Coming of Antichrist just around the corner?

And there are prophecies which state that even believers will think the minor chastisement will be the end of the world (i.e., the major chastisement) because it will be so severe.

 

Yes, but so many believers, true Catholics, see right through him for what he is. Maybe even the majority of truly committed devout Catholics at this time. (Not Christmas and Easter cafeteria catholics.)

At the end of the end times, the deception will be so great, so universal, even the elect will be deceived and it will NOT be so blatantly obvious we have an antipope on our hands. There will not be entire continents raising up in opposition to his nefarious plots.

And the pope at that time may be the False Prophet, but he won’t be the Antichrist.

 

The Antichrist

JIMMY AKIN

The Fathers Weigh In
The Church Fathers displayed significant interest in the Antichrist, whom they commonly identified with the man of lawlessness. They understood him to be a political ruler who would oppose the Church, rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and then demand to be worshiped as a god. At times he was understood to be a person of Jewish ancestry, from the now-lost tribe of Dan.

The details of how Antichrist is to be understood vary from Father to Father, meaning that there is no infallible consensus regarding the matter and some matters are quite speculative. For example, the identification of the Antichrist as coming from the tribe of Dan is extremely slight in Scripture, being based on Genesis 49:17 and on the absence of Dan in the list of tribes in Revelation 7:4–8; the Antichrist is mentioned in neither passage.

Throughout history there have been a large number of individuals who have been identified as potential Antichrists, and such they may have been, though none has been the final persecutor of Church history. The record of inaccurate attempts to identify the Antichrist reveal the extreme caution that needs to be exercised in such matters.

The Catechism explains simply that there will be a “supreme religious deception” before the second coming of Christ and that the supreme form of this deception is that of the Antichrist, who will bring “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh” (CCC 675).

This deception has precursors in our own time. These precursors appear “every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement” (CCC 676), including “the intrinsically perverse political form of a secular messianism” (ibid.) that was displayed by twentieth-century movements such as Nazism and Communism.

The deception of the Antichrist will lead to the final crisis of the Church, which will be persecuted almost to the point of extinction and thus will “follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection,” only to be saved by the second coming of Christ (CCC 677).

The Pope as the Antichrist
It is important for the Catholic apologist to have a good handle on what Scripture does and does not say regarding the Antichrist because the opponents of the Catholic faith have often depicted the pope as the Antichrist.

This was a psychological necessity for the early Protestant leaders because they were in the process of breaking away from what their contemporaries universally recognized as the authentic Church of Christ, governed by the authentic Vicar of Christ. Since breaking with such a body is inconceivable to any one determined to follow Christ’s will, it was necessary for Protestant leaders to deny that the Catholic Church and the pope were these things.

The recognition of the Catholic Church as the one Christ established was so strong—given its centuries of existence, its ubiquity in Europe, and the absence of any plausible rival in tracing its roots back to Christ—that it created severe cognitive dissonance that Protestant leaders had to find ways to overcome. “If it’s not the Bride of Christ then what is it? How can it be explained otherwise?” would be logical questions.

Protestant leaders cast about in Scripture for alternative explanations for a large, false religious system expected to exist during the Christian age. They chose the religious system associated with the beast from Revelation, whom they identified as the Antichrist. They further identified this religious system with the Whore of Babylon, who in Revelation is in contrast to the Church, the Bride of Christ.

They thus came to portray the Church as the Whore of Babylon and the pope as the beast/Antichrist. Only in such a way could breaking away from what everyone recognized as the true Church of Christ be psychologically justified.

Thus the Lutheran Book of Concord states, “The pope is the real Antichrist who has raised himself over and set himself against Christ . . . Accordingly, just as we cannot adore the devil himself as our lord or God, so we cannot suffer his apostle, the pope or Antichrist, to govern us as our head or lord” (Smalcald Articles 2:4:10, 14).

The Presbyterian and Anglican Westminster Confession states, “There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ; nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be the head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and that son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called God” (25:6).

The difficulty with the papal Antichrist theory is that while it may have provided psychological comfort to early Protestant leaders, it does not fit the facts as they are presented in Scripture.

Even given the identification of the Antichrist with the beast, the pope is the last person who would fit the biblical requirements for being the individual Antichrist (or any Antichrist). The epistles of John clearly indicate that the Antichrist is one who denies that Christ has come in the flesh. However, the basis for the pope’s position in the Church is that Christ has come in the flesh and has ascended to heaven, leaving the successor of Peter as his vicar or representative on earth.

For the pope to deny that Christ has come in the flesh would be to undercut the basis of his position. Since no pope historically has made such claims, it is easily verifiable that no pope in history has been an Antichrist. Neither will any future pope be inclined to deny the basis of his position. The anti-papal argument simply is not credible.

Further, in Scripture the beast is clearly a political leader, not a Church leader. In fact, the beast is literally identified with one of the early Roman emperors, who had no part of the Church.
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But in Desmond’s timeline, the current crop of global evildoers will be annihilated during the events leading up to the Triumph and Era of Peace. In my opinion, the current global elites are going down hard in the not distant future, and we will witness the rebirth of the Church and its flowering into a glory never seen in history, prior to the end of the end times.

 

Dittos.

 

This is why I’m absolutely convinced Desmond’s timeline is correct.

 

Any other interpretation is too much based on Protestant / American Evangelical / Pentecostal end times conjecture.