The Antichrist offers another continual presence. It is every whisper that tempts us toward autonomy, that tells us to carry it alone, that insists suffering is meaningless.
I have an intense love–hate relationship with my yard trimmer. I love its efficiency — the way it slices through overgrowth, bringing instant order to chaos. But I hate the way it constantly demands attention: refeeding the trimmer line that somehow vanished, replacing the tiny eyelet guides that snap without warning, figuring out why the line suddenly disappears, as though swallowed by the spool. It is endless maintenance, a never-ending cycle of small frustrations.
All of this sits inside a deeper reality: I don’t just dislike yardwork — I despise it. I wish I could envy those who find peace in manicuring their lawns or joy in pruning hedges, but my disdain is such that even envy is out of reach.
And yet, somewhere between the hum of the trimmer and the sting of failure just as the groove begins, the ordinary frustration of yardwork becomes a metaphor. This is life in the fallen world — friction everywhere. The grass always grows back, in league with weeds. The trimmer always needs tending. And beneath these surface annoyances is a deeper truth: suffering in any form — whether in physical pain, chronic illness, or relational heartache — can create the aching sense that God’s presence has disappeared.
There are seasons when holding fast to Christ feels impossible — when the rope has slipped through your hands, and you’re left grasping at nothing.
The Disappearing Presence
Søren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, names this reality: despair — not the sickness of the body, but the sickness of the self. We are created as a synthesis of the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, body and spirit. But suffering distorts that synthesis.
Even when we know, intellectually, that Christ is near — or felt it intensely hours beforehand — our experience tells another story. We pray, and silence answers. Or we forgo prayer, and the void fills with tangled overgrowth. We reach, and our hands close on air. Kierkegaard calls this the despair of weakness — that helpless, aching space where we want relief but cannot secure it.
Scripture has room for this ache; it meets us on the flat ground at the cross. The Psalms especially give us language for this:
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Ps. 13:1)
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)
These are not sanitized prayers. They are raw, desperate, and yet holy — not because they are tidy, but because they are honest. They are conduits for those who will abide. They teach us that absence is not abandonment, that even silence can be inhabited by God. The Psalms train us to pray our lives without pretense; to bring our confusion, anger, despair, and exhaustion into God’s presence.
“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps. 42:11).
Like in this psalm, God’s word of promise can turn us from despair to hope, even if muted and faint. For God in Christ - our very salvation - refuses to sever the sacred line of relation, even when we cannot feel his strength.
Living Relationally
Kierkegaard reminds us that life is inherently relational — with God, with others, and with ourselves. Suffering is never sealed off; it echoes into every part of our being. And in suffering, the temptation is always toward isolation — toward the lie whispered by our own hearts — that we must carry everything alone. This, too, is the quiet work of the Antichrist: to convince us that solitude in suffering or despair is our only option.
But God’s word — even if it feels like nothing more than a whisper, veiled by the crashing of waves — calls us back into relationship, not only with God but with his people. As Psalm 42 reminds us:
“Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me” (Ps. 42:7).
At the roar of his waterfalls, at his breakers, his waves.
This is where the church community becomes an essential vessel of grace: brothers and sisters who pray for us when we cannot pray for ourselves, who sit with us when silence seems deafening, and who proclaim God’s true promises to us even when we feel only his absence.
Acute or chronic illness, seasons of grief, or the quiet exhaustion of life in a fallen world — these are the places where we are most vulnerable to believe the lie of abandonment. And yet, in these very places, God so often works through the prayers, presence, and faithful, vocational love of others to remind us that we do not walk alone.
Christ himself entered that seeming hiddenness. On the cross, he bore the silence of abandonment so that we might never be truly alone, and so that his presence could be mediated even now — through his Spirit working through his Word, given through the mouths, prayers, and hands of his people.
A Cry in the Parking Lot
Recently, after another bout of wrestling with the trimmer and a bruise on my head from ducking too low under the deck, I dropped off my vehicle at an auto shop to address a stubborn check engine light. It’s an ongoing issue — frustrating, humbling — seeming victory followed by that light returning, glowing orange, a mangled grimace, a mechanical reminder that some problems don’t have quick fixes, and maybe never will.
As I waited outside for my wife to pick me up — my vague sense of hope mingled with persistent defeat — one of the workers came through the door, or tried to. The door caught him, his paperwork scattered, and in the flurry of frustration he cried out, “Oh, Jesus!”
And it gave me pause.
I would never condone the casual use of our Lord’s name — but this didn’t sound casual. There was something in the tone — frustration, yes, but also something rawer, almost like a plea.
As he gathered his papers, I stepped toward him and shared a quiet word about my own clumsiness the day before, still nursing that bruise. He gave a small laugh, said an “Oh, Jesus!” on my behalf, and in that moment, something broke through. Two people, in an ordinary parking lot, naming the friction of a fallen world and — however imperfectly, however likely to raise the eyebrow of the piously moralistic — acknowledging the One who holds it.
In his cry of our Lord’s name, I heard not profanity but prayer. The smallest thread of faith, the instinct to reach for the only name that can hold the weight of frustration, and more.
The Cure and the Call
Paul captures this paradox with clarity and comfort:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come… will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:38–39).
And again:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).
The Antichrist is not some distant, apocalyptic figure lurking in the shadows. The Antichrist offers another continual presence. It is every whisper that tempts us toward autonomy, that tells us to carry it alone, that insists suffering is meaningless — drawing us into existential despair or into grasping at the dense undergrowth of idolatry.
But the gospel speaks a truer word. It tells us that the places where despair wells up — even in parking lots, even behind a yard trimmer, even in the silence that feels like absence during illness — those places are where grace grafts itself most deeply.
And so, we hold fast, however clumsily or anguished, to the One who holds us first.
This article is written by Matthew L. Rubinstein. Matthew is the founder of PsaltPress, a space for Christ-centered storytelling and faithful originality. By day, he teaches at Rutgers University, guiding undergraduate and graduate clinical laboratory science students across multiple subjects. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.) at the University of Bridgeport. He now lives in Morris County, New Jersey, with his wife and two daughters.
