Every generation assembles its own list of Antichrist candidates. A president’s three names get counted out, six letters and six letters and six letters, and the arithmetic circulates for a decade. A number turns up on a ballot tally or a street address, and the photograph of it outlives the argument. The question of who the Antichrist might be has supported a cottage industry for almost two thousand years.

John knew that instinct was coming, and he gives it about half a sentence.

“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.” (1 John 2:18)

The verse acknowledges the figure everyone wants to talk about and then turns hard toward a problem already sitting in the room. The reasoning also runs backward from the direction we expect. We would put it that the last hour is near, so counterfeits are coming; John puts it that the counterfeits have already arrived, and their arrival is how we know what hour it is. He treats their presence as confirmation rather than as evidence the church has failed.

Looking for the Wrong Enemy

“The last hour” is not a countdown to a particular Thursday. Scripture uses that phrase, along with “the last days,” for the closing stretch of human history, which opened when Christ came to earth and closes when He returns. Every believer since the resurrection has lived in the last hour, so reading it any other way turns the phrase into a calendar, and John is not handing anyone one.

What the phrase does carry is urgency, a pressure toward clarity. If the hour felt short to a man writing near the end of the first century, it is difficult to argue it has grown longer since. That urgency also points somewhere specific, and it is not where we usually aim it. The pressure runs toward the person two rows over who has been agreeing with everything and believing none of it.

There is a failure people watch for and a failure that actually happens, and they are rarely the same one. You watch a driveway for the dramatic crack, and what takes the slab apart is water working underneath, freezing and thawing across ten or twelve winters where nobody thought to look. John writes to people scanning the horizon, and he asks them to look at the chair beside them.

What the Word Antichrist Actually Claims

The word is worth taking apart, because the common reading is about half right. We hear the prefix anti and think of opposition, the way a person is anti-tax. That meaning is available in the Greek, though the prefix leans harder toward standing in the place of something, a substitute who takes the seat belonging to another.

The second half of the word is load-bearing. Christ is a title rather than a surname, and it means the Anointed One, promised by the Father and set apart for a specific work. Prophets were anointed to speak, priests were anointed to mediate, kings were anointed to rule, and every one of those anointings pointed at a single person who would be all three at once. Jesus of Nazareth is the Prophet, the Priest, and the King, and He is the reason the oil was ever poured out on anyone’s head.

Put the halves together and the word gets specific. An antichrist is somebody who takes the seat belonging to the Anointed One, which makes the word a description of a position more than of an attitude. He is not merely a person who dislikes Christianity, since plenty manage that from a comfortable distance and never come near the seat.

The doctrine underneath this passage is therefore the preeminence of Christ. He holds the first position over creation, over the church itself, and over the individual life, and He holds it by right rather than by vote. Satan’s strategy against a congregation is not usually to argue Christ out of the building; it is to install something else in the first position and let everyone keep the old language while the seat changes hands.

The tactics have a familiar shape. He deceives, since Genesis 3 was won with a question about whether God had really said. He distracts, and the distractions are frequently good things, which is what makes them work. He discourages, until a congregation decides the biblical way is not producing. He divides, until the body splinters into groups with their own loyalties and everyone else cast as the problem.

Every workplace has a mission statement framed near the coffee maker and an actual mission, which is whatever the loudest person wanted this quarter. Congregations drift the same way, and the drift is rarely announced. Feeding the hungry is good, supporting missionaries is good, and a particular kind of music can be very good. Any of them can become the banner a church marches under, and the moment one takes the first position, something has taken the place of Christ.

When Leaving Tells the Truth

John moves from the definition to a specific and painful case.

“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” (1 John 2:19)

These people went out from us, and those three words carry the sting of the verse. They were in the assembly, on the list, at the meal, known by name, and for a while nobody could have told the difference.

Faithful membership in a Bible-preaching church is not optional equipment for a Christian, and this verse should never be used to argue otherwise. Belonging to one, however, does not manufacture spiritual life. A real relationship with Jesus Christ is what makes a person a Christian, and no congregation has ever conferred that on anybody by proximity. It is sad and it is true that not everyone in a sound church is saved, and a striking number of people who went on to lead cults were raised in solidly biblical congregations.

John’s language here is more careful than it first appears. When he writes that they would have continued with us, he reaches for the same word he uses five verses later when he tells the church to let the truth abide in them, and to abide in the Son. Continuing and abiding are one word in John’s hands. The test he applies is not intensity, or emotion, or how a person spoke about the Lord in a good season; the test is whether they stayed.

This is precisely the point where a congregation can turn a true doctrine into an ugly weapon, and it needs saying plainly. The verse does not license anyone to run down a list of families who have moved on and start assigning verdicts. People leave for a hundred ordinary reasons, and many of them are serving faithfully three towns over, teaching a class, hauling students to camp, loving the Lord as much as they ever did. Attendance thins across a couple of winters for all sorts of causes, and most of them are not apostasy. Taking John’s words about false teachers who abandoned the apostolic faith and applying them to a family that transferred membership would be a misuse of Scripture, and the pride underneath it would be its own kind of sin. It is true that some walk away because they never had an appetite for biblical ministry. Claiming that of everyone who walks away is both false and arrogant, and this passage gives no cover for it.

The Dividing Line Runs Through Jesus

If departure is the symptom, John names the disease in the next breath, and it is a matter of doctrine rather than temperament.

“Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.” (1 John 2:22)

The heresy in John’s line of sight had a name attached to it. A teacher called Cerinthus was circulating the idea that Jesus was simply a man, a good one, who received a special anointing of the Spirit at His baptism, and that the anointing departed before the crucifixion. It sounds like the sort of thing a reasonable person files under hairsplitting. Is it wrong enough to fight over? It is, because it strips the true Jesus of equality with the Father, and everything the New Testament says about the cross depends on who was hanging on it.

