Our Heavenly Father, the psalmist warns us to be careful about lofty thoughts. He, of course, is speaking to us about the pride of heart, the haughtiness of humanity. But we come now today to a text of Scripture that is lofty. And we pray for your wisdom, your guidance. We pray for the Holy Spirit to go before us as we think about this text, for it is indeed a difficult one. Not everything in your word is alike plain, and yet it is indeed all of it your word. And so as we come to grapple with this section of scripture, we pray that you will bless us with understanding. And where we fail to understand, we pray that you'll bless us with your grace. Father, we ask and pray all of this in the blessed name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen. Well, before we get started, I want to make a few comments. And I want to begin with the question, who is the man of lawlessness? That's why we're turning to this text this morning, isn't it? We want to deal with the question, who is the man of lawlessness? And that's a difficult question. And you know how difficult that is. If you've spent any time reading any amount of the end times literature, no matter what particular view it is that you hold, you know that that's a difficult question to answer. One of my previous professors once said, I wish that I had $100 for every time someone tried to identify the man of lawlessness. I would be a very, very wealthy man. Let me give you just a few of the names that have been tossed about. There's Emperor Nero, and if you were listening and you know about Roman history, you know that there were allusions to Emperor Nero in Romans 13. And so there are those who have said Emperor Nero is the Antichrist, or at least was the Antichrist. However, others have said, no, that's not right. Others have said that Hitler is, of course, the Antichrist for obvious reasons. And then others have said, no, no, no, no, that's wrong. They've said Henry Kissinger is the Antichrist. And others have said, and for obvious reasons, Mikhail Gorbachev was the Antichrist. And then it was discovered that it wasn't the mark of the beast on his forehead, just a birthmark. So before we get started, I'd like to answer for you the question, who is the Antichrist? I know that's a question that is weighing heavily upon your minds, and I just wanna answer it before we get started this morning so that we can actually deal with the text and not worry about that question. So what I want you to do is I want you to take your sermon note sheets out, and I want you to turn over to the side that says Naming the Antichrist, and I'll lead you through a little exercise that will help you to understand who it is that this figure is. The first thing I want you to do is, I want you to look at what you take out a pen, pencil, if you want to just listen along you can, but you'll miss out, that's okay. I want you to, in number one, write down in the blanks, cute, you heard me, cute purple dinosaur. I've given you all the blanks, so you know if you have too many or too little, you misspelled dinosaur. Cute purple dinosaur. Now step two, change all of the U's to V's. We want to be proper about our Latin. Step 3. Extract all the Roman numerals from Q-Purple-Dinosaur, and that leaves you with C-V-V-L-D-I-V. Step 4. We want to convert all of those to Arabic values. Now that leaves you with what I have there, 105, 550, 500, 1 and 5. You add those up, 666, you got the Antichrist. It is Barney. Now that doesn't quite work because Barney just died. So I'm going to have to rework this. Now why did I start with a humorous exercise about a not so humorous topic? Well, in order to point out the importance at the very beginning of what we're doing here today, we need to use discernment that is tightly tethered to the scriptures. Not just in this, in all things, but especially this. Because if we don't, then we start to believe every creative nuance that someone brings down the pipe. And pretty soon we're naming names and that person dies and we're left with a bag of embarrassment as the church figuring out who is next on the scene, on the political or religious scene. Who are we going to name as Antichrist next? We want to be careful of that. We want to be careful of that. So with that caution in mind, let us turn to the reading of God's word. And let me remind you, as Elder John already reminded you, that this is indeed the word of God. And what is more, it is a sufficient word. And I think that that's what we need to hear this morning. I think we need to understand, as we already do, that this is God's inerrant word, it's his infallible word, it is certainly his authoritative word, but with regard to a subject like the one we're going to be looking at this morning, we need to remember that though we may not understand in in the entirety of a subject, we need to know that the fault is our own and not God or His word, because this is a sufficient word. So I want to direct your attention to the reading of God's word this morning. I want us to look at 2 Thessalonians 2. I'll start in verse one. I want us to read through verse 12, and I want us to hear this morning God's inerrant, his infallible, his authoritative, and his sufficient word. Now concerning the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, 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. 