End Time Confusion
(2 Thessalonians 2:1-4)
1. Ever since the days of the early Church, there have been False Teachings about the Coming of the Lord. Let me list just a few Deceptions.
• In A.D.135, a man named Montanus proclaimed that the New Jerusalem would soon descend from heaven to earth and land in what is now Turkey. He was wrong.
• About 100 years after that, a historian named Hippolytus records that a Bishop convinced his followers to sell all their possessions and follow him into the wilderness because the Lord was on His way. He was wrong, and his followers were left homeless and hungry.
• Skip ahead to the year 999. St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was filled with people weeping and trembling. They were sure the thousand-year-mark would be the time. Eventually they went on home to their usual routines.
• During all the Middle Ages, there were many groups who taught End Time Doctrines. Many of them set dates and caused a lot of confusion. Some taught that the Puritans were setting up the “New Jerusalem” on American soil and would usher in the Millennium.
• In 19th Century America, there was a surge of interest in the Second Coming. In fact, that’s when a farmer named William Miller taught that Christ would secretly snatch away believers before the public coming. (This is now called the Rapture.) Miller predicted the Rapture would occur on March 21, 1842. He revised the date to April 3, 1843, and over 3,500 followers jammed the Boston Advent Temple. The next day, he lost some followers, but he continued to set dates.
• You’ve heard of some of the groups that grew out of the teachings of the Millerites. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and 7th day Adventists trace their roots back to Miller.
• Hal Lindsey taught that Christ would come within 40 years of the time Israel became a nation in 1948. The forty years was up in 1988.
• Recently Jack Van Impe (a TV evangelist) said he believed Christ would come back between 2008 and 2013. [Source K. Edward Skidmore, Sermon Central, edited]
2. The Bible’s teaching about End Time events is tricky in spots; as a result, some people prefer not to study it all. They do not see its relevance.
3. But the Scriptures are filled with information about the End Times. And 2 Timothy 3:16-17 assures us that all Scripture is inspired and profitable to bring us to spiritual maturity.
4. So if we do not study end time prophecy, we can be sure we will have areas of spiritual deficiency.
5. Other Christians are afraid of prophecy because they have seen people go off the deep end. But the question is this: Do people go off the deep end because they study prophecy, or do people with unhealthy perspectives gravitate toward prophecy because they are looking for something to go off the deep end with? Did prophecy make them weird, or did they become obsessed with prophecy because they were first weird? I think the latter.
6. So we need to let God set our agenda, not be reactionary to the abuses around us.
7. But End Time events can be breeding grounds for heresy. This is nothing new -- this was a problem even in the first century!
Main Idea: When you are not well grounded, you are easily tossed to and fro.
I. False Teaching UNSETTLES the Biblically Unlearned (1-2)
A. About the Second COMING of Jesus (1)
o A few (not most) rabbis believed in two Messiahs…
o Christians understand one Messiah, two comings of the one Messiah
o The Day of the Lord here refers to the Tribulation, a period of 7 horrid years on earth, culminating with the Battle of Armageddon
B. They had apparently become ALARMED (2)
1. Through false PROPHECY
• someone claimed to receive a message from God to this effect
2. Through a bogus REPORT
• someone either claimed that Paul was teaching that the Day of the Lord had come or that the Antichrist had risen to power (Rumor)
3. Through a forged LETTER
• someone went through great effort to compose a letter and sign Paul’s name to it
o Notice in 3:7 that Paul began signing his letters to authenticate them
C. EXPECT to encounter much false teaching. Be neither gullible nor naïve.
When you are not well grounded, you are easily tossed to and fro.
II. The Way to Recognize False Teaching is to Be Fluent with the TRUTH (3-4)
John Stott comments, "Loyalty to apostolic teaching, now permanently enshrined in the New Testament, is still the test of truth and the shield against error."
