His Restraint, Revelation, and Ruination

Well, please open your Bibles, either the one you brought with you or the black Bible in front of you, to 2

Thessalonians in chapter 2. We're going to read verses 1 through 12, but the preaching this morning will be just from verses 5 through 8, sort of right in the middle of what we'll read.

There are letters to the Thessalonians, you know, they take their cue from that church's misunderstandings regarding eschatology, and eschatology is just a $64 word, which means a study of the end times, a study of last things.

It's a very broad field of study, it encompasses things on earth and things on heaven. The questions answered by eschatology, and some of the things that confused the

Thessalonians, which Paul wrote to straighten out and calm them down about, but the question is, what is it going to be like on earth when

God sends his Son from heaven, and how is that going to happen, and when will it happen, what will it look like, what are the consequences or the ramifications of it all?

And their problem, if such a terrifying prospect could be called just a problem, was that they thought that the

Lord had already come, and that they had missed him, or worse, he had missed them.

What they ultimately misunderstood was not so much the events as the reason why God, by his

Spirit through the Apostles' pen, gave them and gave us any information at all about the

Lord's return, this field of eschatology as we call it.

So why did God, through the Apostle, answer the way he did? Well, it was to strengthen the church.

It was to stabilize them, to stop speculating and stop especially worrying about it, as we saw last week, that they were shaken and they were alarmed by the false teaching that had infused the church.

So we have these words, these hard -to -understand words that for centuries and centuries have had so many different interpretations and meanings given to them, but we know why

God gave them to us, and we'll read them in just a moment, to stabilize us, to grow our confidence in the

Lord Jesus Christ who died for our sins, and who will return to call us back to himself by the resurrection, and we will follow in a resurrection like his.

These words were not there to confuse us. They're not there to confound us. They're not there to cause controversy.

They are there to stabilize us, to increase and strengthen our faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ, and to stabilize us as we wait for his return, and waiting be about his business and not distracted by these things.

So with that in mind, we come to 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. We've been going through 1 Thessalonians and now 2

Thessalonians in order. Words that have confounded, words that have terrified for centuries.

This man of lawlessness, this man of perdition, this man of sin as he's called.

Who or what is restraining him, or has restrained him? How will that restraint be removed?

When will all this happen, and why doesn't Jesus just consume him now and let us stop worrying about it?

My message is titled, The Man of Lawlessness, His Restraint, His Revelation, and Ruination. I'm going to speak more about our part as we await

Christ, and the fact that our consciences must be captive to the Word of God. The Word of God that Paul reminds them of, and tells them what he told them would happen.

But our consciences need to be captive to that, because when the word, a different word came into this church that persuaded them away from what the

Apostle taught them, they were shaken and alarmed. And I would argue they'd given up their consciences to the false teaching.

In the meantime, as we await for Jesus' return, we take warning, and we take comfort from the scriptures.

So with that, please stand for the reading of God's Word, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 and verses 1 through 12.

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 me pause for just a moment and remind you, that's the subject.

The coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, and our being gathered up with him. 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 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 refuse 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 righteousness.

May God bless the reading, and now the proclamation of his word. Please be seated. So this lawless man, this son of destruction, who we established last week, and we'll speak again a little bit more about it this morning, established as the

Pope, or perhaps we could say even the whole papacy. What would you imagine is the greatest danger that such a one represents to the church generally, to the world at large, to individual people who would believe the doctrines that he would propagate?

What do you think is the greatest danger? This son of destruction who exalts himself over everything and over everybody, who proclaims himself to be

God. Now he doesn't say, I am God. He never says explicitly, hey, guess what I found out today?

That God is me, and I am God. No, he doesn't say it like that. He proclaims himself to be

God by taking upon himself that which God keeps to his own authority.

Primarily, most importantly, the forgiveness of sins and the granting of salvation. That's how he proclaims himself to be

God. What's the greatest danger here? The danger is that people will follow him, of course.

If that sounds too obvious to you, then I'll follow up with another question. Why? Why would people follow such a man as that?

We've had in this church before people converted for Catholicism. You get all kinds of answers.

Why would you have followed this whole doctrine where you give over yourself and trust your salvation, your sanctification, you trust everything that the

Bible promises in Jesus Christ to a mere man? Why would you do that? One answer might be ignorance.

Millions of people just didn't and just don't know any better. Another answer might be fear. The lawless man has so convinced people that salvation has been delegated to him by Christ Jesus that they're afraid to disobey him.

