The Counterfeit Messiah
Finally, if the universe is designed for human discovery, and if the scientific evidence is trending toward an acknowledgment of the existence of an intelligent designer…about the time this historic event would be persuasively decided by the scientific community…the upcoming Antichrist may come along and say:
“Yes, God does exist, and He is me!”
The arrogance of the grand deception of undeservedly stealing the credit for the brilliance of creation, an appreciation of that brilliance being the result of centuries of human labor investigating the inner workings of the natural world, would truly be ironic on a “galactic” scale.
2 Thessalonians 2:3 tells us that in the end-times the “son of perdition” will finally be exposed as the deadly and deceptive fraud that he is.
In my opinion, the Antichrist will initially be a worldly acceptable rendition of a modern-day messiah…falsely promising worldly economic salvation in a modified version of the temptation by Lucifer of Jesus in the wilderness…having short-cut, alluring, temporal worldly benefits…but eternal, spiritual destruction.
The outwardly attractive, winning ways of the Antichrist would entirely sidestep the currently contentious debate of Darwinian evolution versus theistic creation, because the key worldview issues would immediately shift downward several levels into the lower zone of worldly horizontal, temporally appealing concerns.
This is the same level at which Jesus of Nazareth was rejected as Messiah at His first advent.
Jesus of Nazareth…as the atoning Savior for sin…fell short of people’s worldly expectations for the Messiah.
This is the same level that Jesus will again be rejected by the world, but this time in head-to-head comparison between the Christian church and an Antichrist on earth visibly representing all of the attractive allure of the “cares of this world” in contrast to the higher realm of the spiritual life that only God can produce.
This will be the area of contention…because Satan has nothing else to work with.
The clever counterfeit journey of self says yes to the worldly enticing portion of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (Lk. 4:5-80. A biblical-quality journey of faith says: “no thank you.”
Unbelieving Jews in the first-century wanted worldly conventional salvation from their everyday cares, not an adventure of faith following God like Abraham, Moses, or David.
Christians operating at the higher spiritual level will recognize this subtle but deadly deception…the temporal promise of worldly counterfeit salvation at the cost of eternal damnation.
Lucifer is not God…and his promises are empty, malice-filled, and intentionally misrepresented…in the most heinously fraudulent way.
A genuine God-composed journey of faith, when viewed alongside recent scientific discoveries supporting intelligent design…removes randomness, blind chance, and whimsy from the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible.
Intricate, meticulous, brilliantly ingenious, and inventively arrayed bundles of information characterize the marvels we now better understand in the natural world.
This lends confidence to a present-day journey of faith following Jesus Christ in a new emerging way that is designed to bolster our resolve and determination to withstand the current attacks of radically skeptical unbelief, and the changing subtleties of the upcoming appeal that will mark the final world-class deceptive attractions of the counterfeit messiah…the Antichrist.
The Cross in the Christian Life 