Enduring Trials in Light of Jesus’ Return: The Man of Lawlessness


Sermon by J. Ligon Duncan on September 30, 2012 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12

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The Lord’s Day Morning


September 30, 2012



“Enduring Trials in Light of
Jesus’ Return: The Man of
Lawlessness”


2 Thessalonians 2:1-12


The Reverend Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III

If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to 2 Thessalonians
chapter 2. We’re going to be looking
at verses 1 to 12. And as we said
before the service, this is one of those passages that commentators on the
apostle Paul mark as one of the most difficult, if not
the most difficult, in all of the
apostles to interpret. This is especially because of what Paul says in verse 3.
He speaks of a “man of lawlessness” or a “man of sin,” and no small
amount of ink has been spilt over the last two thousand years by commentators
attempting to explain and identify who Paul is speaking of.

And then again if you look down to verse 7, Paul speaks of “one who now
restrains it,” one who now restrains the mystery of lawlessness, the one who
restrains the man of lawlessness coming into this world and commentators have
probably spent more ink on that question than they have on the question that
stems from verse 3. And so this
passage has its challenges, but we believe that all Scripture is given by
inspiration and is profitable for reproof, correction, and training in
righteousness, and so we believe that even the hard passages, even the obscure
passages, even the tricky passages in the Word of God where you have to be
careful and humble and diligent in order to interpret them are meant to edify
believers. And so we are going to
attend to this passage knowing that God has something very important to tell us.

Now I think that one way to approach this passage to keep it from being so
intimidating is looking at some anchor points that Paul gives you in this text
so that you can remember the big picture, so that you can remember what it’s
about, and so that you can see the main points that Paul wants to make.
So let’s begin by identifying a few of those things before we even read
the passage. First of all, what is
this passage about? It’s about the
second coming of Christ and the gathering of His people to Him.
Now you should say, “Ligon, where do you get that from?”
Well, I get it from verse 1 — “concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ and out being gathered to Him.”
So there is Paul’s topic.
He’s got some questions being thrown at him about that.
And in response to that, Paul gives you five anchor points in this
passage to keep from losing your way.
You know, this is one of those passages that you can be reading along,
tracking with Paul, and then suddenly it’s like, “Squirrel!”
And you’re off on a tangent and you’ve lost the track of where he’s
going.

So how can you stay on track? Well
look at these anchor points. First
of all in verse 2 – “We ask you not to be shaken in mind.”
So Paul’s coming right out saying, “In this discussion of the second
coming of Christ and our being gathered to Him, here’s one of my main agendas:
I don’t want you to be shaken in mind.”
So there’s anchor point one.
And then if you look on down at verse 3, anchor point two is, Paul doesn’t want
you to be deceived. He’s got a
pastoral concern that people won’t be led astray.
There’s anchor point two.
Then if you look at verse 5, he says, “Look, the key here is to remember what
you’ve already been taught.” There’s
anchor point three. So he doesn’t
want you to be unsettled, he doesn’t want you to be deceived, and he wants you
to remember what you’ve already been taught.
And then if you look in verse 7, and I’ll have to explain this a little
bit when we get there, what Paul is saying — and really I’m summarizing what he
says from verse 7 all the way down to verse 12 — is, “In all of this, you need
to remember the sovereignty of God.
God’s in charge of all of this.
Don’t get scared that God is not in charge of this.
God’s in charge of everything.”
That’s the fourth thing he says.
And then when you get to verse 11, what he wants you to remember is what
the delusion is that Satan and this man of sin wants to hoist upon you.
He’s going to tell you what Satan and the man of sin are going to try to
trick you with. He tells you in verse 11, and we’ll look at that.
And those are the anchor points:
don’t be shaken, don’t be deceived, remember what you’ve been taught,
remember that God is sovereign, and remember what the delusion is that Satan and
the man of sin are going to try to put over on you.
If you’ll keep those five things in mind, even the things that you’re
left fuzzy about after we’ve read and explained this passage, I think will make
a little bit more sense to you.

Let’s pray before we read God’s Word.

