_THE MAN OF SIN._
"Now we beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and our gathering together unto Him; to the end that ye be
not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled, either by
spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us, as that the day of the
Lord is _now_ present; let no man beguile you in any wise: for
_it will not be_, except the falling away come first, and the
man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, he that opposeth and
exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is
worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself
forth as God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told
you these things?"--2 THESS. ii. 1-5 (R.V.).
In the first chapter of this Epistle Paul depicted the righteous
judgment of God which accompanies the advent of Christ. Its terrors
and its glories blazed before his eyes as he prayed for those who were
to read his letter. "With this in view," he says, "we also pray always
for you, that our God would count _you_ worthy of the calling."
The emphatic word in the sentence is _you_. Among all believers
in whom Christ was to be glorified, as they in Him, the Thessalonians
were at this moment nearest to the Apostle's heart. Like others, they
had been called to a place in the heavenly kingdom; and he is eager
that they should prove worthy of it. They will be worthy only if God
powerfully carries to perfection in them their delight in goodness,
and the activities of their faith. That is the substance of his
prayer. "The Lord enable you always to have unreserved pleasure in
what is good, and to show the proof of faith in all you do. So you
shall be worthy of the Christian calling, and the name of the Lord
shall be glorified in you, and you in Him, in that day."
The second chapter seems, in our English Bibles, to open with an
adjuration: "Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him." If that were
right, we might suppose Paul's meaning to be: As you long for this
great day, and anticipate its appearing as your dearest hope, let me
conjure you not to entertain mischievous fancies about it; or, as you
dread the day, and shrink from the terrible judgment which it brings,
let me adjure you to think of it as you ought to think, and not
discredit it by unspiritual excitement, bringing reproach on the
Church in the eyes of the world. But this interpretation, though apt
enough, is hardly justified by the use of the New Testament, and the
Revised Version is nearer the truth when it gives the rendering
"touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." It is of it the
Apostle wishes to speak; and what he has to say is, that the true
doctrine of it contains nothing which ought to produce unsettlement or
vague alarms. In the First Epistle, especially in chap. v., he has
enlarged on the moral attitude which is proper to those who cherish
the Christian hope: they are to watch and be sober; they are to put
off the works of darkness, and put on, as children of the day, the
armour of light; they are to be ready and expectant always. Here he
adds the negative counsel that they are not to be quickly shaken from
their mind, as a ship is driven from her moorings by a storm, nor yet
upset or troubled, whether by spirit, or by word or letter purporting
to be from him. These last expressions need a word of explanation. By
"spirit" the Apostle no doubt means a Christian man speaking in the
church under a spiritual impulse. Such speakers in Thessalonica would
often take the Second Advent as their theme; but their utterances were
open to criticism. It was of such utterances that the Apostle had said
in his earlier letter, "Despise not prophesyings; but prove all that
is said, and hold fast that which is good." The spirit in which a
Christian spoke was not necessarily the spirit of God; even if it
were, it was not necessarily unmixed with his own ideas, desires, or
hopes. Hence discernment of spirits was a valued and needful gift, and
it seems to have been wanted at Thessalonica. Besides misleading
utterances of this kind in public worship, there were circulated words
ascribed to Paul, and if not a forged letter, at all events a letter
purporting to contain his opinion, none of which had his authority.
These words and this letter had for their substance the idea that the
day of the Lord was now present--or, as one might say in Scotch, just
here. It was this which produced the unspiritual excitement at
Thessalonica, and which the Apostle wished to contradict.
A great mystery has been made out of the paragraph which follows, but
without much reason. It certainly stands alone in St. Paul's writings,
an Apocalypse on a small scale, reminding us in many respects of the
great Apocalypse of John, but not necessarily to be judged by it, or
brought into any kind of harmony with it. Its obscurity, so far as it
is obscure, is due in part to the previous familiarity of the
Thessalonians with the subject, which allowed the Apostle to take much
for granted; and in part, no doubt, to the danger of being explicit in
a matter which had political significance. But it is not really so
obscure as it has been made out to be by some; and the reputation for
humility which so many have sought, by adopting St. Augustine's
confession that he had no idea what the Apostle meant, is too cheap to
be coveted. We must suppose that St. Paul wrote to be understood, and
was understood by those to whom he wrote; and if we follow him word by
word, a sense will appear which is not really questionable except on
extraneous grounds. What, then, does he say about the delaying of the
Advent?
