The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, February 28, 2025

In his own Name

 

I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. – John 5:43

 

In his first epistle St. John reminded his readers that they had “heard that antichrist shall come.” (1 John 2:18).  He then said that “even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.”  He identified the “many antichrists” who were even then present as false teachers who had abandoned the Apostolic Church (1 Jn. 2:19) and whose false doctrine consists of the denial of the most basic truths of the Christian message.  “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?  He is an antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.” (1 Jn. 2:22)  “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 Jn. 4:3).  “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.  This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” (2 Jn. 7)

 

The last two verses quoted suggest that St. John had false teachers of the type that history knows as Gnostics in mind.  Gnosticism was not a single heresy but a group of heresies that had a number of common traits, among them the belief that the material world is irredeemably evil and a prison from which the human spirit must be liberated.  The idea of the Incarnation was repugnant to them and so they preferred heresies like Docetism, which taught that Jesus had an appearance but no material substance, or a kind of proto-Nestorianism in which the human Jesus and the divine Christ were two rather than one.  St. Justin Marty and St. Irenaeus of Lyon identify Simon Magus – the Simon from Acts 8 who tried to buy the Apostolic power of laying on of hands from St. Peter – as the first of these so they would have been around already when St. John wrote his epistles. 

 

1 John 2:22, however, shows that the error that the Apostle had in mind is even more basic than this, although the Gnostics certainly qualify to be included.  Antichrist is “he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ.”  That would also include those to whom Jesus was speaking in when He told them they, rejecting Him, would receive another who comes in his own name.  Which brings us to the Antichrist with a big A.  The implication of St. John’ saying “even now are there many antichrists” is that his readers had received teaching regarding a singular Antichrist.  While St. John is the only Scriptural writer to use the word “antichrist”, St. Paul mentions a figure in 2 Thessalonians that has been equated with the singular Antichrist throughout the history of Christian Scriptural exegesis.  This figure is the “man of sin” and “son of perdition” (2 Thess. 2:2) and “that Wicked” (2. Thess. 2:8) and discussion of him occupies most of the second chapter of 2 Thessalonians.  This is one of the earliest of St. Paul’s epistles.  The two epistles to the Thessalonians were written back to back shortly after St. Paul’s flight from Thessalonica to Berea (Acts 17:10).  False teachers had taken advantage of the brevity of St. Paul’s time with the Church in Thessalonica to forge a letter (2 Thess. 2:2) to confuse and trouble the Church with their doctrine which resembled that which in the present day is called preterism.

 

The “man of sin” or “son of perdition”, according to St. Paul, is someone who will be revealed after a “falling away” and who “opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.” (2 Thess. 2:4)  His coming “is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.” (2 Thess. 2:9-10)   St. John of Damascus wrote the following about this figure in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith:

 

It should be known that the Antichrist is bound to come. Every one, therefore, who confesses not that the Son of God came in the flesh and is perfect God and became perfect man, after being God, is Antichrist. 1 John 2:22 But in a peculiar and special sense he who comes at the consummation of the age is called Antichrist. First, then, it is requisite that the Gospel should be preached among all nations, as the Lord said Matthew 24:14, and then he will come to refute the impious Jews. For the Lord said to them: I have come in My Father's name and you receive Me not: if another shall come in his own name, him you will receive. John 5:43 And the apostle says, Because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved, for this cause God shall send them a strong delusion that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. The Jews accordingly did not receive the Lord Jesus Christ who was the Son of God and God, but receive the impostor who calls himself God. For that he will assume the name of God, the angel teaches Daniel, saying these words, Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers. Daniel 11:37 And the apostle says: Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition: who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits in the temple of God 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, showing himself that he is God; in the temple of God he said; not our temple, but the old Jewish temple. For he will come not to us but to the Jews: not for Christ or the things of Christ: wherefore he is called Antichrist. [1]

 

