OK I'm going to get tediously repetitive again aout the identity of the Antichrist and the identitty of the Restrainer who must be taken out of the way for the Antichrist to be revealed.
I've been listening to some old Chuck Missler talks and this comes up from time to time in those talks, most particularly of course in his two part talk on the Rapture of the Church. He's solidly pretribulational pre millennial in his eschatology and I still regard that as the best system for the end times although I also still have questions about it that continue unanswered. My questios don't make any of the other systems an more attractive to me at all, they just remain questionsa that color the pretrib system for me.
Despite the fact that Pope Francis has recently been in the hospital, that he's a very old man and hardly suggests the strong man we tend to associate with the Antichrist I still think the Pope must be the Antrichrist. H'e It might not be Francis but the thing about Francis is that he came to his position with all sorts of interesting signs that I've mentioned a number fo times, that identify him as peculiarly evil among the popes. Which we should be able to recognize without the signs anyway, but the signs are there. So it's hard for me to let go of this view of things. I suppose it would take his death to get me to shake it off.
Early ihn these blogs I felt God pointeded me to the Antichrist as a topic I needed to address here, so I listened to a lot of richard Bennett teachings on the subject, and CXhris Pinto, had to see that the reformers had given some solid biblical grounds for identifying the Pope as the Antichrist. Of course there could still be a different man of perdition at the very end but if he's the Antichrist I still have to see him as a Pope, and again, Francis comes with some special signs of his afficliation with the prinice of this world.
Missler thinks the Antichrist will come from the eastern side of the Romkan Empire and that he'll come in the place of the Assyreian found here and there in the Old Testament, or as a Nimrod, Nimfrod having been the first world ruler a good candidate to be the last. This entails a literal reestablishment of the city of Babylon etc. Well, it's an interesting idea but unless I am forced to see it happening in some obvious way I still go with the Pope.
The thing is, Mystery Babylon, the name on the forehead of the Harlot of Revelation 17, refers to the Church of Rome. Alexander Hislopo made that connection very compellingly in my opinion. She's dressed in the red s and purples of the Roman Church and sitting on the beast that represents the city of seven hills which is Rome. She's also Babylon because she's inherited the religion and other trappings of that pagan religion of Babylon that bgoes back to Nimrod and Semiramis. Hislop's Twso Babylons traces it ver6y convincingly as I said.
If the Antichrist of Revelation is the Pope4 then he's already been revealed and we do not need to be waiting for that evcebnt as all the pretrib people keep insisting we do. Missler makes the usual artgument. TWhat restrains this revelation of his identify must be the Holy Spirit because only the Holy Spirit can restrain sin. Well,. but that is not what the restrainewr is said to be restraining and I don't know how it keeps being read that way. What the restrainer is restraining is only the REVELATION of the Antichrist's identify. tghat does not take any special power.
I still think a major clue to the identity of the restrainer is the fact that Paul refers to him in crypitic language rather than identifying him directly. I can't see any reason for such caution or secrecey if the Holy Spirit is the restrainer. The reason for such caution about identifying him makes sense in the reasoning of the Reformerts. It would be dangerous to identify Caesar's existence as the restrainjer because that would bring the Caesar's down even more heavinly on the Church than was already ahappening. The Reformers understood it to be the Caesars who now kept the Antichrist under wraps and who had to be taken out of the way before he could be revealed because threere 8is an implicit threat to the line of the Cesars in this view. It was in fact the Bishop of rome who became the new Roman EWmperor as it were and supplanted the Cesars that the Reformers identified as the Antichrist. There is tone and tons of evidence supporting this view of him too, even a pope who said this move to put the Bishop of rome over all the Chruch was the move of Antichrist, and hundreds of Christians outside the Roman Church identified the Pope as Antichirstr. this is all historically documented and it is Chris Pinto who has put all this together for me. We dcon't need a new Antichrist. The one we've got is only too well attested.
UI enjoy Missler nevertheless. He has a lot of good teachings at You Tuve. I like his very interesting study of the supernatural nature of the Bible in the one title Extraterrestrial Message.
