KING'S BUSINESS PROPHECY SECTION Edited by Dr. Charles L. Feinberg, Director, Talbot Theological Seminary
the Nations ANTI-CHRIST the Church Israel
by Dr. William Ward Ayer M ultitudes are awakening to the fact that world conditions are getting completely out of hand. Observant folk note a definite world movement toward universal tyranny. Bible students who search the Scrip tures and watch the play of continuously tragic inter national affairs, see the emergence of a pattern that could easily be the stage setting for the entrance of the prophe sied Anti-Christ on the world scene. “The final goal of Christianity,” says that keen German theologian, Erich Sauer, “is Jesus Christ. The end of nominal Christendom is the Anti-Christ.” The great body of the Church is deceived in its thinking that history moves gradually but surely toward a kingdom of divine dominion. God’s revelation makes clear that His kingdom of righteousness will be established only after world-wide collapse and catastrophe. Universal lawlessness will have its awful period. Christendom will bring to fruition the seeds of its inner corruption. Israel must reveal the blind ness of her Christ-rejection through this temporary acceptance of the man of sin as the promised Messiah. Today’s religious climate is murky because of the low spiritual pressure of “lost love” and lawlessness (Matt. 26:12). No wonder Jesus queried, “When the Son of man cometh will he find [the faith, or persistence in faith] in the earth?” This climate will suit Anti-Christ at his coming. The term “Anti-Christ” means little to the Church today, but it had a terrible connotation to the early Church, as the message of Paul to the Thessalonians shows. “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now restrains will restrain until he be taken out of the way. And then shall the Lawless One be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the breath of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming . . History has produced many types of Anti-Christ, but Anti-Christ will appear in person at the end of the age after the true Church has been translated by her Lord to heavenly places.
Signs that our age is rapidly approaching its consum mation are present. Much of Europe and Asia are pro gressively coming under communist and atheistic domi nation. The period of the closed door (Rev. 3:7) seems to be upon us and totalitarianism rides rough-shod over millions. Satan is preparing to set up his earthly kingdom. When he does he will imitate God and His working. Revelation 13:1-4 speaks of the trinity of evil. John saw “a great beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” The people fell down and worshipped the dragon. The dragon is Satan; the beast is the temporal inter national Anti-Christ; the false prophet, the religious head of a world religion which is in league with Satan. In this infernal trinity, the Triune God is counterfeited. Satan becomes an “anti-god”; the beast substitutes himself for Christ; and the false prophet imitates the Holy Spirit. God the Father was incarnate in Jesus; Satan, for all purposes, is incarnate in the beast; the Holy Spirit came to glorify Christ and to communicate Christ’s will to those who believe. The false prophet glorifies the beast and imposes the beast’s will on the people. The word “sea” when used symbolically represents the masses of earth’s people. The nations are today “like the troubled sea when it cannot rest.” . Most prophetic expositors believe that out of the old Roman Empire the terrible beast will arise. Revelation 13 declares the beast resembled a leopard, a bear, and a lion. Daniel (chapter 7) records that the prophet had a vision in which the nations were represented as a lion and a bear and a leopard. They are symbols of the world-empires which preceded the Roman Regime. Babylon was a lion, Persia a bear, Greece a leopard. The fourth beast of Daniel 7 was “dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly—it had ten horns.” This is the Roman Empire, and the people and characteristics of all the other kingdoms entered into it. (continued on next page)
MAY, 1960
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