When will the Lord come again? Christians have been asking that question for 2000 years, and never more urgently than when our enemies have the upper hand. When Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410, when Mohammed’s hordes overran the Mediterranean world starting in the 600’s, when the Irish monasteries were sacked by Vikings in the 800’s, earnest Christians were fully convinced that the end of the world was drawing near. The same sort of thinking popped up in the twentieth century, with earnest believers claiming that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin was the “man of lawlessness” Paul describes in verse 3.

But after each wave of brutal suppression, the Christian faith has always expanded anew. The Visigoths and the Vikings eventually embraced the faith of the Christians they had conquered. Today, there are probably more Christians in Communist China than there are in the United States, and as Islam’s inherent brutality and violence is ever more clearly revealed, more Muslims are coming to faith in Christ than at any time in history.

But the cycle of human history forms a pattern of what Paul tells us we can expect in the future. For many cultures that have initially embraced the gospel have just as often abandoned it in favor of the prosperity it invariably produces – in fact, they not only turn away from the gospel, but actively rebel against it. And when the Christian faith no longer provides the glue that holds a culture together, much less the mutual trust and respect on which free markets and the rule of law depend, the usual result is a collapse into tyranny. In the name of imposing law on increasingly lawless people, tyrants from Napoleon to Hitler to Xi Jinping have rejected the law of God and exalted themselves in His place.

And one day, when all the world has gone through the cycle of conversion, decline and apostasy, when there are no more people left who could possibly come to faith in Christ, when human rebellion against Christ has progressed to the point where tyranny has become universal – in short, when the days are like those of Noah immediately before the flood, or of Lot immediately before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – then the Lord Jesus will come.

But until that time, those who are loyal subjects of King Jesus must follow Him, participating in the work that He will complete on that day. Since “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” (v. 7), we must proclaim the Word of God in opposition to it. We must speak truth into the deception and the delusion that is increasingly common in our culture (vv. 10-11), urging people to turn away from worship of pleasure or of the state or of anything except King Jesus – before it’s too late.

II Thessalonians 2:1-12 (ESV)

Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers,
2 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.
3 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,
4 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.
5 Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things?
6 And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time.
7 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.
8 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.
9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders,
10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.
11 Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false,
12 in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.