A personal anti-christ cannot hide-out in plain site for too long a time, because, in essence, he is a man (or woman) and can only live as long as a human being lives. The anti-christ institution, however, can live quite a long time, longer than the lives of ten men, or even twenty old men living birth to death, head to toe, the one dying passing the torch to the baby that waits, this anti-christ institution can outlive any human reckoning, due to the fact that it is not based on humanity, but on a creature that existed before humanity was born.
But that's not what you've been taught, is it. You're expecting a Left Behind bad guy with a steel plate in his head, getting magical words from the devil. And he's going to "sit down in God's temple," oops, I mean, of course, a rebuilt Jewish temple, right?
Anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has existed a very long, long time. Probably back to the day when the Ten Commandments were finger-carved upon stone tables, possibly even further back than that. It's been around, this anti-christ power, further back. Anti-Semitism is its flavor
of the past few centuries, or more likely the past couple of millenia. Point the finger at the Jews, it's all their fault, right? They're the ones, behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Why they invented the Holocaust, don't ya know, the same way they convinced the Egyptians to force them into slavery for more than 400 years, it's a pretty effective trick, don't you think? Pretty sneaky of them, those Jews, they've had us all fooled.
At least, that's what the anti-christ power keeps repeating. Was it Hitler that said if you repeat a lie often enough it will be accepted as truth, or one of his favorite henchmen? Pound it in, drive it in like a stake, get the Christians to start repeating it, that the Jews are going to rebuild the Temple, and that the Bible calls this "the Temple of God" (even though the sacrificial system was ended at the cross . . . hmmmm, why in the world does the Bible call it "the Temple of God," why do you think?).
What is the anti-christ system hiding, anyway? What's the big secret? Why does it change the meaning of "the Temple of God?"
