The End-Times Christian

¹ Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, ² not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. ³ Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, ⁴ who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. ⁵ Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? ⁶ And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. ⁷ For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. ⁸ And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming. ⁹ The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, ¹⁰ and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. ¹¹ Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, ¹² in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Eschatology is the theological word for what the Bible has to say about last things, what is to come at the end of time. What the Bible teaches, that Christ will return in the same way as he left (Acts 1:11), is a great fiction to those who do not believe the scriptures. But the subject of eschatology itself is not a fiction to most people today. We are being told all the time that some nuclear war or the effects of climate change could bring everything as we know it to an end.

So eschatology remains a relevant and urgent subject in our day, whether we think about it or not. As Christians we understand that in one sense the “end times” has arrived with the advent of Jesus of Nazareth. But we believe he is indeed coming again, and it is in light of his return that we are to frame and focus our entire lives.

To be a Christian is to be quite interested in the end-times. But what does that mean? How are we to be “end-times” Christians? This passage shows us how by highlighting the excitement of the end-times, the indicators that signify its arrival, and the way in which we are to be prepared for it.

The Excitement of the End-Times

As much as Paul addresses the subject of the Second Coming, the Christian doctrine of the last things, of eschatology, we can observe that this was a subject of serious interest and concern—and confusion—for these believers in Thessalonica. Why might that be? Why such end-times excitement?

Final Vindication

We know that these were believers who lived in a hostile environment. They “suffered” at the hands of their “own countrymen” (1 Thess 2:14). Paul boasts about their “steadfastness and faith” in spite of all the persecutions and afflictions they were enduring” (2 Thess 1:4). When Christians find themselves under such pressure, it is natural to for them to be looking forward to the hope of God coming to their defense.

This is natural and it is biblical. The gospel story ends with the promise of complete comfort and of vindication, total victory for the people of God (Rev 21:4). So it is right for us to look forward to that day with hope.

Here in verse one, Paul refers to the Second Coming of Jesus as “our being gathered together to him.” He uses a Greek noun that is found in only one other place in the New Testament, in Hebrews 10:25, where believers are told not to neglect the meeting together, but to do it “all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” The Sunday gathering of the church is, among other things, a rehearsal and symbol of the Second Coming of Christ.[1] So it is right for believers to anticipate the Second Coming of Christ and to look forward to that day, to commemorate it in our weekly habits and practices.

End-Times Hysteria

But we are not to anticipate his coming by falling for fanciful speculation and prediction about its occurrence. The return of the Lord is something that should very much captivate our attention, but we must wait for him to return, not get ourselves all caught up in end-times conspiracies.

Paul pleads with his audience “not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed . . . to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.” Paul is confronting a false teaching that stated either that the long-awaited Day of the Lord had already come or was imminent, perhaps even in process of happening.[2] This heresy was making its way by some “spirit” (that is, a prophetic utterance) or “spoken word” or a “letter,” all of which were allegedly coming from Paul himself or one of his colleagues.[3]

Anticipate, Don’t Speculate

Christians today seem to be just as susceptible to such end-times hype. Some of us grew up at a time when there were all sorts of statements about the imminent return of Jesus, that the end of the world was about to happen. I remember hearing from one preacher in my youth who was bemoaning the falling morals of society and then he said, “If Jesus doesn’t return very soon, he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

I sense the same kinds of speculation starting to bubble to the surface again. The coronavirus pandemic and the racial and political turmoil, plus a devastating October ice storm and the recent record-breaking cold with all the power outages and water shortages has us all thinking about how unusual the days in which we live are. Is this a sign of the end? You can almost feel the question stirring in the air again.

And of course, plenty of cults have begun with end-times predictions and then, when those have failed, have tried to spiritualize it. Charles Russell, for example, one of the founders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would take place in 1914. Since that obviously did not happen, today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses insist, without any objective evidence, that at the end of October 1914, “Jesus Christ was installed as God’s heavenly King.”[4]

All of this speculation and embarrassment has led many professing Christians to say that there will not even be a Second Coming. Better to just do away with Christianity’s most glaring prophecy yet to be fulfilled than to keep on being embarrassed by it, they say.

