"Antichrist" meaning "contradictory to Christ" or "opposite to Christ”, signifies a spirit that opposes the teachings, principles, and authority of Jesus Christ. Consider the history leading to the current state of Christianity teachings. It started with teachings of Jesus Christ and prophetic sayings of John the Baptist backed up by written prophecies of scriptures such as those of Isaiah and Daniel, plus the popular scriptures we find among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then the apostles of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit among the early believing disciples started to expand on the sayings of Jesus preserved among them and the prophecies of the believers passed into oral and written traditions of the early church communities. It was all, at this early stage, revered as light in the darkness. This is what was adhered to as discipleship. This is how fellowship with God the Almighty, the Father, was maintained and fellowship with His Son and with the apostles sent to lead this combined church. Errors arose and were countered by the apostles, especially by the main council of the first apostles who gave diktats on what would be taught among the churches, spreading out into the world. At some point, as written documents show us, the emphasis moved away from these teachings, towards a new kind of teaching called orthodoxy as new elders and councils, centuries later, started to look for a way to pin down a corpus of beliefs into a coherent set of theological doctrines agreed by consensus. The authority became less about the sayings of Jesus Christ and more about philosophies and dogmas agreed by the writers and elders who sat in the seats of authority of the earlier apostles. Around this time some writers, leaders, were starting to notice that the Holy Spirit no longer came upon those on whom the leaders laid hands in their church ceremonies. Coincidence? Or had the connection, the fellowship, with Christ Jesus and the Father been lost? We need to understand that this fellowship comes from persuasion that Jesus is the Mediator for believers with God, and adherence to the teachings of God given through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Then as we return to these, keeping faithful to them, we can be freed from our ethical decline. We can be free from the demise of dying in our sins. We can find the gift of eternal life, that promise Jesus originally came to bestow from God. He died for you. He rose again and now forever lives for those who follow him and have fellowship with God through him. Then God will give us miracles among us and the Holy Spirit. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
