What if the “last hour” has already begun? St. Paul warned the Thessalonians that the mystery of lawlessness is at work—and closer than ever, as last week’s NYC election of a defiant democratic socialist mayor-elect vividly shows. This Sunday, uncover the three dangers shaking the Church, the apostolic truth that anchors us, and the unshakable hope that Jesus will crush the man of lawlessness with the breath of His mouth. Don’t miss this bold, biblical wake-up call.
Proper 27
Psalm 17:1-9; Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 6-12, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38
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I.
Let us examine the problems posed to us by the prophetic words of St. Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians.
The first is the problem of timing. Paul writes in verses 1-2, “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.”
Paul’s writings form the earliest part of the New Testament. 2 Thessalonians dates from AD 51-52. However, John, 38 years later, wrote, “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” (1 John 2:18).
Timing is a problem for all biblical prophecy. When you receive a letter (or a text, or an email) you do not say to yourself, “This is clearly for someone living 2,000 years from now.” No. You say to yourself, “Do I need to act on this message now, and if so, what do I need to do?”
We find similar present-day urgency in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.
The second problem is the nature of the deception described in verse three and again in verses nine through twelve. Verse three reads, “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.”
What is this deception and why does verse 11 say, “Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false”? This seems to cast God in the role of spreading misinformation and inducing people to believe in falsehood.
The third problem concerns the man of lawlessness. If he already came, who was he? If he is yet to come, who or what will he be?
II.
We begin with the first problem, the problem of timing. Paul is addressing a false doctrine that was spreading at that time (A.D. 51-52) in the church at Thessalonica.
The false teaching concerned “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him.” The Greek word for “assembling” implies that this will be the final gathering of the church, not a regular Sunday service.
The word also suggests coming together after being scattered far and wide, perhaps due to persecution.
So far, that much is just basic Christian doctrine. The Church expected then (and lives in hope to this day) to be gathered one final time to meet the Lord Jesus when He returns.
The false teaching had to do with timing. Someone, by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from Paul was spreading the rumor that the Church had already met for the last time, that Jesus had returned, and that therefore the Thessalonians had missed out.
Therefore, Paul writes to assure the Thessalonians that “God chose you from the beginning to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.”
Paul is saying that the final gathering of the Church has yet to take place, and, moreover, that certain conditions must be met before that final gathering can happen, specifically, the rebellion, and the advent of the man of lawlessness.
In other words, the Thessalonians haven’t somehow missed Christ’s return — they were not “left behind” — and their salvation remains secure.
False doctrine divides churches. We’ve seen that again and again throughout Church history. We are living through such a time of division now.
The only defense the Church has against false doctrine is apostolic authority. Paul appealed to his own teaching when he was with the Thessalonians. He writes in verse five, “Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this?” Paul then writes in verse 15, “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.”
Online slop apologists for Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy like to pounce on the word tradition here to justify their peculiar doctrines and practices, particularly that of the so-called apostolic succession. That is the idea that the same apostolic authority which Paul claims for himself in verses five and fifteen applies to everyone today who calls himself a bishop.
But a careful reading of 2 Thessalonians proves just the opposite. Only that which can be proven to have been taught by Paul is to be considered true doctrine by the Thessalonian church.
While Paul was alive, that authority could be demonstrated by a personal visit from Paul. Paul had personal authority as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. What he taught was remembered by those he instructed. That is the tradition referred to in verse 15. A letter was the next best thing to Paul being there in person.
However, once that generation died, and Paul himself died, that personal authority and the memory of it died as well.
All that we have now are the written letters Paul sent to his churches. These letters alone are the record of Paul’s teaching. Certainly, they are not everything he taught and said, but they are the only witnesses the Church still has in her possession to his apostolic authority.
Then as now, when disputes arise in the Church, the only authority that can settle them is apostolic authority. The only record we possess, the only testament we still have to that apostolic authority, is the New Testament.
Jesus Himself illustrates this principle, the principle of appealing to the written record, in today’s Gospel reading from Luke, when He debates the Sadducees about the resurrection.
He says, “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”
Our system of chapter and verse came much later, but Jesus is referring to Exodus 3:6 which reads, “And [God] said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”
Jesus is making the point that the resurrection can be proved by the written words of Moses. The resurrection is true doctrine because it is proven by scripture.
It is striking that even though Jesus is God, He does not appeal to His own authority in this dispute with the Sadducees.
Jesus, the Word of God incarnate, appeals to the Word of God written. If Jesus appeals to the Bible to settle a dispute, how much more should we?
III.
What keeps the Church from consistently appealing to and rightly applying the Word of God to settle the disputes which divide her today? To answer this, let us look at the problem of deception.
2 Thessalonians 2:3 introduces the problem of deception, “Let no one deceive you in any way,” Paul writes. But a few verses later Paul seems to say that God is the source of the deception: “Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false.”
