Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace,
1. It is affirmed that "the man of sin" is an individual, not a succession of individuals or any such thing as a system.  Many respected commentators stress this; but, in the book of Daniel, a single figure of "the kingdom of iron" was made to represent all the kings of the Roman Empire, during which time the "everlasting kingdom" would be established.  No less an authority than Lightfoot stated that "In all figurative passages it is arbitrary to assume that a person is meant when we find a personification."[22] He went on to declare that "The man of sin here need not be an individual man; it may be a body of men, or a power, or a spiritual influence."[23] Alexander Campbell took the same position with regard to this, and there can certainly be no intellectual objections to this view of it.