The Great Ribulation

THE COMINQ OF THE ANTICHRIST 37
though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach
to you a gospel contrary to that which we have
preached to you, let him be accursed!” (Galatians
1:8), and went on in the same letter to refite the
legalistic heresies held by Cerinthus. According to
tradition, the Apostle John wrote his Gospel and his
letters with Cerinthus especially in mind. (We are
also told that as St. John entered the public bathhouse
he spotted this Antichrist ahead of him. The
apostle immediately turned around and ran back
out, crying: “Let us flee, lest the building fall down;
for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside!”)
Returning to St. John’s statements about the
spirit of Antichrist, we should note that he stresses
one further, very significant point: as Jesus foretold
in Matthew 24, the coming of Antichrist is a sign of
“the End”: “Children, it is the Zast hou~ and just as you
heard that Antichrist is coming, even now many
Antichrists have arisen; from thk we know that it is the
last boa+’ (I John 2:18). The connection people often
make between the Antichrist and “the last days” is
correct enough; but what is often missed is the fact
that the expression the last Ays, and similar terms,
are used in the Bible to refer, not to the end of the
physical world, but to the last dgys of the nation of Israel,
the “last days” which eno%d with the destruction of the
Tmple in A.D. 70. This, too, will come to many as a
surprise; but we must accept the clear teaching of
Scripture. The New Testament authors unquestionably
used “end-times” language when speaking of the
period they were living in, before the fall of Jerusalem.
As we have seen, the Apostle John said two