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Focus on the Future - 5

Roots of the Antichrist

Lots of people expect the antichrist to be the human version of a fire-breathing dragon. Not so, says Scripture. We saw yesterday that the antichrist power wears a Christian face. Expect a trusted insider to betray the faith. A deceiver, like Judas, emerges within backsliding Christianity to further corrupt the truth.

Maybe that concept is new to you. Then remember what Peter the disciple declared in his second letter, chapter 2 verse 1: “There will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies.” Paul the apostle agreed and added regarding the antichrist power: "The mystery of lawlessness is already at work." That’s 2nd Thessalonians 2 verse 7. Even as the New Testament was still being written, the antichrist power was secretly working within the church. The result was truth decay, you might say. After the apostles died, apostasy accelerated. This is sad, but only to be expected. Paul had predicted to a group of church leaders: “After my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.” That’s Acts 20, verses 29 and 30.

So the antichrist arises from spiritual backsliding within the church. This warning is spread throughout the New Testament, as we’ve seen this week in our Focus on the Future broadcasts.
Now, let’s pick up where we left off yesterday and investigate the roots of the antichrist apostasy.

Even as faithful martyrs sacrificed their lives for the sake of faith and truth, the church as an institution started slipping into paganism. Rites and ceremonies which Christ and the apostles never authorized infiltrated Christianity. Finally the church itself became involved in some rather unchristian, or anti-christian activities. The apostles never would have recognized it. In the darkest days, crusaders stormed out of European cathedrals into Mediterranea. They plunged their swords into the chest of anyone they deemed a heretic or pagan. Jerusalem’s gutters ran red with the blood of those slaughtered in the name of Jesus. These horrors are well known to any student of world history.

Did the church’s murderous crusades and inquisitions represent the true spirit of Christ? The One who commands us to love our enemies? No, friend. What happened in medieval times expressed the spirit of the antichrist. The church had become a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Now, let’s take care to be fair. Even in the cruelest days of antichristian darkness, God had faithful ones in the church. They courageously resisted the spirit of the day. We all know about gentle Saint Francis and so many others who cared for the poor and oppressed. Some sacrificed their own lives serving dying neighbors during the Black Death pandemic that ravaged medieval Europe. Others in the church translated Scripture into the language of the people. Despite vigorous resistance from the church establishment, other leaders resurrected neglected truth. Among them were the famous Reformers. Chief of those who challenged the institutional church was Martin Luther.

Catholic leaders today agree that the church back then was ripe for reform. For many, politics had displaced piety. Spiritual confusion abounded. At one point, three rival church leaders claimed to be pontiff at the same time. Each condemned the others as the dreaded antichrist.

It’s important for us to remember that God had not abandoned His church just because it had gone astray. Remember, the men like Martin Luther who came along appealing for reform in the church were part of the church. The Holy Spirit worked through them, trying to renew the church in purity and love.

And let’s be careful not to blame any church’s leaders or members today for sins of medieval times. A lot of unchristian things were said and done by leaders in every denomination in those days when the battle for the truth was as often fought with swords as with pen and pulpit. So it’s only wise and just to avoid pointing fingers at our ancestors, whatever their denomination. Besides, there’s more to the antichrist than can be confined within any human organization. As we’ve seen, there’s also a supernatural component to the antichrist in the last days.

You may be wondering, Why even talk about what happened in history? Well, it’s helpful to discover how previous generations interpreted Scriptures about the antichrist. Perhaps we can learn lessons from the past and gain background for our own study in these last days.

Here’s the fascinating thing: Back in those days at the end of the Dark Ages, when Christians of a multitude of persuasions were all pointing their fingers at each other and shouting “Antichrist!”, each group developed its own way of interpreting scripture as a self defense against the others.

One of the most fascinating stories to come out of that era concerns the work of two Jesuits,

Luis de Alcazar and Francisco Ribera. These gentlemen, confronted the Protestants’ finger pointing by coming up with two brand new ways of interpreting the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation.

And the most amazing thing about their efforts is that they came up with two ways of reading the prophecies that completely contradicted each other. But both were accepted by their parent organization because both served the same purpose in the end—defending their church against charge that it had become the antichrist.

