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.

Scripture measures fatherhood by what a father provides, not by whether he is physically present.

Picture the boys in your church. One lost his father at age eight. The whole church knows the tragic story. Another’s father walked away over the holidays. Some people are aware, and they try not to speak about it. A third boy arrives each Sunday with his mother while his father sleeps late, works odd hours, or simply stays away. You could point out each of those boys without much difficulty.

Then comes a fourth boy. His father professes faith. He sits next to his father in the same pew each passing week, but that boy has never heard his dad pray for him aloud. He’s never watched him open Scripture midweek, nor witnessed a sincere apology. However, no one frets over this boy because there isn’t an obvious crisis to notice.

The first three boys stand out clearly. The fourth is the focus of this article, and he is the one most churches accidentally overlook for years.

Job 29 introduces a man who would have sought out the fourth boy. Looking back on the years before his trials, Job recalls sitting at the city gate, doing the kind of work that caused others to stand in respect when he appeared. His words answer a question few churches bother to pose: What truly leaves a child fatherless, and who bears responsibility for responding?

There was a season of my life when I wanted a unicycle more than I wanted anything else, and I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds. My parents asked what I wanted for my birthday; I told them that I wanted a unicycle. They asked again at Christmas, and I said a unicycle. Eventually, my parents gave in and bought me one.

Unicycles are remarkably hard to learn to ride. I got good enough to work the second-floor hallway of my dorm, which was only about four and a half feet wide, so there was always a wall within reach when things went sideways. My buddies all wanted a turn, and we had a great many laughs during hours we should have been studying, until wisdom finally overtook ambition and I let the unicycle go.

Before I owned the unicycle, that thing consumed my mind, and after I owned it, I remember thinking it was nowhere near as good as I had expected. The wanting was enormous, and the having was thin, despite nothing about the unicycle changing.

The unicycle was harmless. The appetite underneath it was not, because that same appetite pointed at bigger objects has emptied bank accounts, ended marriages, and hollowed out people. John the apostle writes about that appetite and the whole system that exists to feed it.

We hear often that God is love, and we should, because it is true. However, Scripture also shows us a love that God hates.