Avoiding End Times Deception

Listen Online:

Transcript:

Tonight we’re going to carry on with our study of 2 Thessalonians, and we’re going to be in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. And as I’ve told you before, Paul was writing to a church that was very concerned with finishing well, because they had in the front of their minds all the time the expectation that Jesus was going to return again soon. Which is true.

It’s just a matter of soon according to God’s table. A timetable is not the same as soon according to our timetable. But they expected just any day.

And so they were always looking for his return. That changed the way they lived. It changed the way they did things as it will for us if we’ll constantly remind ourselves of the fact that he’s coming again.

But while they were thinking all the time, they had all of this end times teaching in the forefront of their minds all the time, It also caused them some concern about what was going to happen, what was going to happen next, what might have already happened. And some of them fell prey to some teachers who said, oh, some of these things have already happened. And it was kind of a frightening experience for them to think that they had missed the boat.

I told you the story, I think, a couple of times about when I was a kid. And one day, just after the pastor had been preaching about the end times, all of a sudden, one day I was walking through my house, I couldn’t find anybody in my family. And I thought, this is it.

I’ve been left behind. Only to find out they were all next door. They’d been in the front yard, and now they were next door.

And it was a scary moment for me as a kid to think I’ve been left behind. The rapture’s already happened, and oh dear, I’ve heard a little bit about the things that’ll come next. Well, these people thought that they had missed it.

They thought they had missed the rapture, which Paul talked about the rapture in 1 Thessalonians. And so some of them were now in a panic, I guess, thinking that they’d missed it. And Paul had to write to them and say, no, you continue.

You keep going. You keep doing what you’re supposed to do. And don’t let these deceivers trouble you.

Let’s read the passage. Starting in verse 1 of 2 Thessalonians 2. It says, Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to be easily upset or troubled, either by a prophecy or by a message or by a letter supposedly from us, alleging that the day of the Lord has come.

So somebody had convinced a number of people at Thessalonica that the day of the Lord had already come. And it sounds like one of the tactics that they had used to mislead the people was that they had said that this came directly from Paul. Maybe, hey, we heard this from Paul, or maybe they forged a letter and said Paul wrote it, and they were telling the church at Thessalonica that the day of the Lord had already happened, the second coming, the rapture, that all that had already happened.

Probably in context, more likely the rapture had already occurred. and they were noticeably upset. And folks, by the way, this is something that happened from time to time in the ancient world.

People would occasionally, to gain an audience for their teaching, if they had some kind of new angle on something, to gain acceptance for that, they might write a letter and say it came from Paul, or they might write a letter and say it came from Peter, or they’d write it under the name of Barnabas or John, The Gospel of Thomas that caused so many waves just a few years ago, one of the heretical Gnostic books that, if I’m remembering it correctly, portrays Jesus as something less than God. The Apostle Thomas didn’t write that. There’s no evidence that the Apostle Thomas wrote that.

Instead, it’s more likely it was written in the second or third century or even later by somebody who wanted their ideas to gain acceptance. So they say, oh, I know, I’ll say it was an apostle who wrote it, which naturally raises the question, how do we know that the books that we hold in our hand were actually written by Paul, were actually written by Peter and John and Luke? One of the criteria, and this is a little bit of a rabbit trail, but it’s important for us to know, one of the criteria for a book to be considered canonical, meaning for that book to be considered inspired scripture and put in the collection of divinely inspired writings, is it had to be recognized widely by the churches.

So this idea that, oh, everybody got together at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and they voted on whether Jesus was God, and they voted on what books should be allowed in the Bible, and a lot of these things just snuck in under the, you know, just under the wire, and it was, you know, by one vote, that never happened. The Council of Nicaea discussed some things with the deity of Christ, but it was in line with what had already been discussed and what had already been agreed on. They never discussed at Nicaea the books of the Bible.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this idea that it was all voted on, I trace a lot of that back to the Da Vinci Code. That became a popular theory with the Da Vinci Code a few years ago. These things were not voted on early on.

And by the time they were eventually voted on in, I want to say, the 5th century, by the time there was actually an official vote taken, all they were doing was rubber stamping what was already reality. So we don’t get our Bible from one group that got together and voted. We don’t take our knowledge of the Bible from one church over here that decided all these books were in and all these other books were out.

You look at the wide variety of the churches and the Christian writers that were around in the first couple of centuries, And you look at the lists of what they accepted, what they believed was God’s word and what they didn’t. The ones who were close to Paul and close to John and would have known them and would have known their writing, they read these things and they said, yes, this is John. John said this.

