David

Today I’m continuing with II Thessalonians 2:5-11.  Paul provides more detail about the second event which Paul discusses must occur before Christ returns: the revelation of the man of sin.  First off, I am at a complete loss to what Paul is talking about in verses six and seven.  He speaks of something restraining, though what is restraining or what it is restraining are unclear.  It seems to be restraining the man of sin until it is time for him to be revealed.  The NKJV capitalizes “He” when referring to what is restraining, indicating that the restrainer is God.  However, this does not seem to fit because “He is taken out of the way.”  Thus it seems the restrainer is forced to lose its restraint, which would not be God.

Paul then reveals that this man will be destroyed by the Lord.  Again, Paul normally uses Lord to speak of Christ, so I believe he is saying Christ will destroy the man of sin.  Not only that, but the man of sin is destroyed by the “brightness of His coming.”  So Christ will destroy the man of sin when He returns.

Finally, Paul tells us that this man of sin comes according to the working of Satan speaking lies and displaying power and signs.  Then God will cause those that do not believe to fall for this lie.  It seems that though the man of sin comes with power and signs he is not necessarily very believable.  After all, Paul says that God will “send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie.”  Perhaps they only are deceived because God deludes them.  So the coming of the man of sin brings further condemnation on those that do not believe in Christ.  Perhaps this is the purpose in his coming?  There of course may be other purposes.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.