He says it will not come till the falling away, or apostasy, has come
first. The Authorised Version says "_a_" falling away, but that is
wrong. The falling away was something familiar to the Apostle and his
readers; he was not introducing them to any new thought. But a falling
away of whom? or from what? Some have suggested, of the members of the
Christian Church from Christ;[26] but it is quite plain from the
whole passage, and especially from ver. 12f., that the Apostle is
contemplating a series of events in which the Church has no part but
as a spectator. But the "apostasy" is clearly a religious defection;
though the word itself does not necessarily imply as much, the
description of the falling away does; and if it be not of Christians,
it must be of the Jews; the Apostle could not conceive of the heathen
"who know not God" as falling away from him. This apostasy reaches its
height, finds its representative and hero, in the man of sin, or, as
some MSS. have it, the man of lawlessness. When the Apostle says _the
man_ of sin, he means the _man_,--not a principle, nor a system, nor a
series of persons, but an individual human person who is identified
with sin, an incarnation of evil as Christ was of good, an
Antichrist. The man of sin is also the son of perdition; this name
expressing his fate--he is doomed to perish--as the other his nature.
This person's portrait is then drawn by the Apostle. He is the
adversary _par excellence_, he who sets himself in opposition, a human
Satan, the enemy of Christ. The other features in the likeness are
mainly borrowed from the description of the tyrant king Antiochus
Epiphanes in the Book of Daniel: they may have gained fresh meaning to
the Apostle from the recent revival of them in the insane Emperor
Caligula. The man of sin is filled with demoniac pride; he lifts
himself on high against the true God, and all gods, and all that men
adore; he seats himself in the temple of God; he would like to be
taken by all men _for_ God. There has been much discussion over the
temple of God in this passage. It is no doubt true that the Apostle
sometimes uses the expression figuratively, of a church and its
members--"The temple of God is holy, which temple ye are"--but it is
surely inconceivable that a _man_ should _take his seat_ in _that_
temple; when these words were fresh, no one could have put that
meaning on them. The temple of God is, therefore, the temple at
Jerusalem; it was standing when Paul wrote; and he expected it to
stand till all this was fulfilled. When the Jews had crowned their
guilt by falling away from God; in other words, when they had finally
and as a whole decided against the gospel, and God's purpose to save
them by it; when the falling away had been crowned by the revelation
of the man of sin, and the profanation of the temple by his impious
pride, _then_, and not till then, would come the end. "Do you not
remember," says the Apostle, "that when I was with you I used to tell
you this?"
When Paul wrote this Epistle, the Jews were the great enemies of the
gospel; it was they who persecuted him from city to city, and roused
against him everywhere the malice of the heathen; hostility to God was
incarnated, if anywhere, in them. They alone, because of their
spiritual privileges, were capable of the deepest spiritual sin.
Already in the First Epistle he has denounced them as the murderers of
the Lord Jesus and of their own prophets, a race that please not God
and are contrary to all men, sinners on whom the threatened wrath has
come without reserve. In the passage before us the course is outlined
of that wickedness against which the wrath was revealed. The people of
God, as they called themselves, fall definitely away from God; the
monster of lawlessness who rises from among them can only be pictured
in the words in which prophets pourtrayed the impiety and presumption
of a heathen king; he thrusts God aside, and claims to be God himself.
There is only one objection to this interpretation of the Apostle's
words, namely, that they have never been fulfilled. Some will think
that objection final; and some will think it futile: I agree with the
last. It proves too much; for it lies equally against every other
interpretation of the words, however ingenious, as well as against the
simple and natural one just given. It lies, in some degree, against
almost every prophecy in the Bible. No matter what the apostasy, and
the man of sin, are taken to be, nothing has ever appeared in history
which answers exactly to Paul's description. The truth is that
inspiration did not enable the apostles to write history before it
happened; and though this forecast of the Apostle's has a spiritual
truth in it, resting as it does on a right perception of the law of
moral development, the precise anticipation which it embodies was not
destined to be realised. Further, it must have changed its place in
Paul's own mind within the next ten years; for, as Dr. Farrar has
observed, he barely alludes again to the Messianic surroundings (or
antecedents) of a second personal advent. "He dwells more and more on
the mystic oneness with Christ, less and less on His personal return.