We believe it’s inspired by God. We believe it’s scripture. We’re talking about churches all over the Middle East and the Mediterranean world.

You know, Trinity has this list of books that we think are Scripture. And without really discussing it, First Baptist has this list of books that we think are Scripture. And Harvey Road has a list. And First Bolegs has a list. And Ideal Street has a list. And we compare them and we see the similarities among all the lists.

And we say, well, if all God’s people are coming to these conclusions, when’s the last time you get a bunch of churches together and they agreed on anything? All right. So by the time there was ever a boat, it was just a rubber stamp of saying, this is already reality, let’s just make it official. Now that has very little to do with the message.

But I think I’m not just chasing rabbits. I think it’s important to point out because if we say, well, they were forging this in Paul’s name. Well, it’s important because that question naturally arises if you think about it.

Well, how do we know this wasn’t forged by Paul? Because the people in the churches who knew Paul the best, they also believe it came from Paul. So I’m going to go with the expertise of somebody who knew Paul more than somebody sitting in a liberal university 2,000 years later.

That’s just me. But Paul said, if you hear somebody, and they say, even if it came from us, and it’s a prophecy, it’s a letter, it’s a new teaching, don’t be fooled by that. Don’t be easily upset or troubled by these prophecies, these messages, these letters, supposedly from us alleging that the day of the Lord has already come.

When you get a message telling you the rapture’s already happened, don’t believe it. He says in verse 3, don’t let anyone deceive you in any way. See, and Paul had said things like this before.

He told the churches in Galatia, if somebody comes along preaching any other gospel, don’t believe them. As a matter of fact, let them be accursed. And just so we don’t think Paul was, well, he was being hasty.

He was speaking in the heat of the moment. He didn’t really mean that. Paul went on and repeated it again and said, I say to you, let them be accursed.

He said, let them be cut off from God. He said, it doesn’t matter if it’s another preacher. It doesn’t matter if it’s another messenger.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an angel from heaven comes and tells you this. It doesn’t matter if you hear it out of our mouths ourselves. If you hear any other gospel than the one we’ve preached to you, which is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the availability of salvation by grace through faith in him alone as a result of that death, burial, and resurrection.

If you hear any other gospel, don’t believe it, Paul said, even if it comes from us. Because he said that’s the one and only gospel that there is. So Paul here says the same thing.

If somebody comes even in our name telling you weird things that you’ve never heard before about the end times, don’t believe it. don’t let anyone deceive you in any way for that day will not come he says verse three that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed okay there is a there’s a time when there will be a great falling away he he said don’t let anybody deceive you because there there is going to come an apostasy there’s going to come a falling away there are those who believe we can build the kingdom of God on earth in the sense that we can reshape the world and make it a better place to the point where we’re preparing the millennial kingdom. And then Jesus comes in at the millennial kingdom, and I’m thinking, what kind of kingdom is it without the king present?

But that idea does not fit with what I understand scripture to teach. We’re not heading toward the world getting better. We’re not heading toward the world getting more godly.

We’re heading toward an apostasy. Sometimes our tendency is to say, well, if it’s only going to get worse, let’s just bury our heads in the sand, hide out and hunker down in our churches and just wait for the inevitable. No, we’re still called to go out and confront the darkness and win people to Christ. But we need to do so with understanding that it’s only going to get worse and it’s only going to get more difficult.

He said there’s going to be a falling away and there’s going to be a man of sin revealed. As far as I understand the Bible, the Antichrist is revealed after the rapture and before the second coming. So he says, unless there’s an apostasy and unless there’s a man of sin revealed, you haven’t missed it.

You haven’t missed it. For that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed. The man doomed to destruction.

Verse 4, he opposes and exalts himself above every so-called God or object of worship so that he sits in God’s temple proclaiming that he himself is God. He said one of the things that will be noticeable about this man of sin, about this Antichrist, is that he will exalt himself as though he is the highest possible object of worship. Not only will he exalt himself above God, but he’ll exalt himself over everything that anybody worships as God.

He’ll say of himself, I am the God you ought to worship, so much so that he sits in God’s temple proclaiming that he himself is God. Now traditionally, I’ve told you before, I believe in a premillennial second coming of Christ. I believe that he will be here to usher in the millennial kingdom himself. I believe in a pre-tribulation rapture, meaning I believe Jesus Christ snatches us, the believers, out of the world before the seven years of tribulation.

My understanding of the scriptures is that. What he would be saying here, according to that understanding that before the rapture, there’s going to be a falling away. And then after the falling away and the rapture, the man of sin is revealed.

