I haven’t really written much on the ethnicity or the religion of the future Antichrist. When I have written on the subject of the Antichrist my energies have been focused on his revelation as it relates to the rapture and the day of the Lord’s wrath.
But I want to make a few comments on a circumstantial objection that if the Antichrist were non-Jewish, for example being Muslim, then it would be “inconceivable” for Jews to follow and worship him.
i. This argument cuts both ways: How is it conceivable that Muslims could follow a Jewish Antichrist? Both ways though are quite conceivable.
ii. If it were possible that false christs and false prophets could lead astray “even the elect” (Matt 24:24), how much more deceptive will the Antichrist become for the elect? In other words, if it were possible that the elect could be deceived, how much more possible would it be for religious Jews to break from their religion and follow an Islamic Antichrist?
iii. I don’t think we grasp the magnitude and scope of the intense deception that the Antichrist will possess upon the world. Don’t dare say to yourself, “I could never be deceived by the Antichrist.”
Those who say this—with that disposition—will become deceived, since they are treating Jesus’s warnings flippantly. We should follow Jesus’s warnings with soberness and vigilance—that is how we will become “overcomers.”
Those who think they got their heaven passport stamped and thus immune from any kind of deception will end up getting their right hand or forehead stamped.
If the Antichrist ends up being Muslim, Jews (including Orthodox) will not be immune by the world-wide deception of a dead world leader coming back to life, as well as the deception of “great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people, and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived” (Rev 13:13–14).
iv. Jews have had a long tragic biblical history of placing their trust in foreign gods and messiah-kings. Who is to say they will not also place their safety on a final Antichrist figure?
God has ordained non-Jewish kings for Israel’s purposes (Isa. 45:1; cf. Sibylline Oracles 3.652–56). Josephus thought that Vespasian was the prophesied world ruler (War 3.400–404; 6.313–15). And so on.
So the circumstantial objection that Jews “could never” follow a non-Jewish messiah-king such as one who may be Muslim does not work. To be sure, God has graciously decreed to protect a small remnant of Jews who will not follow the Antichrist when he comes on the scene, but that will be the exception, not the rule.
Of course, there are several other points not mentioned in this brief article that have to do with this issue such as the nature of foreign kings in Daniel 8 and 11 and Ezekiel 38-39, including the non-Jewish ruler Antiochus who is a type of the future Antichrist.
