The Person of the Antichrist

In our last chapter we pointed out how that the Antichrist is not a system of evil, nor an anti-Christian organization, but instead, a single individual being, a person yet to appear. In support of this we appealed to the declaration of our Lord recorded in John 5:43; “I am come in My Father’s name, and ye receive Me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.” Here the Saviour both compares and contrasts the Man of Sin with Himself. The point of comparison is that, like the Saviour, he shall offer himself to Israel; the contrast is, that unlike Christ who was rejected by the Jews, the false messiah shall be “received” by them. If, then, the Antichrist may be compared and contrasted with the Christ of God, he, too, must be a person, an individual being.

Again; we called attention to the expression used by the apostle Paul in 2 Thess. 2: — “That Man of Sin,” “the Son of Perdition,” he that “opposeth and exalteth himself,” “the Wicked One whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth,” “he whose coming is after the working of Satan” — all these point as distinctly to a single individual as did the Messianic predictions of the Old Testament point to the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Assured, then, that “the Antichrist” signifies a specific individual, our next concern is to turn to the Scriptures and learn what God has been pleased to reveal concerning this Personification of Evil.