(A message preached at the monthly Sovereign Grace Advent testimony meeting - www.sgat.org)

That there have been men who in their lives foreshadowed the future Antichrist serves to remind us of a number of important truths.

1. The spirit of iniquity has been at work amongst men since the fall of Adam. The devil's temptation of man was not a random event but rather the beginning, amongst men, of the devil's plan to overthrow God!

2. Furthermore, these vile men were merely foreshadowings and not the substance which indicates the restraining power of God upon the devil at work. The devil would like to have made some of them his ultimate agents but was prevented from doing so by the restraining power of God.

3. Moreover, if such wicked men as Cain, Goliath, Judas, and many others were but foreshadowings of the Antichrist, then the final manifestation of wickedness incarnate will be most dreadful indeed.

As a volcano reveals its destructive heart by its occasional eruptions, even so the repeated emergence of evil men, whose ways and words have been a portent of that satanically-controlled being who will emerge to dominate the Roman world, shortly before the return of the Saviour, has been a revealing of the burning cauldron of degeneracy that has long been inhibited by the mighty power of God until it is God's time to bring to pass "every purpose of the LORD," Jeremiah 51:29.