I REMEMBER THE days in which TV miniseries and made-for-TV movies were a brand new idea and gaining in popularity. Storytelling on television had always been limited by 30 to 60 minute time slots. Expanding that to 90 minutes, or even several 90-minute installments opened up a whole new narrative world, with more complex plots and characters.

Unfortunately, the miniseries format also made it possible to stretch out bad stories. Sometimes, it seemed, the writers would throw one plot complication after another at viewers just to keep them watching — only to cap it all with a cheesy and highly unsatisfying ending, like pulling a rabbit out of a narrative hat. That’s it? I’d think to myself, groaning. That’s all ya got?

Satisfying stories typically need to set a dramatic stage, heighten the tension through conflict, then resolve it in a way that resonates. The grandest and most complicated story of all is the one the Bible tells, the story of everything that God has done since creation, of everything God will yet do until the coming of the new heaven and new earth John speaks about in the book of Revelation. And John seems to think we’re in the last chapter of that story.

Here’s what he says:

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. (1 John 2:18, NIV)

In the verses prior, he’s tried to tell his readers not to love the world, not to become enamored of the all the things that vie for our attention. Life in these bodies of ours comes with legitimate wants and needs, but these can become distorted through the world’s values and priorities. We start to want what everyone else in the world wants — things, status — more than we want God, more than we want fellowship with the Father and with the Son.

Our place in God’s story is to be in the world, but not of it, to not be defined by its desires. We’re in the last chapter of that story, John suggests. How does he know? Because there are multiple “antichrists” in the world already.

That word “antichrist” probably brought a lot of you up short. So let’s pause for a moment, so I can toss a Bible trivia question at you. Ready? Here goes: how many times does the word “antichrist” appear in the book of Revelation? I don’t expect you to know the exact answer, so just think for a moment and silently take a guess.

The answer?

Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Surprised? Despite what many of us have been taught, the word “antichrist” does not appear at all in Revelation. In the entire New Testament, in fact, the word is used only in the letters of John. He uses it four times in this letter (we’ve seen two of them already in one verse), and once in 2 John. That’s it.

And note how what John says here is different from our usual ideas about the antichrist, in which we identify the Antichrist with the coming “beast” in Revelation. In 1 John, he’s not talking about the future, but the present — and indeed, his “present” is far in our past. Moreover, he’s not just talking about a single individual, but many “antichrists,” plural. While it may be possible, therefore, to link the image of the Beast with the language of “antichrist,” the best we could say is that the Beast is an antichrist, one of many through the centuries, and not the Antichrist with a capital A.

So what, then, does John mean by the word? In Greek, John’s word is antichristos — so small wonder we’d translate that as “antichrist” in English. It simply means “against Christ,” and therefore could embrace anyone who opposes the truth about Jesus, whether in their beliefs, teaching, or conduct.

In the verse we read, John says that his readers have “already heard that the antichrist is coming.” For us, that statement might fire up whatever images we have of the events foretold in the book of Revelation. But we don’t know what the people had heard. That’s the problem with reading the New Testament letters: the writers often speak of things that their readers would know, but about which we can only guess. Had they already been told about John’s vision in Revelation? Maybe. But at the very least, surely the people would have known what Jesus had already told his disciples in the Upper Room: Trouble is coming. The world has hated me, and they will hate you…

But again, notice that John doesn’t stay with the idea of a single antichrist who was to come. He redirects their attention to the present day and their own situation, to things that have already happened. In context, as we’ll see, he seems to be saying something like,”The people who left our community made their choice: they chose to oppose the truth about Jesus. They are therefore antichrists, and their presence is all the evidence we need to know that we’re in the last chapter of God’s story.”

All of that leaves us with an important question: just what were these people opposing? Again, we have to do some guessing, though Bible scholars through the ages have made their own arguments. But we may be able to get some clues from what John says later in the letter. We’ll explore the possibilities in the next two posts.