Who is the Antichrist, and why are people taking to You Tube to tell us who he is? At the time of this blog post, there are 66,100 search results about the Antichrist on You Tube, all with differing views about who it is. There’s Prince Charles, various Popes, Barack Obama, reptilian shape-shifters, Adolph Hitler and many others over the centuries. and in fact, the source material for the concept of the Antichrist comes from the First Epistle of John, which stated under the mistaken impression that the Day of Judgment was about to occur
“Young children, it is the last hour, and, just as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now there have come to be many antichrists.”—1 John 2:18.
The Epistles, or “letters” of “John” (the name has been traditionally attributed to “John,” although we simply do not know who wrote these letters which were targeted to the community this “John” belonged to. The major upshot is that there were break=aways and splinters in that group and these letters were meant to hold the group together while warning of false teachings from heretical teachings by “Antichrists.”
“Many deceivers have gone forth into the world, persons not confessing Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.”—2 John 7.
So really, an “Antichrist” is someone who denies that Jesus didn’t have a body, but only appeared as a “phantom,” because spirit was thought to be pure while the material flesh was considered “evil” or “fallen,” which is a conception that comes down from the ancient Greek Orphic religious philosophy and latched onto the early Christian tradition. Also, these letters were written with the expectation of Christ’s immanent return, which failed, of course, to take place. Thus we have had a long history of Antichrists and projected Doomsdays that haven’t occurred (with the possible recent exception of northern Japan), and various beings identified over centuries, including Napoleon and Muhammad Ali, but never, to my knowledge, has a woman been identified as an Antichrist! By a black American Christian minister!
In this “sermon,” James David Manning, PhD (unaccredited), claims that Oprah Winfrey is the antichrist and Barack Obama is the false messiah. Sigh. Look at his pulpit. Why does he have the emblem of the Royal Arms of England???
Faithful readers of my blog know how I fear about black Americans who embrace the slave master’s religion of Christianity, but Holy Moses! This guy takes the proverbial cake. With his exhortations to “Run, children, run,” he reminds me of the well-meaning but possibly mentally ill preachers I was forced as a child to watch every Sunday on the pulpit exclaiming for all they were worth that the End Times were upon us, any day now, and high time, too! I believed it until one day I looked at all those sad faces and decided God couldn’t possibly care for anyone if he let these good people down. Then again, it seemed like we were all gripped by differing degrees by a collective spell of madness. The spell broke for me one night after fervently praying for the “Holy Spirit” to touch me and nothing happened! And I stopped “believing.”
Then again, there was a kind of empathy I felt for these people and I did briefly consider becoming a minister myself, but I had read too many books and the Christian religious fervor within me faded away forever. Good thing, too. Because for the Grace of nobody, I could have ended up a Looney Tune like Rev. Manning.
