His Marks are in the Wrong Places!

I had a funny thought this week.

What if the Antichrist has already been born and died, and his name was Mohammed?

Sound crazy? Think about it.

The Antichrist is a warped copy of the actual Christ. That means there should be similarities. Here’s a big one: the fundamental purpose served by Jesus Christ was to save people and baptize them with the Holy Spirit so they would become like him and do as he did, “infecting” the world and undermining Satan’s kingdom. Sort of like Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded.

What did Mohammed do? He created a Satanic religion, and then, like Jesus, he left the earth. Like the followers of Jesus, the followers of Mohammed slowly increased in numbers, and they came to control more and more of the world’s population.

In some ways, Islam is the opposite or negation of Christianity. Accepting Mohammed prevents you from receiving salvation. It prevents you from being baptized with the Holy Spirit. It assures that you will not become like Jesus or serve him. In fact, it is likely to cause you to persecute Christians and Christianity, as well as Jews and Judaism. True Islam requires the persecution of all unbelievers.

As you progress as a Christian, you become less fleshly. Your character improves. You shed things like selfishness and greed and gluttony. Your final reward is to go to a place where you are free from fleshly drives and you can live an enlightened life in true righteousness.

What happens when you progress as a Muslim? Okay, you go to hell. I guess I should be clearer. What are you told will happen as you progress as a Muslim? If you manage to win salvation (killing Jews and Christians is the surest method, according to Islam), you go to a place where all of your fleshly, crass desires are sated continually. You get 72 virgins, all the food you can eat, beautiful young boys, and lots of wine. Basically, you spend eternity living a lot like a hog. If you want to see a good imitation of Islamic paradise, read up on Hugh Hefner’s private life.

Islam promises to cause people to become degenerate, sort of the way Christianity causes them to improve.

A modern clergyman who calls himself a prophet claims the Antichrist will not be a single individual. He says the term actually refers to a people. Maybe it works like this:

1. Jesus was the Christ.

2. Mohammed was the Antichrist.

3. Christians are the body of Christ.

4. Muslims are the body of the Antichrist.

Jesus has always identified with his people. The Old Testament called him Israel. Jesus said that when we do certain things to others, we do them to him. Maybe the Antichrist is the same way. Maybe the term “Antichrist” can refer to Mohammed and also to the body of people who follow him.

Perry Stone suspects that the Catholic Church will eventually venerate Mary so excessively that she will replace Jesus, and the Muslims will get on board, and in the end, they’ll form a religion that serves the Beast. It’s an interesting idea. There are already Catholics who consider Mary a sort of co-savior.

Prophecy is a funny thing. It’s full of metaphors, so you have to be careful not to take things literally when it’s not appropriate. It’s even worse than that. Sometimes a Bible verse is true literally and also metaphorically. The Jews recognize three levels of meaning in the Bible. Anyway, the fact that the Bible calls the Antichrist a man may not necessarily mean he’s only one individual. The Bible calls Israel a fig tree. It calls Satan the Prince of Tyre. God deliberately made the Bible confusing so Satan and ungodly people would not be able to understand it. You can’t hope to understand it until you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, and even then, you only get as much understanding as God thinks you need.

The term “Antichrist” may apply to more things than we know. There is a great spirit–Satan–for whom the term is probably most apt. Then there are the host of spirits who constantly persecute and work to exterminate Christians and Jews. They are an antichrist force. And then there is the human being we all expect to see one day, and there are lesser antichrists, like Hitler. I don’t know if I’d get all hung up, trying to drop the label on a single individual. But it may be that Mohammed is the best fit.

Muslims are turning out to be good at Antichrist-like accomplishments. We all wonder how the Antichrist will make people put marks on their hands or foreheads so they will be able to buy or sell. You would expect people to resist that. But look what they’ve done at our airports. They’ve manipulated us into posing publicly for nude pictures and allowing strangers to feel our genitals. That’s pretty impressive. If they can do that, maybe Islam can find a way to put the infamous marks on us. Over sixty years ago, the antichrist effort got Jews and other Nazi prisoners to strip naked in large mixed-gender groups, as if it were perfectly normal, and it managed to get Jews to get tattooed, which is forbidden by halacha. Getting us to mark ourselves should not be hard. Maybe it will have something to do with computer hackers making the money supply unsafe.

Maybe Muslims will bring the rapture about. Maybe it will be a wave of executions. The Bible says we’ll meet Christ in the air, but does it say how we’ll get there? Somehow I can’t see millions of people disappearing without explanation. A sign that powerful seems unlike God; he likes to leave room for faith, and an event that spectacular might make his existence extremely obvious. But I can imagine an epidemic of beheadings, poisonings, and shootings, performed by a new religion that has the world convinced that Christians and Jews are all that stand between the human race and peace and progress. We are already a stench in the nostrils of Europeans and American liberals. I could see them rejecting boring traditional religions, joining a trendy new cult, and marching us to the killing fields. People who don’t have the Holy Spirit inside them are wide open to crazy influences. Look at the Germans and Austrians. They were highly cultured, accomplished people, yet they tried to exterminate the Jews and gypsies.

Maybe the rapture will be the result of a new Kristallnacht.

It’s probably a mistake to sit around scanning the horizon for a flashy new worldwide celebrity with “The Antichrist” tattooed on his forehead. The antichrist process is already at work. It was at work in Eden, when Cain killed Abel. It was at work in Egypt, when Ramses tried to kill off the Jewish messiah (small M) Moses. The battle is already taking place. If we wait for the appearance of the Antichrist to slap us in the face, we’ll probably fail to notice a lot of his work.

I suppose I should leave this kind of speculation to people who are willing to study the Bible very closely, but I can’t help thinking about it.