In medieval times, kings would not cross him because he could excommunicate them and that was tantamount to sending them to hell forever, or he might place interdiction on their land and denying what they call the sacraments, especially final unction for the dead so the corpses would pile up in the land, and that was a specter so terrible that kings would then fear assassination or removal through other means.

And so they would concede everything to this man of lawlessness in order that he would relent and heal their land.

Well, it's the Pope. We have said so plainly. It's the papacy. History would prove that.

That line of self -exalting outlaws who have taken to themselves the honors meant only for Christ Jesus.

The Roman Catholic Church is in the distant background in Paul's day, just waiting for a chance to explode onto the scene and take control, and take control.

And here's the warning for us this morning right up front, that we do not give control or possession of our conscience to any but the

Word of God taken on its own merits, and perhaps we could even say, as has been understood by the centuries and centuries of the scholars and the men that God has given the church to explain it and make it plain to us.

We take those interpretations and we give them great respect beneath the scripture, but still respect them as they've held up to scrutiny for so many centuries.

That is our great warning, that what is at risk here is control over your conscience, control over your life, control over your eternal destiny, or so -called.

I preached this morning to Baptists, largely to Baptists and not to Catholics, to Reformed Baptists, you who know and believe that our fate is in God's hands alone, that your fate was sealed before the foundation of the world by God when he placed you in Christ Jesus, before he made the world upon which we walk this morning.

We know that, do we not? And yet we need to be careful, we need to be cautious, we need to always be warned that our conscience belongs to you, myself, and God, and it is to be pricked only by the

Word of God, properly understood. And this is what the

Son of Destruction, who's revealed just four short centuries after this letter was written, did and does, takes control over men's consciences.

We'll talk a little bit about some extra -biblical history that I think and stand in line with the great men of the church for many centuries.

It happened, what happened when this restraint was taken out of the way, and who it was who rose up and then usurped men's consciences, taking upon himself, calling himself

God by what he did. Our warning this morning to all of you who believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ, your conscience is captive to the Word of God, and to Christ Jesus alone.

Let it go nowhere else. What was the attraction of this lawless, law -making man?

It's that this lawless, law -making man made so many rules and usurped authority in a way that eased the

Christian life. Anyway, he said, here's the rules that you follow. We could think of the

Pharisees in Jesus' day, just do this, this, this, this, and you'll fill that cup up with righteous deeds, so when you see

God you'll have enough, and he will then declare you righteous. Leaving behind what the

Apostles said to the Romans to us in Romans chapter 5, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

Lord Jesus Christ. A declaration of God that is irreversible because God declared it at a time that by the faith he gave you you've been declared righteous, and therefore have peace with him.

This lawless, law -making man by his rules usurps all that, and makes the

Christian life seem so much easier because he gives you the rules to follow, and if you just do these things you'll be okay.

He says, just trust me. I'm the Vicar of Christ. I know what I'm doing, which is to say you don't.

Trust me, follow me, give me all. This should be Christ's. The Apostle says in verse 5, beginning of our passage this morning, verses 5 -3 of 2

Thessalonians 2, do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? How quickly they forgot, because these letters to the

Thessalonians were written only a few months or several months after the Apostle had been there with Timothy and with Silas.

They'd only been there for three or four weeks, had great impact by the power of the Holy Spirit in their preaching, converted many people, that's where the

Thessalonian Church started, and so quickly they forgot. So quickly they forgot and gave themselves over to this false teaching, and I would argue gave their consciences over to something other than the

Word of God. And Paul says, don't you remember? I told you these things. Well the Scriptures remind us that Jesus is coming, and that's verses 1 -4, we won't go through this in any detail, will be seen by everyone.

Jesus will come, He will not miss a single one. All that the Father has given me will surely come to me, said the

Lord Jesus Christ. Are you in Him? Are you waiting for His return?

Are you looking forward to your resurrection? If your faith is in the Lord Jesus Christ, having repented of your sins and trusted

Him and His work on the cross where He suffered for your sins, let me just tell you now, you will not be missed.

You will not miss Him, and Jesus will not forget you. You recall from verses 1 -4 that wrong teaching had somehow gotten into the church.

