The Anti-Christ

I almost laughed when this message came through my inbox the other day.

According to the Book of Revelations the anti-christ is: The anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuassive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal.... the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destory everything. Is it OBAMA??

It has apparently been around since March of this year. Wonder how I managed to escape it this long?

Two things that made me go "Huh?" (then almost burst into laughter) were:
1. I've read the book of Revelation a couple times. It is one of my favorite books of scripture. Mostly because of all the symbolism and deepness of it. It is not the easiest to interpret or understand. The "huh?" comes from the fact that it is so full of symbolism. Nothing is really specific. There is no who, what, when, or why. This is one of my favorite scriptures out of Revelation 13:1-2:

1 ^aAnd I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the ^bsea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his ^apower, and his seat, and great authority.

So frankly it surprised me that there would be something so specific about an anti-Christ in Revelation.

The second thing is why would God put something so specific about the "anti-Christ" in the scriptures yet not allow us to know when Christ will come again? The whole thing just doesn't make sense!

With these two things in mind I had to research this. I went to snopes.com. They are such a good resource for stuff like this. They seem very neutral. This is thought provoking:

Nothing in the Bible — in Revelation or elsewhere — describes the anti-Christ as being "a man, in his 40s, of Muslim descent." In fact, since the book of Revelation was complete by the end of the second century, but the religion of Islam wasn't founded until about four hundred years later, the notion that Revelation would have mentioned a "Muslim" at all is rather far-fetched. (And even if it did, it couldn't be construed as a reference to Barack Obama, since Senator Obama isn't a Muslim.)

It's just another way someone is trying to to attack someone and use religion to back it up. I sure wish people would stop doing that! It really doesn't help the cause of religion.

It amazes me that people would read something like this, believe it so blindly and then pass it on. Maybe Obama is right, maybe people really haven't been reading their bibles when they get so wildly misquoted.