The one doesn’t seem to follow from the other. First, Paul says, “Do not be deceived.” A few verses later he says, “God will make you believe a lie.” How do we make sense of this?
I think there are two keys to unlocking the meaning of this difficult passage. The first key is found in verse 3, “for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first…”
The Greek word translated as rebellion is apostasia, or in English, apostasy. Its meaning is twofold.
First, it is referring to a rebellion within the Church, among those who once believed, but who are now falling away.
Second, they are falling away in large numbers. After all, one doesn’t refer to a riot as a rebellion, or to a church that has lost a few members to backsliding sin as apostate
The second key is found in Romans 1:24. Romans 1:24 begins with the word therefore: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.” Mankind as a whole is a race of rebels, those who hear God’s Word and purposely do the opposite. Therefore, God gives them up. Their sin becomes their punishment.
In Romans 1:26-27, Paul says that the punishment for indulging in unnatural passions is that you yourself become unnatural. This is clearly what Paul means in 2 Thessalonians 2:12 when he writes, “so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
This judgment isn’t arbitrary. It is the inevitable fruit of rebellion. That’s why Paul’s thinking is consistent in both letters. 2 Thessalonians 2:11 also begins with the word therefore, “Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false.”
The punishment for listening to false teachers is that you yourself will become a false student, a false disciple. Have you noticed that those in the Church who are the most deceived by new and progressive doctrines insist that they are still Christians? This is proof they are under a strong delusion.
You can — and some most certainly do — call a traditional Christian many things. You can call him backwards, bigoted, hateful, and mean, but one charge that won’t stick is that he has forgotten what Paul said when he was with us. Of course, Paul wasn’t with us, but here we are, all these years later, still standing firm by what he wrote to the Thessalonians.
IV.
It is bad enough when a single church goes astray, and Paul warns the Thessalonian church to stand firm and guard their faith so that this won’t happen to them.
But he also assures them that the general apostasy of the Church, a future widespread rebellion of believers, is still ways off. This brings us to the third problem we want to address. The timing of the general apostasy coincides with the coming of the man of lawlessness.
Paul writes in verses 6-8, “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.”
Whereas the work of Christ was completed on the cross, Paul warns us that the work of the antichrist is still underway. This is an important point. In a few weeks’ time the church year will start over again on Advent Sunday. During the Season of Advent we prepare to celebrate the first coming of Christ as the child born of Mary.
But another advent is already underway. It has been underway since the first century A.D. Even then, Paul warned us, the mystery of lawlessness was already at work.
Centuries later, the poet William Butler Yeats, writing after the carnage of the First World War, asked, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The mystery of lawlessness has been at work since nearly the beginning. In fact, for the longest time we knew more about the man of lawlessness than we did about the Son of Man.
Early on the man of lawlessness was revealed as the serpent which tempted Eve. Genesis 3:1, “Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made.”
For the next 4,000 years we had only obscure sayings and dim prophecies to give us hope. From Genesis 3:15 we knew of the enmity between the woman and the man of lawlessness, between her seed and his, and we were promised that one day her seed would deliver the decisive blow, and would crush the head of the seed of the serpent.
Paul names the seed of the woman in today’s reading. The Name of Jesus became the hope of Thessalonian Church: “And then the lawless one will be revealed and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming.”
The man of lawlessness is closer than ever before, certainly closer than when Paul wrote those words, but the hope his words gave the early Christians is still our hope today: “the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming.”
V.
Now, let us review the three problems we set out to solve at the beginning of this sermon.
First, we examined the problem of timing. I showed you that Paul wrote for a specific time and place, the church in Thessalonica. However, that does not solve the problem entirely. The Church has yet to be gathered. Jesus has yet to return. The man of lawlessness has yet to be fully revealed.
Yet, I also quoted 1 John 2:18, “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.”
To solve the problem of timing, we must stand firm on what both these apostles wrote. It is the last hour. The mystery of lawlessness is already at work yet it is still restrained.
That is good news. It is good news for your lost friend or relative. They may yet come to Christ and be saved. It is good news for you, too, if you are not yet saved. Do not neglect this moment. It will not come again.
Second, we examined the problem of deception. We saw how God allows, even wills, the deception to make those who are to perish believe what is false. We have ample evidence in the churches that this deception is ripening and that the apostasy, the falling away, is increasing.
Finally, we considered the problem of the man of lawlessness. We learned that he was already at work in the garden, and that he was partially revealed to us as the serpent, even before the first prophecy of Christ was uttered.
Yet something happened. Jesus Christ leapfrogged the man of lawlessness in history and was born of the Virgin Mary over 2,000 years ago. Paul and the other apostles fully reveal Jesus to us as the Christ in their authoritative writings.
However, the “the lawless one [who] will be revealed” is still to come. Nothing more can be said about him save that “the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming.” This is the sign for which we eagerly look.