We don't know from whom, we don't know He doesn't name false apostles or super apostles or anything like that like He does with the

Corinthians, but it got in here and it spread like gangrene, it shook them and alarmed them, this uncertainty about the

Lord's return, and so important was it, and so convincing somehow was this false teaching that it shook them off the platform of the

Word of God, and gave them over, and I'd say they gave their consciences over to something other than the

Word of God. You recall from 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 13, when they heard Paul's preaching, what does

Paul say? Because you heard it not as the Word of men, meaning himself, but as what it really is, the

Word of God, and so quickly it was cast aside by this somehow persuasive other teaching that shook them off that foundation.

They came to believe that the Lord had missed him, missed them, or he had missed them, and this error happened so quickly, and so we need to be warned as Thessalonians basically are warned, don't you remember?

Stay to the Word of God, stay true to the Word of God, we read it and we take it on its own merits in context, we translate it from the original languages, we take the interpretations that make sense, we do want to make sense out of it, we want sensible applicable preaching and teaching, we stand on the shoulders of great men who've worked on these for centuries, not a single man for centuries, but centuries of scholarship that have led us to our basic understanding, how quickly we can move away from that, how important it is that all of us keep our eyes on the

Word, how crucial it is even as I preached to you this morning, that you're hearing as the

Bereans heard in Acts chapter 16, and you're hearing with an open mind, but a mind that's open not only to what is being preached to you, but look into the

Word of God and seeing always are these things so? Am I being told the truth?

How quickly the Thessalonians having heard the Word of God directly from the Apostles mouth, the

Spirit of God inspiring him word for word in just a few short months, they're knocked right off that foundation.

They gave control of themselves to false teachers or false teaching. Again, we don't know how it got in there, but control you see, control over men is a two -sided coin.

On the one hand, men like to control, do they not? We don't want to wax political, but as control is ceded to the government, it rarely, if ever,

I could even say never seems to come back. Men want to control, and on the other side of that coin, men want to be controlled.

Now we wouldn't say that any more than the Pope would say, I'm God. We wouldn't say that explicitly, but we do like to hear the rules.

We do like to be given the checklist and told, here's what you do. If you do these things, you'll be okay.

And the Christian life just is not that easy. It's a struggle. It's a suffering life as we suffer as the

Lord Jesus does, and that's what associates us with him. It's a hard life. Why is it so hard?

Why did God make it hard? Well, it's because of him whose image we were predestined to be like. Jesus Christ, the beloved

Son of God. Jesus Christ, God's righteous one, the Holy One of God. Well, if he's the image, if he's the one we're trying to be like, and he is, it's gonna be difficult, is it not?

It's not just a checklist. It's not just a series of rules. That's what that man of lawlessness presents, is here's what you do.

Just trust me. And by the way, keep this thing closed, because the priest will tell you what it means, and he'll tell you what you need to know.

And for centuries, by the way, you didn't have to keep it closed, because you didn't understand it. It wasn't written in a language that you understood at all.

Men like to be controlled, even though we wouldn't say so, because it seems to make it easy. You know,

I recently had a meeting with my doctor, and he offered me two options for my long -term treatment, and one involved a fairly minor outpatient kind of surgery, and the other involved daily diligence on my part.

And he asked me, which one do you think would be better? Which one do you want? And I was kind of taken aback.

I said, well, there's two people in this room. There's me.

I studied business in college, and then I went to seminary. I ran away from sciences like biology when

I was very young. And then there's you, who got good grades in high school, went to a good school, studied pre -medical subjects, went to medical school, went to residency, and all the things you have to do, and some 16 or 20 years later, whatever it takes to be a doctor, you became a doctor.

I want you to tell me what to do. I cede to you this control. You tell me what's best.

That's what I came here for. But that was control over my body. That was because of his expert opinion.

That was not my conscience or my soul. Very different from what was happening in Thessalonica.

When they submitted themselves to teaching that went against the apostles' words, which I said, 1 Thessalonians 1 .13,

they took as the Word of God, they were in danger of surrendering their consciences to something other than God's Word, to whoever brought the error to them, two mere men.

Paul says, do you not remember that when I was still with you, I told you these things? Church, I say to you, do you not remember that being with you now, your pastors, you have two pastors in this church, we have taught you that your consciences are captive to one thing and one thing only, the

Word of God. Brothers and sisters in the Lord can help prick your conscience.

We are to admonish one another. Paul says to the Romans, I am satisfied in you brothers that you are full of all wisdom and goodness and able to admonish one another.

We do admonish one another, and I can do something to open your conscience, but your conscience is not mine.

I have no control of your conscience other than the duty that we all have with each other to admonish, to rebuke, to encourage, and so forth.

