2 Thessalonians 2:7 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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2 Thessalonians 2:7

Comments

We have an old-fashioned translation at this point. He now withholds, is the sense that he holds back the man of sin or lawlessness. He will withhold until he, the withholder, be taken out of the way, which could equally be translated, until the withholder removes. Of course the withholder ultimately is God. God removes himself. He does not have to be taken – as if implying by somebody else – out of the way. When the Holy Spirit steps aside then the man of sin is free to do his work.There are some things the apostle Paul is not going to mention here, they are taught elsewhere in the Bible. There are some details, the man of sin, it is the end of Satan’s little season in the book of Revelation. And the two witnesses, the church, the spokesman of the Gospel, are able to stand up on their feet once again. And there will be perhaps a last age revival, there will be preaching, there will be people saved and Christ will come. The apostle is not concerned to deal with everything right here. He deals only with this – that the reign of the man of sin will be short-lived. But let us look at the details – ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work.’ This is astonishing. Why does the apostle call it the mystery of iniquity? Why is the apostasy: the great rundown, the constant challenging of the truth coming to a climax at the end of time – why is it a mystery? It is not a mystery to us. He has explained it. We can see it clearly. It is a great orchestrated campaign. All over the world LGBT, the same argument, the same language, everywhere, the same progress – scientific humanism – the same books, the same teachers. It is spread throughout the world. It is a great satanically orchestrated campaign. So it is not a mystery to us, but it is a mystery to the world. Now some people say that what withholds the man of sin is law and order and in a measure they are right, but it is God who upholds that. Only the Holy Spirit can hold back the man of sin.

Application

If you are an unbeliever, you may have a PhD, you may be a professor of a department, you may be brilliant. But if you are an unbeliever, you do not understand the orchestrated campaign of iniquity. You do not realise, because you do not believe in God and you do not believe in the devil, it never enters your mind that the world is subject to a great campaign. It is a great mystery to you.

It is a mystery in other ways too. Take communism, with its power and its wickedness and its oppression, and yet viewed morally, dare I say it, it was somewhat puritanical and law and order was maintained. What a mystery. How astonishing that the representative of scientific humanism at that time, absolute atheism, nevertheless promoted moral restraint and law and order, even though the apparatchiks and the leaders themselves were immoral men. How does that work out? It is a mystery; it is the hand of God. He has decided they will not go down that channel. So law and order restrains them. The great mystery of the straining of iniquity to get to this point of throwing off all morals, and yet God has got some restraint on humanity. And so we see it in Western society, we see the, ever since Darwin and so on, the throwing off of the yoke of God, and yet people still want law and order. The principle of law and order is left in society. So for the most part there are still some standards left and some upholding of them. What a mystery! It is not what people really want, and yet, God has written in to society a kind of compulsive determination to hold on to some of those things.

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2 Thessalonians 2:7 Commentary and Bible Study