1 John 2:18
“Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.”
Over 2000 years have gone by and some people say, “Well, where is the final hour? The end times?”
Some think the end times are between Christ being on earth the first time and when He comes back the second time. In Biblical thought the last time or end time is the end of one age and the beginning of another. So it’s used more then once in the Bible and not always about the same period of time.
Men have the choice of allying themselves with the old world, which is doomed to destruction or allying themselves with Christ and entering into the new world. Here is the urgency for John: man has a choice and it depends on whether or not he has given his life to Jesus Christ.
So you may argue that every hour is the last hour, every minute in fact we are confronted with allying ourselves with God or with evil forces that are against God. I heard someone say once that one of the reasons we go to church is to show the world whose side we are on!
The antichrist John mentions here is not the one and final antichrist he talks about in Revelation. Here he uses it as a term for one who is an adversary of Christ or a false prophet or false teacher. Many men in history have been thought to be the antichrist, the one in Revelation: Nero, Hitler, the Pope (!), Stalin, Mussolini to name a few. But, in the letters of John he is not so much a person as a principle, the principal that is hostile to and actively opposed to God.
Show the world whose side you are on. Christian tees at:
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