The Damascene’s account of the Antichrist is fairly representative of Patristic teaching on the subject.  St. Cyril of Jerusalem included an extended discussion of the Antichrist in the fifteenth of his Catechetical Lectures.[2]  One of the earliest treatises extant on the subject was On Christ and Antichrist by St. Hippolytus of Rome who lived in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.  St. Hippolytus stressed that the Antichrist would be a Satanic counterfeit of the true Christ:

Now, as our Lord Jesus Christ, who is also God, was prophesied of under the figure of a lion, on account of His royalty and glory, in the same way have the Scriptures also aforetime spoken of Antichrist as a lion, on account of his tyranny and violence. For the deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God. Christ is a lion, so Antichrist is also a lion; Christ is a king, John 18:37 so Antichrist is also a king. The Saviour was manifested as a lamb; John 1:29 so he too, in like manner, will appear as a lamb, though within he is a wolf. The Saviour came into the World in the circumcision, and he will come in the same manner. The Lord sent apostles among all the nations, and he in like manner will send false apostles. The Saviour gathered together the sheep that were scattered abroad, and he in like manner will bring together a people that is scattered abroad. The Lord gave a seal to those who believed on Him, and he will give one like manner. The Saviour appeared in the form of man, and he too will come in the form of a man. The Saviour raised up and showed His holy flesh like a temple, John 2:19 and he will raise a temple of stone in Jerusalem. And his seductive arts we shall exhibit in what follows.[3]

 

St. Hippolytus was a student of St. Ireneaus, the second century Bishop of Lyon, a spiritual grandson of sorts to St. John the Apostle, in that he had grown up in the Church of Smyrna under the teaching of its bishop, St. Polycarp, who had been a disciple of St. John.  St. Ireneaus discussed the Antichrist in the fifth book of his Against Heresies.  Drawing primarily on the book of Daniel and 2 Thessalonians, St. Irenaeus depicted the Antichrist as a tyrannical ruler who would arise at the end of history, putting away idols to make himself the one idol, who will rule for three and a half years and set up himself to be worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem.[4] 

 

On this last point, St. Irenaeus, like St. Hippolytus and St. Cyril of Jerusalem, held that the Temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt so that St. Paul’s prophecy could be literally fulfilled.  Other Fathers interpreted the passage less literally.  There is no Patristic consensus on this point.  Where the Fathers are far more united is in their assertion that before the Second Coming of Christ, at the very end of history, this final and ultimate figure of evil will arise.  References to this figure appear in most of the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest Patristic writers whose lives partially overlapped those of the Apostles.[5] 

 

Since the Man of Sin will be destroyed by Jesus Christ at His Second Coming (2 Tess. 2:8) it is reasonable to understand him to be one of the beasts of Revelation 13 which are depicted as being cast into the Lake of Fire by Jesus Christ at His Second Coming in Revelation 19.  This is indirectly acknowledged by the Fathers, who generally preferred to make reference to the Old Testament antecedent of the beasts of Revelation, the beasts and “Little Horn” of the book of Daniel when discussing the Antichrist.  The canonical status of the book of Revelation may have something to do with this – it was the last book of the New Testament to be written and the last book to gain universal acknowledgement as canon.  It also raised some interpretative difficulties.  There are after all, two beasts mentioned in Revelation 13.  Which of the two is to be understood to be the Man of Sin?  This problem does not arise with Daniel because although there are four beasts mentioned there rather than two, it is clearly the “little horn” of the fourth beast who is to be identified with the Man of Sin.