Heavenly Father, we do believe that all Scripture is given by inspiration and is
profitable because it’s Your Word.
It’s given to us that we might be equipped for every good work.
So we ask that You would open our eyes to behold wonderful things through
Your Word, that You would enable us to see that this Word is the truth of God
and You would sanctify us by it. We
pray that You would give us to diligent study of Scripture.
We thank You for the man pastors and commentators that have poured
themselves out giving detailed study of this passage. We thank You for their
labors. And we pray that as we give
attention to Your Word today, that You would not only enlighten us with facts
that we haven’t understood as fully before, but that You would press home the
truth of Your Word deep into our hearts so that we believe You and trust You and
we resist the lies of Satan. We ask
this in Jesus’ name, amen.

This is the Word of God. Hear it,
beginning in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 1:

“Now concerning the
coming of our 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.”

Amen, and thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant Word.
May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.

We have said several times as we have studied 1 and 2 Thessalonians, that in
these letters Paul gives special attention to the coming of Jesus Christ.
That’s why we’ve titled our series on 1 Thessalonians as “Living Life in
Light of Jesus’ Return” and 2 Thessalonians, “Enduring Trials in Light of Jesus’
Return.” Paul, over and over,
returns to the subject of Jesus’ return and he explains to the Thessalonians how
they’re to live now and how they’re to get through trials in light of the
glorious truth that Jesus is coming again. But it’s also very clear that this
subject was confusing to the Thessalonians and that they struggled with it.
They clearly had questions for Paul when he was there teaching them.
He had to write them a first letter to clear up some questions and
frankly some confusions that they had.
And even here in the second letters he’s having to write them again
because they’re confused.

Now you need to understand, these Thessalonians, they’re predominately Gentiles,
if not exclusively Gentile, and they already have in their minds certain
presuppositions about how the end time is going to play out that they have
believed since they were little children in this culture.
If you were in the Greco-Roman culture in the days of the apostle Paul,
you hadn’t been exposed to the teachings of the Old Testament, the things that
the Jewish people believed, you hadn’t been exposed to the apostles’ teaching
before, you were just going off what you knew from the culture around you, your
expectations about the afterlife are going to be very different from what the
Bible says. If you’re going to
believe, for instance, that at death, you enter into a shadowy, spiritual world
that has no material substance to it; there’s no bodily afterlife.
And so when the apostle Paul comes to start teaching you about a bodily
second coming of Jesus, you’re kind of scratching your head because that’s not
part of what your culture teaches the afterlife is going to be.

And then he starts talking about a bodily resurrection of believers at the end,
so that you’re not just raised in your spirit, but your body is raised and
glorified and united with your soul and you as a whole person exist eternally in
fellowship with God. That’s very
strange teaching to you and it’s not surprising that the Thessalonians would
struggle with this. And in this
context, Paul indicates that they’ve still got questions about the coming of
Christ and the gathering of God’s people to Him.
And so in a pastoral response to the question that they’re asking him, he
speaks to them in this passage. And
boy does he talk to them about some hard things.
But the big picture is clear.
So even as we respectfully and humble wrestle with the hard things, let’s don’t
get lost in the forest for the trees.
The big picture is clear here.


DO NOT BE SHAKEN IN
MIND

And so to keep that big picture clear in our minds, let’s use those five anchor
points. And the first one you’re
going to see in verse 2. Paul says
in the midst of these questions that they have about the second coming and about
our being gathered to Christ, he does not want them to be shaken in mind.
Look at verse 2. “We ask you,
brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed.”
Paul is concerned about some of the things that are troubling the
Thessalonians. Some of them, we’re
told point blank here, some of them are afraid, look at the end of verse 2, some
of them are afraid that the second coming has already happened.
Some of these people are afraid that the day of the Lord has come and
they’ve missed it and they’re troubled!
And Paul says, “I don’t want you to be troubled about these things.
It would not be good for you to be troubled about these things.
I don’t want you faith to be unsettled by these things.”
Paul is pastorally concerned that they would not be tripped up by this
and so he speaks to them in this passage.

