To Encourage You

2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 “. . . they refused 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 unrighteousness.”

Are you living under a delusion?  Surely, if we are, we would want to know it.  What a tragedy to live our life in a deluded state of mind and to end up, in the end, finding out that we had all along been deluded in what we had thought about things, such as the value of things, the “rightness” of things, or our expectations.   The verses above tell us clearly that some people are deluded, in fact they are strongly deluded. They are so certain that they see things clearly, but they do not. Specifically, they are so sure that the Bible, i.e., the Truth of God, isn’t really true at all. They have heard that in the Bible God “commands all people everywhere to repent” and be saved (Acts 17:30), but they have refused to believe it, because they don’t think it’s true.  The evidence of this is the fact that they “had pleasure in unrighteousness.”

But what does that mean?  It means “unrighteousness” as God has defined this term in the Bible.  It’s the opposite of everything God has said is right and true in His Word.  They take pleasure in violating the commandments of God, summarized in Exodus 20. For example, they love money rather than God, making it their god, and thereby taking pleasure in violating the first of the 10 commandments.  They enjoy speaking in an unrighteous manner, often taking God’s name in vain (the third commandment) as they laugh and joke with friends. They take pleasure in speaking ill of others, displaying their anger at them, thus violating the sixth commandment by committing murder in their heart as Jesus explained in His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21-22).  They take pleasure in violating the seventh commandment by practicing sexual immorality, either blatantly, by practicing it themselves, vicariously, by lusting after others, or enjoying it in the things they watch and read. 

The Bible warns us that any of us that take pleasure in any of these things or any of the other things that He has declared to be unrighteous, is living in a deluded state of mind.  And if one continues in that delusion to the end, they will be condemned by God, and that is no delusion.  It’s the truth. 

May God help us to love His Truth and thereby live a life directed by a sound mind, rather than live the deluded life of the lover of unrighteousness who will face the shock of the condemnation of those who refused to love the truth and be saved.