Yesterday’s Bible lesson was already a bit long, but I need to add something that may not be obvious. In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul quotes from Daniel’s description of a type of Antichrist. Daniel does the same thing we saw in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28: A denunciation of some earthly figure echoes with the sins of the Devil in his fall from his high position as God’s bodyguard. It’s not about the Devil, but the nature of the human figures’ sins are the same kind of mistake the Devil made.
Daniel does the same thing regarding, near as we can tell, Antiochus IV. In the same way Isaiah and Ezekiel embellish and dramatize through exaggeration the evil of devilish human rules, so Daniel adds some dramatic extravagance to his portrayal of someone who would come in his future. And Paul does the same thing, warning that there would be an Antichrist figure at the close of the Church Age (the gathering of Gentiles into the New Israel) who carries echoes of previous figures like Antiochus IV.
What kind of man was Antiochus IV? How did he wreak havoc on the Judean kingdom of his day?
The man was very intelligent. He saw the political wrangling among the Judeans and took advantage of it. Over a period of some few years, he employed agents who would bribe or make promises, provoked all sides of the quarrels, etc. When they were internally weakened, he was ready to drop the bomb, technically making Judean religion illegal. He defiled the Temple and no one was there to oppose him. Then he launched his campaign to sweep across the whole territory.
The Judeans pulled together briefly under the Maccabees, but then promptly shattered again and one side invited Rome to get involved. And then came the Herods, etc. They never recovered their political independence because God had no use for it; they certainly had no use for His Son.
The inherent flaw in the system was that they mistook the Law of Moses for something else entirely. As we’ve already seen in the previous post, it was never about the ethnic nation, but about Abrahamic faith. God gave them the Law because the covenant people were encumbered with a large number of people who simply never got the covenant in their hearts. The Law would grant a certain level of order among the faithless, allowing the faithful to focus on what really mattered.
Thus, in the applicable Romans passages, Paul quotes where God told Elijah that it wasn’t time yet to destroy the Northern Kingdom because there were still 7000 faithful. He wanted to protect that small group. As the size of that remnant dwindled over a few generations, God was ready to finally divorce the 10 Tribes as just another Gentile horde to place under the hands of His Divine Council. He would later exchange them for the Gentile Elect He wanted to build up His new Israel.
But the churches have the same problem, loaded with faithless people, same as Israel was. While God is calling the fullness of the Gentiles out of the nations of the world, there has to be a system that will allow the faithful within the churches to keep operating. Churches have developed a system that accommodates those who lack Abrahamic faith. If they take this system too seriously and neglect the command of Christ to love each other as He does, then churches will spiritually atrophy the way the Northern Kingdom did.
And when the final Antichrist arises, it won’t be too hard to seduce the churches and bring about a loss of religion. He’ll be able to employ agents and bribes, provoking divisions and quarrels, and bring about an apostasy. That’s what Paul foresaw in 2 Thessalonians 2.
On the one hand, we know that God won’t send His Son back until He’s finished calling out enough Gentile Elect to rebuild the Lost Tribes. But We know that the close of that period will be marked by the rise of an Anitchrist that will attack genuine faith, making it illegal, so that he can be the new god of mankind. We can reasonably estimate that he will try to manifest himself as the Second Coming of Christ. That’s the question Paul was trying to answer there. We will need to see someone trying to deceive nominal Christians into proclaiming him Christ. There won’t be any justification for having churches when that succeeds.
It’s long past time for us to build a more accurate eschatology, taking these things into account.