There will be a falling away before the rapture, and then the man of sin is revealed. And so what he’d be telling them there is that if you’re not seeing this general apostasy in the churches, if you’re not seeing a falling away from God of people who’ve already professed to know him, and you haven’t seen, then you haven’t missed the rapture. And if you’re not currently seeing the man of sin being revealed, then you know you haven’t missed the rapture either.

These things, there’s a timeline here. And one of the things that the Antichrist will do is exalt himself to the point where he tries to take the place of God. And again, in that literal understanding of the scriptures, we assume it means that the temple is going to be rebuilt at some point in Jerusalem before all this takes place.

So I believe Jesus could rapture us at any time, but there’s also some evidence here saying the temple needs to be rebuilt before all of this takes place. That’s where when people say, we just know we’re in the end times. No, you don’t know that.

I mean, God can make things move however he wants, but you look at the Middle East today, I cannot imagine a scenario in my lifetime where the Muslims give up the Al-Aqsa Mosque that’s now on the Temple Mount. I cannot picture that. Now, God can do it.

What I’m saying is I don’t see the temple being rebuilt today. Maybe next week, but I don’t see the temple being rebuilt today. He says here that he’ll try to put himself on the throne in God’s temple.

He’ll try to take God’s place. If you read that literally, it sounds like he’ll call people during the tribulation to start worshiping him in the temple in Jerusalem so that he sits in God’s temple proclaiming that he himself is God. He says in verse 5, don’t you remember that when I was still with you, I used to tell you about this.

He said, you’ve already heard this. This is nothing new. And he said, I don’t want you to be confused about this.

He did not want them to be confused about this. He said, I’ve already explained all of this to you. And I’d love to have the benefit of the Apostle Paul sitting there explaining how all this is going to work.

But in reality, we have God’s word, we have his written word, and we know everything that we need to know about what is going to happen. Don’t you remember that when I was still with you, I used to tell you about this. He says in verse 6, And you know what currently restrains him so that he will be revealed in his time.

The Antichrist is just waiting to be unleashed. He’s just waiting to be let off the leash. And Paul said, you know what it is that restrains him.

And I believe, based on other scriptures, that what he’s talking about restraining the Antichrist is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our world. That as soon as the church is raptured out of this world, the Holy Spirit that dwells within us goes with us, and suddenly the Holy Spirit of God lets the Antichrist off the leash to where he’s then able to be revealed. A few weeks ago, I listened to Greg Laurie, pastor out of California, preaching on the end times.

It was a really good series. He was talking about the end times and made the case, we’ll never know who the Antichrist was. That’s a shame.

I want to know, but then I don’t want to know because then I’d be around to find out. He’s not yet revealed, and we waste a lot of time if we speculate about it because he won’t be revealed as long as the Holy Spirit is here with the church on this planet to restrain him. Folks, we think this world is so terrible sometimes already, and it is terrible, but imagine this world without the presence of the Holy Spirit overflowing from God’s people.

I won’t say the Holy Spirit’s totally absent during the tribulation. As we learned in Brother Terry’s class, I think it It seems like there is an opportunity for people to become saved during the tribulation. But think about how many people profess to be Christians on our planet now.

And if even half or a third of those truly are believers, the Holy Spirit is present in every country. The Holy Spirit is present in every state of this country. The Holy Spirit is present in most cities.

Even if it’s just one believer, the Holy Spirit is found all over every corner of this planet. Now suddenly, take out the restraining influence of the Holy Spirit of God, spilling out, overflowing from God’s people. And imagine how dark this planet gets.

He said, he will be revealed in his time. When it’s time, he’ll be known. He said in verse 7, for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.

Sin is already there. Satan’s plans are already in the workings. But the one now restraining will do so until he is out of the way.

So it’s not so much that the Holy Spirit is totally absent during the tribulation. It’s that he kind of steps aside. Not to abdicate power, not to say, all right, Antichrist, you won, but to let the Antichrist off the leash so that God’s plans can be fulfilled.

And verse 8, and then the lawless one will be revealed. The Lord Jesus, okay, seven years, seven years the Antichrist runs amok. And the first half of that, first three and a half years, some things will probably appear pretty good for some people for a while.

They’re going to think briefly there’s a time of peace and prosperity, but pretty soon he shows his true colors. And especially in the second half of that, what we call the Great Tribulation, God’s wrath is poured out as sin just infects everything, and as sin runs rampant, God’s wrath is poured out, and it’s just a terrifying scene painted in the book of Revelation. And we might look at that and think the future is so dark, And it’s just this inevitable reign of the Antichrist is something to worry about.

