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The Man of Sin

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Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 15, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 7.

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The Man of Sin

By Editor

3039.— E. E. D.— The Man of Sin.— The view that the man of sin is some particular individual, some great world-influencing character in the last days, is not a new view. The suggestion has arisen from those who do not see what Paul declares in 2 Thessalonians 2 fulfilled in the Papacy. It is contrary to the genius of the whole Scripture, it seems to us, to interpret it as an individual. Of course there will be an individual behind it all, and that will be Satan, the one with whom sin originated; and when the time fully comes, he himself will appear as an angel of light. He will have agents; but he will use no one human agent to deceive and delude the whole world. There have been noted characters in the past whom the Lord uses as types. Cain is the type of the sinners who lived after him—many in number. Jezebel, the idolatrous wife of Ahab, becomes a type, in this dispensation, of a great apostate church. Ahab himself becomes the type of weakly, worldly powers which yield to the seductions of an apostate church. Elijah, the true messenger of God to the one small nation, becomes a type of a class of men who will like Elijah give God’s truth to the world. So the man of sin represents a system controlled and held and molded by men, the head of that system itself being man, and not God.
Replying further to our correspondent, we would say that there are even those in various churches who see some of the light from God’s Word concerning the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. One of the great means which Satan has used to nullify all such preaching, is to pervert it. He has led men to attach to the wonderful doctrine the return of the Jews, a great personal antichrist, that is called the “second rapture,” and other deceptions which find no root or ground in God’s Word, in order that the very ones who are agitated over His coming may put far off the evil day. The only true way for the Christian to do, is to hold to the Word and to the interpretation of the prophecies found in Daniel. Holding to these, he will have no difficulty in deciding what is the man of sin.