So brothers and sisters in the Lord can prick the conscience, but that prick is not according to the Word of God and provable by the

Word of God, then it's an error. Now stubborn spirits can resist admonishment, but then instead of giving yourself over to a mere man, you've given yourself over to yourself, also a mere man, to your good alone self.

But you take my point, I hope, that your conscience must be subject to the Word of God, captive to the

Word of God. We can help. Your pastors are here to help, but all we can do is give it that little nudge.

Maybe it's a stronger nudge, maybe it's a push, but remember, what was the risk here in Thessalonica?

It's giving your conscience over to something other than the Word of God, and getting shook by a false teaching that knocks you off the platform that holds you sure to the

Word of God and Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you not remember that you have the

Word of God with you now? Look there, this lawless son of destruction, the son of perdition as some translations call him.

It's like he could hardly wait to burst onto the scene, but it's all in God's timing. The scripture makes it plain that he doesn't reveal himself, he is revealed, it's in the passive.

God is the master of history, and what the Apostle is telling the Thessalonians is,

I told you that Christ is not coming until this restraint is removed. We'll talk about that restraint in a few moments, and how the

Thessalonians would have understood it, and then this man will be revealed. Not revealed himself, but revealed in God, the sovereign's timing.

Verse 6, and you know what is restraining him now? 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.

See, his restraint was and is according to God's sovereign purposes. So we established last week, and I've been saying it over and over already, hopefully last week to your satisfaction that the

Pope, or perhaps more properly the whole papacy, is that man of lawlessness that was revealed.

We quoted Tertullian, who lived in the 200s, and spoke out against this, quote, bishop of bishops that was in Rome, and sort of rising up, and sort of a predecessor to the

Pope. And this bishop of bishops began to claim great authority, authority to remit sins.

Tertullian, oozing sarcasm, called them the Pontifex Maximus. The first,

I think, to use that term. Not the Pope, he didn't see that far ahead, but this man, this bishop of bishops said,

I remit the sins of both adultery and fornication to those who have fulfilled repentance. And so you see the beginnings of what this would turn into.

Tertullian, remember he was far closer to the freshly minted scriptures than we are, living in the 200s, and he saw the danger of a man who would presume to take such authority as to forgive sins.

As the Pharisees said against Jesus Christ, who can forgive sins but God alone?

Good question. And the question contains the answer. None can forgive sins but God alone.

You cannot give your conscience over to anyone who can forgive sins, because only Christ Jesus brought for forgiveness of sins.

Only God by his spirit gives you faith to believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, and by that your sins are forgiven by faith, which is a gift from God.

Well from verse 6 and the end of verse 7, we have this idea of restraint. Something the

Thessalonians understood is so confusing to us over the centuries, but the Thessalonians had to have understood what

Paul was writing to them. You notice at verse 6, it says, what is restraining him?

You know what is restraining him? An impersonal force of some sort.

This general, this thing that is out there restraining him. And then verse 7, he says, only he who now restrains it.

So we have this impersonal, and then it switches over to a personal kind of a noun. Well it's easy enough to translate.

It's a little bit difficult to interpret, and has been over the years. So who or what is meant?

I want to assemble for you some opinions, excuse me, just very quickly on this restraint, and who or what is this restraining force that Paul told the

Thessalonians is holding back this lawless man. Okay, well

Tertullian again, he said, what is this but the Roman state whose removal when it has been divided among the ten kings will bring on Antichrist?

Two centuries after him, John Chrysostom, that'd be in the 400s, his translations of the

Greek, his comments on the text are still quoted today. He said this a little bit longer quote, some interpret this as the grace of the spirit, but others of the

Roman empire, and this is my own preference. Why? Because if Paul meant the spirit, he would have said so plainly and not obscurely, but because he meant the

Roman empire, he naturally glanced at it, speaking covertly and darkly. So when the

Roman empire is out of the way, then he, the Antichrist as he calls him, will come.

So the Thessalonians, I want to say because it's important that our trend, our understandings of the scripture made sense to the people then, they would have, because they're living under the auspices of Roman law and order at the time, would easily have understood it this way.

If anything's restraining anything lawless, they would say, yes, that's Pax Romana, the peace of Rome.

Roman law, which still has much influence today, but then was strongly administered and fairly consistently, if we give them credit for that.

Neither man, Tertullian or Chrysostom, knew of a papacy. They didn't know of indulgences that were coming.

