The Pilgrim
Identifying the antichrist
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Written by The Pilgrim
The antichrist is referred to in the two letters written by Saint John in The Bible, and appears to be someone who will superficially resemble Jesus, but who will do the devil’s work. A favourite pastime of scholarly people down the ages has been the attempt to identify certain living people as being either the antichrist or (less commonly) the devil incarnate. Candidates have included the Emperor Nero, Niccolo Machiavelli, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ronald Reagan, and more recently Barack Obama.
Sometimes the supposed evidence is very basic. People in Elizabethan England noted that the name Niccolo resembles “Old Nick”, a colloquial name for the devil, and that Machiavelli resembles “make evil”. Could you want stronger proof than that? (All this man did was write a book about politics. How big a crime is that?)
A magazine I read as a teenager (when Ronald Reagan was president of the USA) stated that his full name (Ronald Wilson Reagan) was made up of three six-letter words, and that this relates to the number of the beast - 666 - in The Bible (Revelation 13:18).
More often however the alleged evidence is more arcane. Sometimes it involves numerology (assigning numerical values to letters of the alphabet), while at other times it involves subtle examination of certain words in The Bible.
There are a number of videos online at the moment which examine the case for Barack Obama being the antichrist, and some of them make reference to Luke 10:18 in which Jesus says “I beheld Satan as lightning falling out of heaven”. These words would have been spoken in Aramaic (the everyday language of the Jews in the time of Jesus), and recorded in Ancient Greek. However the language of scholarship for the Jews was Hebrew, the language in which most of the Old Testament was written. These words “lightning from heaven” or “lightning from a high place” could be rendered in Hebrew as “Baraq O Bam-Mah”.
One of the most famous Frenchmen of all time was a man called Nostradamus who lived in the sixteenth century. He claimed to be able to see the future, and he probably could. He recorded his predictions in books, but because he feared persecution for heresy, he wrote them in a way that tended to obscure their true meaning. It is not surprising therefore that their true meaning remains obscure to this day. Many people have studied his writings, and claimed that they predict recognisable events, but these tend to be done retrospectively – claiming that an event which has already taken place was predicted by Nostradamus.
I am not aware that any student of Nostradamus has ever made a correct prediction based upon his writings, with the exception of predictions which can be regarded as a safe bet. During the Second World War, people on both sides claimed that their side would win because Nostradamus had spoken. Obviously one of those predictions was bound to be proven true.
A book published in 1990 predicted that George Bush would win a second term as President of the USA in 1992, which did not happen. Had anyone predicted his failure to be re-elected, then it would of course have been proven true.
Some of the writings of Nostradamus allegedly refer to the advent of an antichrist figure, and I have recently watched a video on Youtube which claims that Nostradamus predicted that the antichrist would be a young dark-skinned man. Is Barack Obama young enough and dark-skinned enough to be worthy of consideration here?
If you want to know more about this, then log on to youtube, and type in “Obama satan” or “Obama antichrist” in the search box, but to save time here is a link to what is probably the most comprehensive such video .
However I should warn you not to take prophecies of the antichrist seriously. It can be fun to speculate that The Bible or Nostradamus might predict that a certain politician is a figure of great evil, but remember that people who make such predictions follow in the footsteps of many people who were wrong.
As a final point, if we look at what the Bible actually says , it soon becomes clear that there have perhaps been huge numbers of people down the ages who could be called the antichrist.
