Should believers try to identify the Antichrist today?

Question 10188.

We should not try to identify the Antichrist, and I think Scripture gives us several good reasons why not. That may sound like a dull answer in a culture that loves a candidate, but the history of such attempts is a long catalogue of confident men being proved wrong.

Let me give the reasons from the text rather than from the embarrassment, and then suggest what we should be doing with our discernment instead.

Why Scripture never asks us to identify the Antichrist

Scripture tells us a great deal about the coming man and never once tells us to name him. John says in 1 John 2:18 that many antichrists have come, which is how we know it is the last hour, and he defines the spirit of antichrist doctrinally as the denial that Jesus is the Messiah come in the flesh.

Paul describes the man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians 2 and says he will be revealed in his time, which is a passive construction. He is revealed; we do not detect him. Daniel describes his origin, his career and his end. Revelation describes his authority, his number and his defeat.

Put all that together and the pattern is consistent. We are given his character so that we will not be deceived, and we are not given his identity because we are not meant to have it. Any attempt to identify the Antichrist is therefore reaching for information God withheld deliberately.

Note as well how John uses the word. He never applies it to a political figure at all. He applies it to false teachers who had left the fellowship, and he says they went out from us. If we want to identify the Antichrist spirit where John located it, we should be looking at pulpits rather than parliaments.

The revealing comes after the church has gone

This is the structural reason. Paul says the restrainer must be taken out of the way before the lawless one is revealed, and he says the day will not come until that happens. If the church is removed at the rapture, then the unveiling of that man belongs to a period we will not be here to watch.

There is also the matter of the covenant. Daniel 9:27 indicates that he becomes identifiable by making a strong covenant with the many for seven years. Until that document exists there is nothing to point at, which means any current attempt to identify the Antichrist is guessing ahead of the evidence.

So the answer to the question is not only that we should not, but that we cannot. The marker Scripture supplies has not yet appeared. I set out the biblical portrait in the article on who he is.

The dismal record of naming names

Church history is littered with confident identifications. Nero, Muhammad, various medieval popes, Luther in the other direction, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger, and a steady supply of presidents and secretaries general since. Books were written, numbers were calculated, and every single one of them was wrong.

The damage is not only to the author’s reputation. When Christians spend their credibility on failed predictions, the world quite reasonably discounts what we say about matters that are certain. Every attempt to identify the Antichrist that collapses makes the gospel sound like one more conspiracy.

And there is the pastoral cost. I have met believers made fearful and cynical by this material, unable to read a news bulletin without dread. That is not the sober watchfulness the New Testament commands.

There is a particular kind of damage done to the young. A teenager fed a diet of identification videos learns to read Scripture as a code and the news as a threat, and when the named candidate turns out to be nobody, the whole framework loses credibility together. I would rather teach the doctrine plainly and leave the personnel to God.

What about the number 666?

Revelation 13:18 does invite calculation, saying let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. So the number will eventually mean something to somebody, and I hold it to be literal rather than symbolic.

But notice the setting. That verse is addressed to people living under the beast’s system, who will face the practical question of whether to take his mark in order to buy and sell. The calculation is for them, and it will be obvious enough when the system is in operation.

Meanwhile Hebrew and Greek letters both carry numeric values, which means an ingenious person can make almost any name total 666 with sufficient determination. That is not exegesis, it is arithmetic in fancy dress. I take the number up in the article on whether 666 is literal.

What we should be doing instead

John’s own use of the word points the way. He warns about many antichrists already at work, and he tests them by their doctrine of Jesus. That is a test we can apply now, today, to teachers we can actually hear, and it protects the flock in a way that speculation never will.

So rather than trying to identify the Antichrist, learn to identify antichrist teaching. Does this man confess Jesus as the Messiah come in the flesh, fully God and fully man, the only mediator? Does he point to the cross for forgiveness or to himself for benefits? Those questions have present day answers.

That is the discernment Scripture actually asks for, and it is considerably harder work than watching a video about a European politician.

This is also where the doctrinal tests of the New Testament earn their keep. Test the spirits, said John. Examine the teaching about the person of Jesus, said Paul to the Galatians about a different gospel. Those tests are usable on a Sunday morning, and no attempt to identify the Antichrist has ever protected a single congregation from error.

Holding prophecy and humility together

None of this makes me shy about the doctrine. There will be a man of lawlessness, he will make a covenant with Israel, he will break it, he will demand worship, and he will be destroyed by the appearing of Jesus. I preach all of that without hesitation.

What I will not do is add a name, a date or a nationality that Scripture has not supplied. Jesus said in Matthew 24:36 that no one knows the day or the hour, and the same reticence applies to the personnel. I make the case against date setting in the article on that habit.

There is a freedom in that restraint. If I do not have to identify the Antichrist, I can read the news as a Christian rather than as a codebreaker, and I can get on with the work in front of me.

There is a related discipline about signs. The New Testament tells us the character of the last days, with scoffers, departures from the faith, and love growing cold, and it tells us those marks without dates. Recognising a character description is a different exercise from making an identification, and Scripture asks us for the first only.

Peter does the same thing in his second letter. He describes false teachers at length, warns of scoffers in the last days, and then tells his readers to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus. Warning followed by growth is the apostolic pattern, and it leaves no room for a hobby of naming names.

One more reason to leave it alone

Our commission concerns a different person entirely. The apostles preached Jesus crucified and risen, and they mentioned the coming apostasy as background rather than as headline. Not one sermon in Acts is about the identity of the coming man.

If our teaching gives more attention to the Antichrist than to Christ, something has gone badly wrong with the proportions, whatever the accuracy of the details. The subject of prophecy is the returning King.

So watch, be sober, test doctrine, and leave the naming to God, who has never yet needed our help with an identification.

There is a simple test I apply to my own teaching on this. If a sermon on prophecy leaves the congregation more interested in a man who has not yet appeared than in the Saviour who already has, I have preached it badly, whatever the accuracy of the details. Paul told the Thessalonians about the lawless one in order to steady them, and then went straight back to giving thanks for their faith and telling them to stand firm in the teaching they had received.

So, now what?

Try a simple exercise this week. Take the last piece of prophetic speculation that reached you, and ask which verse actually says it. If no verse does, put it down without guilt and pick up something God did tell you.

And apply John’s test where it counts. Who are you listening to regularly, and what do they say about Jesus? That question will protect you far better than any attempt to identify the Antichrist ever could.

And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.

2 Thessalonians 2:8 (ESV)