Alcazar pointed to the past to identify the antichrist. To him, the prophecies about the antichrist had been fulfilled long ago with pagan Rome. This was before the popes had power. Ribera taught the opposite view, known today as futurism. He said that the antichrist would not arise in power until the last days when Christ returns. Either way, whether placing the antichrist in the past or future, the Jesuits achieved their goal of removing the antichrist from the present. This took the heat off the church and deflected the Protestants’ pointed fingers.

Well, we could go on reviewing a multitude of different ways of interpreting prophecy that sprang up back in those days of religious conflict, but most aren’t really relevant to us today because they’ve fallen into the dustbin and been forgotten.

But here’s how that discussion about church history becomes relevant for us. Earlier this week we studied the prophecy of Daniel 9, which points to Christ fulfilling God’s covenant. Ribera reinterpreted Daniel 9 so that its prophecy about Christ applies instead to some future antichrist. This laid the groundwork for the Left Behind prophetic scenario, as we shall see.

Predictably, Protestants back in the 16th and 17th centuries rejected Jesuit ideas about the antichrist. But something has happened in the centuries since then. Something truly amazing. Protestants in the last two centuries have abandoned their prophetic heritage. In its place they have adopted and adapted the futurist interpretation that was originally formulated as a defense against Protestantism.

George Eldon Ladd, an honored scholar of our day, documents this in his popular book, The Blessed Hope. I’m quoting from pages 37 and 38. “It will probably come as a shock to many modern futurists to be told that the first scholar in relatively modern times who returned to the patristic futuristic interpretation was a Spanish Jesuit named Ribera. In 1590, Ribera published a commentary on the Revelation as a counter-interpretation to the prevailing view among Protestants which identified the Papacy with the antichrist. Ribera applied all of Revelation but the earliest chapters to the end time rather than to the history of the Church. Antichrist would be a single evil person who would be received by the Jews and would rebuild Jerusalem, abolish Christianity, deny Christ, persecute the Church and rule the world for three and a half years.”

Who would have ever thought that a mode of prophetic interpretation developed to defend one group of Christians from another group would eventually win the day and become the most popular way of understanding prophecy for so many denominations?

How did this sea-change in prophetic understanding come about? It’s a fascinating story.

Come with me back to the early 1830's. Edward Irving, an influential pastor within the Church of Scotland, became fascinated by predictions of Christ's second coming. He co-founded the Society for the Investigation of Prophecy. Irving did a lot of good in calling attention to the second coming of Jesus. Unfortunately, he also accepted the futuristic method of interpretation that had been developed by Ribera back in the 1500s. He even translated from Latin to English a book of Jesuit scholarship.

Irving gained quite a following, both among London's high society and with lay people. In Scotland he taught an outdoor audience of twelve thousand. (I don’t know how he managed that without a microphone!) Irving died young, but his influence lived on. Through his teaching the Irish scholar John Nelson Darby adopted and began to promote futuristic prophetic interpretation Darby, a zealous and pious young man, journeyed around Europe and the United States proclaiming his beliefs. By the time he died in 1882, Darby had founded nearly a hundred study groups in North America committed to his futurist interpretations.

After Darby, the torch of futurism passed to C. I. Scofield. You might have heard about the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 and still popular today. Then along came Hal Lindsey with his 1970 best-seller: The Late Great Planet Earth. Millions of enthusiastic Protestants accepted its futurist view of the antichrist—the end-time belief invented long ago by the Jesuits. And now we have the Left Behind series.

Now, here’s something really amazing. You’ve heard the term “rapture” used in reference to the Second Coming of Jesus—did you know it’s not a biblical word at all? In fact it comes from the Latin, not the Greek, and since the New Testament was written in Greek it just doesn’t show up there at all. So can you guess where it came from. If you guessed it was made popular as a result of the Latin works translated by Edward Irving, you’d be right.

So what do we make of all this? Some people shrug their shoulders. “What difference does it make what we believe about the antichrist, so long as we sincerely believe in the real Christ?” Well, if we really are sincere about Jesus, we’ll base our beliefs upon His Word. Don’t you think? Friend, let’s seek the truth—the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in God’s Word. Let’s focus our attention on Jesus, and on His promise to come back and be our true Christ—anointed ruler—for all eternity. I hope you’ll join us again next week as we continue our Focus on the Future series!