Much lore surrounds scripture’s mysterious “Antichrist” — the false messiah prophesied to come in the End Times as a supreme and final embodiment of rebellion against God prior to Christ’s Second Coming.
For centuries, Bible scholars have debated this climactic future figure; Christians have theorized about who it might be (often pointing to corrupt elites); and Hollywood has used the sinister being as horror movie fuel.
But this hyper-fixation on the capital-A Antichrist, says BlazeTV host Jase Robertson, can distract from another part of scripture perhaps even more worthy of our attention: There are already antichrists living among us.
No place in scripture is this more evident than in 1 John.
In 1 John 2:18, he warns that “many antichrists have come.” Two chapters later, he lays bare what an antichrist is: “every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus” (4:3). This kind of spirit, he says, is “not from God” and is “already in the world.”
In other words, the denial of Jesus’ deity is the spirit of the antichrist, and it’s lurking everywhere.
John’s words remain strikingly relevant today. The spreading of darkness, erosion of truth, and deterioration of morality are evidence that the spirit of the antichrist is alive and well.
It’s this reality — not a future singular villain, the Robertsons warn — that impacts our daily lives, and yet many Christians, perhaps to their detriment, obsess over who the Antichrist is or will be.
“Look, I’ve got a guy who I love dearly. He’s one of my best friends in the world, and he got to 2 Thessalonians 2 in his Bible study, and he’s never gone forward or backwards,” says Jase. “He wants to know who the ‘man of sin’ is, and he wants a detailed account.”
Second Thessalonians 2:3 mentions a “man of sin” proclaiming himself God, who many Christians and scholars interpret as a direct reference to the final Antichrist.
Jase believes his friend, and others who get hung up on pinpointing the Antichrist, is missing the bigger point.
“The one in us is greater,” says Jase, referencing 1 John 4:4.
“The ‘man of sin’ — I don’t need to know exactly if that’s one person. I see that in men everywhere,” he continues.
The question it ultimately comes down to, says Jase, is: “Are you in Jesus or are you anti-Jesus?”
“I think [antichrists] are people who are intentionally trying to persuade people and deceive people away from Christ,” adds co-host Zach Dasher, “and the reason why I say that is because in [1 John 2] verse 26, he says, ‘The reason why I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.”’
Even though John was writing in the late first century, his words hold just as true in our time.
Zach points to a story he heard recently about a young Christian whose faith was badly “damaged” after he watched a series of social media videos from a professor who was making “incredibly compelling cases of why the Bible’s not real, why Jesus isn’t who He said He was.”
Eventually, however, it was exposed that this professor’s arguments were “blatant lies.”
“I think that’s more the spirit of the Antichrist,” says Zach.
To hear more of the panel’s discussion, watch the full episode above.
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