Now apparently there’s a reason why they’re troubled.
It’s not just that they’ve had a hard time understanding the apostle Paul
in the first place; apparently they’ve been given some bad information.
Look at the language he uses in verse 2 — “Either by a spirit or a spoken
word or a letter seeming to be from us.”
Now has someone claimed to have a word of knowledge, a word from the Holy
Spirit, a prophecy from the Spirit that contradicts or confuses them about what
Paul has already taught? Or has
someone been speaking a word, been teaching there amongst the Thessalonians who
contradicted what Paul said or confused them about what Paul meant?
And had somebody written them a letter claiming to be Paul telling them
something that, again, is contradictory to what Paul said or confuses them about
what Paul said? They’ve been
unsettled not because of the questions in their mind but because they’ve gotten
hold of some bad teaching. And Paul
says, “I’m concerned about that.
It’s not good for you to be unsettled about these things.”

Now in this context of course, these things especially pertain to the second
coming of Christ and to our bodily resurrection, but what Paul says here about
not wanting them to be unsettled about those things really goes for all Biblical
truth. You know, we believe in the
infallibility, the inerrancy, and the final authority of Scripture here at First
Presbyterian Church. We strongly
believe in the truth of God and the truth of Scripture.
That doesn’t mean that we’re afraid of people wrestling with questions.
You know some churches just love questions.
They want you to question everything and have no answers.
That’s not where we are either.
We believe in truth, we believe in the truth of the Bible, but it’s very
important that you not wrestle with unsettled doubt and questions by yourself.
Over the course of my life, I have been greatly helped by the people of
God, both pastors and professors and by brothers and sisters in Christ who
walked alongside of me when I was having great doubts.
And Paul is concerned that the Thessalonians not quiver in their doubts
without getting some help. We may
not be able to answer everything but we can answer a lot of things together from
God’s Word and he doesn’t want them to be unsettled.
And we live in a day and age when many Christians are unsettled by that
and so I want you to know that First Presbyterian Church is a place where you
can come and you can talk to your pastors and it needs to be a place where you
can talk to your brothers and sisters about hard questions where the truth is
taken seriously but where you’re not alone by yourself trying to wrestle through
these hard questions.

Just over the last two or three weeks, Dr. Roger Parrott at Belhaven University
has given me the privilege of speaking to the student body during the chapel
about some hard questions. Why should we believe that God exists?
Has Christian hypocrisy disproven Christianity?
And other things like this that young folks are wrestling with today.
We’re not afraid of those kinds of hard questions but we also don’t want
to leave people unsettled in those doubts.
We want them to come to understand the truth of God and the truth of His
Word. And Paul pastorally is dealing
with precisely that kind of situation here.
People’s faith has been unsettled.
I mean you can imagine if you’ve thought, “The day of the Lord has
already come and I’ve missed it!”
That would be relatively unsettling!
And Paul’s saying, “I don’t want you to be in that unsettled state.”


LET NO ONE DECEIVE YOU

Secondly, look at the second marker here.
It’s in verse 3. Paul says that he doesn’t want you to be deceived — “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
apostle Paul is saying to the Thessalonians, “There is a definite way that you
can know that you have not missed the day of the Lord and that definite way is
this: Before the day of the Lord
happens the rebellion will come and the man of lawlessness will be revealed.”
Now just hold on, don’t run too far; we’re going to get there.
But notice what Paul is doing first.
He’s saying, “You can know that you’ve not missed the day of the Lord
because the rebellion, or it may be the apostasy, has not happened, and the man
of lawlessness or the man of sin has not been revealed.”
In other words, Paul is saying, “There is something that has to happen
before the day of the Lord happens and since that hasn’t happened, you don’t
need to worry that you’ve missed the day of the Lord.”
That’s what Paul is doing pastorally in this passage.
He’s explaining that there is a definite way that they know that they
have not missed the day of the Lord.

