A friend of mine sent me an email asking me about the recent video entitled, “DIDJESUSGIVEUSTHENAMEOFTHEANTICHRIST.wmv”. You can
watch it on YouTube. Here is my response to him.
I’m not sure if it is meant as a joke or not. I don’t know who made it. Everyone who knows me well knows that I am no fan of our president. I disagree with him probably on almost every major Theological, Moral, and Political issue. However, this video is among the worst Biblical exegesis out there.
First of all, when interpreting Scripture, we are should not be seeking to read between the lines, but rather the very lines themselves. We should not look for some hidden code in numbers or transliterated letters, but rather for what the words themselves actually mean.
Secondly, we must seek to understand the words in their given context (not ours here in 21st America) and how they were actually intended by the writers (under God) of the Bible. Thus, if we can manipulate the words and letters and patterns in the Bible (or in Shakespeare’s plays or the NY Times) to make it say something like this, it does not mean that that is what the original writers intended for their orginal readers to understand.
Thirdly, the passages that this video points to have very clear meanings referring to satan’s past fall from heaven, not the Anti-Christ’s future take over. Let’s be honoring to Jesus and His Word by taking Him at His word, as He intended them.
Fourthly, while there may be one final Anti-Christ to come in the future, there have been and still are and will be many anti-Christ’s (I John 2:18; II John 7). Whoever is not with Him, is against Him.
Fifthly, in order to understand Scripture we should be taking Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek words and translating them, NOT transliterating them. The difference is this: Translating is taking a word from the original language and writing it in another language with the intended meaning of that word in it’s given context. Transliterating is taking the letters of a word from the original language and writing the letters in another language. For instance, the Greek word “γη” in English is translated as “earth”, but it is transliterated as “ge“, pronounced as “gay” in English. This, of course, does not mean that the physical earth we have is happy or homosexual. That is just plain stupid.
Sixthly, some words in the Bible are proper names as well as common nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc…. The name, “Timothy”, means “honoring God”, but people called him Timothy. If we were to read a Scripture passage about how we our commanded to always be honoring God, we would not suppose the passage to be saying that we must become “Timothy” or change our name to Timothy. So we need to understand that names are names, and verbs are verbs and nouns are nouns and so forth. And there is actually a man in the Bible named “Barak” (See Judges 4 and 5 and Hebrews 11:32). And yes, his name does mean, “lightning”, but he in no way is likened to satan, the anti-Christ, or our current president. Why is that? Because that does not fit someone’s twisted agenda.
I hope all of this is clear. There is just such a lack of serious Bible study and honest handling of God’s Word. If people wanted to do it badly enough, they could twist the Bible to make it say that “Bob Hope” or “Oprah Winfrey” is the anti-Christ. I would hate for someone to be incited by such a video to devise a plan to attack our president. And I would hate it even more if such a video incited an attack on our president with the Word of God and the Name of Christ being dragged through the proverbial mud as this was claimed to be a “Christian” thing.
