Little children, these are the end times, and as you heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen. By this we know that it is the end times.
Whereby we know it is the last time - They have the characteristics which it was predicted many would have before the end of the world should come. The evidence that it was “the last time,” or the closing dispensation of the world, derived from the appearing of these persons, consists simply in the fact that it was predicted that such persons would appear under the Christian, or the last dispensation, Matthew 24:5, Matthew 24:24-27. Their appearance was to precede the coming of the Saviour, though it is not said “how long” it would precede that; but at any time the appearing of such persons would be an evidence that it was the closing dispensation of the world, for the Saviour, in his predictions respecting them, had said that they would appear before he should return to judgment. It cannot now be determined precisely to what classes of persons there is reference here, because we know too little of the religious state of the times to which the apostle refers. No one can prove, however, that there were “not” persons at that time who so fully corresponded to the predictions of the Saviour as to be a complete fulfillment of what he said, and to demonstrate that the last age had truly come. It would seem probable that there may have been reference to some Jewish adversaries, who denied that Jesus was the Messiah (Robinson Lexicon), or to some persons who had already broached the doctrine of the “Docetae,” that though Jesus was the Messiah, yet that he was a man in appearance only, and had not really come in the flesh. Classes of persons of each description abounded in the early ages of the church.