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, 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. Do you not remember that when I was still with you, I told you these things and you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. 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. 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. The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore, God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. I thought it might be helpful if we started by me telling you what my view of the end actually is. I align myself with what is called the amillennialist position. The amillennialist position is not an exciting position. It's not one that's thrilling like the dispensational premillennialist view that we looked at the last time. It's not overly pessimistic. And it's not overly pessimistic because it does believe that the gospel will go forth and conquer. And praise be to God for that. But if it's not overly pessimistic, it's also not overly optimistic. And I say that because it does believe that the bad is going to get worse before the end, just like the good, the gospel good is going to get better. So evil and wickedness will also intensify. In other words, we might say it like this. We might say it the way we understood it the last time when we looked at chapter one. When Christ returns, he will find his faithful people living on the earth, but he will also find people persecuting those faithful people of his. Now, why is it the case? In other words, why will there be a time of distress, conflict between good and evil as good intensifies and as evil grows as well? I mean, think about it. If the Lord is going to conquer, if He's going to ride forth on His white horse and He's bent on conquering, then why the distress? Well, Ronald Wallace gives a wonderful answer to that question. And I read this to you once before when we were going through Daniel, but I'll read it to you again. He writes this. He says, the tribulation is due to the tension and fear that evil has of the triumphant and developing kingdom of Christ around it. It is the increase of goodness on the earth that causes this intense reaction of evil from the simple motive of fear. You remember the last time I read that quote to you, I said, that's exactly the opposite of the way we think about it. We typically think about ourselves as being in the position of fear, fearful of the world, fearful of the evil in the world. But it's actually the other way around. It's the evil in the world that fears the goodness because it's gospel goodness and it knows its own end. So this being the case, that the good will get better, the gospel good will get better, and the evil will intensify, how will the events unfold? Well, I begin with the scriptural understanding that we are living in what the Bible calls the last days. We are living in the last days. And I get that notion out of scripture. Scripture tells us that we are living in the last days. When did they begin? Well, Acts chapter two, verses 16 through 17, Peter says that Joel's prophecy was fulfilled in the hearing of all on the day he preached it. Now, what did Joel say? This is what Peter quotes, just listen to it. And in the last days, it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. In other words, Peter takes this prophecy of Joel and he says, today this has been fulfilled. These are the last days. The idea is then that the last days were inaugurated with the ascension of Christ. And we don't find anything different when we look at other places in the Bible. When we look at Hebrews chapter one, verse two, the author of Hebrews tells us, he says this, in the last days, in these last days, God has spoken to us through his son. Peter says in his first epistle, chapter one, verse 20, that Christ was manifest in these last days for our sake. And one more, John. John actually takes the idea of these last days and intensifies it. What do I mean? In 1 John 2, verse 18, he says this. He says, children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many Antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. So we're living in the last days. In fact, if we follow John, and we should, it would be appropriate to call these days the last hour. And that period of time encompasses the time stretching from the ascension of Christ to the second coming of Christ. And I want you to know something. I want you to know another aspect of the Bible's understanding of these times in which we live. And if we're going to go there, and so you don't have to go there now, but I want you to know that the Bible, the book of Revelation rather, is a picture book. It's a wonderful picture book. In fact, it fits our present age, doesn't it? We disparage the word so much and we're people of image. This is a great book for our time. It's a book of verbal images. And I want you to know that on every page, in every chapter, almost in every verse, you find a picture. And you have to understand the book that way. You can't interpret a symbolic book literally. I mean, if you did, think about what chapter 4 would be like, chapter 5. I mean, here's this