 

In fact, the book of Daniel should remove the dilemma with regards to the two beasts of Revelation.  The fourth beast has ten horns, just like the first beast in Revelation 13.  This suggests that the first beast of Revelation 13 is the Man of Sin, a fact further supported by the fact that the function of the second beast is to make the world worship the first beast and his image (Rev. 13:12-15), which would make the first beast the one who sets himself up to be worshipped.  Moreover, the beasts of Revelation 13, along with the dragon of Revelation 12, make up a triumvirate of evil that is clearly supposed to be a Satanic counterfeit of the Trinity.  When they are spoken of this way, the first beast is in the second position after the dragon (Satan), and before the second beast who is called the false prophet.  This is where we would expect to find the counterfeit of the real Christ, because the real Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

 

The first beast of Revelation 13 is not just the Man of Sin, however, but his empire as well.  In Daniel, the four beasts of Daniel 7 are the same empires depicted as parts of a giant image in Daniel 2.  The empires would rise in succession to each other.  Daniel lived most of his life under the first of these, the Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar.  He lived to see this empire overthrown in the days of Belshazzar by Cyrus the Great’s Persian Achaemenid Empire.  The third was the Macedonian Empire of Philip and Alexander.  The fourth, of course, was the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire is easily recognizable in the first beast of Revelation, not only by the ten horns equating it with the fourth beast of Daniel, but by the seven heads, identified as seven hills upon which a great city that rules over all the world sits (Rev. 17:9, 18).

 

The identification of the beast of Revelation with both the Roman Empire and the Man of Sin has raised a number of interesting questions.  How can the Roman Empire be around to be destroyed at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ when it long ago converted to Christianity, broke up into a Western and Eastern Empire, the first of which disappeared in the first millennium, the second of which after a further half millennium of war with the Islamic world, fell to the Ottomans on the eve of the Reformation?  How can an individual be someone who will deceive the world in general and the Jews who rejected the true Messiah in particular into worshipping him and at the same time the ruler of the Roman Empire?

 

Revelation actually provides the answer to the first question.  Revelation 17:8 reads:

 

The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

 

The beast, remember, refers both to the Roman Empire and to the tyrant who will rule it at the end of history.  When trying to understand passages about the beast it is not a simple matter of determining which of two is in view, for verses often about him often – perhaps always – have a double meaning, one which applies to the empire, the other to its ruler the Antichrist.  This verse, applied to the man rather than the empire, would indicate a Satanic counterfeit of the events of the Gospel.  The events of the Gospel, of course, are the death, burial, and resurrection of the true Christ.[6]  Revelation had already indicated that there would be a Satanic counterfeit of this shortly after introducing the beast in the thirteenth chapter and we will return to that shortly.  As applied to the empire this verse explains how a long defunct empire will be around to be ruled by the Antichrist at the end of history.  In some way this empire will cease to be and will return.

 

The Protestant Reformers, in an interpretation born out of the battle over ecclesiastical reform in the Western Church in the sixteenth century, took the position that the presence of the Roman Empire at the end of time is to be explained by the Imperium having passed to the Pontificate so that the Roman Empire survived in the Roman Catholic Church.  By this interpretation the Pope – not a particular pope, but the office – is the Antichrist.  Judged by its fruit, however, which include the false understanding of Church history that the heretical sects of the last four hundred years have used to justify departing from Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, this interpretation is a bad tree.  The error of the papacy is not the denial of Christ – Rome affirms the orthodox Creeds – but the error of continuing to do what the disciples were doing in Luke 9:46, and ignoring what Jesus had to say about it in the verses that immediately follow. 

 

Furthermore, Revelation 17:8 indicates a return – “is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit” – rather than a survival through transfer of power to a different institution.  Bible prophecy interpreters of the last century frequently spoke of a “revived Roman Empire” and while these teachers generally interpreted Biblical prophecy through the lens of dispensationalism, a false system of theology based on the errors of a) ignoring St. Paul’s identification of the seed of Abraham in Galatians 3, b) reversing St. Paul’s identification of the period of Law as a temporary measure within God’s program of Grace and claiming the present Age of Grace to be a “parenthesis” in the period of  Law, and c) denying the obvious implication of continuity between Israel and the Church in the olive tree metaphor of Romans 11 and positing a two peoples of God theory, the term aptly describes what has to happen for the Patristic explanations of the Antichrist to be correct.

