July 21, 2009
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Question 161 - Are we in the Apostasy? Is Christ coming back soon?
6) Bob, what do you think of Catholic prophecy regarding the last days? Do you think we are in the days of antichrist? Have you heard of a supposed Catholic Monarch? Is our Church has heavily infiltrated by the illuminati and Masons as it was on the eve of VatII?
Brenden
R. Sungenis: I don’t know the identity of all the groups that may have infiltrated the Vatican, but I do know that Satan is the head of them all and is working very hard to get a foothold in the Vatican. As Paul VI himself said: “The smoke of Satan has entered the Church.” It is a constant struggle between the Holy Spirit protecting the Church from error and the devil trying to deceive prelates and parishioners into error.
Regarding the last days, if the “Man of Sin” in 2 Thess 2:3-4 is a single person (which it appears to be from a face value exegesis of the passage), then we would have to wait until we see such a person ascend to such heights before we can expect Christ to return. But we may be near that period. The first thing that happens, according to vr. 3 is that “the apostasy comes.” The word “apostasy” is preceded by the Greek article, which means that it is a special or unique apostasy, never before seen on earth. This apostasy will happen in the Church, for “apostasy” is a falling away from the faith. This is not pagan Rome, for example, since the Roman gods were not Christian. This is a worldwide apostasy that affects the Church worldwide. It is the same as John’s description in the Apocalypse of Satan being loosed for a “little season,” the time when Satan goes out into the “four quarters of the earth to deceive” (cf. Ap 20:3, 7-8), which you can read about in my book on the Apocalypse. The reason this apostasy is unique is that it is taken over by the Man of Sin who exalts himself over “anything” related to God or religious worship. This has never happened before. In other words, this Man of Sin will accept no competition, and he will prove this by actually going into the “temple” and showing himself to be God, that God has been incarnated in him. In other words, he will claim to be the same thing that Jesus Christ is – God incarnated, and attempt to make Jesus into a fraud. He will convince the world of this lofty status by doing “miracles, signs and lying wonders” (2Thess 2:9), and he will not be a suffering Messiah as Jesus was, but a victorious miracle worker who squashes all the competition.
I believe the word “temple” here is a double-entendre. In the first sense, it refers to the Church. John also speaks of the “temple” in Apoc 11, but there is an inner court and outer court to the temple. The outer court is where the Church has its thoroughfare with the world, where the Gospel is preached by the “two witnesses.” But when “the beast rises from the abyss” (which is the same as Satan being “loosed for a little season” in Apoc 20:3), the two witnesses are killed. Interestingly enough, they lie in Jerusalem (Apoc 11:8 - “where our Lord was crucified”), but Jerusalem is now called “Sodom and Egypt,” and this is due to the very apostasy that Paul delineates in 2 Thess 2:3. In other words, most of the Church has become like Sodom in perversion and Egypt in godlessness.
After the two witnesses are killed, the people of the world rejoice for 3.5 days (a symbolic period of time of the apostasy). They are now being ruled by the “Man of Sin” (who is also the “beast” of Apoc 11:7). They are totally deceived by him because of his “miracles, signs and lying wonders” (see also Apoc 13:14).
In the second sense, the “temple” could also be a reference to the physical temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish temple. As such, the “Man of Sin” will be a Jewish man who claims to be God incarnated and the real messiah, for it is the Jews who have rejected the first messiah, Jesus Christ, and are waiting for their own incarnated messiah. He will literally take his seat in this reconstructed temple and declare himself the messiah of the world. I believe the 1994 Catholic Catechism has partially picked up on this and thus refers to “the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism,” although it does not commit itself to saying that the Antichrist is a single man but instead refers to it as “by which man glorifies himself in place of God.” Paul is rather clear, however, that this “Man of Sin” is one person, since he includes the Greek article in each case.
He is also called “the son of perdition” (2Thess 2:3), which was a title originally given to Judas, the one apostle from Judah (while all the rest were from Galilee) who was possessed by the Satan and led Christ to be killed (cf. Jn 6:70; 17:12). This most likely means that the second “son of perdition” will also be a Jew who denies Christ and has him “killed.” But this time the “killing” is against the Christ’s Church as he causes a worldwide “apostasy” (i.e., the “two witnesses” of Christ are killed in Apoc 11:1-8).
As for identifying the “Man of Sin,” Paul gives us a hint by implying a two stage process. The first stage is that the “apostasy comes.” The Greek means that it “comes” in such a way as we see the sun rising every day. We see the dawn, then the first part of the sun, and then the full disc in the sky. The apostasy will thus be a slowly but surely increasing phenomenon, and we could be in this very time today, but how long it could go on before the Man of Sin is revealed we do not know.
But as the apostasy “comes,” Paul uses a different Greek word for the Man of Sin. The Man of Sin is already present in the apostasy, but he has not been “revealed” (Greek: apokalupsis). The most likely way he will be “revealed” (and the way we will know who he is) is when he “takes his seat in the temple” and declares himself the God-incarnated messiah. This is the ultimate apostasy, because no apostasy prior to this has featured the claim of a God-incarnated messiah to compete with Jesus Christ. He will do miracles just as Jesus did, and thus he will deceive most of the world. There is more I could tell you, but this will suffice for now.