Now that still leaves you with the question, “Well what is the rebellion or the
apostasy and who is the man of lawlessness?”
And I’ve got to tell you, for nineteen hundred years, Christians have
worked very hard to identify their own contemporaries as the candidate, the
leading candidate for the man of sin or the man of lawlessness.
In that first centuries of the church, before Christianity was a legal
religion in the Roman Empire, guess who got called the man of lawlessness all
the time? The Roman Emperor!
Nero was a pretty good candidate.
Caligula, who set up a statute of himself in the temple in Jerusalem and
demanded to be worshiped; Vespasian whose troops crushed the temple in Jerusalem
and them worshiped him there to mock the Jewish people — do you think the early
believers thought of the Roman Emperor as the man of sin?
Oh yes they did! But then
after Constantine converted to Christianity, the Roman Emperor wasn’t so good a
candidate for being the man of sin.
The next people that came along that were good candidates were the vandals, the
vandal invaders into North Africa and into Europe and into the old Roman Empire.
And it was soon that it was Christians identifying the vandal rulers who
eventually sacked Rome in 455. They
were the man of sin or the man of lawlessness.
And then they were Christianized.

And who was it next? Interestingly,
when Islam began to spread throughout the old Roman world all the way up into
Spain, across North Africa, into Europe through the Baltic, almost all the way
to Vienna, guess who was named as the man of sin, the man of lawlessness?
Mohammad! Then, in the high
Middle Ages when the popes became very powerful, the Franciscans, a branch of
Roman Catholic theologians and many of them monks, decided that the corrupt
popes were the man of sin. And then
in the Reformation, before the Reformation, Wycliffe and Huss and the
Waldensians and then during the Reformation, Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and
Knox and Cranmer, identified the papacy as the man of sin, the man of
lawlessness. And then the Roman
Catholics returned the favor by announcing that Martin Luther was the man of
sin! It’s gone on and on and on.

So what do we do with this? Well, we
go right back to the Word of God.
Just look at what Paul spells out for us.
What are we to be looking for in the man of sin?
First, he is the “man of lawlessness.”
He is against the law. He
rebels against the law of God and the law of man.
Secondly, he is a “son of destruction.”
Just like Judas was a son of perdition, so the man of sin is a son of
perdition. He has been ordained to
be destroyed. This is one of the
things that Paul’s telling you in the passage that lets you know however
terrifying these thoughts may be, God is still in control.
This man of sin isn’t going to mess up the plan of God because he’s
already been appointed for destruction by God.
He will not win; he will lose.
He’s appointed for destruction.
Third, verse 4, he “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.” He
sets himself up in place of God.
He’s against the law, he’s appointed to destruction, and he puts himself in
place of God. And, if you’ll look
down to verse 11, this is confirmed.
“God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false.”
Some of you, if you’re looking at a King James Version or other
translation that passage may read, “that they may believe the lie.”
Now the lie of course refers to what Paul speaks of in Romans 1.
What’s the lie? Worshiping
the creature rather than the Creator.
So that fits perfectly with this idea that he puts himself in place of
God. So Paul is saying, “One is
coming who is going to be against the law, he’s destined for destruction, and he
puts himself in place of God. That’s
the identification of the man of sin.”
And he’s saying, “Don’t be deceived.
Don’t be deceived. When he
comes and he makes his claims, you don’t be deceived; you be ready.”
We’ll come back to that in just a minute.


REMEMBER WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN
TAUGHT

Here’s the third thing that we see in this passage though.
How do we prepare ourselves not to be deceived?
Well Paul tells you in verse 5.
“Remember what you’ve been taught.”
Now the best way to remember what to look out for and what to be on guard
against in this spiritual deception, this mystery of lawlessness the man of sin
is going to bring, is of course to go back to the Word of God.
And the apostle Paul says, in verse 5, “Do you not remember that when I
was still with you, I told you these things?”
So Paul’s saying, “I haven’t left you unarmed.
When I came to you, I taught you the Word of God.”
And you remember back in 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, Paul congratulates
the Thessalonians for receiving what he taught them not as the words of men but
for what it really was, the Word of God.
And he says, “You go back to the Word of God.
That’s how you’re ready to be discerning when deception and delusion is
hoisted on you.” That’s one of the
reasons you come to church every Sunday and you read your Bibles and you pray
and you study it, so that you’re not deceived, so that you’re not taken in by
the delusion. And the apostle Paul is saying you go back to the Word of God.

