The Antichrist spirit in each one of us is our self-will and self-centeredness. We want to be a God like the true God but not as part of Him. We desire to maintain our individuality, our own will, our own being, apart from God.

God desires to remove the Antichrist spirit from us. He accomplishes this by bringing us into situations that demand much patience. It is in the patient waiting on the will of Christ that the Antichrist spirit of self-will is destroyed.

This is why the Scripture says, after describing the torments of those who succumb to Antichrist, "Here is the patience of the saints."

Meanwhile we must keep the commandments of God. We must, through the help we gain in prayer, do those things Christ has commanded in the Gospels and through the Epistles of the Apostles. We must make it our duty to love God, to love one another, to refrain from every uncleanness, from sorcery, from violence, from drunkenness. We must put our flesh to death by the Spirit of God. We must do all these things through faith in Christ, continually seeking His face, abiding in Him, doing His will, confessing His name.

The exhortation of Antichrist is that we live, that we accomplish much in this world, that we make a name for ourselves, that we prosper.

It is at this point in history, the time of man loving himself and contemplating his potential to govern his world, that those who die in the Lord are blessed.

Why are they blessed? Because they have turned away from the Antichrist spirit and have yielded themselves to Christ. They have abandoned their own life so He may live. They have become crucified with Christ so He may live in them.

They are delivered from blood-guiltiness. They are delivered from the Antichrist spirit. How? By dying in the Lord.

The term "henceforth" means from the time mankind is tempted to make itself like God—from that time, those who die in the Lord are supremely blessed.

They enter into rest during the end-time judgments.

. . . and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: . . . (Habakkuk 3:16).

Their works follow them because it is not they who are working but the Father and the Son through the Spirit of God who are working in them. They have entered the secret place of God, into the cleft of the Rock.

There has been a marked change in the spiritual environment over the past forty years. At some point there has entered a fullness of God that does not seem to have been present previously, a move from the spiritual fulfillment of the feast of Pentecost to the spiritual fulfillment of the feast of Tabernacles.

It may be true also that a spiritual darkness in which no man can work has come upon us or is close to coming upon us. We believe that from this time forward, "from henceforth," the ability of the believers to "do things for God" will be overcome, either by violence or by deception, and only those who enter rest in God will be able to stand and bear fruit. (from The End-time Judgments)