138. False Messiahs and Antichrists

Matthew 24 as the Prequel to Revelation

These are not answers that concern our future. What we're gonna see is Jesus gives them answers to their questions about what is gonna happen in their time. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

This is episode 138, false messiahs and antichrists. Everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we're in a new series on the book of Revelation. And as we've said over the last two weeks, you cannot even begin to understand this most confusing work until you've understood Matthew 24, which serves as the prequel to Revelation, the answer key, if you will, for all of the symbols and the signs that proliferate this apocalyptic text.

So as an introduction to the book of Revelation, we're gonna be camping out in Matthew 24 for a few weeks. So that whenever we open up John's apocalypse, everything is going to make so much more sense.

Now, last week we laid a detailed foundation and a context for Matthew 24, where we examined three particular threads to see how each of them pointed to the doom that was soon gonna befall Jerusalem. The first thread that we examined was the eschatological statements of John the Baptist and how he was the end time prophet who was coming in the spirit of Elijah.

He was there to prepare the people for the coming day of the Lord, that great and terrifying day that Malachi prophesies about. And he says that that day is coming, the ax is already at the root of the tree, one more swing and it's going to be unleashed upon the Judeans.

That's the first thread. The second thread we talked about last week was Jesus's teachings and his miracles and his sermons and his parables and the showdown that he had with the Pharisees in Jerusalem in the final week of his life, all of which is pointing to the sudden and calamitous ending that is soon gonna be coming upon the city that Jesus indicted for killing the prophets and for murdering God's only son.

According to Jesus, God was gonna uproot that city like the withered fig tree, Matthew 21, 19. He was gonna take the kingdom away from them because they weren't bearing any fruit, Matthew 21, 43, and he was gonna give it to a new people who would bear its fruit, Matthew 21, 41.

And as a result of their fruitlessness, just like the fig tree, he was gonna send his armies to set that city on fire, Matthew 22, 7, leaving their temple abandoned, Matthew 23, 38, and Matthew 24, 2.

Now, alongside of those two themes, which are proof enough, we also get this motif of curse language that comes out of Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, and that's our third theme. Jesus evokes this covenantal language showing how God's covenantal wrath was gonna be poured out on that particular generation of covenant breakers.

He even says that all of the wrath that had been stored up since Cain killed Abel was being held up by the dam of God's grace, but that generation, by killing Jesus, swung the hammer and broke the dam, and all of God's fury came crashing down on them.

That's what Jesus is arguing for in Matthew 23, and he's using Deuteronomy 28, Leviticus 26, and all of the covenantal woes that are contained therein to describe the near coming doom on the city of Jerusalem.

That's what we talked about last week, and because of that, none of what we've seen so far even remotely has to do with far off distant events that are gonna happen sometime in the uncertain future. Jesus is not speaking about our future.

He's speaking about clear events that have already happened in the past, events that happened in the lifetime of his disciples, of the people who are listening to him give these covenantal woes in the city of Jerusalem, and because of that, Jesus is now, today, we're gonna look at even more evidence where he's gonna give his apostles clear and unmistakable signs that they could be on the lookout for so that they could know when all of this doom was about to happen.

These signs are not for us to view in our world. We're not supposed to look and say, oh, wars and rumors of wars, oh, false messiahs, and oh, look at this, and look, that's not for us. Jesus gave those signs to them so that they could be on the lookout for something that was going to happen in their generation.

Remember, these men were going to be living during the time where Jesus described the downfall of the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem. They were gonna be spending the next 40 years pouring out their life, preaching urgently, calling men and women to repent, like deck men on the Titanic, pleading men and women to get into the lifeboat before the ship collapsed.

For this reason, those men would need to understand what those next 40 years were gonna look like. When was the final disaster finally gonna overtake the city? And what are some evidences that they could be looking for to show them that it was time for them to leave, that it was time for them to flee the city and abandon it to destruction?

If somebody told you that your city was about to collapse, you'd wanna know, well, give me some pointers, give me some ideas, what's gonna happen? What are gonna be some signs that the city is getting ready to fall?

That's exactly what Jesus is going to be giving our disciples today. And that's what we're gonna see in the book of, or in the chapter of Matthew 24. So with that, let us turn to that great chapter and let us begin our time in Matthew 24 by talking about two things.

