times as well. All these prophecies of the end and this "man" only mentioned a couple times. That's hard for some to believe, and especially those who believe they've studied end day prophecies. The problem is that most people are looking at end day prophecy through a lens of other teachers. They come to the text with pre-conceived notions of what certain things are saying. For example, when reading the letters from John (1 John, 2 John, and 3 John) people believe that John is talking about a man ruling in the end that he called "antichrist". The fact is, John was not talking about the end as most people translate today; and we're going to look at that here.
When you break away from these teachings and start fresh, you start to see a different story than that we were raised on. And one thing we find is that this man ruling in the end is not as big of a deal to God and the authors of the Bible as we've made him out to be today. There's more important warnings in Revelation.
Context is key because we can take any verse in the Bible and make it mean anything we want it to mean. We must remember that each and every Biblical book and letter was written to a specific people, in a specific time, with a specific culture, for a specific purpose, having specific problems, by a specific author or narrator, in a specific situation, addressing specific issues.
So, how do we come to a man in the end days called anti-christ? We’ve already discovered that people are making a big deal out of something that God obviously did not see much importance in. The way we get to a man called "antichrist" is by taking a couple sentences from a letter written to a specific church, of a specific culture, for specific reasons, to address specific problems in that church, and ripping them from the middle of the context of this letter and then applying them to this non-important, supposed, man in the end. Where does the term antichrist come from? The term can only be found in one set of letters in the Bible. The letters of 1, 2, and 3 John, written to the Johannine church.
The reason John wrote his first letter was so that the joy of his audience would "be full" (John 1:4) and that they would "not practice sin" (2:1) and that "you who believe in the name of the Son of God... may know that you have eternal life" (John 5:13). John was concerned about heretical teachers that had been influencing churches under his care. Such teachers were considered antichrists (John 2:18–19) who had once been church leaders but whose teaching were straying from the truth of the Gospel. It appears that these teachers taught a form of docetism in which Y’shua came to earth as a spirit without a real body of flesh (John 4:2) that his death on the cross was not as a true atonement for sins (John 1:7). It appears that John might have also been rebuking a proto-Gnostic teaching to which claims were made denying the true humanity of Christ (John 2:22).
Johns purpose (1:1–4) is to declare the Word of Life to those to whom he writes, in order that they might be united in fellowship with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ. He shows that the means of union with God are, (1) on the part of Christ, his atoning work (1:7; 2:2; 3:5; 4:10, 14; 5:11, 12) and his advocacy (2:1); and (2), on the part of man, holiness (1:6), obedience (2:3), purity (3:3), faith (3:23; 4:3; 5:5), and love (2:7, 8; 3:14; 4:7; 5:1).
Notice that John was not warning about any end day prophecy that he seen in his vision written in Revelation. Likewise, the second letter from John was a followup from his first.
"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 John 1:7
Notice the verbs in the verse. “For many deceivers have GONE out”. This is a past tense verb, which is talking about something that has already been happening; and to which he’s addressing. “who DO NOT CONFESS Jesus Christ” is a present tense statement - remember, that’s present tense to the letter of John. “This IS a deceiver and an antichrist” which is a present tense verb to the time of John. Notice the statement “This is a deceiver and AN antichrist”. Notice it does not say THE but AN. An is the form of the indefinite article - it’s more than one and of a non-numerical amount.
These passages do jump across time and culture and what they tell us is that because the coming of Christ brought in the time of the end, there will be people who do not believe in Christ or who will teach false teachings of Christ, and these people are called antichrists by John. That is a lot of people. So, what does this tell us in relation to end day prophecy? Absolutely nothing. It tells us that these “antichrists” has no relation to a man who is going to sit in the temple of God, or a man who is supposed to rule the world in the end, or a man whose name adds up to 666.
And now we know the truth behind this highly talked about name - "antichrist"