You know it’s not surprising to me that the Thessalonians would struggle with
what Paul was teaching about eschatology because their own culture had very,
very different presuppositions about what the end was going to be like.
I understand that myself. I
was born and reared in a Bible-believing, Presbyterian home.
I grew up on the Catechism, I
memorized it three times and forgot it twice, and yet the literature that I had
read about the end times was all from a dispensational perspective.
And so when I went to study Biblical theology with Dr. Palmer Robertson
who grew up in this congregation, I can remember he’s teach about eschatology
and I’d say, “Yeah, but where is the European Union going to attack China and
Russia in the Valley of Armageddon?
When’s that going to happen?” And
he’s say, “Um, it’s not going to happen.”
And I’d go, “Okay, we’ll explain that to me again.”
Why? Because I had these
presuppositions wedged in my mind and I almost couldn’t hear what he was saying
to me. And of course what he was
saying to me didn’t sound nearly as exciting as the books that I had read!

Well I think something like that’s happening with the Thessalonians and Paul’s
saying, “Look, look. You need to go
back to what I taught you, you need to go back to the Word of God, and you need
to make sure that what’s anchoring, what’s framing your thinking about all of
this is the Bible, Scripture interpreting Scripture.”
And in fact, the good commentators on this passage take you back to
Scripture and especially the book of Daniel to help you understand that language
that Paul is using here, like man of sin, man of lawlessness, mystery of
lawlessness, etc. In other words,
they use Scripture to interpret Scripture.


REMEMBER GOD IS SOVEREIGN

Fourth, in verse 7 especially, but really all the way from 7 to 10, Paul says,
“As you’re thinking through this all, remember that God is sovereign.”
Look at verse 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.”
Now again, I told you that commentators wrestle with what that means.
Who is, “he who restrains it”?
B.B. Warfield thought it was the Jewish state.
Most early commentators and commentators today, think that Paul may have
had the Roman Empire in his mind.
And William Hendrickson, one of my favorite commentators, says that it’s
speaking of the principle of government in general, which restrains evil, Paul
says, in Romans 13. But if I could
back away from the specific question of who is the instrument who is restraining
evil that Paul is talking about in verse 7, it’s very clear if you look at the
big scope of verses 7 to 12 that it is God who is in control here.
Whoever it is that is the restrainer of evil is simply the mediatory of
God. He is God’s instrument to
restrain evil, the principle of lawlessness and the man of sin.
It’s God who is in charge here.

You can see this in such a clear way when you look at what is going to happen
when the man of sin is revealed.
Look at verse 8. The lawless one
will be revealed and then what happens?
The Lord Jesus will kill him with a breath of His mouth.
Now you know, in fantasy stories there’s a great build up until the end
when the bad guy and the good guy have a final knockdown-drag out.
And in good fantasy stories, the bad guy almost wins and the good guy
snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.
He just barely pulls it off.
Okay, this is not going to be anything like that.
This is the biggest blowout in history.
The man of lawlessness is revealed and then Jesus destroys him with a
breath of His mouth. This is
Godzilla versus Bambi! I mean, the
man of lawlessness is revealed and then, “Boom!” Jesus destroys him.

There have been like thirty-five “Games of the Century” fought in college
football in the last, you know, fifty years.
One of them that I remember was in 1972 in the Orange Bowl when
undefeated Nebraska, number one in the nation, was going to play Bear Bryant’s
Alabama Crimson Tide, number two in the nation.
Do you remember that game?
Some of you were alive then!
That game, in the Orange Bowl, it had torrential rain — kind of like we have had
in the last couple of days — torrential rain left a sheet of water on the Orange
Bowl in Miami. And the lights of the
stadium reflecting down on it made it look like the Orange Bowl was a lake.
And there was a picture of Bear Bryant walking before the game on the
stadium turf that made it look like he was walking on water.
And this picture was shown all over the AP; it was shown everywhere.
And so this build up to the game of the century between Nebraska and
Alabama and Nebraska crushed them!
It was 33-6 or something like that.
It was never close from the beginning.
They destroyed them! And
that’s what Paul’s saying here. When
the man of sin is revealed and Jesus comes — whew!
It’s gone! It’s going to be
120 to nothing. You’re going to have
negative yardage total for the game because God’s completely in control here.
God is sovereign. So it’s a
terrible thing to face the mystery of lawlessness and the man of sin but God is
sovereign; don’t forget that!