The first thing we're gonna be talking about today is the interaction that Jesus has with his disciples where they're confused and they ask him three very reasonable questions. And the second thing we're gonna try to accomplish today is we're gonna be looking at the first sign that Jesus gives.

The very first sign that Jesus gives is false messiahs and antichrist are gonna be rising up in Judea. So we're gonna look at those two things. Number one, a little conversation Jesus has with his disciples.

And number two, we're gonna be looking at the first sign he gives, false messiahs. So with that, part one, a confusing march to Olivet. Now the weight of everything that they had seen and heard in the city was clinging to them as they were walking out of Jerusalem.

It was as if time itself had slowed down when Jesus cursed the fig tree. The disciples had watched in horror as life drained from the tree right before their very eyes, its leaves withered instantly as if cursed by death itself.

But it wasn't just a tree. They knew that now, they were understanding what Jesus was actually getting at. When Jesus turned and he pointed to the city of Jerusalem after cursing the tree, the message was undeniably clear.

The city that was just like this fruitless tree was now under the doom of God. Their hearts beat heavily in their chest as they followed Jesus through the streets, walking towards the temple where he would deliver scathing parables that sent shivers down their spines.

His words weren't just teachings, they were declarations of war. Each parable cut through the tension in the air like a blade condemning the city and its leaders, promising judgment, promising fire, promising that armies are gonna be coming, promising that the king is gonna burn the city to the ground.

The disciples must have been exchanging nervous glances between each other, each one of them wrestling with their own fear and their disbelief and their horror, knowing that this beloved city of Jerusalem, the city of God, one of the great architectural wonders of the world was going to fall, was gonna be ruined, was gonna be left in a pile of rubble.

As Jesus went toe to toe with the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes and the aristocracy in the city, they stood, the disciples did, nearby, anxious, feeling the danger pulsing through the crowd.

Their minds were racing trying to reconcile the Messiah who had spoken of peace, but now was pronouncing woes upon the city and its leaders. The tension had to have been unbearable. And then when he said that God was gonna abandon the temple, it probably felt like the ground had just shifted beneath their feet, like an earthquake had just happened in their expectations, the very heart of their faith, the temple being reduced to rubble was reducing them.

They struggled to grasp it. They felt like a knot was tightening inside of them and there was no way to untangle it. Every word that was being uttered on Jesus's lips seemed like a nail in the coffin of their expectations, sealing the fate of the city that they had grown up revering.

And when he finally said that it was time for them to go, I can imagine they could hardly process everything that had just been said and their feet are moving instinctually, but their brains are reeling from what just happened.

They marched in bitter silence out of the city and they left through the Eastern gate and the noise of Jerusalem was subtly fading behind them. And as they walked, their eyes were drawn up to the temple.

You can imagine them walking out of the gate and walking down the hill and heading towards the mountain of olives and the temples looming over their gaze and they look up and their eyes are drawn upon this beautiful temple complex that towered over them.

Its gleaming stones were reflecting in the late afternoon sun and it was too much for them to bear. One of the disciples, his voice shaking, pointed to the temple in desperation and he said, look, teacher, look at the buildings.

Now, this wasn't because Jesus had never seen them. Of course he'd seen them. He was just standing right in front of them. He had been to the temple every year of his life as a faithful Jew. So this disciple's not telling him to look as if he'd never seen them before.

This was different. This was a plea. This was a last attempt at understanding. Could this, Jesus, could this thing be destroyed? Look at it, how beautiful it is, look how glorious it is. Could God really allow his own house to be torn down and desecrated?

Jesus's reply that he gave to them really didn't offer any comfort. When they said, do you see all of these buildings? He said to them, not one stone, not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down.

Matthew 24, one. These words would have lanced through them. It would have caused them to be heavy and their hearts even immovable. The disciples were finally starting to come to grips now. They were starting to understand now that they had heard him correctly.

The confusion that had been swirling in their minds was not a misunderstanding at all. It was a bitter pill that they now were tasting and they were swallowing that God really was going to destroy his own house.

And so they marched in silence once more. From the valley below the city of Jerusalem, they marched up the Olivet Hill, the weight of all of these things pressing down on them as they climbed up to the Mount of Olives.

The city now as they grew higher and higher in elevation, the city was now below them. And the temple still gleaming somehow less majestic than it was before. And finally, when they reached the top of the hill, when they could bear their confusion no longer, a few of them approached Jesus as he sat on the Mount of Olives and in the weight of everything that had just happened, they needed answers.

