Once upon a time I wrote in an early draft of a book manuscript about the spirit of antichrist as given in the Bible.  It was more or less a question positing whether this passage might have something to do with anti-Semitism to some extent. Here is the Scripture.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: 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 John 4:1-3)

My cogitation revolved around whether the words:”in the flesh” might somehow include/involve the fact that Jesus came into the world through Jewish ” flesh.” After all, Christ came into the world through the Jewish race. Satan has always wanted to have the world deny that the Jew has any special place in God’s plan for humanity.

The Jew has been hunted and hated throughout history. Adolf Hitler said the Jew is sub-human, and much of the communist world would agree with the Nazi thought in that regard, history shows. They were mistreated–brutally–by Stalin and subsequent dictators and held as the scapegoat for all problems the dictators themselves created and perpetuated. This is still going on in our time in Russia and other places. Anti-Semitism is on the grow  in virulence and scope in Europe in a way that has not been seen since pre-Nazi Germany.

Islamist hatred is not only on the grow as violently as at any time in history, it is accepted with hardly an objection by the rest of the world. Our own president, in my view, is culpable in looking the other way as burgeoning anti-Semitism explodes around the world.

As I was saying, I wrote in the manuscript about this question–and it was in an inquiring, speculative tone, intended as mere examination, not as adamant postulation. I wondered if denying that Christ came in Jewish flesh somehow figured into the matter of anti-Semitism, because Antichrist, himself, will certainly champion great hatred for God’s chosen people.

Bible prophecy is replete with foretellings of how Antichrist will persecute and murder those of the Jewish race during the Tribulation–i.e., might  denial that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” mean, in part at least, that the Antichrist spirit has at its core hatred for the Jew because that is the “flesh” through which God chose to usher His only begotten Son into this fallen world?

This went over not at all well at the publisher with whom I was under contract to do the book. I was told this was false teaching–or as I recall, that was the tone and threat I inferred the response to mean. The words were rather strongly put that I must cut that portion or they couldn’t be a part of such heresy. Well, again, that was how I interpreted the charge and subsequent threat.

Someone at the publishing house had a quite sensitive spot which I had obviously touched, not able to understand that I wasn’t challenging the standard take on what constitutes ”the spirit of antichrist.” I know that the meaning is, primarily, that there is a visceral denial among those of this lost world that God came to earth in the flesh to die for the sin of mankind and to redeem mankind. Still, He did enter this world through the Jewish flesh.

I find the fact that Christians who truly have a pre-Trib, pre-Millennial view of Bible prophecy seem the only core entity that doesn’t display animus for Israel. Most of the world sees Israel as the cause of the problems with regard to the so-called Palestinian question. That the Jewish state is illegitimate, and the illegal occupier of land belonging to the Palestinian people, is the never-ceasing mantra.

Those who aren’t openly hostile to Israel either give nods of approval to those who say Israel is the problem or say nothing at all as that nation is verbally pounded and hounded from every quarter.

So-called Christian  organizations–even those churches claiming to be evangelicals–join in the satanic stream-of-consciousness insistence that Israel no longer is inheritor of God’s promises made to that people. These enthusiastically join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction” (BDS) movement in their denial that the Jews are God’s chosen people.

Okay, I might be way off the mark in my ruminations about the Jewish race–about Israel–being a part of John’s warning in this antichrist spirit passage. But, the Jews are indeed being hated today like throughout all of history. That anti-Semitism is on the rise can’t be denied by anyone other than those who are cerebrally incapable of realizing it, or who are liars.

Every indicator points to the likelihood that the one called Antichrist is about to step out of the shadows of this rising hatred and into the spotlight for doing his dastardly deeds against God’s chosen people, the Jews.

Thankfully, born-again believers will have to exit the world stage first. The antichrist spirit so prevalent today is proof-positive that the time of that exiting–the Rapture– must be near indeed.