A Problem Illustrated

From an 'interesting' website:

Why The Beast/Antichrist And The False Prophet Enter The Lake of Fire First

Have you ever noticed that all the wicked go to the Lake of the Fire after the Millennium but the Beast and False Prophet go in before the Millennium? Why the inconsistency? The answer is not for weak-hearted.

The question here is an excellent question. In the work 'A Challenge to the Doctrine of Eternal Torment' I wrote:

'The first two occupants of the 'lake of fire' are the Beast and False prophet, but when we enquire as to their identity we generally get a different answer for each person we ask. The modern evangelical will answer along these lines: The Beast is the 'Antichrist', a powerful world leader who will arise in the end times and via one world government rule the entire earth. The False Prophet is a religious leader who with the Antichrist leads the world into one united false religion. While this is a rather novel (and I might add relatively new) teaching concerning the Beast and False Prophet, there are problems with this interpretation. If this be the case, then one would assume that these are humans. That would seem to follow without question. But the trouble is this: If these are indeed human, then they are the only two wicked humans who will escape the Great White Throne Judgment. These would go into the Lake of Fire BEFORE the judgment, in contrast to the rest of wicked mankind who go into the lake of fire FOLLOWING judgment. Not even Satan is thrown into the 'Lake of Fire' prior to this judgment. The Bible is clear that every child of Adam must appear for judgment to give account; how do these escape? I suppose we could say that their wickedness is such that it precludes judgment and they are sentenced to the lake of fire directly, but that would be a matter of pure guesswork.'

This question should in fact be viewed as a huge problem for evangelical theology. The fact that it is not speaks volumes. Seeing that evangelical theology has reduced the final judgment of mankind to an empty show (in their view the destiny of each being decided at the moment of their death) the fact that any should enter their doom without judgment can easily be sidestepped without much difficulty.

It would seem that the website mentioned above does in fact recognize this question as a legitimate difficulty. The way in which they answer this is however a classic example of what is wrong with much of evangelical biblical interpretation...

So if all the wicked get judged and thrown ino the Lake of Fire after the Millennium, why do the Beast and False Prophet get thrown in before the Millennium? I don't care how terribly wicked they obviously are, it seems inconsistent of God to throw them in before the Final Judgment for humans. This was a mystery for many years until a chain of events got me to see the only other possibility: the Beast and False Prophet could not be human. Only Possibility: They Are Not Human

So there you have it. The only possibility is that the Beast and False Prophet are 'not human'. This in itself is a reasonable conclusion. Since Daniel 7 says 'the fourth beast shall be the fourth KINGDOM upon earth' this SHOULD have been obvious. The Beast is not human because it represents a kingdom - this according the Bible's own definition of this symbol.

Is this however the logical and biblical conclusion drawn by the author of this article? Unfortunately not:

So could the beast and false prophet be angels or some angel/human hybrid (clearly neither of them is the Devil since he is established above as a separate entity)?

In order to maintain their sensational futurist predictions of a future one-man super-human antichrist, they present this completely bizzarre and unscriptural interpretation. It appears to have never crossed this author's mind that these are not human because they are not individual personal entities at all.

This sad example shows the abysmal depths to which Christian 'scholarship' has sunk in our day.