lamb that looks as if it has been slain, given a scroll with seven seals. Now, if you interpret that literally, what do you do? Well, you see a lamb with its hooves trying to hold a scroll and flick off these seals that are on the scroll that automatically jump into these huge images. You see, it's a symbolic book, and we're to understand it like that. And that also means that the numbers of the book, and you've heard a lot of those numbers and expressions of numbers, 1,200 and some days, time times a half a time, three and a half days, and so on. And you also hear about the millennium in chapter 20. Now, the millennium in chapter 20 is, as are the rest of the numbers in the book of Revelation, they are figurative values. Now, I'm not going to say much more about that aspect at this point, but I do want you to notice something about the millennium. The millennium is that figurative period of time that began at the ascension of Christ and will culminate in the second coming. That's the millennium. We are living in the millennium now. The amillennialist position is often caricatured by its name. It means no millennium, amillennial, no millennium, but that's not true. We do believe that there is a millennium. We just believe that we're living in it now and that it's a symbolic period of time, not a thousand literal years. but a thousand year period stretching between the ascension of Christ and the second coming. Now, here's the crucial question. What's the purpose of the millennium? Well, the Bible actually tells us that. Revelation 20 actually tells us that. It says that it's for the binding of Satan. Now, what does that mean? Well, graciously, God has explained that even further. It means what God says it means. The binding of Satan was so that, verse 3, Satan, quote, might not deceive the nations any longer. Now that's very simple when you think about it. It doesn't take a whole lot of work to stop and think for yourself what the world and the nations of the world were like before Christ came, before Christ ascended into heaven. What were they like? Well, the Word of God actually tells us that. In Acts chapter 14, verse 16, it says this, In past generations, he, that is God, allowed the nations to walk in their own ways. God allowed the nations to walk in their own ways. And then in Acts 17.30, this is what you find. Talking about the idolatry of the nations, Paul says this, quote, the times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. Now, I think the point is absolutely clear when you think about it just from those two particular texts. Prior to Christ's coming, the nations walked in their own ways, they walked in ignorance, or you might say, quite clearly, they walked in darkness. And all you have to do is look at the Scriptures and you find the truth of that paganism everywhere in the nations that surround Jerusalem. But then Christ came. And what did Christ do? Well, he did many things, didn't he? But one of the things that I want to single out when we think about this particular aspect is this. He prayed in Psalm 2. He prayed Psalm 2. And what did he pray? He prayed that the Father would give him the nations as an inheritance. Isn't that striking? prayed that the nations would be given to Him as an inheritance. And that prayer was answered, wasn't it? How? In the binding of Satan, that He might not be able to deceive the nations as He once did. And so it makes perfect sense when Jesus is resurrected, He meets the disciples. What does He tell them to do? He tells them to go and disciple the nations. Why? Because Satan is now bound. What does that mean? He's no longer able to deceive the nations as He once did. You see, this is not that difficult when you really think about it and you just use the statements in Revelation 20 to understand what's happening. It's not that difficult. So we're living in the millennium, a time when Satan is bound, a time when missionary activity abounds. It's a wonderful period of time in which to be living. Now someone's going to say something like this, I know they are. Someone's going to say, but doesn't Satan prowl about like a roaring lion? Doesn't Peter say that? And doesn't Paul say in 2 Corinthians chapter 4 that he blinds the eyes of men, the minds of men? Yes, he does. And we shouldn't be surprised about that, not at all. We shouldn't be surprised that Satan is active, though very much limited. I'll tell you what we should be surprised about. We should be surprised. We should be surprised at the binding of Satan and how he is not able to deceive the nations in total as he once did, but the gospel continues to move forward in triumphant progression. The good gets better. The gospel good gets better. That should amaze us and just leave us in wonderment. Well, we could go on, but what happens next? Well, according to Revelation 20, verses seven through 10, before Christ returns, Satan is going to be loose to deceive among the nation once again, and the time will be short, and with that deception will come all that comes with opposition to the gospel, and then the end will come. And you heard me talk about that end in 1 Thessalonians, and then again last week in 2 Thessalonians. There will be one coming, It is the parousia, it's not a secret