He speaks repeatedly of the indwelling presence of Christ, and the
believer's incorporation with Him, and hardly at all of that visible
meeting in the air which at this epoch was most prominent in his
thoughts."
But, it may be said, if this anticipation was not to be fulfilled, is
it not altogether deceptive? is it not utterly misleading that a
prophecy should stand in Holy Scripture which history was to falsify?
I think the right answer to that question is that there is hardly any
prophecy in Holy Scripture which has not been in a similar way
falsified, while nevertheless in its spiritual import true. The
details of this prophecy of St. Paul were not verified as he
anticipated, yet the soul of it was. The Advent was _not_ just
then; it was delayed till a certain moral process should be
accomplished; and this was what the Apostle wished the Thessalonians
to understand. He did not know when it would be; but he could see so
far into the law of God's working as to know that it would not come
till the fulness of time; and he could understand that, where a final
judgment was concerned, the fulness of time would not arrive till evil
had had every opportunity, either to turn and repent, or to develop
itself in the most utterly evil forms, and lie ripe for vengeance.
This is the ethical law which underlies the Apostle's prophecy; it is
a law confirmed by the teaching of Jesus Himself, and illustrated by
the whole course of history. The question is sometimes discussed
whether the world gets better or worse as it grows older, and
optimists and pessimists take opposite sides upon it. Both, this law
informs us, are wrong. It does not get better only, nor worse only,
but both. Its progress is not simply a progress in good, evil being
gradually driven from the field; nor is it simply a progress in evil,
before which good continually disappears: it is a progress in which
good and evil alike come to maturity, bearing the ripest fruit,
showing all that they can do, proving their strength to the utmost
against each other; the progress is not in good in itself, nor in evil
in itself, but in the antagonism of the one to the other. This is the
same truth which we are taught by our Lord in the parable of the wheat
and the tares: "Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the
time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the tares,"
etc. _In the time of harvest_: not till all is ripe for judgment, not
till the wheat and the tares alike have shown all that is in them,
will the judgment come. This is what St. Paul understood, and what the
Thessalonians did not understand; and if his ignorance of the scale of
the world, and the scale of God's purposes, made him apply this law to
the riddle of history hastily, with a result which the event has not
justified, that is nothing to the prejudice of the law itself, which
was true when he applied it with his imperfect knowledge, and is true
for application still.
One other remark is suggested by the description of the character in
which sin culminates, viz., that as evil approaches its height it
assumes ever more spiritual forms. There are some sins which betray
man on the lower side of his nature, through the perversion of the
appetites which he has in common with the brutes: the dominance of
these is in some sense natural; they are not radically and essentially
evil. The man who is the victim of lust or drunkenness may lose his
soul by his sin, but he is its _victim_; there is not in his guilt
that malignant hatred of good which is here ascribed to the man of
sin. The crowning wickedness is this demoniac pride: the temper of one
who lifts himself on high above God, owning no superior, nay, claiming
for himself the highest place of all. This is rather spiritual than
sensual: it may be quite free from the gross vices of the flesh,
though the connection between pride and sensuality is closer than is
sometimes imagined; but it is more conscious, deliberate, malignant,
and damnable than any brutality could be. When we look at the world in
any given age--our own or another--and make inquiry into its moral
condition, this is a consideration which we are apt to lose sight of,
but which is entitled to the utmost weight. The collector of moral
statistics examines the records of criminal courts; he investigates
the standard of honesty in commerce; he balances the evidences of
peace, truth, purity, against those of violence, fraud, and
immorality, and works out a rough conclusion. But that material
morality leaves out of sight what is most significant of all--the
spiritual forms of good and of evil in which the opposing forces show
their inmost nature, and in which the world ripens for God's judgment.
The man of sin is not described as a sensualist or a murderer; he is
an apostate, a rebel against God, a usurper who claims not the palace
but the temple for his own. This God-dethroning pride is the utmost
length to which sin can go. The judgment will not come till it has
fully developed; can any one see tokens of its presence?