So with their minds reeling, they asked him three questions. And they wanted clarity and they wanted understanding and they wanted something that they could cling to in the midst of the chaos. So this is what they say to him.

Tell us Jesus, when these things are going to happen and what's going to be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age. Their questions probably hung in the air just a moment as they waited for Jesus to respond and they were desperate for something to calm the storm that was going on inside of their hearts.

But the questions that they were asking would not receive the kind of answers that would calm the storm, but only reveal a greater storm that was soon going to be coming upon Jerusalem. Now they did ask three very reasonable questions.

This disciples were still in shock over Jesus's prophecy about the temple. And these questions were reasonable for them to ask. The idea that the temple was going to be left desolate and destroyed was unimaginable to a first century Jew.

So as they're now with Jesus on the Mount of Olives, they need clarity. So they asked him three very reasonable questions. And each of these questions are the absolute key for you and I understanding what is going on in Matthew 24.

The Three Questions of the Olivet Discourse

So we're going to unpack each of these and we're going to look at each of these questions one at a time. And what we're going to see is that the only consistent hermeneutical method for understanding these questions and the answers that Jesus gives is not through a dispensational preterist or futuristic lens, but it's through a preterist lens.

Preterist means that it happened in the past. These are not answers that concern our future. What we're going to see is Jesus gives them answers to their questions about what is going to happen in their time, which means that preterism is the only hermeneutic that can actually interpret and help us understand Matthew 24.

Understanding that these events were fulfilled in the first century past, not in the distant future. So the disciples asked us, tell us when these things are going to happen. What's going to be the sign of your coming?

And what about the end of the age? That's the three questions. We need to break down each question and demonstrate how the answers are going to lead us to a preterist understanding. So the first question, when will these things happen?

That's the question that the disciples led off with, and it directly ties to Jesus' shocking declaration that the temple's going to be destroyed. When's this going to happen? They're asking about the timing of the destruction of the temple.

When is the temple going to be destroyed, Jesus? When is this great symbol of God dwelling among his people going to be torn down? They weren't thinking of some far future cataclysmic thing that is going to happen in our lifetime.

They're thinking about their temple, the building that is standing right in front of them, this building that represented the center of their religious life and their thought and their identity as a person.

We understand, looking at this from a preterist perspective, that this question actually refers to the events that are going to happen in their lifetime, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem. They want to know, Jesus, when is that going to happen?

And that's what Jesus' prophecy is aiming at as he describes what's going to happen when the Roman armies that are going to be led by Titus are going to come and besiege the city of Jerusalem and destroy it.

That is the only interpretation that makes sense in light of this particular question. When is it going to happen? Not thousands of years in the future, but in their lifetime. That's the first question.

The second question that they ask is, what's going to be the sign of your coming? And this question is often misunderstood. Many people assume that when the disciples are asking Jesus about coming, they're referring to his final coming at the end of human history.

But that is not at all what the disciples had in mind. In fact, that couldn't have been further from what they were actually thinking. Far from pausing their urgent discussion on the life-changing catastrophe that was about to happen in their city in order to sequester a little teaching on eschatology, they continued their line of reasoning, asking Jesus, give us a sign.

Listen, they had just left the city. Now they're listening to Jesus talk about that all these things are going to happen in their lifetime, and they want a sign that's going to help them understand when the armies are coming, when the destruction is coming.

They want evidence. And while it's likely that the disciples envisioned a physical return of Jesus, they probably envisioned that Jesus was going to ride a war horse into the city, he was going to besiege the city with his loyal soldiers, that they were going to, as they were leaving Jerusalem, and that they were on the Mount of Olives, maybe they were thinking that Jesus was going to start building an army there, and that he was going to attack the city, and he himself was going to lead them in the destruction of the city.

But that's not what Jesus was talking about. But they at least were understanding that the physical city was going to be destroyed. Now they're looking for evidence of when it's going to happen, signs of when it's going to happen.

But scripture, and this is what Jesus is going to give them later in this chapter, scripture tells us exactly the kind of signs that they needed to be looking for. And some of those signs we're going to see allow for not a physical coming of Jesus, but an invisible judgment coming of Jesus.

And we have to take a moment here just to help anyone who's listening out. When you read Matthew 24, and you think that Jesus is coming back, which that's what the disciples are asking, give us the sign of your coming.