A. The REBELLION must first occur (3a)
o The word translated "rebellion" is made up of two words, meaning to stand away from; some have taken this as the rapture, but the word itself is not used this way in Greek…
o This provides an argument for the agnostic, mid & post Trib positions; why did Paul not say, "We know that the Tribulation cannot be happening now because we are still here…
o MacArthur counters, "It is important to see that the Thessalonians’ fear indicates that Paul had taught them that the Rapture of the church precedes the final wrath of God, including the Tribulation and the Day of the Lord (1 Thess. 5:2–5; cf. Rev. 3:10). If he had taught them that they were to go through those judgment periods, they would have been rejoicing because being in them meant that the Lord’s coming was near. Clearly, Paul had taught them that they would be taken up before those times, thus their confusion when they felt like they were in them."
o Whatever the relationship of the rapture to the Tribulation, the tribulation begins with a unique rebellion against God
o Sanh. 98a teaches that the Messiah will not appear until the whole world is either entirely righteous or entirely wicked
o The Greek word for "apostasy" means a falling away, a withdrawal…it means the abandonment of the faith.
o Church history has seen many apostasies… but this will be a massive and fast religious abandonment of the Christian fundamentals…
B. The Man of LAWLESSNESS must then be revealed (3b-4)
Called "the little horn" (Daniel 7:8, 24), the “prince who is to come” (Daniel 9:26), "the king who does as he pleases "(Daniel 11:36); "the foolish, worthless shepherd" (Zechariah 11:15–17); the beast (Rev. 11:7; 13:1; 14:9), “the man of lawlessness” and the “son of destruction” (2 Thessalonians 2: 3), “that lawless one” (2 Thessalonians 2: 8), and “the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan” (2 Thessalonians 2: 9). The most common term by which we refer to this man is "The Antichrist" (1 John 2:18).
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia: "Even the names of Antichrist in this passage are of Jewish origin; the "lawless one" (II Thess. ii. 8, R. V.) is none other than Belial—whom Paul mentions in another place as the opponent of the Messiah (II Cor. vi. 15)—a name interpreted by the rabbis as compounded of without, and yoke, so that Belial is the one who will not accept the yoke of the Law (Sifre, Deut. 92; Tanna El. R. iii.; Midrash Sam. vi., ed. Buber, p. 64). It is thus evident that this "little apocalypse" represents not a Christian, but the Jewish view of the Anti-Messiah. The pseudepigraphic literature (see Bousset, "Der Antichrist," pp. 86, 99, 100) informs us that in Jewish circles in the pre-Christian period the expectation was prevalent of the appearance of Belial (one of Satan’s lieutenants) if not of Satan himself; and that his activity was imagined as being almost identical with that expected of the Antichrist in Thessalonians (Jewish Encyclopedia, "Antichrist" article by Louis Ginzberg)."
How is he initially revealed? What do we know about him? From the book of Daniel (mostly chapter 9) we learn:
(1) He will probably be Italian or Romanian -- or whatever it means be a descendent of the Roman Empire, (2) He will lead a united Europe, and (3) He will sign a 7 year peace treaty with Israel, a treaty he will break.
1. He is DOOMED to destruction
2. Exalts himself above GOD
3. Invades the Jewish temple and claims to be GOD
4. The Temple was destroyed in 70AD and has to be on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem; right now, a Muslim shrine inhabits the location; it can be rebuilt quickly, however, and plans are in the works;
*******watch video clip.
Just as the true Messiah claimed to be God, so does the false.
C. IGNORANCE of the Bible and doctrine is not bliss
When you are not well grounded, you are easily tossed to and fro
Some Christians believe the best strategy is to be passive and ignorant, then they bemoan that they didn’t teach their children properly, that they didn’t know the Word well enough to keep from getting on a spiritual detour, that they made foolish decisions because they did not cultivate Biblical wisdom… we must believe that you need to know and start learning … we must stop taking the attitude of the grade school student in English class who asks, "What do I need to know this for?" We must believe that if God put it in His Word, it is important for us to know!
