Do you think Barack Obama is the
Antichrist?
The short
answer is, “No.”
The more
detailed answer involves examining the assumptions behind the question. The
question assumes a particular eschatology, that is to say, a particular view of
Bible prophecy and the end times—a view which I think is fundamentally in
error.
The
common view, popularized by men like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye (in his Left Behind series) is that there is
coming a world ruler who will be a kind of counterfeit Christ. They take the prefix
anti to mean “in the place of,” so
that the antichrist is a pseudo-Christ, a false Christ, a counterfeit Christ.
They
teach that he will be the leader of a revived Roman Empire, or at least over a confederation
of nations that currently take up the territory of the old Roman Empire. Supposedly this figure will
suffer a mortal wound but will miraculously recover; or that he will die and be
resurrected, mimicking the resurrection of Christ. He will have the power to
perform signs and wonders. He will exercise a world-wide tyranny, by requiring
people to worship him, or to worship an image of his likeness. This will
consist in part of having a computer chip imbedded under the skin with the
number of his name, the dreaded 666. Although initially making peace with Israel, he will end up breaking his
treaty and seek to annihilate the Jews. This will lead to the battle of
Armageddon when Christ returns to save Israel.
There are
a number of problems with all of this, however. In the first place, the Bible
doesn’t speak of “the antichrist,” as
if there is just one. Rather, it speaks of antichrists…in the plural. There is
not one, but many antichrists.
“You have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many
antichrists have come” (1 Jn. 2:18).
Notice
two things: the use of the plural
(antichrists); and the time frame
(they had already come in John’s day).
Who is he
talking about? He tells us in the following verses.
Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the
Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (1 Jn. 2:22)
He is
talking about those who teach what is false about Jesus Christ, specifically
those who deny that he is the Christ, as he makes clear in 4:3.
“Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.
This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard was coming and now
is in the world already” (1 Jn. 4:3)
Then 2
John 7 he says,
“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.”
He is
speaking about those (and there were many) who denied that Jesus was the
promised Messiah, and those who denied his divinity. These, he says, are
antichrists.
So the
first problem with the commonly accepted view is that the Bible doesn’t speak
of just one, but of many antichrists.
Second,
the view takes elements from several different passages, speaking of several
different individuals and rolls them all into one. The view takes passages from
the book of Daniel, which prophetically speak of Antiochus Epiphanes, a Syrian
ruler who persecuted the Jews nearly two centuries before Christ; and passages
from the book of Revelation, which speak of the Roman Emperor Nero, who
persecuted the early church in the first century; and then these passages from
John’s epistles that speak of religious leaders who denied Jesus’ deity and his
office as the Messiah—and puts them all together to form one composite figure.
But the passages don’t go together. They’re not speaking of the same person.
The third
problem with the common view is the time element. The passages are not speaking
about figures who are yet to appear, but about those who have already come and
gone.