Jesus is not talking about the end of human history, bodily coming, where he comes at the final moment of history to win the world back to himself, or whatever, to fight against the Antichrist, or go into battle of Armageddon.

Whatever theory that you feel like that you have, that's not happening here. What Jesus is talking about is not a physical return, but an invisible return, where Jesus himself comes in judgment upon a nation.

That's the second coming, actually. If you want to call this the second coming, the second coming is a judgment coming. It's a coming on the clouds. It's a coming against. It's a coming against a particular nation, which we see in the Bible is deeply rooted in the prophetic literature.

And God uses these ways of describing his coming in judgment. That's what Jesus is doing. He's saying, I'm coming in judgment, and he's using Old Testament language to kind of prove that. So for instance, let me give you a couple of examples.

In Isaiah 19, one, we read, behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and is about to come to Egypt. The idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence. Isaiah 19, one. Here, God is coming, but God doesn't show up in bodily form.

In history, we know that God did come against Egypt, and he used physical armies from other nations as his chosen weapon of judgment to destroy them. So in that sense, he came. He came in judgment, and he used, he borrowed pagan armies to do it.

This is not a physical coming of God to earth. That's not the point. The point is that God is coming, and he's coming in judgment, and that's the exact same thing Jesus is saying that he's going to do in Jerusalem.

So he's using that Isaiah language of coming to talk about not a physical bodily return, but a spiritual destruction judgment coming where he's going to borrow the armies of Rome as his weapon to exact judgment on Jerusalem.

That's exactly what he's saying, and Isaiah gives us the hermeneutical key, but there's more. Micah 1 .3, the prophet declares against Samaria and Jerusalem, for behold, the Lord is coming. Behold, the Lord is coming, coming forth from his place, and he will come down and tread on the high places of the land.

This language may seem to indicate to you that God is going to be coming in the flesh in order to dole out judgment against Samaria and Judah, but that's, again, not what God is talking about. God is talking about his warlike presence coming in judgment against his people who defamed his name, and he's going to raise up an army to execute his will upon the people who have broken his covenant.

Throughout the Old Testament, this is how God speaks about coming. He uses the word coming not to describe a physical phenomenon, but to describe his actions of judgment, his actions of retribution against nations who defy his holy law.

In Jeremiah 4, for instance, God says he's coming against Judah, riding on a cloud of destruction by raising up, what, a pagan army called Babylon to do his bidding. So God really did come, and yet it wasn't physical.

It was physical in the sense that he raised up Babylon to be his sword, but God himself didn't come in bodily form. Here's another example. Ezekiel 30 describes God coming against Egypt, where the same imagery of clouds and wrath are employed, but the only physical manifestation of the coming was the fact that God raised up Assyria and used them to be his weapon against Egypt.

Here's another example. In the judgment of Tyre and Sidon, God uses the language of visitation. He's gonna visit these people, and he's gonna rain down his wrath upon these people by raising up and for an army to crush them, whether it was against Babylon in Isaiah 13, Edom in Isaiah 34, Egypt in Ezekiel 30, or every other example that you can, there's at least 10 of these, where God is coming, and he's gonna come in wrath, and he's gonna bring his wrath against a real tangible people with a real tangible army, but he himself is not coming in bodily form.

He's coming in the form of his judgment. So in the case of Matthew 24, I've just quoted probably five or six examples from the Old Testament of God coming in judgment. This is exactly what Jesus is describing.

When his disciples say, give us the sign of your coming, they're asking him, what's gonna be the sign of your judgment? They're not asking for what is gonna be the sign of your bodily coming. That category doesn't exist for the Jew because they're looking back at Isaiah 13 and Ezekiel 30 and all of these other passages.

They understand that the coming of God in this sense is the coming of judgment, and we'll get into that more in the weeks ahead. Now, the coming of Jesus is describing the day where he's gonna unleash his wrath upon Jerusalem using the armies of Rome, and they're gonna execute his judgment upon that godless city.

This is not a visible return of Jesus in the flesh, but it is an Old Testament-like invisible coming of God's wrath upon covenant-breaking nations. The signs that the disciples were asking about are the indicators and the evidence that Rome was coming, that Rome was drawing near, and that Rome was going to be at their gates.

And over the course of the Olivet Discourse, Jesus is gonna lay out one sign after another after another that's going to give his people a roadmap for when the armies of Rome would come. That is what Jesus is talking about.

