Have You Prayed against Antichrist Today?
Have you prayed against Antichrist today?
To answer that question truthfully, you first need to know who Antichrist is. Protestants once knew the identity of Antichrist. But the Protestant school of prophetic interpretation has been out of fashion for a long time, and other systems such as Postmillennialism, Amillennialism, and Dispensationalism have captured the bulk of Reformed and Evangelical pulpits in our day.
For the Postmillennialists, Antichrist is yesterday’s news. He came and went in the first century, so there’s no need to pray against him. For in the literal sense of the word he is history.
With the Dispensationalists it’s not much different. For them, there’s no need to pray against Antichrist, because Antichrist will not appear until sometime in the future. When Isaiah prophesied to King Hezekiah that the Babylonians would come and carry off all Judah’s treasure to Babylon, he exclaimed, “The word of the LORD which you have spoken is good...Will there not be peace and truth at least in my days?” Hezekiah saw the destruction of Jerusalem as a small thing since it was an event in the distant future and would not affect him. Not Hezekiah’s finest moment, that. For Dispensationalists, it is much the same way. The coming of Antichrist is a future event and not a clear and present danger. Perhaps some Dispensationalists pray against the supposedly future Antichrist, but human nature being what it is, probably most do not.
But what if the Antichrist is right here among us today? What if we see him and his works daily on the internet and TV? What if the newspapers, magazines, and mainstream media websites are full of references to him? What if he’s lauded even in putatively Christian publications as a brother in Christ? What if he’s doing his work right in front of our noses? Would that get your attention? It certainly would get mine.
Some may say, “If Antichrist were doing his work, everyone would know it.” But is that the case?
Judas spent every day for three years walking with the disciples, hearing the words of Jesus, and bearing witness to his miracles. He was, on the surface, a believer and in preparation to do great things in the name of the Lord. Only as we know, that’s not how it played out. Even the other disciples at the Last Supper didn’t have a clue that he was the betrayer. There he was, right in their midst, but Jesus' disciples didn’t recognize him.
Worth asking is this question, if the disciples were deceived by Judas, is it possible for us to be deceived about the identity of Antichrist and altogether miss him, even though, like Judas, he’s right here, right now, doing his work for all the world to see?
Charles Spurgeon was not in the dark about the identity of Antichrist. He went so far as to say, “It is the bounden duty of every Christian to pray against Antichrist.” Given what I said above, it seems that the “Prince of Preachers” was not a Postmillennialist or a Dispensationalist. After all, if a man believes Antichrist is yesterday’s news or not coming until some time in the future, why would he say that it is every Christian's bounden duty to pray against him? Clearly, Spurgeon believed in a present Antichrist. So just who was this present Antichrist against whom Christians had a bounden duty to pray?
Spurgeon continued, “If it be not popery in the Church of Rome there is nothing in the world that can be called by that name. If there were to be issued a hue and cry for Antichrist, we should certainly take up this church on suspicion, and it would certainly not be let loose again, for it so exactly answers the description.”
Many who claim to be Protestants or Evangelicals in the Year of Our Lord 2024 would doubtless find Spurgeon’s words shocking if not downright offensive and intolerant. Yet in his day, they were not so considered and were an expression of the prevailing view of the Protestant church since the days of the Reformation.
One of the great figures in the English Reformation was William Tyndale, a brilliant linguist and translator, he was the first man to produce an English language translation of the New Testament based on the Greek text and was eventually martyred by Antichrist for doing so. According to this hero of the faith, “It is impossible to preach Christ without preaching against the antichrist.” Why would he say such a thing? Doesn’t that seem a bit extreme? It may seem that way at first, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
You could say that Tyndale was tapping into the power of negative thinking. Which again sounds odd to us but let’s consider the case. Saying what something is certainly is helpful and necessary. But if you just leave it at that, some may get the wrong impression. Consider what the Apostle Paul wrote when talking about saving faith to the Ephesians. He wrote, “By grace you are saved through faith” (Eph. 2:9). “Okay,” someone may think, “but it can’t be that easy. Why, that’s easy believism! Therefore, I have to add good works to my faith.” But Paul continues, “and that [God’s grace and our faith in him] not of yourselves; it is [the combination of God’s grace -his unmerited favor - to us, and our belief in Gospel of Jesus Christ] the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” Here, Paul states both positively how we are saved and negatively how we are not saved. We are saved by faith [belief] in Christ Jesus and are not saved by works. Further, the faith that we have is not a result of our inherent goodness, wisdom, intelligence, or education. It is a gift of God. As the reformers liked to say, Soli Deo Gloria! To God alone be the glory!
By stating by how a sinner is saved and how he is not saved, Paul closes off any excuse for his readers to miss his point.
This is what Tyndale was doing with his statement “It is impossible to preach Christ without preaching against antichrist.” Yes, by all means, preach Christ and him crucified. But if you want to be clear in your preaching of Christ, you must also preach Antichrist.
But how can the Protestant church follow Tyndale’s prescription when it doesn’t know who Antichrist is? The failure of the Protestant church to properly identify Antichrist in the 20th and 21st centuries has had disastrous consequences, not only for the church herself but also for the nations of the West, whose civilization is based on the Protestant Reformation.
To bring this a bit closer to home for my fellow Americans, your country is being destroyed by Antichrist, yet hardly anyone seems to know it. The destruction is coming through many channels, but since I’ve written a great deal about immigration on this blog, let’s look at that problem in particular. The millions upon millions of illegal aliens from all over the world you see pouring across our southern border is simply the practice of the Antichrist Roman Church-State’s immigration theory. Why would Rome want to flood America with illegal aliens? Both to Romanize America – the policy of flooding a nation with aliens loyal to an outside sovereign power is called irredentism – and to eventually fold America into a system of world government run by the Vatican.
The invasion of America we see on the news daily is ultimately not a political battle – we need to elect Republicans and not Democrats – neither is it about economic opportunity or seeking asylum from political oppression in foreign lands. It is an assault by the papal Antichrist on one of the last bastions of liberty and Biblical Christianity in the world. It is meant to destroy God’s people here in the United States and the civilization that they built, to sweep it away and usher in the system of Antichrist. Our Protestant forefathers in the 19th century repeatedly warned the American people about the dangers Rome's growing power in the United States posed to their liberties, but nothing effective was done to stop the rise of Antichrist in America. As a result, their heirs have been largely driven from positions of power and influence in a nation that traces its beginning to the Puritans.
It is my heart’s desire that the Lord’s people in the United States would recognize the great danger they are in, that they would understand the source of that danger, and that they would be moved to take effective action to check Antichrist’s illegal alien assault on their home.
Have you prayed against Antichrist today?