They didn't know about piles of sacraments. They didn't know about the Vatican or any of that, but both saw something of it coming, and both saw

Rome as the restraining force. And moving ahead about 12 or so centuries, our 1689

London Baptist Confession, chapter 26, paragraph 4, with these very verses that we read this morning in support of their opinion, says, neither can the

Pope of Rome in any sense be the head of the church, but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, that son of perdition, that exalts himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called

God, whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. And just one more.

F. F. Bruce, who passed away in 1990, he agreed with the ancients, and he named that restrainer as Rome.

So what does all this have to do with us and our conscience, and giving over control of ourselves to others, and staying true to the

Word of God? We step outside the Bible just a bit, for just a moment, because when was this restraining force of Rome taken out of the way?

When was it removed? Now again, we're stepping a little bit outside of the Bible, but true history, and God is the master of history, in the year 410, just a few years after Chrysostom died,

Rome finally fell. Alaric the Goth, he led his army into Rome. They sacked, and they plundered, and they raped their way through the city.

He was not, and Tertullian was not, quote -unquote, prophetic, but they read the scriptures at their plain meaning.

They took the scriptures on their own merit. They took the scriptures in a manner that made sense of both the scripture, most importantly, but also to the

Thessalonians at their time. So what happened? When Rome fell, people looked for explanations.

People looked for direction. They looked for stability. For many years, the churchmen of Rome had built this high reputation for getting the scriptures right.

When controversies erode, when important questions came up, and they needed answers, you go to the great centers of learning, which was like Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, and the answers that the bishops in Rome gave tended to hold up to scrutiny.

They were confirmable by the scriptures. They made sense, and they, quote -unquote, worked.

So Rome built up this great reputation, and so when the empire of Rome fell, the churchmen in Rome, with this high reputation, rose up in more and more prestige, and more and more people came to them looking for, what do we do now that Rome has fallen?

As their sway over people became stronger, so did their greed for control, and the

Roman church, with their vicar of Christ and all that, their pomp and their riches, was born.

You see, men cannot resist the urge to control, and once gained, it is rarely given back, and here again we must be so careful.

We're not Catholics. We don't have that set of rules, but we so easily fall into it, do we not?

We read books on all kinds of manner of sanctification. We get the how -to books of Christianity, and we just use them like a checklist.

By golly, I'm not a Catholic. I don't believe I'm building up righteousness. God declared me righteous because of my faith in Christ.

I've got it. But here's what I have to do. This many

Hail Marys for penance, rather than going to faith in Christ. Acts of righteousness, building up your standing before God, rather than the declaration of Scripture being justified by faith, we have peace with God.

Teaching that salvation is by membership in the church, and that comes by christening when you're a baby, and on and on it goes, leaving behind, for by grace you've been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves is a gift of God, so no one could boast before God.

But they say by this act you're made a member of the church, and therefore you have salvation.

My purpose is not to give a litany of complaints against Roman Catholicism, so I'll stop there.

The lawless man does nothing but make laws, and by those laws bind the conscience.

Jesus saw this in his own day. He said, woe to you lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.

That's in Luke chapter 11 verses 46 and 47. He's talking about binding up men's consciences with the rules, taking them away from Scripture, and faith in God, and just giving them the checklist approach to coming to God, rather than simple faith in Christ.

You know a brother or sister in the Lord, like I said, can do much to help you see your conscience. We can stir it up for you so that your conscience gives you grief over your sin.

I can show you in Scripture how you've covered your sin with excuses and rationalizations, but only

God owns your conscience. Only God owns it, and to Him we will all one day answer.

And this is nowhere clearer than Hebrews chapter 4 and verse 12. For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two -edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

None other than the Word of God, attended by prayer in the Spirit of God, can open up your conscience.

But we can help. Your brother, your sister, your spouse, your pastor can see things that you're blind to.

We can kind of yank those eyes open and get these scales to fall off a bit so you go, oh, that's what

I've been covering all this time. That's what I've been ignoring. We can help. But you don't give your conscience over to any but Christ Jesus our

Lord. You hold your conscience captive to the Word of God and none other. You see the

Thessalonians, when they moved away from that, when they took the false teaching, they're shaken.

They were alarmed. They didn't know which way to turn. When Rome fell, people were obviously shaken and alarmed.

And they ran to these bishops of Rome who for so long had such good credibility. And they took control more and more and more.