That's the second question that they ask. The third question that they ask, what about the end of the age, is perhaps the most misunderstood question of them all. Many people, when they read that question today, they interpret it as if Jesus was speaking about the end of the world.

They say that age equals world. So, Jesus, what about the end of the world? That's the way they interpret it, but that would have been nonsensical to the disciples. Imagine putting yourself in their situation.

If someone told you that your beloved city was about to be destroyed, and let's just say that someone came to you today and said, hey, a meteor is gonna hit your city in the next three years. Sometime in the next three years, you're gonna have a lot of questions on how you're gonna make sense of that event.

And they're gonna be reasonable questions. You're gonna say things like, okay, when is this gonna happen? Is there any sign in the sky that I'm gonna see that's gonna alert me that it's coming? What do I need to do?

When do I need to put my house on the market? You're gonna ask very practical questions. And you're gonna ask relevant questions that are gonna affect your life and your experience. But what would be an absolute complete waste of your time would be asking about things that aren't gonna happen for another 2 ,000 years.

It would be like saying, okay, I understand that there's a meteor coming, and I know that this is gonna happen, and it's gonna happen to my house, and I need to prepare for it. But hey, wait a minute.

Just for a moment, while we're at it, could you tell me about things that are gonna happen to a people that I will never know, at a time that I will never live, on a side of the world that I may not even know exists yet, concerning times and cultures that I can't even comprehend, about events that you're personally not even talking about.

Can you tell me about that? That wouldn't make any sense. You are dealing with the destruction of everything that you know personally, and you wanna stop and you wanna talk about things that are happening 2 ,000 years into the future?

Nobody would have ever done that. That would have been so utterly inconceivable, and it would have exposed the disciples as if they were raving lunatics or had the intellect of a poached egg, as C .S. Lewis once famously retorted.

The disciples were not asking about the end of human history. They were asking about the end of the Jewish history, the end of their nation, the end of their temple, the end of their world as they knew it, not the end of the entire world.

They were asking about the end of the Jewish age. When they asked Jesus about, tell us about the end of the age, they're talking about the end of the old covenant era, the era that was symbolized by temples and priesthood and sacrifices and prophets and feast and festivals and all of those things.

They wanted to know when that era of God's redemptive history, where God had dealt with the world through one nation called Israel, when is that gonna be over? When is God gonna no longer dwell in his house that sat on top of Jerusalem's hill?

And instead, where's he gonna dwell now? Where's he gonna go? He's left his temple. They wanna know those questions. They don't care a nick about you. They're not even thinking about you. You riding around in your fancy car and scrolling your 401k on your mobile device, they have no category for you.

They're thinking about their time when men are no longer going to travel to Jerusalem to hand their sacrificial animal off to the priest, but they're now gonna be represented by Jesus directly before the father.

They're thinking about the time when they no longer have to pilgrimage to the temple because Jesus is their true temple. They're thinking about all of the end of everything that they've ever known and their dad and their granddad and their ancestors had ever known all the way back to Mount Sinai.

Every aspect of what it meant to be a Jew was ending. So the question that they're asking when they say, tell us about the end of the age has nothing to do with you. It wouldn't have made any sense if it did.

They weren't thinking about the end of your world or the destruction of your things. They were thinking about their things, the temple. They wanted to know when the mosaic era of temples and priests and sacrifice was coming to an end.

When's the old way of relating to God gonna die and what's gonna replace it? Those were reasonable, practical, very earthy questions that they were asking that futurist and dispensationalist have distorted to their own liking, injecting abject lunacy into the text.

That's just simply not warranted. It is the preterist interpretation of Matthew 24 alone that fits the context of what Jesus is saying and what the disciples are asking. Now, I want us to look, now that we've looked at the three questions that they've asked, I want us to look at how Jesus begins answering their question.

It would be really weird if in tears they come to him and they say, tell us, Jesus, when is the temple gonna be destroyed? Give us a sign about when you're coming in judgment and help us understand when the whole mosaic period is gonna come to an end.

Jesus, tell us. And Jesus looks at them and says, that might be important to you, but I need to speak right now to the American, the American Christians. And I need to tell them about the World Economic Forum.

And I need to tell them about the Antichrist. And I need to tell them about their rapture. And I need to tell, like the disciples would have been like, what the heck is Jesus talking about? Does he even care that we're panicking right now?

