Q. Christians are supposed to love everyone, but would that include even the Antichrist mentioned in the book of Revelation? Are Christians supposed to pray for the salvation of everyone, including the Antichrist? Does God love or hate the Antichrist?
I think the answer to your question lies in our understanding of the terms “love” and “hate.” It has been well said that, in a biblical sense, “love is not a feeling, it is a commitment.” Specifically, it is a commitment to act consistently in the best interests of another person.
Conversely, but in a complementary way, in a biblical sense, “hatred is not a commitment, it is a feeling.” As I say in this post, godly hatred is “that feeling of strong antipathy towards anything dishonoring to God that makes us want to have nothing to do with wrongdoing and not join in with wrongdoers. … But if instead we are ‘out to get’ somebody, that is, if we are committed to acting consistently contrary to their best interests, then this is not really ‘hatred’ in the sense that the godly psalmists use the term. It is instead bitterness or vengefulness—something we cannot in good conscience indulge.”
So to speak in light of this to your question, I would say that Christians should not harbor bitter, vengeful feelings even towards the Antichrist. In the best interests of that person, we would still need to oppose his efforts to destroy the worship of Jesus on earth. For his own sake, we would need to try to keep him from doing such a thing that was so opposed to God. (And for the sake of our own Christ-likeness, we should not be bitter or vengeful either.) At the same time, we would need to recognize that the Antichrist had made a series of choices that had led him to become the arch-enemy of Jesus, and that should fill us with a strong antipathy that would make us want to have nothing to do with him or his purposes.
While God knows what is in the depths of the hearts of people, other human beings don’t. Christians have various understandings of how the prophecies in the Bible about the end times will be fulfilled. But suppose, for the sake of discussion, that there were believers alive on earth during the time of the Antichrist. I’m not sure they they would know definitively that this was indeed the Antichrist. For all they knew, with prayer and sacrificial love, this person might turn from the path of opposing Christ. So I would say that, given the limitations of our knowledge as finite humans, we can’t really ever give up on anybody. We should pray for the salvation of everyone, knowing that “God is not willing that any should perish, but wants all to come to repentance.”
We also need to recognize, however, that God has given people the freedom to make moral choices, and that a long series of wrong moral choices may lead a person to the place where he or she becomes definitively opposed to God. But that is something we would recognize only in principle. In the case of any given person, we could not know whether they had reached that point. So we pray with realism but also with hope.
I would say that God loves the Antichrist in the biblical sense I have described: always wanting what would have been the best for him, always wishing that he had made different moral choices. And I would say that God hates the Antichrist in the biblical sense I have described: not wanting to have anything to do with someone who opposes love, peace, and justice to the extent of oppressing people cruelly and even trying to exterminate the worship of his beloved Son.
Good Question 