Who is the Antichrist?

According to the 1970s horror flick “The Omen,” it’s a bratty little boy named Damien. According to a bratty little boy in my third grade class, it was Ronald Wilson Reagan (6 letters in each of his 3 names: 6-6-6). According to a traveling evangelist speaking in our fundamentalist church a few years ago, it’s a slick European politician. Whoever it is, according to Tim LaHaye and Hal Lindsey, he’s almost certainly in our midst right now, on the verge of great political power (of course they’ve been saying that for decades).

So how can we ever know?

Actually, when you stick to the Bible you realize the whole question is wrong. There is no THE Antichrist. Antichrist is not a single “who.”

The word antichrist is used only 5 times in the Bible:

“Little children, it is the last time [the last days of Israel]: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time” (I John 2: 18).

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (I John 2: 22).

“And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world” (I John 4: 3).

“For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist” (II John 1: 7).

So antichrist is not a single man, but a belief: the belief that Jesus is NOT God’s son, the one and only Messiah. That’s all. That makes Oprah Winfrey’s philosophy antichrist. That makes Muslims antichrist. That makes Jehovah’s witnesses and Judaists and Unitarians antichrist. “These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce you,” John says about the spirit of antichrist.

Lumping all Biblical references to evil into a composite future person named The Antichrist misses the point that that spirit is all around us and needs to be confronted every day in mundane settings.