Opus 2026-156: Monday Pulpit: The Blessings of Good-bys

The Sunday School lesson was interesting but I still have a short attention span.  It wasn’t totally my fault.  The guy assigned to read went beyond the request.  I noticed.  My sense of righteous indignation tried to kick in.  Instead I followed along and considered what he had read.

He crossed over into a comment about the antichrist.

(1Jn 2:18 KJV)  Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
(1Jn 2:19 KJV)  They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

If you are into eschatology then you are probably familiar with The Anti-Christ.  He is a dominant figure in the battles of the end times.  Like so many Biblical concepts, our theology gets ahead of our reading.  Another way of saying that is that our emotions get ahead of our reason or our opinions get ahead of the evidence.  Of course I could be doing that with my evaluation of what they are saying.

But not so fast.  In the Greek the first “antichrist” does have the definite article so we could accept that as synonymous with what end times folks like to talk about.  A couple of problems should be obvious.  The most important is that this Greek word does not appear anywhere but in the writings of John.  The second is that it is implied that this has already come.  A third is that John immediately switches to the plural.  It is many antichrists, not one Anti-Christ.

What got my attention was that John seems to be defining what he means by antichrist.  Look at verse 19.  It seems that John is defining them as people who were once part of the church and then left.  Depending on your theology you can say that they backsliden and gone apostate or you can say that evidently they were never saved in the first place.  Either way, the antichrist is people who once were in and now are out.

With that understanding the antichrist has been around since the first church was formed.  They are still with us.  They will be with us until the resurrection.  This should also tell us that someone leaving your church is not necessarily bad.  It may be they needed a different church and the move was a good thing.  On the other hand it may have been that they were secret disciples of Satan and they just could not take the holy fire of your worship.

Something to think about.

homo unius libri