Look at what he says in verse 8. At the beginning of verse 8, he says, And the lawless one will be revealed. He’ll show his true colors.

He’ll run amok. He’ll have his day. And then the very next sentence at the end of verse 8 is the Lord Jesus.

It’s always good when the Lord Jesus shows up, isn’t it? The Lord Jesus will destroy him with the breath of his mouth. and will bring him to nothing at the appearance of his coming.

Even the most powerful curveball that Satan has only gets to run amok for seven years out of all of the history of the universe. And then God says, enough. And at the second coming, Jesus Christ steps forward to deal with him.

And I love a message that Adrian Rogers preached about this years ago, where he said, Jesus will step forth. And just with the words of his mouth, he’ll tell Satan and he’ll tell the Antichrist, drop dead. And I think about the power that’s there in the word of our Lord, that he spoke this whole universe into existence with the words of his mouth, and with the words of his mouth, he’ll fix everything in the end.

Jesus doesn’t even have to break a sweat. All of his hard work was accomplished at the cross. All Jesus has to do is step forward with the words of his mouth, and even the Antichrist comes to nothing.

These people were really worried about it because they They felt like they were in it. They were afraid they had missed the rapture. They were afraid maybe they’d missed the second coming.

They’re worried about it. And he says, oh, no. You’re worried about the man of sin. Number one, he’s not here yet.

You haven’t seen him. And even once he’s here anyway, he’s no match for Jesus. Verse 9, the coming of the lawless one is based on Satan’s working with all kinds of false miracles, signs, and wonders.

He said, make no mistake about where this comes from. it’s Satan’s power that’s going to animate the work of the Antichrist, and he will appear to do miraculous things, but he’ll be, in that regard, he’ll be a paper tiger like the magicians in the court of Pharaoh against Moses. Moses was doing genuine miracles from the power of God, and they were doing parlor tricks.

And even his worst is a parlor trick compared to what God can do, because he said, it’s all going to be false miracles and signs and wonders. None of it’s going to be true. None of it’s going to be lasting.

None of it’s going to be powerful, any kind of power compared to God. And with every wicked deception among those who are perishing, verse 10, they perish because they did not accept the love of the truth and so be saved. And for this reason, God sends them a strong delusion so that they will believe the lie, so that all will be condemned.

Those who did not believe the truth, but delighted in unrighteousness. People ask, well, why would God mislead people? Why would God cause people to be deceived by a lie?

And folks, I don’t see that that’s what’s happening here. We see that these people have had the opportunity to believe the truth. They’ve had the opportunity to respond to the truth.

They didn’t want the truth. They didn’t want anything to do with God. They didn’t want anything to do with Jesus Christ. And instead, they wanted, even in this life, even in this day, People want to believe Satan’s lies rather than deal with the truth of Jesus Christ. So I don’t see it as God saying, okay, you have no choice.

I’m going to deceive you. I’m going to send a lie to deceive you. It’s more like they’ve already decided they wanted to be deceived.

And God says, well, here, I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you what you want. And he sends a strong delusion.

And those who wanted the delusion will buy into the delusion. And he says they’ll be condemned. They didn’t believe the truth.

They delighted in unrighteousness. They didn’t want the truth. They perished because they did not accept the love of the truth and so to be saved.

And I’ve also heard people say from time to time, why would God condemn somebody to hell just because they believe the wrong thing? Well, first of all, he doesn’t condemn us to hell for believing the wrong thing. It’s our sin that separates us from him and condemns us to hell.

Our trajectory toward hell didn’t begin with us believing the wrong thing, unless you want to look back at them believing Satan’s lie in the garden and saying, oh, you will not surely die. But it wasn’t just because we usually where people are coming from with that and make it sound like, well, we had a different opinion. And so why would God condemn us over a different opinion?

It’s not a different opinion. Sin separates us from God. Sin leads us on that path toward hell.

That’s where we’re destined because of sin. And where belief comes in is the belief in the gospel, the belief in his truth, the acceptance of Jesus Christ as our Savior in order to be rescued from that. And so, yes, in that sense, a lack of belief does leave us condemned because we’re already condemned by our sin.

On top of that, belief is never just by itself. What we see in this passage, he said that they did not believe the truth, but delighted in unrighteousness. See, it’s not just belief by itself.

Belief always shows up in our actions. And what he says here about the people who reject Christ, that all of us who reject Christ continue to go on not just believing the wrong thing, but loving the wrong things and living the wrong way. They rejected Christ and continued to love unrighteousness.

