The Spirit of AntiChrist

The evangelist and pastor of Times Square Church in New York, David Wilkerson delivered a chilling warning about the “mystery of lawlessness’ that the apostle Paul warns about in his second letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thess 2:7), and a great falling away that is already happening as a result of this “spirit of antichrist”:

“(The apostle) Paul warns that there will come false prophets who will preach another Gospel and another Jesus and that other Jesus is the antichrist. They are going to be of the Spirit of antichrist. And there are going to be many apostate Christians in the last days. But folks, whilst we have been looking for this man (the antichrist) Satan has been creeping in and by his spirit preparing (people). You see, antichrist is not going to suddenly appear on the scene and try to overwhelm mankind. antichrist is not going to come and try and influence people. By the time he has come there will have first been a trickle, because Paul the apostle said that the (antichrist) spirit is already at work. It was at work in the primitive church and it’s been working now, it’s up to a stream, it’s up to an ocean flow. The Bible says that by the time the antichrist is revealed he will already have prepared hearts for his coming. They will receive him. How will many receive him? Why would certain, so-called backslidden, apostate Christians ever turn to the antichrist? It is because they are of his body, his spirit, and likeminded. And he is now in the world preparing hearts for when he comes.” [1]

As David Wilkinson warned his congregation in New York during his ministry there, the question of who the antichrist is and when he emerges is not our primary concern, however, of much greater concern is the “spirit of antichrist" - the worldliness that gets into our hearts and the church and misleads many away from the truth about Christ and salvation.

We will now take a deeper study of apostle John’s first two epistles, since the term “antichrist” is peculiar to the apostle John, which provides us with some teaching on this spirit of antichrist enabling us to understand why so many churches are losing their lampstands in this hour.

Writing to Christian congregations across what is now modern-day Turkey, the apostle John warns:

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” (1 John 2:15-17 ESV)

Before we look more specifically at the antichrist spirit that John talks about a few verses later, it is important to interpret it in the context of what the apostle is saying in these verses. He is warning them (and us) that there is an attitude in the world that is set firmly against God, a clear dividing line is drawn between those who love worldliness and those who love God. This is going to make sense of how professing Christians so often fall away from the faith and why it is so dangerous for churches to embrace worldly values. Notice the order in which the apostle John places these worldly desires: “the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life,” or to put it another way: the body, mind, and soul of an individual.

As humans we are made up of body, mind, and soul - the soul is also referred to in the Bible as the heart or the spirit - it is the essence of who you are, whilst the mind is the creative ability of an individual to think, dream, imagine or scheme with the physical body interacting physically with the material world around us. And these three are all connected: the heart drives the mind which drives the body, so to have a corrupted heart means that the mind is driven by the evil that is in the heart so that the body then carries out the will of the heart and the mind. In the first chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome the apostle Paul describes this unregenerate state of being because their hearts were impure, they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and this led to the “dishonouring of their bodies” (see Romans 1:24-25). Another biblical example of this can be found in Genesis:

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5 ESV)

What is so significant about this verse is that the Hebrew word (‘yetzer’) that is translated into English as “intention” is the same word that is used at the beginning of Genesis to describe God “forming” Adam out of the dust of the ground (see Genesis 2:7). In other words, the same creative ability to form, plan and make that God used to create humanity and bestowed on His creatures, is now being used by them to form and make evil plans and actions against God. It is what theologians refer to as “Total Depravity.” Now that might sound rather extreme and a person might think “Well I’m not that bad” but total depravity does not equate you to being an evil person like Hitler. However, it does mean that every part of us - mind, body, and soul are corrupted by the fall. The heart which is full of evil desires drives the mind to scheme ways to carry them out and the body gets pleasure in carrying out whatever the heart wants it to do. The theologian Jonathan Edwards argued that all the choices and decisions that a person makes are determined by the will of the individual:

“It is the motive which stands out in the mind’s eye which is the strongest influence on a person, and that motive determines the person’s will.” [2]

Edwards goes on to further explain:

“By motive, I mean the whole sum of that which moves, excites, or invites the mind to volition, whether that is one single thing or a collective of things. Many particular things may agree and unite their strength in order to influence the mind, and when this happens, they all act together as one complex motive.” [3]

As Edwards explains, there is a reason behind every choice that we make, the heart drives the mind and the will of a person, who is now emotionally committed to a particular course of action. It is very deliberate, there is nothing spontaneous about the choices that a person makes, the choice is self-determined and that is what makes sin so destructive, it is a wilful choice that is driven by the heart. This is why the apostle John warns his hearers not to love the worldly things that unregenerate people desire since those desires are set against God. When we desire that which is of the flesh we are making ourselves easy prey for Satan, but if we put to death those fleshly desires rather than giving into them, we are doing the will of God and will abide with Him forever.

