2 Thessalonians 2:3 Commentary and Bible Study

So there are going to be two events that precede the coming of Christ that Paul is inspired to particularly mention. First then there is a falling away. The basic misunderstanding of the Thessalonians is that they have thought that a sudden return of Christ means an imminent return of Christ. Oh yes, Christ would come suddenly but did not mean soon. First there will be a great apostasy, a falling away. When you think of this, don’t think of people simply fading in their Christian belief or losing heart or drifting away; think rather of a complete breach with great animosity and opposition.We are told in 1 John that the things of anti-Christ, even this apostasy, were happening even in Bible times. In a sense there is something continuous about this. In every period of the gospel age, from the very beginning of the church, there is a measure of falling away and opposition. In the apostle’s day the main people who fell were the Judaisers. When the apostle would go round evangelising, hot on his heels were false teachers who came out of Jerusalem. They tried to get into the new churches and tell them, ‘No, no, no, you cannot be saved by only belief in Christ, you have got to adopt Judaism as well and keep the law.’ Next came the Gnostics, and then there were various others. By about 6th century you get the deviation and falling away which leads to the church of Rome with all its vital errors and opposition to crucial salvation doctrines. In more modern times, the 19th century, you have theological liberalism and unbelief which has infected all the dominations. Now you have got the last stage, rank atheism. Up until now all the deviation, all the apostasy has been to pervert, and to change religion, and to bring in false doctrine, but the crowning mark of Satan is to bring in rank atheism. The term son of perdition just means he is the son of destruction: he is made to be destroyed, he is incorrigible, unsavable. He is the man of sin, the anti-Christ. Yes, there are anti-Christs here already. All the lesser anti-Christs, but the anti-Christ will be the man of sin. When we say the man of sin, think in terms of the man of lawlessness, the man who is anti-law, anti-moral law, anti-divine law, anti-order. Is he a person? Well, he could be a person, or he could be a movement. But if he is a movement, there will be a figurehead because the way the apostle speaks throughout this passage the man of sin is assumed to be a literal man. So if we are to see the man of sin, which I think is very likely and possible, as really a movement, still at the very end there will be a figurehead, a leader, a major figure representing that movement.A movement could be something like communism, but it is not that because that has peaked and passed in the old Soviet Union. It is still there in China, but it no longer looks to be the world possessing force that it once aspired to be, and also it does not match the anti-Christ in all respects. More likely today, but I only suggest this, it could be the great movement of scientific humanism which is getting into every country in the world, ultra-rationalism, the abolition of God invading and possessing the minds of people. That would answer the characteristics of this passage. What are the aims of the man of sin? This movement, can you imagine, scientific humanism as a movement combining with all the forces of LGBT and moral lawlessness, all coming together into one great massive orchestrated anti-Christian campaign? You can well imagine that at the moment. Of course we have to be careful because 30 years ago people could read all this into communism, but we could well imagine – all the great orchestrated schemes to seize and rape and possess and dominate the minds of men and women.