From my pastor: MOST EMBARRASSING FAILED DISPENSATIONAL PROPHECIES, candidate five
"Antichrist Identification"
First off, even calling the End Times supervillain THE Antichrist is biblically shaky. "The Man of Sin" or the First Beast or the Little Horn would be more correct. (John describes "antichrist" as a spirit, not an individual man.) But Antichrist is easily the most marketable of those labels so we'll run with it.
The embarrassing bit I'm referencing is the cascade of wrong guesses that have flowed out, and continue to flow out, from believers who have the Revelation open, highlighter in hand, while watching Fox News.
I don't have a lot of memories before the 70's but I've been alive to see every President of the US, the USSR and Russia, and Israel since then; plus the Prime Ministers of every prominent European power, plus every Pope; plus anyone who achieved any sort of world-status in international affairs, identified as the Antichrist. In fact, just hours before I wrote this post, a FB friend suggested (I think seriously) President Macron of France. This paragraph has probably only scratched the surface of the constant stream of guesses that have all come up false.
At least, with guessing the timing of the Rapture, we have a warning from Jesus that no man knows the day. That doesn't stop those bad guesses, but I'm thinking it probably does curb them a bit. With the Antichrist, there's no such warning against trying to identify him, and so the wrong guesses fly like clay pigeons at a skeet shoot.
If this is what your interpretive scheme produces in every place it's taught, a non-stop avalanche of false warnings, don't you have to consider that the underlying problem is systemic?

#faith #bible #christian #endtimes