 

The most well-known Bible prophecy interpreter of the last century was Hal Lindsey.  Lindsey, who passed away last November just two days after his 95th birthday[7] was the author, with the help of C. C. Carlson, of The Late Great Planet Earth.  Published in 1970 by Zondervan, the largest of the evangelical publishing houses based in Grand Rapids, Michigan[8] this became the bestselling nonfiction book of the decade.   Lindsey believed the European Economic Community or Common Market, founded by the Treaty of Rome in 1958, and an early stage in the development of what is today the European Union, would develop into a “United States of Europe” that would become the revived Roman Empire.[9]  Although Lindsey proved to be correct in his prediction that the Common Market would evolve into a political confederation there is a better contender for the status of revived Roman Empire.  The fact that the European Union occupies much of the same territory as the old Roman Empire should not be regarded as a decisive identifying factor.  The city of “Babylon” in Revelation 17, after all, was not located on the Euphrates River.

 

In the eighteenth century, when the leaders of the Thirteen Colonies decided they wanted to leave the British Empire, they evoked the actions of Lucius Junius Brutus and his confederates who drove the last king, Tarquinus Superbus out and established the Roman Republic.  The comparison was not a good one.  The house of Tarquin had provoked this action with the rape of Lucretia, the wife of one of Brutus’s colleague’s and the daughter of another, by Tarquin’s son Sextus.  The actions of the British government to which America’s fathers took offense were not remotely comparable, and the elected Parliament was responsible for them rather than the king against whom the rhetoric of America’s founding propaganda was for the most part directed.  Nevertheless, the comparison became deeply embedded in the American identity.  When they had won their independence, they established a republic in the Roman sense of the word (kingless government), borrowing Roman constitutional and legal principles, terminology (Senate), and symbolism (the eagle).  They consciously evoked the architecture of ancient Rome in designing the capital city of their new republic, and Congress meets in a building called the Capitol on Capitol Hill, which names are borrowed from the Capitoline,[10] one of the seven hills of Rome, the one that was home to the temple of Jupiter.   Note that it was pagan Rome, not Christian Rome, the earliest form of Christendom or Christian civilization, to which America’s Founding Fathers looked for inspiration.  The United States, while it has historically been a Christian nation, in the sense that Christianity was the majority religion of its people, was not founded as a Christian country, but as a liberal, secular, country.

 

As did the Roman republic, so the United States, the New Rome, has grown into an empire.  She signaled her intention to do just that very early on.  In the nineteenth century her imperialism was one of literal territorial expansion.  Her attempt to conquer, or in her diseased mind “liberate” British North America (Canada) in the War of 1812 failed, but she was much more successful at expanding to her south and west.   A huge step in her growth into an empire was her internecine war in the 1860s.  In the misleading, simplified, version of this story, it was a war over the abolition of slavery.  In reality, it was the culmination of a clash between two different cultures in the United States.  The “Yankee” culture of the American north-east had grown out of the Puritanism of the Plymouth Rock colony.  The Mayflower Pilgrims, rejecting European Christendom, had come to North America, believing they were called to establish a purer Christian society in accordance with Puritan ideals, a “city on a shining hill.”  They retained this attitude, even after their Christianity evaporated, and developed a kind of secular Puritanism, in which liberal, capitalist, democratic values took the place that strict Calvinist had once held.  The culture of the American South had grown out of the slightly older Jamestown colony, which had been settled by Christians who were more orthodox and less Puritan, and this culture was less inclined to cut ties with European Christendom and retained more of the older set of values of Christian civilization.  In the century since the American Revolution, the balance of power between the two shifted, the Yankee culture came to dominate, the South decided it wanted to secede from the United States as the United States had seceded from the British empire, and the Yankee north-east went to war and brutally crushed the South.  Having suppressed internal dissent to Yankee culture, with its delusion of American exceptionalism, the United States entered into a new era of American imperialism on a global scale. 