rapture and that coming will be Christ's coming and he will separate the sheep from the goats at that time. The wicked on his left and the righteous on his right, those who are righteous in Christ and he will cast the wicked into the Lake that burns with fire forever, and their destruction will be an eternal destruction. And those who belong to him will go with him into the new heavens and the new earth. And what a glorious thing it is to think on those kinds of things. But we have only set the framework. We need to now think about our passage, the passage before us. And with that framework in mind, let's ask the first question. When will the man of lawlessness come? When will the man of lawlessness come? Believe it or not, that was, at least in part, what the Thessalonians were asking. It bore that question upon their situation in Thessalonica, because it appears that the Thessalonians had been duped. Someone had come along with a prophecy of claiming that it was by the spirit, or perhaps it was an oral message, or someone had a letter and they claimed that it was from the apostles, and maybe it was all three. And they said, these false teachers said that the day of the Lord had already come. Now that raises not a few questions, but let's confine ourselves to those questions tied closely to the text. And I can't think of a better question than the one that's our first point. When will the man of lawlessness come? Well, how would you answer that question? I want you to just think about it for a minute and hopefully gather the resources that you have in your own memory banks. How would you answer that question? Now, I'm not going to ask you. I'm going to try and tell you what I think Paul says when he answers that question. And what he says, the first thing that he says is very instructive, as you might imagine. He says, let no one deceive you in any way. Now at that point, our ears perk up, don't they? Let no one deceive you in any way. Deception. That's Satan's work. He's been bound from doing that work. He still goes around and does it, but not to the same degree that He once did prior to Christ's ascension, prior to God giving Him the nations as an inheritance, prior to His command of the disciples to go and disciple the nations. But this, you see, this is Satan's work. Deception. And that ought to make our ears perk up. And those who would deceive them then are in the service of the evil one, not to mention the man of lawlessness, or at least his spirit. Why? Because the man of lawlessness comes with all wicked deception. That's what we find in verse 10. The man of lawlessness acts according to the activity of Satan himself. He deceives. But that's not all Paul says. He obviously warns them. But what else does he say? He says there are two things that need to happen, that must happen before the Son of Man comes in glory. First of all, the rebellion will come. And second, the man of lawlessness will be revealed. Now, those two events are in some sense connected, and we'll look at that possibly a bit later. But now, having said what is clear, let me introduce another dimension that I think throws a little bit of difficulty into the mix. Paul not only talks about the man of lawlessness, he talks about the mystery of lawlessness that is already at work. Now, I want you to know something. The interesting thing, I think a manifestation of this particular aspect of this particular text, this idea that the man of lawlessness, the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. That oftentimes prompts people to say things like this. They say this, they say, you know, and I remember this when I was a kid. Somebody will say in a most solemn and serious way, you know, the Antichrist may already be among us. You know what I mean? Like very, see, and you know, as a kid, when you hear that the man of lawlessness may be a little kid with you, you know, he may be the one that's going to rise up, you know, you're like. You know, there's a fear factor that goes along with this, and I want you to know something. I want you to know that whether a person believes that the man of lawlessness was in the first century, or whether a man believes that the man of lawlessness is in the 21st century, we have a tendency to say those sorts of things. In other words, if you believe that the man of lawlessness was a figure in the first century, you identify him in the first century when Paul was writing this letter, or at least forerunner or at least he was born or something of that nature. And the same is true for today, isn't it? People say the Antichrist is already living among us. So how do we understand this? How do we understand the mystery of lawlessness already at work that seems to manifest itself in no matter what position we take? How do we understand it? Well, let me put it like this. And I wanna set things in this way for you to help you understand something about the mystery of lawlessness. I want you to think, first of all, about when the letters of 1st and 2nd Thessalonians were written. They were written in the early 50s. Most people date them about 51 or 52. Earliest letters of Paul, at least 1st Thessalonians was, earliest letters of Paul. But now I want you to think about 1 John. 1 John, you remember that quote that we read from him? We'll read it in just a minute. In 1 John, 1 John, John writes about the Antichrist. And John's letter was written in the 90s. And you find that John says the same thing. Children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard, that Antichrist is coming. So now many Antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. So how, so the question that I'm asking you is how should we understand this anticipation that seems to be in the scriptures? 