But we should look to the Second Coming with great anticipation. At the same time, we need to cast away all fruitless end-times speculation. And the best way to do this, is to stick to the end-times indications that the Bible actually gives us.

The Indicators of the End-Times

As we move to verse 3, we see that Paul does give three end-time indicators. “For that day will not come, unless…” and then he says that certain things must come first. These indicators are not there to help us speculate but to give us objective indications of the immanence of the end, so that we know when it truly is about to happen.

Three Indicators

First, “the rebellion.” The Greek word is apostasia, which in the Bible always refers to a religious crisis, “a large-scale compromise of faith among God’s people.”[5] So, just before Christ returns, we are told to expect scores and scores of professing Christians to abandon their faith in God and his gospel.

The second end-time indicator that Paul speaks of is the revealing of “the man of lawlessness” (v. 3). The title describes his behavior in regard to the commands of God; the great rebellion against God is led by the great rebel against God. He is also called “the son of destruction” which is a reference to his final destiny as a rebel against God and his ways. This is one “who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship.” The pride of this individual reaches a climax at the end of verse 4 as he claims to be God himself.

The third indicator that the day of the Lord is immanent is found in verses 6-7. Paul says, “And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time.” Something is holding back this man of lawlessness, keeping him from being revealed. Or rather, someone, for verse 7 personifies this “restrainer.” The day of the Lord will be immanent when this restrainer is out of the way. When that happens, verse 8 says, “the lawless one will be revealed.” But his claim of sovereignty will not last long, for the revealing of this man of lawlessness will result in the second coming of Jesus, who will obliterate the great rebel. The phrase at the end of verse 8, “the appearance of his coming,” refers to the “epiphany” of Christ’s arrival, a “sudden appearance” of Christ in the midst of this time of crisis.[6] And it will be game over: Christ will destroy the rebel “with the breath of his mouth.”

Interpreting the Indicators

Now let me say that each of these three things have been variously interpreted throughout church history. What precisely they refer to is a matter of debate. We need humility as we consider each one of these. But what I would argue is that while these three indicators may be obscure from our perspective now, the point is that they will not at all be obscure when they have come to pass. Everyone will understand them then. And there will be no doubt that the day of the Lord has come. So don’t be too quick to interpret these indicators.

So when it comes, for example, to this “man of lawlessness,” there have been no shortage of historical personages who seem to have fit the bill, but none of them could have been “the one.” Paul’s own description of this individual is taken from the prophecy of Daniel 11:36-37, and perhaps from other Old Testament texts as well. Most commentators believe that Daniel’s prophecy referred to the king from the Seleucid Empire, Antiochus Epiphanes, who desecrated the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in 169 BC. But Paul must be speaking of someone else. The Thessalonians would have likely thought of the Roman Emperor, Octavian, who in 27 BC was given the name “Augustus,” a Latin name coming from the same root word as the word worship. Augustus was considered throughout the empire to be a divine figure and to be honored as such, but he was long gone by the time Paul wrote this letter.[7] More recently at that time, there was the Roman Emperor, Gaius, who in AD 40 tried to put his own image inside the Jerusalem temple and declared himself to be the new manifestation of God.[8] But we know that it must not have been him that Paul was pointing to.

And on and on it goes. Throughout church history, in every generation, there are no shortages of attempts to identify these end-times indicators in one’s own day. But that is exactly the kind of thing this passage warns us not to do. Better to say what Augustine said all the way back in the fifth century. In his City of God, Augustine said this about the enigmatic “restrainer”: “I have no idea what is meant.”[9] It seems that the Thessalonians knew what Paul meant (v. 6), but we simply do not know, not with any degree of certainty anyway.

So is that much ado about nothing, then? Does the obscurity of these verses mean we try in vain to garnish any wisdom from them? No not at all.

There’s plenty here we can understand. We have enough here to get us prepared for the arrival of the day of the Lord.

The Preparations for the End-Times

So let me conclude this morning with some help from this passage on how we can best prepare for the arrival of the end times.

Danger of Deception

First, the Bible warns us of a coming crisis just before the Second Coming of Jesus and the arrival of the Day of the Lord. We must be ready for it. The great danger here is that anyone would be unprepared. More specifically, we see in this passage that the danger is deceit. In verse 3 Paul says, “Let no one deceive you in any way.” In verse 10 we read that the main weapon to be wielded against God’s plan is “wicked deception.”