In asking such a question we pass from the interpretation of the
Apostle's words to their application. Much of the difficulty and
bewilderment that have gathered about this passage are due to the
confusion of these two quite different things.[27] The interpretation
gives us the meaning of the very words the Apostle used. We have seen
what that is, and that in its precise detail it was not destined to be
fulfilled. But when we have passed behind the surface meaning, and
laid hold on the law which the Apostle was applying in this passage,
then we can apply it ourselves. We can use it to read the signs of
the times in our own or in any other age. We may see developments of
evil, resembling in their main features the man of sin here depicted,
in one quarter or another, and in one person or another; and if we do,
we are bound to see in them tokens that a judgment of God is at hand;
but we must not imagine that in so applying the passage we are finding
out what St. Paul meant. That lies far, far behind us; and our
application of his words can only claim our own authority, not the
authority of Holy Scripture.
Of the multitude of applications which have been made of this passage
since the Apostle wrote it, one only has had historical importance
enough to be of interest to us--I mean that which is found in several
Protestant confessions, including the Westminster Confession of Faith,
and which declares the Pope of Rome, in the words of this last, to be
"that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth
himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God." As
an interpretation, of course, that is impossible; the man of sin is
one man, and not a series, like the Popes; the temple of God in which
a man sits is a temple made with hands, and not the Church; but when
we ask whether or not it is a fair _application_ of the Apostle's
words, the question is altered. Dr. Farrar, whom no one will suspect
of sympathy with the Papacy, is indignant that such an uncharitable
idea should ever have crossed the mind of man. Many in the churches
which hold by the Westminster Confession would agree with him. Of
course it is a matter on which every one is entitled to judge for
himself, and, whether right or wrong, ought not to be in a confession;
but for my own part I have little scruple in the matter. There have
been Popes who could have sat for Paul's picture of the man of sin
better than any characters known to history--proud, apostate, atheist
priests, sitting in the seat of Christ, blasphemously claiming His
authority, and exercising His functions. And individuals apart--for
there have been saintly and heroic Popes as well, true servants of the
servants of God--the hierarchical system of the Papacy, with the
monarchical priest at its head, incarnates and fosters that very
spiritual pride of which the man of sin is the final embodiment; it is
a seed-bed and nursery of precisely such characters as are here
described. There is not in the world, nor has ever been, a system in
which there is less that recalls Christ, and more that anticipates
Antichrist, than the Papal system. And one may say so while
acknowledging the debt that all Christians owe to the Romish Church,
and while hoping that it may somehow in God's grace repent and reform.
It would ill become us, however, to close the study of so serious a
subject with the censure of others. The mere discovery that we have
here to do with a law of moral development, and with a supreme and
final type of evil, should put us rather upon self-scrutiny. The
character of our Lord Jesus Christ is the supreme and final type of
good; it shows us the end to which the Christian life conducts those
who follow it. The character of the man of sin shows the end of those
who obey not His gospel. They become, in their resistance to Him, more
and more identified with sin; their antagonism to God settles into
antipathy, presumption, defiance; they become gods to themselves, and
their doom is sealed. This picture is set here for our warning. We
cannot of ourselves see the end of evil from the beginning; we cannot
tell what selfishness and wilfulness come to, when they have had their
perfect work; but God sees, and it is written in this place to startle
us, and fright us from sin. "Take heed, brethren, lest haply there
shall be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away
from the living God: but exhort one another day by day, so long as it
is called To-day; lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness
of sin."
[26] There are indications of such a thing in various words of Jesus.
"Many false prophets shall arise, and shall lead many astray. And
because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax
cold."--Matt. xxiv. 11f. "There shall arise false Christs, and false
prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead
astray, if possible, even the elect."--Matt. xxiv. 24. "When the Son
of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?"--Luke xviii. 8. What
answers to these in St. Paul's writings we see in Acts xx. 29f.; Eph.
iv. 14; 1 Tim. iv. 1. But these passages belong to the very latest
years in his life, and they are not connected with any such
anticipations as are characteristic of the Thessalonian Apocalypse.
The history of the Church, as Paul foresaw it, did not include in
itself a phenomenon which could be described as ἡ ἀποστασία.
[27] A conspectus of the historical interpretations, most of which are
really applications, of this passage, is given in most commentaries.
The fullest is Lünemann's, which is followed by Alford. Farrar's
Appendix is briefer.