40 years apart from one another. One author says, Antichrist, many Antichrists have come. One, many Antichrists have come. Now it raises a good many questions, doesn't it? Not the least of which is who are the many who are to come? But I'll tell you what else it does at the very least. It says this. It says that we don't have to know the identity of the man of lawlessness in order to know his work. And that could be said whether you place the man of lawlessness in the first century or you place him in the 21st century. We know the work of the man of lawlessness. because his work is in accord with the activity of Satan. So that's first. The second point that I want to deal with is what is the rebellion to come? What is the rebellion to come? Now, you need to understand that I would argue that if the rebellion is tethered to the coming of Antichrist, whose spirit is already at work, and there have been many Antichrists, or at least men in the spirit of the Antichrist, who could be thought of even as Antichrist, then their coming has been accompanied with a rebellion of some sort or another. Now let's think then about the rebellion, or the little rebellions that accompany the Antichrist who have already come. Let's start with the word itself. The word in our text is the word from which we get our word apostasy. And that word means falling away. Now, the word apostasy for us has religious connotations, but you need to understand that the word does not denote anything religious. In fact, the word is not only found in religious language and religious texts, but it's found in political texts, in the political arena. And so there are various usages of this word. Let me give you an example. This word was actually used to describe the Jews in the intertestamental period as they rebelled against or fell away or apostatized from Antiochus IV. Now, I don't know about you, but that would be a good apostasy. Not a bad one. And so the word connotes things to us, but that's because we have the Puritans and we've read about John Owen and the apostasy of the church and the word connotes things to us, but it doesn't denote those things. It's more of a neutral word. Now, With that in mind, the question then becomes, what is the rebellion that precedes the man of sin or accompanies the man of sin in some way? What is it? Well, I'm going to state it first of all, and then I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what I mean by it. It is both religious and political. It's both religious and political. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, I mean this. I mean that the apostasy mentioned here will be a general abandonment of civil order. And since civil authority is authorized by God, we read that in Romans 13, the rebellion will ultimately be against him. but it will have political overtones to it. An abandonment of civil authority, abandonment of civil order, which ultimately, again, traces back to him. But you get the idea. It's political. But we must not forget that this man is also the man of lawlessness. Now, I want you to think about that for a minute. He's not only the Antichrist, he is the Antinomian. He is the one who is against the law. Now, here's the question that we need to ask ourselves. What is the law that this man is against? What is the law that this spirit is against? Well, I can't think of a better answer to that than the law of God. the law of God captured in the law of Moses, the law of God written on the hearts of even the pagans. This is the law of God over against the man of lawlessness. And so the apostasy is a falling away from two things. It's a falling away from God's ordained civil order, And it's a falling away from God's law, at the very least, written upon the heart of the pagan. Now look, I really don't need to tell you, give you examples of this kind of thing today, do I? All you have to do is look in Romans chapter 1, and you see how you begin to get a movement away from the law of God, and God permits it. In fact, God puts those people away from himself. People say, they say, I want to worship the creation rather than the creator. And so God says, let's have you do that. And then they say, well, I don't, you know, a man exchanges natural affection for woman, and he invested in a man. And God says, well, then go ahead and do that. And then, you know, at the end, He lists all kinds of sins and he says, oh, and by the way, he says, anybody that participates or gives a condonement to these things. And what do we have today? What do we have today? But people who are giving their hearty approval to all kinds of things that are contrary to the law of God and the promotion of civil disorder. Now, when understood like that, it's easy to see when a nation is in the midst of a