I believe that the Beast of Revelations is a reference to an evil state and not to any one “Antichrist” person. As close as we get to the Antichrist is the “man of sin” but I think the key is that an evil state ruled by evil men comes into existence in the last days, that a spirit of antichrist prevails, and that three forces (beast, dragon, false prophet) combine their hatred of God in one final assault.
I have also come to the conclusion that the prophecies manage to describe two different end times, those which are separated by the “thousand years” of the Kingdom, and that this may all be allegorical so that we may in fact be able to view the situation as follows —
First, we have already seen the first end time, prophecy may have been fulfilled by the events of the second world war. The “thousand year kingdom” may turn out to be a reference to the phase of modern times that led to the current “little season” in which we see a renewed attack of evil forces on the Kingdom, at the present time only partially realized.
This second end time will not wait a thousand years, that is perhaps a reference to the millenium or just to the observation that a thousand years is like a day in the Lord’s timetable.
This would explain why such massive and perhaps obvious parallels of the second world war were not in fact followed by the second coming as most would understand that — we have had the spiritual version of the second coming and now we await the actual final dispensation.
You could check some dates in the second world war to see that periods of the required length of time were quite evident. In particular, it was just about 1,335 days from the onset of America’s declaration of war to the end of the war in the Pacific. Shortly before that, events at about 1,260 and 1,290 days can be linked to the required imagery. Every other image of the Revelation timetable is fairly easy to link to the history of various powers involved in the Second World War.
My belief then is that much of the prophecy has already been fulfilled and that only a few sections more specific to the “little season” require completion. America’s role in this prophecy is not peripheral and in fact seems to validate the Mormon concept of a dispensation of the Kingdom on the land mass of the United States although perhaps not exactly as they understand that location. I know that similar beliefs are held by non-Mormon evangelical Christians.
Now that Donald Trump is president, perhaps the conditions are met for all things to be brought to completion. It may be that Obama was the “man of sin” and that we are even now right at the predicted time when sudden changes for the better will begin to unfold.
The partial nature of the millennial kingdom suggests that the dispensation may be the creation of a “more perfect union” or political order on the earth following the total defeat of last-gasp beast, dragon and false prophet giving it the old college try for one final time. This is perhaps also the reason why the demons are pouring out of the abyss at this very time (sure you noticed that).
The “Beast” is a World Empire that lives, endures a deadly head wound(toppled from power) then reborn under the leadership of what some would call THE Antichrist. The Beast is the Babylonian Empire reborn IMO. To me it means instead of one language being split into many, the many will return to one language and nation. The original Tower of Babel story in reverse. This is an off the cuff analysis, I could do much better scripturaly but it will have to do.
Absolutely. The features of the beast of Revelation clearly reference the beasts revealed to Daniel. (Lion, Leopard and Bear) and the beasts Daniel saw were revealed to represent civilizations or empires.