 

Out of the three Punic Wars of ancient times, Rome had emerged as master of the Mediterranean world.  This was the birth of the Roman Empire, before there was a Caesar to rule it as emperor.  At the end of the Modern Age, over the course of which the liberalism that had given birth to the United States gradually transformed Christendom into “Western Civilization”, the countries of “Western Civilization” fought two major conflicts with each other, the two World Wars, out of which two superpowers emerged, the United States and the Soviet Union.  The countries of the former Christendom that had not fallen under Soviet control behind the Iron Curtain quickly became clients of the United States.  When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States as the sole power, the then American president George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” in which a coalition led by the United States, would police the world in the name of freedom, capitalism, and democracy.  The Global American Empire was born.  The revived Roman Empire.

 

Note that in the book of Revelation, when Babylon, the woman who rides the beast is destroyed, the merchants of the world are particularly said to mourn.[11]  This aligns well with the GAE as the revived Roman Empire since capitalism is not only the United States’ basic raison d'être but the glue that holds the GAE together as well.  Note also, that both the books of Daniel and Revelation say that the Antichrist will rule for three and a half years.[12]  That is half a year short of an American presidential term.  Jesus in the Olivet Discourse said “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.”[13]  This could refer either to the period leading up to the destruction of the Temple, or to the period leading up to the Second Coming, or to both since Jesus was addressing both events in this discourse.  Applied to the period leading up to the Second Coming, it would explain the difference between the rule of the Antichrist and a presidential term, if the GAE is indeed the revived Roman Empire, making the Antichrist an American president.

This makes it all the more interesting that a false christ is currently the president of the United States.

 

Now, before I continue, let me make it clear that I am not saying dogmatically that Donald the Orange is the Man of Sin.  People have been saying that such-and-such is the Antichrist for two millennia and getting it wrong.  The safest time to say that you know for sure that someone is the Antichrist is when Jesus Christ returns and throws him into the Lake of Fire.  That having been said, eventually someone has to get it right and whether or not he is the actual ultimate Antichrist someone who matches the description as closely as Donald the Orange needs to be warned against.

 

That Donald the Orange is at the very least a false messiah is demonstrable.  Jesus of Nazareth is the true Christ.  He was born of a virgin, the sign God gave to the house of David,[14] the legitimate heir of David by two methods of reckoning recorded by the Evangelists while the records were still available before the Temple was destroyed,[15] in Bethlehem where the Messiah was to be born,[16] shewed Himself to Jerusalem in the way it was prophesied that He would,[17] and underwent the suffering the Old Testament predicted He would suffer,[18] at the very time it was prophesied this would take place.[19]  Then, unlike false messiahs who end badly and whose movements die with them, He rose again from the dead, also in accordance with prophecy[20] as the ultimate proof of His identity.  When He comes again, there will be no mistaking it, for He will come in the same manner in which He departed earth.[21]  Therefore, anyone who is not Jesus of Nazareth, about whom serious messianic claims are made either by himself or by his followers without his repudiation, is a false messiah.

 

In 2022 an author by the name of Helgard Müller published a book entitled President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man – The Christ.[22]  This book argues that there are two Christs, the Son of God, Jesus, and the Son of Man, Trump.  The year after that, someone publishing anonymously and blasphemously as “Holy Ghost Writer,” published an e-book entitled Donald J. Trump: The Second Coming of Christ.[23]  A book with an almost identical title to this, Donald John Trump: The Second Coming of Christ had previously been published in 2019 by Martin Orchard Twig and Eleanor Orchard Twig.[24] 

 

These books which literally say that Trump is Christ are by anonymous or obscure Trump followers.  Someone might try to argue that Donald the Orange himself should not be held responsible for what the wing-nuts of his movement say about him.  One problem with this argument is that these writers have merely taken to its ultimate extreme something that is mainstream in the MAGA movement – comparing Trump to Christ, making an idol out of him,[25] and speaking about him in messianic language as a saviour.  Another problem with the argument is that Trump is clearly the one who has created this idolatrous cult around himself.  Rather than repudiating these blasphemous claims, he embraces them, redistributes them, and makes them himself.

