There are 3 things (if you can bring more ideas to the table, I'm all ears!) that could be considered to be "holding back" the anti-christ from being revealed. Those are considered to be governments, the church, and the Holy Spirit - since this is going to be AFTER the 10 kingdoms of "Revised Rome" have been put back together (indicating heavy reliance on government), and the fact that the Holy Spirit will NOT be removed, that leaves the church. I'll admit it is arrived at after deduction, but again, if you can give me another "force" that would be able to hold back the anti-christ, I'm always happy to study more!
“There are 3 things (if you can bring more ideas to the table, I’m all ears!) that could be considered to be “holding back” the anti-christ from being revealed.”
Well, here is the problem that I have with this line of thinking: it’s unverifiable, and therefore, any conclusions you draw from it must be tentative ones.
The Bible simply doesn’t tell us what will be taken away before the anti-Christ is removed. We can speculate, and make deductions, and perhaps even guess correctly, but without seeing the prophecy fulfilled (or some further divine revelation), we will never have a certainty that we are correct. So, knowing that, I think we shouldn’t make statements like this:
“Anti-Christ will not be revealed until the church has been removed and is no longer stopping the evil.”
After all, that statement expresses a certainty which we just don’t have. Then, if you are trying to use such uncertain ideas to support other deductions and extrapolations (the pretribulation rapture), you are on even shakier ground.
Now, I wouldn’t be so much of a stickler on this if the pretrib rapture folks would just say “we think the rapture might happen before the tribulation, because we make the following deductions...”. Yet, you don’t often hear them say things like that. Most of the time, their statements are much more final and certain, as if their interpretation is based only on Scripture, and not on their own fallible interpretations of it.