It’s easy to get comfortable and find yourself unprepared for a crisis. I don’t know how many times last year I told myself I needed to get on my roof and cut back some tree branches that were dangling just above the shingles. But I didn’t do it, and the October ice storm caught me by surprise and cost me $850.

We’ve been told that “the rebellion” is coming, the great apostasy. And Paul told Timothy that the Holy Spirit has explicitly told us to expect plenty to depart from the faith due to “deceitful spirits” (1 Tim 4:1). The point of telling the Thessalonians about this is not so that they can go around accusing professing Christians of deserting the faith because of some disagreement on secondary matters, but so that they themselves will not be caught up in great apostasy when it happens.[10] You can expect to be surprised by the scandal of apostasy. Some Christians you respected and learned from will apostatize. Don’t you go down with them!

The Mystery of Lawlessness

As for the “man of lawlessness,” there does seem to be an expectation that there will be a historical person who will be the embodiment of all who rebel against the Lord. This “man of lawlessness” has not yet arrived, but Paul told the Thessalonians in verse 7 that “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.” Our concern must not be in identifying the individual but in guarding against his message.

Although Paul does not use the term himself, it seems that he is referring to the same person that John calls the Antichrist. “You have heard that antichrist is coming,” we read in 1 John 2:18, but already “many antichrists have come.” In 1 John 4:3 we are told that “the spirit of the antichrist . . . is in the world already.” So it doesn’t seem to be a biblical concern that we know who the antichrist is; the concern is that any Christian at any time in history be able to fend off the message of antichrist which is already present.

What is that message? John tells us plainly. “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (1 Jn 2:22). Or again, in 1 John 4:3, “Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” The nature of the antichrist, John says, is deception about the nature of Jesus. Second John 7 says, that “many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 Jn 7).

Surely this is the mystery of lawlessness that is already at work. It has everything to do with denying the person of Jesus, of denying that he alone is God, God in the flesh. The antichrist is all about getting us to stop believing in Jesus, not just intellectually, but morally. To stop following Jesus and his ways. To yield belief that he is not just a lord but the Lord, not a god, but the God. The only true God. The true and rightful sovereign.

The spirit of the antichrist, the mystery of lawlessness, is at work any time we get distracted from single-minded dedication and devotion to Jesus as our Lord and as our God. Where do you see that spirit of antichrist taking ground in your life?

The Activity of Satan

We cannot say who or what “the restrainer” is, but we know who is behind the man of lawlessness. Verse 9 says, “The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan” who is hell-bent on using any power or sign or wonder to keep people from loving the truth and so to be saved. You and I fight a very real and very powerful foe. Don’t underestimate him.

Satan is the one behind the rebellion, the power manifest in the great rebel himself. He just might even be the “restrainer,” who’s deceptive work will one day be taken out of the way, unmasked for all the world to see clearly.

But he is not match for Jesus. Just read verse 8 and take comfort in that.

And also take comfort in the fact that, according to verse 11, Satan is able to carry out his work only under the total sovereignty of God himself. Satan “wins” only under the authority of God who carries out his own righteous judgment through the devil’s deceptive work.

But for those of us who believe the truth—the truth of Jesus—and seek our pleasure in him alone and in his righteousness, we are empowered by his matchless might to withstand the onslaughts of Satan.

All who fall for Satan’s lies will be condemned (v. 12). But “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1).

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[1] Gene L. Green, The Letters to the Thessalonians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 302.

[2] The Greek verb, ἐνίστημι, is in the perfect tense, which ordinarily would refer to present results from a past event, but it could also be referring to something as yet in the future.

[3] Charles A. Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), 239.

[4] “1914—A Significant Year in Bible Prophecy,” available online at www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-teach/1914-significant-year-bible-prophecy.

[5] Beale, 203-204. Though some have argued that this word here refers to the “removal” of the rapture, this would make the word doubly obscure.

[6] Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ), rev. Sir Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 669.

[7] Green, Letters to the Thessalonians, 310.

[8] Ibid., 311.

[9] Augustine, City of God, 20.19.

[10] Green, Letters to the Thessalonians, 307.