Sermon Tone Analysis

Ever since the moment Satan and his demonic forces rebelled against heaven, there has been a supernatural, God-opposing, evil power throughout the universe.

From its earliest chapters, the Bible shows that the Evil One and all who function in his kingdom have constantly opposed God’s plan.

At the end of the age, a personality the Apostle John calls The Antichrist, will rise to the pinnacle of world leadership and will act in opposition to Christ and all who name the name of Christ.

The term antichrist occurs only in John’s letters.

However, the concept of the antichrist appears repeatedly throughout Scripture.

The Apostle Paul refers to him as the man of lawlessness, and in his Revelation, the Apostle John refers to him simply as The Beast.

It is a compound word that transliterates the Greek word antichristos, from christos (“Christ”) and anti (“against,” or “in the place of”).

The term describes anyone who opposes Christ, seeks to supplant Him, or falsely represents Him.

Such opposition always offers distorted and aberrant views about the nature of Christ.

These antichrists are in the world and they represent a ‘clear and present danger’ to the church.

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I. IT'S THE LAST HOUR - RECOGNIZE THERE ARE ANTICHRISTS ALL AROUND US

* /“Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come.

This is how we know it is the last hour.

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us.

For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.”/ (1 John 2:18–19, NIV84)

#. the aged Apostle John reminds his readers that they are living in the last hour or the last time

#. it has been the last hour for a long tie

#. the Bile pictures the entire Church Age, from the time Jesus came into the world to die on the cross and rise from the dead all the way to his Second Coming at the end of the age as the last hour

#. when the Spirit of God transformed the first 120 Christians into the church on the day of Pentecost, the Apostle Peter stood up and quoted the Old Testament Prophet Joel, telling the crowd that the final hour had begun

!! A. A LAWLESS ONE IS COMING WHO WILL OPPOSE CHRIST

#. the last hour will climax with the Second Coming of Christ, when our Savior will right every wrong and usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth

#. before that climactic event, the Apostle reminds his congregation, the Antichrist is coming

#. the Bible teaches that at some point in the future—perhaps our own lifetime—a person will arise who stand in opposition to Christ, and all he stands for

#. in 2 Thessalonians 2:4, the Apostle Paul referred to this individual as /the man of lawlessness and say that he will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God/

#. this person will embody every hostility toward Christ that’s ever been expressed in all of the world’s history, all in one man

#. the final Antichrist will be an imposing, intimidating figure of superior intellect and oratorical skills, possessing advanced military and economic expertise, who becomes the leader of the world

#.

it’s tempting, of course, to speculate who the man of lawlessness might be

#.

throughout 2,000 years of church history Christians have nominated hundreds of men as potentially the Antichrist

* ILLUS.

Just in my lifetime that list has included Pope Pious XII, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, King Juan Carols of Spain, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ayatollah Khomeini, Al Gore, Louis Farrakhan, Prince Charles, and even Bill Gates.

#. we are not to despair at this news of the Antichrist’s coming because his defeat is predicted

* /“But the beast was captured, and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf.

With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image.

The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”/

(Revelation 19:20, NIV84)

#. until he arrives, however, there will be many antichrists in the world and some of them will be people we know

#. the Apostle John writes, even now many antichrists have come ...

#. who are these antichrists?

#. some were members of the church—the ones who went out from among John’s congregation that he refers to in v. 19

!! B. ALL WHO OPPOSE CHRIST ARE ANTICHRISTS

#. they are a precursor of the man of lawlessness who is the Antichrist

#. what make this truth all the more difficult for John’s readers is that some of these antichrists were people they knew

#. these are people they had worshiped God with, people they had prayed with, people they had shared the Lord’s Supper with, and people whom they had ministered together with

#. the Apostle John says that the fact that they had abandoned the Christian faith reveals that they never truly were of Christ in the first place

#. they may have looked like followers of Christ, and they may have talked like followers of Christ, but in actuality they were tares among the wheat and goats among the sheep

#. the Apostle Peter refers to such people in a style consistent with his plain talk

* /“It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.

Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.””/ (2 Peter 2:21–22, NIV84)

#. the Apostles are not talking about people who begin attending another church

#. nor are they referring to the believer who has stepped on a spiritual landmine and is incapacitated for a while

#. they are talking about those who have abandoned Christ and the Christian community

#. this—according to the Apostle John—is evidence that we are in the last days

#. how do we recognize an antichrist?

#. examine what they believe about the Christ—their Christology will always be bad

#. they will deny that Jesus was a real historical figure of flesh and blood, they will deny or minimize his humanity

* /“Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world.

Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.”/

(2 John 7, NIV84)

#. they will deny that Jesus, and Jesus only, is the Messiah, the only Savior who pardons sin

* /“Who is the liar?

It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ.

Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son.”/ (1 John 2:22, NIV84)

#. they will deny the deity of Jesus, that he was God in the flesh, claiming instead that he is merely a prophet, or a martyr to a cause

* /“but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.”/

(1 John 4:3, NIV84)

#. what we believe about Jesus matters

* ILLUS.

A modern-day example of one of these antichrists, is Dr. Bart Ehrman (born 1955).

He is an New Testament scholar, and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He left the faith completely about 12 years ago.

I’d like to read to you part of his explanation for doing so.

/“For most of my life I was a devout Christian, believing in God, trusting in Christ for salvation, knowing that God was actively involved in this world.

During my young adulthood, I was an evangelical, with a firm belief in the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God.

During those years I had fairly simple but commonly held views about how there can be so much pain and misery in the world.

God had given us free will (we weren’t programmed like robots), but since we were free to do good we were also free to do evil—hence the Holocaust, the genocide in Cambodia, and so on.

To be sure, this view did not explain all evil in the world, but a good deal of suffering was a mystery and in the end, God would make right all that was wrong.

In my mid 20s, I left the evangelical fold, but I remained a Christian for some twenty years—a God-believing, sin-confessing, church-going Christian, who no longer held to the inerrancy of Scripture but who did believe that the Bible contained God’s word, trustworthy as the source for theological reflection.

And the more I studied the Christian tradition, first as a graduate student in seminary and then as a young scholar teaching biblical studies at universities, the more sophisticated I became in my theological views and in my understanding of the world and our place in it.

I [finally] came to realize that I simply no longer believed the Christian message.

A large part of my movement away from the faith was driven by my concern for suffering.

I simply no longer could hold to the view—which I took to be essential to Christian faith—that God was active in the world, that he answered prayer, that he intervened on behalf of his faithful, that he brought salvation in the past and that in the future, ... he would set to rights all that was wrong, that he would vindicate his name and his people and bring in a good kingdom ... “/

#. today Bart Ehrman considers himself an agnostic

#. unfortunately , his consuming passion is now to convince others—particularly his students—that the ancient testimony to Christ that we call The Four Gospels, are not eye-witness accounts of Jesus’ life, and that they are totally unreliable documents that teach us little, if anything, about the life of Jesus

#. the Bible refers to people like Ehrman as apostates—those who are in open rebellion against God

#. apostates are the most dangerous of antichrists because the passion they once had for Christ is now turned against Christ and His Church

#. apostasy is a continual danger to the church, and the NT contains repeated warnings against it

* /“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”/

(1 Timothy 4:1, NIV84)

* /“Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from your secure position.”/

(2 Peter 3:17, NIV84)

#. then danger of apostates and antichrists is that they would seduce believers from the purity of the Word with ‘another gospel’

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II.

IT'S THE LAST HOUR - REMEMBER THAT GOD WILL PROTECT US FROM DECEPTION AND LEAD US INTO ETERNAL LIFE

* /“But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.

I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.”/

(1 John 2:20–21, NIV84)

#. for those who remain true to Christ, to his Gospel, and to his Church, we have two resources to help us remain faithful

#. we have the Spirit of God—the Holy Spirit who indwells our lives

#. we have the Word of God—the Scriptures that indwell our mind