The apostle John goes on to address the subject of the antichrist and the spirit of antichrist:

“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.” (1 John 2:18 ESV)

If the apostle John thought that it was the last hour when he was writing this two thousand years ago, then how much sooner must we be to Christ’s return today? Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones made this observation about the reality of living in the last days, which would certainly resonate today, seventy or eighty years after his message was preached:

“We are living in the last time in that general sense. We may be living in a last time also in a more particular sense. Not only Christians, but also many secular writers and historians at the present time are teaching us that we are living in what they call an ‘age of transition,’ in one of the great turning-points of history and there can be no doubt but that this is perfectly true. We are living in a time when essential changes are taking place in the history of mankind; there has been no such period at any rate since the Renaissance of the Protestant Reformation. It is one of those turning-points when things which appeared to be stable are being shaken; there can be no doubt at all but that Western civilisation is coming to an end." [4]

We can certainly see this in our modern times with significant social, political, and economic changes occurring in just a couple of years since the Covid-19 pandemic began. There is also the dwindling witness of the established Church, having all but lost her voice for upholding biblical truth in preference of commenting on political issues rather than proclaiming the Gospel and calling the nation back to God. There is a shift happening in our world that is taking us further and further away from God. The question of where society is headed is addressed by Francis Schaeffer back in 1976 in his famous book “How should we then live?” At the end of the book, Schaeffer reflects on how the course of human history points to the rise of a coming political elite:

“As we consider the coming of an elite, an authoritarian state, to fill the vacuum left by the loss of Christian principles, we must not think naively of the models of Stalin and Hitler. We must think rather of a manipulative government. Modern governments have forms of manipulation at their disposal which the world has never known before.” [5]

Schaeffer concludes by making a sobering observation about the irrelevance of political parties and positions in the future rise of an authoritarian elite:

“At that point the words left or right will make no difference. They are only two roads to the same end. There is no difference between an authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same. An elite, and authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on society so that it will not go on to chaos. And most people will accept it — from the desire for personal peace and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assume the functioning of some political system, business and the affairs of daily life.” [6]

This is key to understanding how society is being conditioned to willingly receive this political antichrist figure when he eventually arrives on the world stage. People will value peace and affluence over freedom, and their desire for a comfortable earthly life will take precedence over anything else. So to return to the biblical text in 1 John, the apostle warns that it is the last hour and this antichrist is coming, there are also the “antichrists” - the false teachers who had led many astray in the church then, but the warning is clear to them, “it is the last hour.” Picking up on this topic again a couple of chapters later on in his epistle, the apostle warns them to be careful who they listen to because there are deceitful and lying spirits in the Church:

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” (1 John 4:1-6 ESV)

On the 28th of July 2022, the BBC covered the live opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games being held over ten days in the City of Birmingham. The ceremony began with a call for unity: “In times of darkness, we carry a dream of light that calls us all together.” But this unity was not Christian unity and the light was not Jesus Christ “The light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). This unity was the very opposite of Christian unity, and the opening ceremony was nothing more than a Pagan ritual full of imagery straight out of Scripture, two of which were particularity significant: the Tower of Babel and a giant Bull of Baal with the ‘Whore of Babylon’ arrayed in purple and scarlet riding on top of the beast (See Genesis 11 and Revelation 17).

And this was not an isolated event either. In 2023 we have also witnessed the pop star Sam Smith dressing up as Satan and performing a song called “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards, the pop singer Rihanna’s satanic ritual performance at the NFL Super Bowl, and in Brazil there was a demonic parade for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Fast forward to the 2024 Eurovision song contest and Ireland’s entry was a chillingly satanic ritual performed by the artist ‘Bambie Thug,’ a spectacle so sinister that it awakened a great many Christians to the realisation that there is something very dark happening in the modern world.