One other thing may be inferred about the lawless one. Just as there were types of the Christ who was to come: Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, so there are types of the Antichrist, who is yet to come: Cain, Pharaoh, Ahab, Herod, Nero, Julian the Apostate, Mohammed, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.
There are also movements from the time of the early church to our own day that anticipate, prefigure, the rebellion, the great apostasy, the falling away which must take place before the man of lawlessness is revealed.
These include the Pharisees that sought to kill Jesus, the Sadducees, with whom He argued about the resurrection, the Circumcision Party, which tried to rob the early church of her liberty, the Nicolaitans, who tried to rob the early church of her purity, particularly in matters concerning sex, the gnostics and Arians who denied the true nature of Christ.
It includes the rise of Islam, and the subsequent falling away of Christian North Africa, Christian Spain, and the Christian Eastern Roman Empire. In the west, it includes the tyranny of the Pope of Rome, the bloodlust of the French Revolution, and the subversion of Christian Europe and America by atheistic Communism.
These men and movements are evidence that what Paul wrote in the years 51-52 is still true: “mystery of lawlessness is already at work.” Yet, to date, none of them has triumphed totally, proving again the truth of what he wrote the Thessalonians: “what is restraining him now… will do so until he is out of the way.”
What restrains the “man of lawlessness” is the Providence of God, by which God governs and restrains His creatures.
Last week, the voters of New York City elected a “man of lawlessness” to be their next mayor. What I am about to say isn’t meant to be partisan. It’s meant to discern spirits and read the signs of the times using biblical criteria.
Let me also be clear. I did not say the voters elected the man of lawlessness referred to by Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 and 9, but they added one more to that incomplete list of types I just gave you. Another of the “many antichrists” has come, just as the Apostle John wrote.
Just as Christ cannot be separated from His kingdom, so the men of lawlessness cannot be separated from the system that produces them. The system that produced and elected Mayor-Elect Mamdani is democratic socialism, otherwise known as communism.
But let’s not forget it’s gone by other names during its long march through history.
It was called the spirit of rebellion when it erupted in Russia in 1917, and before that in France in 1789.
It was called the spirit of apostasy harnessed by the Jesuits at the Council of Trent when they tried to snuff out the biblical reformation then sweeping Europe.
It was called the falling away of Constantinople and nearly half of Christendom before infidel invaders.
Let’s call it what St. Paul called it: “the mystery of lawlessness” and, indeed, it seems a mystery to us as to why God allows this to happen. But we know why. Paul tells us: “because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.”
Jesus tells us in Matthew 12:37, “for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Let us hear then what the mayor-elect has to say in his own words.
In his victory speech he said, “The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”1
Here we have a man speaking words that, by his own admission, condemn him. He is damned by his false religion, damned by his politics, and damned by his stubborn pride and refusal to repent from any of it.
Could there be a better illustration of what Paul spoke of in 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12? “Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
Now, you may be wondering what to do. How do you respond? How do we get through such dark days? Remember, the Thessalonians thought they had missed the final gathering of the Church, that they had missed Jesus’ return, that they were left behind.
If we are left behind, it is because there is good work to be done and a good word to be preached. Paul concludes this morning’s reading with these words: “Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.”
Pair that with all we’ve read from Jesus in the past few weeks about doing our duty as faithful (if unworthy) servants, as persistent widows, as sinful tax collectors, and you know that God is leaving us, His Church, here on earth for this reason, and for such a time as this.
By doing the works He has given us to do and standing firm in the Word He has caused to be written for our learning, we will proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.
Islam is the religion of the demoralized. Despite its reputation, it is not a fighting faith. You need only look at the formerly Christian countries of Eastern Europe, the steppes of Asia, and the coast of North Africa to see a diminished people. What energy Islam seems to have is borrowed from the spirit of rebellion. Wherever Islam spreads, complacency sets in.
Dhimmitude is not just for whatever Christian population remains in the lands it conquers. It defines what it means to be Moslem. Submission, a condition of permanent subjugation and legal inferiority, is in the very name, Islam.
The Church, by God’s Providence and as the Body of Christ, is “he who now restrains” the lawless one and the “many antichrists” still to come. The Church must “do so until he is out of the way,” that is, until the Church is gathered for the last time at the coming of the Lord.
Until then, we, as members of the Church, have a role to play, a fight to fight. We did not go looking for this fight. It came to us. This is what it means to take up the cross and follow Him, to put our hand to the plough and not look back.
Preached on November 9, 2025, at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut (https://www.firstchurchwoodbury.org).
“CNN’s Van Jones among those raising alarm at Mamdani’s instant ‘character switch’ after winning power,” New York Post, Media section, November 5, 2025, https://nypost.com/2025/11/05/media/cnns-van-jones-among-those-raising-alarm-at-zohran-mamdanis-instant-character-switch-after-winning-nyc-mayoral-race/.