falling away. In fact, I would argue that it's easy to see how this is both political and religious because our nation that is falling away from the law of God is taking a good many churches with it. All you have to do is think of the liberal churches, but not just the so-called liberal churches. There are other churches that name themselves as evangelical that are just as happy to go along with the falling away. So all you have to do to find these things is look in Romans 1 or Romans 13. If the law of God is being suppressed and rulers are acting contrary to their expressed God-ordained purpose, the protection and upholding of God's religion expressed in his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the nation is falling away. Well, that's the rebellion. What about the third point? What type of man is the man of lawlessness? Well, there's a sense in which we already started to answer this question. He's a man against the law, and he incites or takes advantage of lawless behavior. These things we know, but what else do we know? Let me start outside of our text, in a passage that's commonly understood to be speaking of the Antichrist, and I want us to go now to Revelation 12 and 13. Elder John read this chapter to us, and so I'm not going to read it again. However, I am going to ask you a question, see how well you listened, although I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand or speak out loud. My question is, How many beasts do you remember reading about in these two chapters? If you say three, you're right. There are three. There's the dragon, there is the beast from the sea, and then there is the beast from the earth. Now, what ought to hit you immediately? What ought to hit you immediately is that this is an unholy trinity. An unholy trinity. You say to me, well, I don't know if I believe that. Well, just think about it for a minute. Let's just think about the text here. Look at the dragon, chapter 12. The dragon is a fatherly-like figure to the other two beasts, right? And then you have, he stands on the shore of the sea, almost waiting as the beast from the sea is given birth to and by the sea. And what is the sea? Well, you know, sometimes revelation, sometimes God in his revelation helps us out a little bit. It doesn't leave us to run back to the Old Testament. Sometimes he tells us right in the text what it is that things are. And one of the things that you can do is jump ahead to Revelation chapter 17 and you find this unholy city emerging in chapter 17. And the unholy city sits on what? It sits on many waters, verse 1. But the great thing about it is in verse 15 we're told that this unholy city, pictured as this prostitute, sits on waters. And he says, the waters that you saw where the prostitute is seated are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages. In other words, when we think about this particular imagery, we ought to understand that the beast who rises out of the sea rises out of the nations. And notice that his authority is from who? The dragon. And what is more, notice this, he does the work of the dragon in that he persecutes the church. Now, isn't that what we were told that the dragon did? He tried to consume the church. He went after the church. And this beast is doing the work of his unholy father. But notice also that he's accompanied by the unholy spirit in the beast from the earth. Notice this, the beast from the earth speaks like what? The dragon. He speaks like the dragon. And what does he do? He makes people on the earth worship who? Not himself. He makes them worship the beast out of the sea. Isn't that like the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit causes people to worship the Son. In this case, the beast out of the earth causes people to worship the beast out of the sea. Now, why did I take this passage and try to unfold to you what we see of this unholy trinity in these particular chapters? Well, In order to answer the question, what else do we know about the man of lawlessness? And here are just several things that I would say. First of all, I want you to notice that he is a political figure. You can tell it from the text. He rises out of the sea. He rises out of the peoples and nations. He is a political figure. And if you notice, and remember your history, you notice that this particular beast, this beast out of the sea, is described very much like Rome. And there's a particular seemingly resurrection that happens in this beast out of the sea, very much like the Son of God, only this is a pseudo-resurrection. It only seems to be a resurrection. And people say, well, this is possibly Nero who killed himself, but there was a rumor around that Nero was going to be redividus. He was going to live again. He was going to be revived. It seems to be that when you take the picture of these texts, it seems to be that the person who is the man of lawlessness and the spirit of the man of lawlessness is a political figure. He has obvious religious overtones because, that's the second thing I want to say, he seems to have difficulty in discerning his being because this particular figure always wants to be worshipped. And we'll see that in just a second. And third, he will use deceit just like his master, the dragon, in