And this is the restraining force that was taken out of the way by God, the master of history.

And this is when that man of lawlessness rose up and took control and was given control of men's consciences.

Those tumultuous times, people needed that stability. They needed to know where to go.

They needed to be told what to do. Because everything they stood for, everything they believed in, all that they thought was going to be secure the next day, was gone when

Rome fell. Today we live in tumultuous times, do we not? Today we live in times when we're looking for answers.

And so easy to look at the books and the opinions and the commentators, the talking heads as we call them.

We have COVID, we have BLM, we have cancel culture, we have CRT, we have trillions of dollars starting to fly off the press.

My goodness, how can they count that much what is called money? It's not even really money anymore. Where do you find your stability?

Psalm 11 asks, if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? We could ask, if Rome falls all around me, what can

I do? Where can I look for answers? We could say, if the pandemic doesn't end, if the printing presses won't stop, if the laws won't stop flowing out of Washington or Sacramento restricting us and bringing more and more evil in the land, what can we do?

Where can we go? Who can we look to? With a government in active support of evil, when it partners with those who hate

Christ, when mandates come and go, and intrusion becomes our daily diet, where do you go? When you get shook up by those things, do you allow them to shake you, to alarm you?

Do you see the restrainer being taken away? The Word of God, the more shook you are, the more time you need to spend in prayer, the more you need to look to the

Bible, and the more you need to look to a friend, a brother, sister, a husband, a wife, and find that stability, not through a man, but again through the

Word, through what the Word of God tells us, the only safe and secure foundation which is

Christ our Lord. Verse 9 attributes the Pope's rise to the activity of Satan, and we're going to cover that in the next message in this series.

For now, it's as if the devil looks at the fall of Rome and says, well, let's not let this wonderful crisis, which is that fall and that breakdown of law and order, let's not let this go to waste.

Well, he didn't, of course, it wasn't Satan who had anything to do with it. It was God, the master of history. He declared the beginning from the end.

It was God's decree that brought the Roman government to an end and the Roman church to birth. And we come back to this in a few weeks.

Verses 9 through 12, we'll see God's purposes in all this. Verse 8, for this morning, 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. Now, we've argued that the revelation of this one happened around the year 400.

When will Jesus kill him with the breath of his mouth? We don't know. We do know he will, and it will be when he returns.

Jesus will take vengeance on this son of destruction. He who destroyed so many souls will be himself destroyed.

The reference to Jesus killing with the breath of his mouth is in two other places in the scripture. It comes from Isaiah chapter 11, beginning at verse 1,

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, which is of course Jesus Christ, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the

Lord, and his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide disputes with what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth, and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

And then it's in Revelation, this idea of Jesus killing his enemies with the breath of his mouth.

Revelation 19 at verse 11, Then I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse.

The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.

His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself.

He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is the Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses.

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule over them with a rod of He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the

Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

This is the return of our Lord Jesus Christ, and when he returns he will take vengeance, not just against the pope, not just against the papacy, but against all who bound men's consciences to anything but himself, against all whose rules buried the gospel too deep for men to see, against all who willingly surrendered themselves to them, loving the comfort of rules rather than the responsibility of simple faith.

Faith in Jesus Christ, faith in the word that he gave us. As we await his return, let us hold fast to the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Let us remember that no matter how attractive it may seem to run to the rules and to the regulations, they can only give a semblance of the true security that we have in Christ Jesus our

Lord. We look to rules, whether they're from the pope or any other man, when he says here's what you need to do to be right with God, and I'll just give you the do's that you do rather than anything of simple faith, ask yourself this, did this one die for my sins?

No. Did this one give me his spirit? No. Did this one give me the word of God so I can understand who

God is and what he would have of me? No. Only Jesus the Lamb of God could and did these things, and by his one sacrifice may complete atonement for your sins.

Let our trust be in him. Do not trust men. We can help. A good and godly brother or sister can help, but your conscience belongs to God, and your conscience is captive to his word.

Amen. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the confidence that we can have because of your word that as we await

Jesus Christ, we know that he will come. He will not miss any of us, and Father, in these times so uncertain, so tumultuous, we look to you,

Father. We know that whatever restraint has been removed, whatever is happening, it is all in your sovereign hands, but we,

Father, we're in Christ's hands, and therefore we are solid. We are stable. We pray,

Father, that you would increase our faith and our sureness in what he has done for us and our ultimate destiny in him when he returns, and we ask it all in Jesus' name.