 

On August 21, 2019, Trump sent out a series of tweets which contained a quote from Wayne Allan Root that Root had made during his live call-in television show on Newsmax.  Here are the tweets, to which I have added italics to Root’s words to make it clearer who is speaking:

 

‘Thank you to Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words. 'President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world not just America he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world...and the Jewish people in Israel love him....

 

....like he's the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God...But American Jews don't know him or like him. They don't even know what they're doing or saying anymore. It makes no sense! But that's OK if he keeps doing what he's doing he's good for.....

 

.....all Jews Blacks Gays everyone. And importantly he's good for everyone in America who wants a job.' Wow! @newsmax @foxandfriends @OANN[26]

 

Now, while Root attributed the blasphemous view of Trump as Christ (“King of Israel” “second coming of God”) to Israeli Jews, the attribution is one of approval not condemnation, to which Trump gives his own approval.  According to Root, Trump after sending out these tweets “walked outside of the White House, in front of a mob of media, looked up at the sky and said, ‘I am the chosen one.’”[27]

 

So no, there is no absolving Trump of responsibility for these blasphemous claims about himself.  Since he is not Jesus of Nazareth, returning in the clouds to the Mount of Olives, he is therefore a false christ.

 

Now Jesus said that there would be many false christs.[28]  Is there any reason for thinking Donald the Orange to be the ultimate one, the Antichrist, other than that he is a false christ heading a revived Roman Empire?

 

The first time that the possibility occurred to me was after his assassination attempt on July 13 of last year.  A sniper’s bullet grazed his ear during a rally in Pennsylvania.   When I first heard the story and saw the footage of him with his bloody ear rising up and raising his fist, I became fairly certain that he had just been handed an election victory.  However, a verse from the Bible also immediately popped into my head: “And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.”[29]  I quickly dismissed the thought because the wound was hardly “deadly” and at the time I still had a fairly positive view of Trump.  He had entered American presidential politics ten years ago, after all, as champion of those whom the Left had been unjustly villainizing and scapegoating for decades, whom mainstream “conservatives” had been afraid to defend, and who had been constantly told that any attempt to speak out for their own interests constituted one sort of unconscionable “ism” or “phobia” or another and while skeptical that he would deliver, I set aside my disdain for demagogic populism and cautiously cheered him on.  He delivered better than I thought he would.  On the issue of abortion, for example, he delivered an American Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, more than any of the previous presidential candidates from his party who courted the American pro-life movement every election had ever delivered.  The people who were against him were and are generally the people I am against.  The increasingly cultish attitude of his followers bothered me, but I was not aware at the time of just how far that cult had gone in its idolatry of the man.   After his first of many threats of Anschluss against my country opened my eyes regarding him I reflected further on what I had too quickly dismissed.  It occurred to me that while the literal head wound he received was not mortal, his political life could be described as having received a mortal wound in the election of 2020 and its aftermath from which it recovered largely through the means of the literal wound.  Prophecies about the beast, remember, have many layers.

 

It then occurred to me just how much of what Revelation 13 says about the beast fits Donald the Orange.

 

The verse immediately after the one about the head wound says that the world will worship the dragon (Satan) and the beast, “saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?”[30]  Trump’s followers have long been convinced that he is invincible and will inevitably get his way on everything, an attitude that seems to be increasingly shared by others who are not his followers per se.

