On 1 John 2:18

“Someone might assume that ‘many’ antichrists implies there is no personal, individual Antichrist. But this was not John’s thought. His readers had been taught that the Antichrist is coming. This is what they heard. To show that this was no vague generality, John adds ‘even now many antichrists have come.’ He looks at the plurality of antichrists — those who deny that Jesus is the Messiah and thereby put themselves unequivocally against Christ — as proof of the eventual emergence of one supreme foe of Christ. The Antichrist who was already present and who was the liar was in his day much like the later model except that the latter will have greater power and destructiveness. In attitude they share the same outlook” (A. Berkeley Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984, p. 373).

A considerable confusion has been introduced into the study of the Bible’s prophecies by the theory that John (above) discounted the idea of a single, future antichrist and wanted his readers to understand “antichrist” to mean only a present, ongoing threat. John said: “You have heard that antichrist is coming.” He then went on to speak of the spirit of antichrist already active in advance. We misunderstand John’s intention if we attempt to make him say: “You have heard that antichrist is coming, but there will be no such final individual tyrant.” John did not contradict the many passages in Daniel and elsewhere which speak with brilliant clarity of a future, ultimate exponent of evil in the form of a single personality. It is a question of “both…and” not “either…or.”