The distinction the church eventually sharpened is between essence and function. In His function the Son submitted to the Father, since He came to do the Father’s will, and that order is real. In essence there is no gradient at all: the Son is not a lesser God, the Spirit is not a junior partner, and the three are one God, equally worthy of worship. Confusing a submission of role with a difference of nature is how most Christological error gets started.

That fault line is old and it keeps reopening. Paul warned the Galatians about people working to distort the gospel, insisting that nothing be added and nothing taken away (Galatians 1). He told Timothy that some would depart from the faith and chase other teachings (1 Timothy 4:1), and that others would carry an outward display of godliness with no power behind it (2 Timothy 3:5). He named one of them. Demas had been a coworker in the gospel, and Paul’s note about him is short enough to memorize: he loved this present world, and he left (2 Timothy 4:10).

The modern version is gentler in tone and identical in structure. You meet it at a graduation party, near the sheet cake, when somebody says they pray every single day and believe deeply in God, then adds that they have never gotten comfortable with all the Jesus material. They want a God of love, of kindness, of the occasional intervention on a hard day. The cross is not on the list, and neither is following a Lord who claims a whole life.

The love they are reaching for, though, has only ever been demonstrated in one place.

“but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

That is the ultimate expression of the love of God, and it happens at the cross or it does not happen. John closes the door on the alternative without leaving a gap.

“No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” (1 John 2:23)

A person cannot say no to Jesus and yes to God, because the Son is where the Father has made Himself known. Confessing the Son means declaring loyalty to what the Bible says about Him, which is a considerably larger thing than admiring Him.

The Anointing That Answers the Antichrist

Everything so far has been diagnosis. John does not leave his people holding it; he gives them a defense, and it turns on a word he has been setting up all along.

“But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.” (1 John 2:20)

The wordplay is doing theological work. Christ means Anointed One. Antichrist means the one who stands in His place. What John says these ordinary believers possess is the anointing, from the same root as the title the antichrists are busy denying. The counterfeits reject the Anointed One; the church has received the anointing from Him.

He assumes something striking about his readers, too. He writes not because they are ignorant of the truth but because they already know it (v. 21), which makes him a man strengthening what is there rather than filling an empty vessel. That anointing works itself out in two ways the passage keeps braiding together, and they are best understood as one protection rather than two.

The first is a deep knowledge of the Word of God. John tells them to let what they heard from the beginning abide in them, promising that if it does, they will abide in the Son and in the Father, and that the promise attached to all of it is eternal life (vv. 24–25). He gives the same reality three names in five verses: the truth, what you have heard, the promise. Saturation like that is the work of years, since casual interest has never once produced a person who could recognize a lie on sight. Nobody spots the wrong part by studying a catalog of wrong parts; they spot it because they have handled the right one ten thousand times and their hands know the weight of it.

Sunday morning is where that work begins, and it was never designed to be where it ends. Every few years somebody surfaces with a key that supposedly unlocks the whole Christian life, one real verse elevated into a master principle and asked to carry a load it was never built for. Honoring your father and mother is true, and it still does not outrank the cross. A theology assembled out of clever sayings will not survive contact with anything difficult.

The second way the anointing works is a sensitivity to the Spirit who indwells every true believer. God once dwelt above the mercy seat, behind a curtain, at a distance managed by priests, and He now makes the believer’s own body His temple, bought at a price (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

His indwelling means God is at work in a person, leading, prompting, warning, convicting. Sincere people go off the rails here in both directions, so the line has to be drawn with care. The Spirit takes the truth already known and presses it into thinking and living until it moves. He is not in the business of revealing new information, and a believer who announces that God told him something outside of Scripture has stepped past anything he was promised.

That is not the same as saying He does nothing. He prompts a person to pray, to confess something that has been sitting there for months, to give when giving is inconvenient. A name surfaces on a drive to work with no news attached to it, and the settled thing to do is pray for that person and then send the text saying so. The reply comes back describing something nobody else knew about often enough that coincidence is a strain.

“But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.” (1 John 2:27)

John is not dismissing teachers, since he is functioning as one in the act of writing the sentence. He is telling a church under pressure from impressive false teachers that they are not waiting on a new authority to arrive with fresh revelation. What they have already received is sufficient, and the Spirit within them will confirm it.

The Long Work of Staying

None of this cashes out into a program, since the place it actually cashes out is an ordinary Tuesday.

It looks like a Bible open on the kitchen table at six in the morning, in a passage already read four times, because the tenth reading is where the weight of the thing finally settles. It looks like listening to a compelling teacher on the drive and running what he said past what you know rather than past how it made you feel. It looks like the coworker who tells you about her spirituality over lunch, and you love her enough to be honest about the difference rather than agreeable about it. It looks like showing up in the same seat, with the same people, for the twentieth winter in a row, which is the least dramatic form of faithfulness there is and very nearly the whole of what John is asking for.

The antichrists John described were once regulars. They sang, they gave, they were missed for a season after they went. What separated them from the believers around them was not a gift or a temperament; it was that they did not stay, and their leaving made plain what had always been true underneath.

Staying is the visible shape of abiding, and abiding is not something a Christian generates on his own. The anointing you received abides in you, which means the strength for the long, ordinary, unglamorous work of remaining was given to you before you ever knew you would need it.

May God watch over this assembly, and may He keep us true to Him, true to His Word, and true to the Son who is our Savior.

2026.08.30 / Antichrists Among Us / Pastor Brent Stille