 

Then the verse following that says “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.”[31] Forty two months is three and a half years which we have already discussed.  The first part of the verse is most interesting.  Again “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies.”  This alludes back to the prophecy of the little horn in Daniel that had eyes “and a mouth that spake very great things.”[32]  This detail is repeated a few verses later in the explanation of the little horn “And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws:”[33]  Trump has definitely been given a mouth.  He uses it, alternately to talk about the greatness of this, that, and the other thing, and to trash talk.  Changing laws is a large part of his agenda, he seems to think that he has the authority to change any law he likes with his pen, and while he hasn’t gotten around to changing times yet, after renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” can renaming the days and months to things like “Americauary” and “Trumpday” be far off?

 

Verses 11-15 of Revelation 13 describe the second beast, who in the rest of the book is called the False Prophet.   This beast exercises the power of the first beast and causes all to worship the first beast.[34] He is a miracle worker who brings fire down from heaven.[35]  He makes an image of the first beast,[36] which he is able to bring to life.[37]  The day after his second inauguration, Trump declared a $500 billion investment in AI (Artificial Intelligence) infrastructure.[38]  More recently, he posted an AI-generated video depicting his plan to turn the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East” featuring a giant gold statue of himself.[39]   The video also includes a scene in which Elon Musk walks through a crowd of Gazans as money rains down from the sky on everyone.  Musk, the tech wizard behind Tesla, while he has expressed concerns about AI in the past these have not prevented him from making use of it, and if Trump proves to be the final Antichrist, is the obvious contender for the role of False Prophet.

 

The last three verses of Revelation 13 contain the part of the prophecy of the Antichrist that is most familiar to people, the famous Mark of the Beast, in which all are made to receive a mark on their right hand or forehead, without which they cannot buy or sell, which mark is the number of the beast, six hundred and sixty-six.[40]  The Mark of the Beast is a brand, indicating that the person who receives it belongs to the Antichrist, a Satanic counterfeit of someone being marked as belonging to Christ with the sign of the cross in baptism.  Note how the Antichrist uses economic threats to force people to take his mark.  Now consider Donald Trump’s tariff policy.  Trump’s tariff policy is not that of protectionism or economic nationalism the way these have traditionally worked.  Trump uses tariffs as weapons, to force other countries to do his bidding. He uses tariffs on countries, the way the Antichrist uses his mark on individuals.  As for the mark, take note of where Trump’s followers wear their sign of allegiance to him and his movement. In those red hats, on their foreheads.

 

Donald Trump is one who has come in his own name.   Because the Antichrist will be received by the Jews who reject Christ, it has long been thought that he would be Jewish, a reasonable assumption in that it seemed unthinkable that the Jew would accept a non-Jewish messiah claimant.  Some of the Church Fathers were more specific and argued that the Antichrist would come from the tribe of Dan, on the grounds of Jacob’s final words about Dan[41] and the tribe’s omission from the list of tribes in Revelation.[42]  This was a less reasonable assumption in that it is rather clear in the Old Testament that the Christ comes from Judah – the term “Messiah” or “Christ” refers to his being the Anointed King of Israel, Son of David – so why would the Jews accept a claimant from another tribe? While this would seem to rule the nominal Presbyterian Trump out, in his first term as American president, he was more popular in Israel than in his own country.  By the end of that term the only country in the world where he was more popular than in Israel was the Philippines,[43] and Israel was the only country with majority support for his non-domestic policies.[44]  He remains extremely popular in Israel to this day.[45]  He has come in his own name, and has been received in at least a sense by those who have rejected the true Christ, although I suspect that Wayne Allyn Root’s claim that they literally view him in messianic terms is in large part a projection of his own views of the man.  Daniel 9:27, “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week” has been interpreted as meaning that the Antichrist will make  a seven year peace treaty with Israel that he will later break.[46]  While not exactly a seven year treaty, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the latest round of their ongoing co-operative effort to raise funds from their gullible sponsors by fighting each other, went into effect the day before Trump’s second inauguration with him, of course, taking the credit for it.[47]  He has since been at the centre of the ongoing talks, and this Gaza plan of his is about equal parts his own self-aggrandizement and securing peace for Israel.  It would be entirely in keeping with his character for him to build a Third Temple then erect a gaudy statue of himself in it.

