Well, another date prophesied for the Rapture has come and gone. In 2018, a South African preacher named Joshua Mhlakela announced that he had a vision in which Jesus told him that He would return on the Feast of Trumpets (that is, the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashana) in 2025. That would mean the Rapture, in which dispensationalists believe that Jesus will take Christians immediately to Heaven to escape the tribulation to come, would be on one of the two days of Rosh Hashana: September 22 or 23.
Social media got ahold of this date, stirring up lots of trepidation and anticipation. Those dates have come and gone, but Christians remain in this world and Jesus continues to tarry. Though Rev. Mhlakela might argue that the Rapture did come, but that there are so few genuine Christians that the public might not notice that they are missing.
It certainly feels like the End of the World must be at hand. Yeats felt that way:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
What’s most intriguing, though, is that another aspect of End Time speculation is coming to the fore: the rise of the Antichrist.
This is not coming from a preacher but from one of our biggest tech titans, Peter Thiel. One of the founders of PayPal and the national defense software giant Palantir, Thiel, as the 103rd richest man in the world, is also a venture capitalist who was a major investor in Silicon Valley projects ranging from Facebook to Artificial Intelligence. He has also bankrolled the political ambitions of Vice President J. D. Vance and other conservatives. Though Thiel is in a same-sex marriage, he identifies as a “somewhat heterodox” Christian.
Lately, he has been lecturing on the coming Antichrist. Sponsored by the Silicon Valley Christian ministry that we have blogged about, ACTS 17, these lectures are supposed to be confidential, but one attendee has violated the conditions of attendance and told the media what Thiel has been discussing.
So who is the Antichrist, according to Thiel? No, not the pope. Not Donald Trump. And not an all-knowing and all-knowing AI. In fact, Thiel says regulating AI and other technology is what will bring on the Antichrist.
Here is his argument, as reported by Angel Au-Yeung in the Wall Street Journal:
This is how Thiel says the end of the world might happen, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his recent lectures. Existential risks will present themselves in the form of nuclear war, environmental disaster, dangerously engineered bioweapons and even autonomous killer robots guided by AI.
As humans race toward a last battle—the Armageddon—a one-world government will form, promising peace and safety. In Thiel’s reckoning, this totalitarian authoritarian regime, with real teeth and real power, will be the coming of the modern-day Antichrist, a figure defined in Christian teachings as the personal opponent of God who will appear before the world ends. . . .
According to a review of his past lectures, Thiel draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power needed to regulate the existential risks from science and technology. . . .
“The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, it’s redistributive, it’s an extremely great philanthropist as an effective altruist,” Thiel said. “And these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong.”
All of this is to say that the public will become so afraid of technology and of all of these potential “existential” risks, that we will turn to a charismatic leader and accept a totalitarian one-world government that promises to save us.
According to the article, Thiel “encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.” A cynic might notice that Thiel’s conclusion happens to promote the products that he himself sells. But he is hopeful that we can prevent the Antichrist from emerging. “In driving people to think more about the Armageddon or the Antichrist,” says Au-Yeung, “his hope is that human society can find a third way and avoid both outcomes.”
He thinks we can prevent the Antichrist from coming? Keep the tribulation from happening? Postpone Christ’s coming until a time more convenient to us?
Thiel said of the Bible that “One can take it seriously without taking it completely literally.” Thiel, like the Rapture-predictors, would do well to take the Bible literally instead of turning it into a set of symbols capable of unlimited interpretations.
You want to know who the Antichrist is? The Bible is very clear about that:
“Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.” 1 John 2:22
“Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.” 1 John 4:3
“For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.” 2 John 1:7
And there are and always have been lots of people who deny that Jesus is the Christ and that He has come from God and that He has not come in the flesh:
“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.” 1 John 2:18
It has been the last hour ever since St. John wrote these words in the first century. This is the same St. John whose vision of the actual Apocalypse is recorded in the Book of Revelations. His accounts of the Beast and the False Prophet and the horrors of God’s judgments are understood best not when they drive us to speculation about politicians, fear of catastrophes, or questions about whether or not we should invest in technology, but when they drive us to Christ.
The coming of the Antichrist is a prelude to the far, far greater coming of the real Christ.“The lawless one will be revealed,” says St. Paul, “whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).
Photo: Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115161430
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