order to deceive the people who follow him. And God will put them under a delusion so that they'll believe the lie. We see that this particular man and the spirit of this man are substitutes, cheap substitutes, that's putting it too good, cheap substitutes for Jesus Christ. What can we say about the man of lawlessness? He is a wretched substitute for the Lord Jesus. And you know, the interesting thing to me about this is that if you look at the history behind the New Testament text, one of the things that you find is, you find that this sort of thing is going on all the time. And no writer ever says, this is the man. This is the Antichrist. They all seem to say that the mystery of lawlessness is at work, and there is a man, but this man seems to reoccur, reoccur, reoccur. For instance, 10 years before Paul arrives on the scene in Macedonia, Emperor Caligula ordered that his image be set up as an idol in the Jerusalem temple. 10 years, 41. Paul writes in 51. In fact, during the time that Paul was in Macedonia, Claudius began to have reconsiderations about himself and the worship that he refused in Alexandria, but later said, no, no, no, I changed my mind. And he started claiming divinity for himself. In the mid to late 60s, Emperor Nero believed himself to be divine. And in the 90s, when John wrote his epistles and Revelation, Domitian was doing the same exact thing. I think the reason why John uses Nero is he's an example of this political religious figure who emerges in the spirit of Antichrist, leads a rebellion against God's civil order and against God's law. And the church feels it acutely. Because that's, after all, the purpose of the dragon that prompts and motivates the beast out of the sea and the beast out of the earth. All of his resources are directed to the destruction of the church, just as all of the resources of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are for the preservation of his church. You know, we should never, ever, ever think that the civil disorder we see, or the abandonment of God's law that we see, are not related to the attack of Satan upon the church. If we do, then we've misread the entire situation. Because that's exactly what's happening in our world. There's only one battle going on, and there are only two sides. And thank the Lord, He's already won, but He's not consummated the victory. There's only one battle going on, regardless of what you think. And you see manifestations of the Antichrist, of people trying to substitute Christ in various ways, don't you? You see it in the tolerance of today. You see it in what? What? I'm going to take the rainbow. You think that's an accident. I'm going to take the rainbow and make it the symbol of the gay and lesbian community. Is that an exit? No, it's a supplanting of God's order and God's law. It's just one manifestation of the mystery of lawlessness that's afoot. Well, there is something else that we need to remember and Paul helps us to see it. He helps us to see it in 1st and 2nd Thessalonians. The apostle describes the Lord's coming and the coming of the Antichrist in similar language, using similar themes. In fact, it's really interesting. If you do a comparison, there's the parousia, there's the trumpets, the cry of command, the military cry of command, the military entourage, and all of these things, the coming home and victory. All of these images that are being used to describe the coming of Christ are being used actually to say that there is another king who is far more powerful than any of these Roman emperors. And all you have to do is think again to Acts 17. Isn't that why the city officials had such a problem with the believers and Paul and Thessalonica? Because they claimed there was another king. You know, one of the things that I would encourage us to do is this. I would encourage us to remember that there is another king. I don't think that we remember that enough. I think we remember Jesus as our Lord and Savior, as somebody who helps us to escape from that lake of fire in the end. I think that we need to broaden our understanding because it's there in our theology. We need to broaden our understanding of Jesus. He is the king of this world and he is coming again. I want you to know something. When He comes, He will destroy the man of lawlessness, any manifestation of the man of lawlessness with the breath of His mouth. And He will overthrow him because He loves us and because He loves His name. And I want you to know something, those who love the Lord will not only be rescued, but they will be safe in Him. The best, listen to me, we are in a tumultuous time, and the best place for your eyes to be are not upon the manifestations of the man of lawlessness in any way, shape, or form. The best place for your eyes to be are on the coming Christ, because in Him there is safety. In him there is rescue, and in him there is a manifestation of love that you will not see anywhere else. Father in heaven, thank you for this day, for the time you've given. Bless us as we have thought about your word. We pray again that you will bless us in the understanding of it. We pray that you will give us grace where we were unable to do so. And Father, we ask and pray these things in Jesus' blessed name. Amen.