 

Ultimately, of course, the question of whether this false christ presiding over the revived Roman Empire is the final Antichrist will be decided by whether his downfall coincides with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  If he is the Man of Sin, before that he will make “war on the saints”[48]  Although the new White House Faith Office he has established is supposed to do the opposite of that, an agency of that nature can easily become the instrument of persecution.  At any rate, whether the ultimate Antichrist or merely the latest in a long line of forerunners, this false christ presently enjoys overwhelming support among America’s Christians.  The eyes of the truly faithful will eventually be opened.  May you be found among those loyal to the true Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, rather than any imposter.

 


[1] St. John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 9, edited by Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace, 4.26.1.

[2] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 7, 15.9, 12-18.

[3] St. Hippolytus of Rome, On Christ and Antichrist, trans. J. H. MacMahon in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe, 6.

[4] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1,  5.27.1-5.

[5] For example, Epistle of Barnabas, 4, and St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 110.

[6] 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.

[7] Interestingly, in a trivial rather than a relevant or significant way, his birthday is also the anniversary of the JFK assassination.

[8] Since 1988 Zondervan has been owned by HarperCollins, a branch of the Murdoch media empire.

[9] Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), 88-97.

[10] The city in which it the Capitol is located, Washington D.C., is the capital city of the United States.  Capital is not derived from Capitoline, but from caput, capitis, the Latin word for “head”, although Capitoline itself likely comes from this word (by ancient tradition the hill was named after the temple which was so called because of a skull uncovered when digging the foundation for it).  Thus, while the two words come ultimately from the same source (caput), it is through entirely different paths, and by a strange coincidence they ended up denoting, the one a building and the other the city in which it is located.

[11] Rev. 18:11-19.

[12] Dan. 7:25, Rev. 13:5.

[13] Matt. 24:22.

[14] Isaiah 7:14.

[15] Matthew 1, Luke 3.

[16] Micah 5:2.

[17] Zechariah 9:9.

[18] Psalm 22, Isaiah 53.

[19] Daniel 9:24-26.  The years in the weeks of years are Chaldean lunar years of 360 days.  The commandment to restore and build Jerusalem took place in 445 BC according to our reckoning of years.  After all the adjustments are made from the one way of calculating years to the other, this prophecy has the Messiah being “cut off”, i.e., killed, in the early 30s AD.

[20] Psalm 16:10.

[21] Acts 1:11.

[22] Helgard Müller, President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man – The Christ, (Outskirt Books, 2022). 

[23] Anonymous (as “Holy Ghost Writer”), Donald J. Trump: The Second Coming of Christ, (2023).

[24] Martin Orchard Twig, Eleanor Orchard Twig, Donald John Trump: The Second Coming of Christ, (2019).

[25] John Wesley Reid, “Trump Idolatry is a Real Thing and It must Stop”, Christian Post, January 25, 2024. https://www.christianpost.com/voices/ trump-idolatry-is-a-real-thing-and-it-must-stop.html Accessed February 27, 2025.

[26] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ documents/tweets-august-21-2019

[27] Wayne Allyn Root, “Donald Trump is the Chosen One”, Creators Syndicate, August 8, 2023. https://www.creators.com/read/wayne-allyn-root/08/23/donald-trump-is-the-chosen-one  Accessed February 27, 2025.

[28] Matt. 24:5, 24.

[29] Rev. 1342.

[30] Rev. 13:4.

[31] Rev. 13:5.

[32] Dan. 7:20.

[33] Dan. 7:25.

[34] Rev. 13:12.

[35] Rev. 13:13.

[36] Rev. 13:14.

[37] Rev. 13:15.

[40] Rev. 13:16-18.

[41] Gen. 19:17.

[42] Rev. 7:7-8.

[46] Lindsey and Carlson, 56-57.

[48] Rev. 13:7.

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