REMEMBER WHAT THE DELUSION IS

One last thing. In verse 11, Paul
beckons us to remember what the delusion is, therefore God sends them a strong
delusion so that they may believe what is false, or as I think a better
rendering is, so that they may believe the lie.
What’s the lie? Well we
mentioned it before. The lie is that
you should worship the creature rather than the Creator.
That’s what Paul says in Romans 1.
They did not honor Him as God but they worshiped the creature rather than
the Creator. And Paul calls that in
Romans 1, the lie. That fits
perfectly with the man of sin because he’s going to put himself in the place of
God in the temple, worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.

It’s very interesting to me that Richard Dawkins titled his book, designed to
disprove the existence of God from his version of evolutionary biology, he
called it, The God Delusion.
And the apostle Paul, two thousand years before Richard Dawkins brought
up that Satanic thought, it telling you, “Let me tell you what Satan’s big lie
is — worship the creature rather than the Creator.
And what’s the whole point of Dawkins’ book?
That we need to worship the creature rather than the Creator.
It’s not our delusion that needs to be burst, it’s that lie that needs to
be burst. Do you see what Paul’s
doing here? Paul is reading to you
from Satan’s playbook. He’s saying
that Satan’s “Watch on the Rhine,” that Satan’s “Battle of the Bulge,” that
Satan’s last ditch effort to frustrate the plan of God is going to be to release
the man of sin on the world. Do you
notice what Paul says? “The coming
of the lawless one,” verse 9, “is by the activity of Satan.”
This is Satan’s strategy and he thinks that he is going to thwart God’s
plan and he is going to frustrate God’s rule and worship by the unleashing of
this man of sin. And Paul’s reading
you from the playbook out loud, ahead of time.

You know, pardon the sports illustration, but offensive coordinators are
neurotic about people reading their signs that they’re trying to pass into their
quarterbacks and teams to lead the offense.
Have you noticed that?
Because everything’s one media today, you can be sitting in the stands watching
the game while looking at your iPad and looking at the instant replay on that or
on these jumbo-trons that they have in the stadiums now.
And so offensive coordinators, they’ll hold their play sheets up in the
front of their mouths while they’re talking to the guy up in the press box.
Or a couple of weeks ago, I saw two managers on either side of the
offensive coordinators holding up towels so that the stadium cameras couldn’t
pick them up calling the play into their quarterback.
They’re absolutely neurotic about someone intercepting their plays.
They don’t want the defense to know what they’re doing ahead of time.

Paul’s reading from Satan’s playbook!
He’s saying, “Here’s what he’s going to do. Here’s what he’s going to do.
He’s going to try to deceive you with the lie.
I’m telling you ahead of time.
He’s diving right! Put eleven
guys right there! That’s what he’s
going to do! You don’t even need to
cover the receivers! Put them all
right there; he’s diving right!” Why
is Paul doing this? To prepare us
for the deception of the evil one so that we will stand firm and so that we will
not do — look at what ends up happening.
People, because of this, end up, verse 12, “not believing the truth,
verse 11, “believing what is false and taking pleasure in unrighteousness.”
And Paul says, “I don’t want you to fall for that because unbelievers all
over this world are going to fall for it.
I don’t want you to fall for it.

Now there are fifty questions that I haven’t answered from this passage, but the
big picture is clear. And isn’t it
kind of Paul, isn’t it kind of the Lord, to tell us the plays that our enemy is
going to run before he ever runs them so that we can be ready.
It’s very kind. Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Word.
Grant that we would understand it and believe it and act on it, in Jesus’
name, amen.

Well let’s sing that the Lord Jesus is the way and the truth and the life using
number 154.

Receive now God’s blessing. Grace,
mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.

© 2024 First Presbyterian Church.

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