I believe that what we are seeing right in front of our eyes is Mystery Babylon (see Revelation 17-18) and the spirit of the antichrist in our world. In the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, this call to unity was lit up on the Tower of Babel with all the nations of the world represented gathering around the Tower of Babel. This is a symbolic uniting of the nations against God where the religion is tolerance, inclusion, and aggressive liberalism, it is a unity that requires the individual to agree with the beliefs and worldview of the antichrist culture, where The Lord Jesus Christ is rejected and true, biblical Christianity is scorned.

This is why the established, mainstream Church has gone quiet, it is because the culture has become increasingly hostile towards Christ and instead of taking a stand for Christ and the Gospel, the mainstream church has gone silent on the truth and started affirming the antichrist narrative.

The great writer C.S. Lewis, in the third book of his space trilogy “That Hideous Strength,” describes a tyrannical organisation called “the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments” (or “N.I.C.E” for short) whose aim is to free humanity from nature to increase the overall efficiency of humanity. However, unknown to the humans, there are evil forces at play hovering above the earth whilst the main evil character in the story is ‘Alcasan’s head’ a dismembered head that is kept alive artificially, who is also the forerunner of a new species of dismembered heads that never die. In his book “That Hideous Strength: A Deeper Look at how the West was lost,” the pastor-theologian Melvin Tinker refers to this third book from C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, bringing it alongside the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, he explains how this push for unity in the world is an agenda to deconstruct God’s created order and rebuild it. Tinker highlights three ways (or “Three C’s”) in which ‘that hideous strength’ attempts to exert itself over and against God:

“Communalism - the group identity and solidarity in rebellion. While the rest of the Genesis narratives have individuals who are identified as playing significant roles, here we have humankind as a group acting to the detriment of the individual.

Constructionism - literally in the building of a city and a tower, but also in using language to reshape reality, believing and declaring that we can bring God down and so ‘de-god’ God as it were, who is the ultimate reality. It is then a short step from this idolatrous construal to reimagining everything else.

Connectivity - being in one place and having one language enables people to connect and so perpetuate their blasphemous ideas and actions even further.”

Tinker concludes by explaining the thought process behind the aggressive woke, inclusive, liberal thinking that we see in our culture today that is determined to shut down the Christian narrative:

“What we have in the Tower of Babel episode is in effect a rival cosmology or ‘social imaginary’ to that of God’s; it is an unmaking and a remaking of the world — a blasphemous human ‘let us’ over and against the holy ‘Let Us’ of the Triune God.” [7]

Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with the spirit of antichrist in the Church, and the truth is, it has absolutely everything to do with it! Being able to correctly observe what is happening spiritually in the world around us is key to understanding why it is so spiritually dangerous when the church abandons biblical teaching and doctrine for a worldly narrative because it wants to be acceptable to the culture. By doing that, the church has brought this antichrist spirit in, they are “tolerating that woman Jezebel” like the church in Thyatira (see Revelation 2:20). They foolishly believe that by bringing this worldly teaching into the Church they can become more relevant and appealing to the culture. But in doing this they will spiritually pollute the church with the spirit of antichrist, the result of which is to paralyse and shut down Gospel discipleship and evangelism in one fell swoop, the lampstand will disappear and what they are left with is little more than a religious Sunday social club that engages in social action. It is no longer a Church anymore, they were deceived as they took Satan’s bait and lost their lampstand.

Footnotes:

[1] David Wilkerson “Falling Away to the Antichrist” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKy_zwMIig

[2] Jonathan Edwards “Works Vol 1” (Banner of Truth, 2009) p5 (my modern paraphrase)

[3] Jonathan Edwards “Works Vol 1” (Banner of Truth, 2009) p6 (my modern paraphrase)

[4] Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones “Life in Christ: Studies in 1 John” (Crossway, 2002) pp232

[5] Francis A. Schaeffer “How Should We Then Live?” (Crossway, 2021) p261

[6] Francis A. Schaeffer “How Should We Then Live?” (Crossway, 2021) p282

[7] Melvin Tinker “That Hideous Strength: How the West was lost” (Evangelical Press, 2020) pp49-51