Here is a new Time Magazine online article which questions whether McCain is portraying Obama as the Antichrist. While I thought about just letting this sit because it is so ridiculous, I thought some points needed rebutting:
It’s not easy to make the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign seem benign. But suggesting that Barack Obama is the Antichrist might just do it.
First of all, the Willie Horton ad wasn’t subtle. I think the point of McCain’s ad was pretty clear. In the media and his own eyes he has become a “Messiah.”
The ad was the creation of Fred Davis, one of McCain’s top media gurus as well as a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and the nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe.
What a disgrace! Let the people who know what the Bible says make a parody ad in which the opponent is labeled a Messiah!
Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.
Because it is the Antichrist who leads us up to heaven!!
Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign’s red-white-and-blue “O” logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.
What he is referring to is Daniel 7:4, which states: “The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings. I watched till its wings were plucked off; and it was lifted up from the earth and made to stand on two feet like a man, and a man’s heart was given to it.” (NKJV). Basically, Daniel sees a prophetic vision in which there are four beasts. It is the fourth beast that could be described as “the Beast,” and the little horn that arises on the fourth beast’s head is the Antichrist. The interpretation of the first beast that Eric Sapp thinks is the Antichrist is actually given in Daniel itself: “Those great beasts, which are four, are four kings which arise out of the earth.” (Dan. 7:17). There is no solid interpreter that would view the first beast, that had “eagle’s wings” as being the Antichrist. Plus, I don’t think Daniel depicts the lion with eagle’s wings coming out of the Red Sea when God parted the waters for Moses!
Might I quote James Dobson here? Eric Sapp is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”
It’s not hard to see how some Obama haters might be tempted to make the comparison. In the Left Behind books, Carpathia is a junior Senator who speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd prominence after delivering just one major speech.
So I guess this is a “hater” website now! Left Behind was written 8 years before Obama’s big convention speech, and can you fault the authors for somehow making Carpathia look like Obama before Obama came on the scene? They must have just known! What a grand conspiracy!
A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative Evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote.
Or, they could just show them this.
Nobody is seriously calling Obama the Antichrist. Time Magazine is, like the rest of their buds in the MoveOn.org media, off the reservation.