And he wants to talk about some people we've never met and we'll never know and we'll never see? No, Jesus doesn't answer the question like that. Instead of telling them about things that were gonna happen in the end of our age, he begins by telling them what's gonna, things that are gonna happen to them, because he loves them.

And he's answering their question. And he begins with the very first sign that is gonna show them that these things are happening, that Jerusalem is decaying and getting ready to be destroyed. And the first sign that he gives them is that there's going to be a uptick and a rise in false teachers, false messiahs and Antichrist.

False Messiahs and Antichrist in Matthew 24

And that leads us to our second section, which is part two, the rise of false messiahs and Antichrist. Now, the first evidence that Jesus gives to his disciples who are looking and trying to understand when this judgment is going to happen is the sign that false teachers, false messiahs and Antichrist are gonna be coming and they're gonna be misleading many people and drawing them away from Jesus.

Now, this is not a general warning that every Christian in every generation is supposed to be on the lookout for false teachers, which of course we should do that. That's a good warning and we should take that seriously today.

But that's not what Jesus is getting at. He's not giving a general admonition to the church of all eras to make sure that you're looking out for false teachers. I mean, Jesus is not here referring to the seeker sensitive movement or the new apostolic reformation.

And he's not certainly condemning modern day charlatans like T .D. Jakes and Bill Johnson and Stephen Furtick and others. Although you can find passages that are talking about those fools in other places.

But here he's speaking about first century false teachers, a rise, an uptick in false Messiah movements that were gonna characterize this era and it was gonna lead many people astray. This is what Jesus says, "'See to it that no one misleads you, "'for many will come in my name saying, "'I am the Christ and will mislead many.'".

Matthew 24, four through five. Now, remember Jesus is talking to his disciples and he's saying that these false teachers are gonna come and deceive many of you, many of your generation. Now, the word that Jesus uses here is very important.

It's the Greek word brepete, which means to watch carefully or to be on guard. It's the kind of word that you would use if you were a guard on top of a wall and you were looking out across the horizon, you were scanning and you were trying to make sure that no one, no threat was coming upon the horizon.

This word tells us that Jesus expected his disciples to pay attention in a concentrated way, in a dedicated way. He was expecting his disciples to pay attention to their world and their time because the false Messiahs and Antichrist would be coming against them, not us.

They weren't coming to mislead you and me, they were coming to mislead them and to mislead them against Christ. This is not about something that's gonna happen thousands of years in the future. Jesus is not giving them passive instructions but he's calling them to active spiritual awareness, continual focus because these things are gonna be happening right in front of them.

The fact that Jesus used the phrase or the word brepete shows that he expected his disciples to be on guard, to be alive and to be alert and to be engaged in the events of their space and time and their circumstances because they needed to be able to warn other people not to follow these false Messiahs in their day.

Now, we need to talk about a little bit about what the word Messiah means and what Messiah actually is because we need to understand this rightly. This is so important. If you're gonna understand what Antichrist is, if you're gonna understand what the Bible is talking about when it calls someone an Antichrist, you have to understand what Messiah means.

If you don't, you're gonna botch it and you're gonna think that, oh, well, the Antichrist is gonna come and he's gonna lead the world into this great tribulation and none of that is what the Bible is talking about.

That's what left behind is talking about. That's what late great planet Earth is talking about and that's what people who are confused about their theology think that the Bible is talking about but that is not what the Bible is talking about when it uses the word Messiah.

So we have to understand this correctly. So before we open up the rest of the New Testament, before we look at the extra biblical evidence that everything Jesus said was true, that there really was a proliferation of false Messiahs that did occur in the first century, before we give the history of that, the biblical evidence for that, we have to talk about the word Messiah.

We have to talk about what it means, what expectation the word brings, what the historical consequence of that word is and how Jesus' coming created a Messianic vacuum that is going to lead us to this rise in false Messiahs that we see in Matthew 24 that came true with shocking accuracy.

So first, what is the meaning of the word Messiah? The word for Messiah originally comes from the Greek word Christos and the Hebrew word Mashiach. Instead of those words meaning a single person, they actually meant an office.

The word Messiah is not a word that means a particular individual person, but it is an office. It is a Messianic office. Both Christos and Mashiach, both were words that originally meant a person who had been anointed for public service in a particular office.

That's what the word means, anointed one. Now, in the Old Testament, there were three offices that you would have to be anointed in order to be called Mashiach or Messiah. There was the anointed priest who was called Messiah.