The office of Messiah is a unique one. Messiah comes from the Hebrew word Mashiach, which means โanointed.โ This is also where we get the word โChrist.โ The Messiah is spoken of throughout the Scriptures, starting in Genesis 3:15 and continuing through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.
The picture gets clearer as we read Godโs word, and yet many have usurped the title or been declared messiahs by others. None has come even close to having the credentials Yeshua has because He is the only Messiah who checks all the boxes.
The ultimate false messiah is known as the Antichrist, and he will play a key role in the end times. Before we look at what the Bible says about this individual, we should also look at a couple of others who have been disqualified over the centuries.
The first famous false messiah might be Simon Bar Kokhba. He led the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans (132-136 CE). He was initially recognized as the Messiah by Rabbi Akiva. He died in 135 CE during the Jewish last stand against the Romans, disproving Rabbi Akivaโs claim and opening the door for the worldwide Jewish dispersion (diaspora) and the start of the ever-widening divide between Christians and Jews.
Incidentally, Rabbi Akiva is still considered one of the great sages of Judaism, even after his messianic blunder. Nobody is going around denying his Jewish identity because of his poor judgment of Bar Kokhba. Why should Jews who believe that Yeshua of Nazareth (another Jewish man) be stripped of their Jewish identity? Messianic Jews might be wrong to some, but let them remain Jews!
Another intriguing candidate is Shabtai Zvi (1626-1676). He was a Sephardic Rabbi during the Ottoman Empire. In 1648, at age 22, he declared to his disciples that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. Initially rejected by the Jewish community for being too young, he didnโt give up and tried again in Jerusalem in 1666, to no avail.
The Jewish eagerness to accept Zvi as the Messiah might have been due in part to the bloody killings of Jews during the Khmelnytskyi Massacres, responsible for the death of 20,000 Jews at the hands of the Cossacks in Eastern Europe.
He moved to Constantinople, believing that he would replace the Muslim Sultan and become the new leader, as his followers continued to support and finance him. He was quickly thrown into prison, where he eventually converted to Islam. Today, there continues to be a small following of Shabtai Zvi, known as the Sabbateans.
More recently, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the seventh Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch denomination, was declared the Messiah during his lifetime. He never declared himself the Messiah but never officially denied it.
The Rebbe was born in the Russian Empire and died in New York in 1994. Some of his followers continued to believe he was the Messiah and even trusted that he could be resurrected and proclaimed Messiah. Some even believe that he never died.
When one considers that Rabbi Schneerson was born in Russia, it should be easy to disqualify his messianic claims.
This is not meant to dismiss his human wisdom and charity but to remind us that according to the prophet Micah, the Messiah should be born in Bethlehem-Ephrata (Micah 5:2)
The ultimate false Messiah has yet to come on the scene. Satan will empower him to fulfill his final nefarious agenda. Satan was a created being, and as such, he is not omniscient, omnipotent, or even omnipresent.
So, Satan has had a candidate selected to become his antichrist throughout all the ages, waiting for the opportune moment to push him on the world scene and set him up as the final world leader. This will happen in the future when many will follow his lead.
The antichrist will be the opposite of who Yeshua was, yet he will mimic the ministry of the real messiah in many ways. The antichrist will:
โข Perform signs and wonders (2 Thessalonians 2:9)
โข Claim to be God (2 Thessalonians 2:4)
โข Make a Peace Covenant with Israel (Daniel 9:27)
โข Be called a king (Daniel 11:36)
โข Sit on a throne (Revelation 13:2)
โข Have an army (Revelation 6:2)
โข Have a violent death (Revelation 13:3)
โข Be resurrected (Revelation 13:3, 14)
โข Have a Second Coming (Revelation 13:3)
โข Have a worldwide kingdom (Revelation 13:5-8)
โข Be part of an unholy trinity with Satan and the false prophet (Revelation 13)
Additionally, the antichrist can be identified further in the Scriptures.
โข He will be a Gentile. Typologically, the โtypeโ of antichrist in Daniel was Antiochus Epiphanes IV, a Gentile king. In Revelation 13:1, he is described as โRising out of the sea.โ The word โseaโ generally symbolizes Gentile nations in the Bible.
โข He will become famous almost overnight and be very mesmerizing and charismatic (Revelation 17:11-12)
โข He will usher in the New World Order (Revelation 13:16-17)
โข He will claim to be God and sit in the Temple (2 Thessalonians 2:4)
โข He will force people to get the Mark of the Beast (Revelation 13:16-18)
โข He will gather all the nations against Jerusalem (Zechariah 12:1-2; 14:1-3; Revelation 16:16; 19:19)
The false messiahs came and went, either on their own or were rejected by those they tried to gather as followers. The antichrist will stick for a bit longer and do much damage. Yet, while Yeshuaโs kingdom will last 1,000 years before the eternal order starts, the Antichristโs kingdom will only last 3.5 years.
The people who are hired to recognize fake money are always taught the same way. They never study the fake bills because new fakes pop up all the time, and they canโt keep up. Instead, they study the real bills, and they study them so well that they can always spot a fake very quickly.
If we want to identify the false messiahs, we need to know the real one through the inerrant biblical account, which is replete with prophecies about the coming redeemer. Just a handful of those hundreds of prophecies make Yeshua the ONLY VIABLE candidate:
โข From the Tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10)
โข A prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15-19)
โข A king from the line of David ( 1 Chronicles 17:10-14)
โข A Priest according to the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:1-7)
โข Born in Bethlehem Ephrata (Micah 5:2)
โข Born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14)
โข Die by crucifixion for the sins of Israel and the whole world (Isaiah 52:13-53:12)
Many will come in His name, and many will claim His office, but only Yeshua is worth the title, the ministry, and the obedience of Israel and the rest of the world.
