John MacArthur Reiterates the Popular Doctrine of the Restrainer and I Try to Answer Him

Now I'm put in an uncomfortable ppsition. Just saw a recent excerpt from a John MacArthur sermon -- "Who Is HOLDING BACK the Antichrist?"-- in which he expounds on the identify ot the Restrainer I discussed in the previous post. Since I criticized that interpretation I am put in the position of defending what I just argued.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be--qqpyp94


MacArthur's theme is that the Antichrist himself is being restrained, his power in the world is restrained, not just the revelation of his identity is being restrained, which is how I read it and apparently the Reformers read it. Of course the only one who can restrain the power of the Antichrist, who is Satan, is God himself.

But the passage does not desribe any supernatural restraint of the power of the Antichrist himself, what it describes is the restraint or withholding of his appeaing, the time not being right for that yet, and the revelation of his identity. I see no implication that the time of his revelation implies the time of his great power in the Tribulation period of the book of Revelation:

2 Thess 2:3 ... for [the day of Christ] shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; 4 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[th4e day of Christ] that he is God.
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5 Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? 6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. 7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

The Falling away or apostasy would have been occurring over the years preceding the rise of the Pope/Antichrist, the accumulation of false doctrines that became absorbed into the Roman Church And again, we don't need to wait for some special occasion for the Anticvhrist to exalt himself above God because the very attributes and titles assigned to the Pope usurp the identity of Christ and God the Holy Spirit and God the Father.
Again I emphasize that if Paul was referring to God the Holy Spirit he would have had no reason to speak in such veiled terms, he would have come right out and said what he meant. But he is referring to something he had told them before without naming it, something that had not been put in writing, which implies some danger in naming it.

This refusal to name the Restrainer doesw not fit with the end times scenario that is coming about in our time, but does fit with the Reformers' interpretation that the Antichrist was revealed to be the Bishop of Rome elevated over all the other powers of the Church, which occurred in 606 AD with a decree of the Byzantine empoeror Phocas. This elevation created the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, a leader who had both religious and political power and wielded it over the next thousand years in western Christendom.

He didn't yet wield the ultimate power we expect of him during the Tribulation period, but he certainly functioned as Antichrist. the Popes were notorious for their evil lives, their sexual sins, their greed for power and wealth, their murders. Popes had fifty million true Christians tortured and murdered along with Jews and Muslime and others, he was carianly not restrained in the sense MacArthur is saying. The Roman Antichriwst Church absolutely dominated the Middle Ages. The Pope made kings and he ruled over the kings. The Roman Church grew in the superstitions of the pagan religions and the gospel message got more and more buried under those superstitions. It never completely disappeared so that true Christians remained in the Church although most of them were dissenters outside the Roman institution, such as the Waldensians. Yes the Pope did indeed put himself in the place of the Caesars, continuing the Roman Empire and calling it by that name. Christians used to know all this, many books were written about it, but all that has been lost in our day and we ar4e laboring under a half-baked eschatology concerning the identity of the Antichrist while the true Antichrist still rules over more than a billion lost souls and is jockeying for the top position in the revived Roman Empire Number Four that has been shaping up and will come to power when the Protestants are gone.

Ti ihe Pope was recognized as Antichrist by true believers outside the Roman church He operated as the Antichrist in the "Holy Roman Empire." THAT was the revived Roman Empire people are looking for today. It is already here. Its power rose and fell and just about disappeared after the Protestant Reformation but in fact did continue in the Kaiser and then Hitler's THird Reich. MacAZrthur speaks of the Roman Empire as dead. It was not, it continued as a different sort of "empire" dominated by the Pope. Now we are seeing the struggle to bring it back in the form of the European Union. The Fourth Reich. It never disappeared completely but this would be its final most powerful manifestation in the Great Tribulation period.

He's been revealed to those who understand this history, but of course he will have a more complete revelation after the Church has gone and he comes forward as the leader of the international forces that have been brewing for decades now. He's always been a political as well as a religious figure although this is not well known: the Vatican is a political entity, a sovereign state unto itself.

The true Church is ignorant of history, that's the biggest problem. I only got some inkling of all these things by listening to ex-Catholic priest Richard Bennett and to Chris Pinto who has made himself an expert on the machinations of the Jesuits to destroy the Protestant Reformation in all its forms. They infiltrate churches, they infiltrate governments, they teach their doctrines of devils in the universities and corrupt the youth of a nation, they work tirelessly to restroe the Roman Church as the ruler of the world. Too few have any sense of this and that allows the Roman Church to appear subdued and even to be treated by Protestants as just another denomination.

John MacArthur is a staunch opposer of the Roman Church and yet they fly under his radar too. No, Dr. MacArthur, we are not waiting for the revelation of the Antichrist, he's been revealed, he's been operating in plain sight for centuries AS the Antichrist over the Revived Roman Empire which is largely composed of the Roman Church itself, with all its pagan Roman trappings, weird pagan religious garb, doctrines of devils and superstitions , lying signs and wonders which have always characterized the RCC, and general inheritance of the religion of Babylon, which Alexander Hislop demonstrated in his book The Two Babylons. Not to mention the statue of Nebuchadneazzar's dream of the ssuccession of empires which tites all the heathen nations together with Rome as the ultimate expression of them all.

I have no power to influence anyone of coruse, my blogs are restrained by the censoring powers of the day, but I pray for what I write to get to the people who need to know it. I guess that's arrogant of me but oh well.