So it’s not God condemning anybody over a difference of opinion. It’s about a heart that stubbornly and steadfastly insists on remaining estranged from God. It’s about a heart that rejects any effort on God’s part to redeem us and bring us back to Him, because the heart would rather hold on to sin and wickedness and everything that’s offensive to God.

And there comes a time, now we see the mercy of God all throughout Scripture, God giving people opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to repent. And he said in the book of 2 Peter, I believe it’s 2 Peter, maybe 1 Peter, that God’s not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. God is merciful.

And I fully believe that one of the reasons why we have not seen the end times yet is because God is giving opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to repent. Because God would rather us repent and be restored to him through Jesus Christ than just to get us and punish us for our sins. If he wanted to do that, he could have done that without sending Jesus to the cross.

But he wants to give us the space and the opportunity to repent. But there will come a day when God says, all right, if you were going to repent, you already would have. There’s a day when God looks at the world and says, all right, time’s up.

And the choices that we’ve made, the things that we’ve embraced, we’re going to stick with. Because God knows if we were going to repent, we would have already repented by then. Like when one of my children’s not telling the truth, and I give them seven or eight opportunities to tell me what I already know.

I figure after several opportunities, okay, if you were going to tell me the truth, you already would have. So now we’re past grace and we’re on to whoopings. All right, that’s how this is.

That at some point God looks at it and says, all right, I know everything. And everybody who ever would repent has repented. And then the choices we’ve made, we stick with.

The direction we’ve chosen, we stick with. And as I mentioned last week, we shouldn’t be giddy over that. Sometimes I hear Christians, sometimes, I don’t know if y’all have ever seen people argue theology on Facebook.

It’s about as annoying as when people argue politics on Facebook. But from time to time, I’ll hear a Christian tell an atheist or somebody of a different religion, Well, one day you’ll figure it out. One day you’ll see.

One day you’ll get what’s coming to you and you’ll see. And I think, why do you sound almost giddy about the fact that somebody’s going to suffer eternal separation from God, eternal condemnation in hell? That’s nothing for us to be excited about and look forward to.

Yes, we should look forward to the coming of Christ and getting to be with him. But in the meantime, we should be focused on as much as we are able, influencing for that not to happen, trying to lead these people to Christ, rather than sitting back and saying, well, one day you’ll get yours. So Paul, in all of this, just wants to explain to them how the end is going to come, because they’ve been working so hard and serving so faithfully and running well, because they were looking at the fact that, like I said, it was right in the front of their minds all the time, Jesus is coming back, and it changed the way they lived, and all of a sudden, they’ve gotten convinced that they’ve missed it.

And not only does that mean they’re in for big trouble, but that also means, wait a minute, we’ve been wrong about what we’ve believed. If we missed the rapture, then wait a minute, there’s something deficient in the gospel. And so Paul comes along and explains this to them about the Antichrist, about the tribulation, about the coming judgments, not because he wants to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, but to remind them of the truth so that they’re not deceived and so that they don’t give up before they get to the finish line.

He wanted the church at Thessalonica to finish well. And for them to finish well, they had to be reminded of what was ahead of them on the course. So he didn’t want them to be deceived or troubled by false teachers.

He told them instead, remember the truth you’ve been taught and trust in Christ. Because here’s the outline of how these things are going to happen. Here are some of the signs to look for so you’ll know if you haven’t seen these things, you haven’t missed it. But ultimately, as you’re concerned about the trouble, you’re concerned about the Antichrist, you’re concerned about the tribulation, you’re concerned about the judgment, you’re concerned about what’s all going to happen, look back at verse 8 and see the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus will destroy him with the breath of his mouth.

Even in this most chaotic of scenes, if you read through the book of Revelation, it looks like just chaos, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s vials of wrath being poured out, and there’s seals being opened, and there’s death, and there’s destruction, and even in the midst of that, even when the whole world’s spinning out, Jesus is still in control. And that ultimately is what we need to know to finish well, that we’re not trusting ultimately in an order of things, in a plan of things.

We’re not trusting in our circumstances or how things look. We’re not trusting in what we’ve been told. We’re trusting in the fact that we’re being obedient to Jesus Christ, and He’s in control.

and so he encourages them to continue on trusting in Christ and reminds them of the severity of the judgment that’s coming up and again I that’s not that’s not to remind that’s not to to make them feel justified that oh we’re not going to be here and all you who are causing us trouble will be you’re going to experience that I believe that’s to remind them of the severity of the judgment and think there’s nobody I hate bad enough that I want to see them go through that there’s nobody I hate bad enough that I don’t want them to come to Christ and know Him and find salvation and rescue and reconciliation with the Father through the Son.