To Encourage You

2 Thessalonians 2:1-4 “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers,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. 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,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.”

Have you ever wondered why the Bible speaks of future events in so many places, but they are future events to us even now, not to mention to those to whom the words were written over 2,000 years ago?  That was one of my thoughts as I read the verses above from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.  Here Paul speaks about the second coming of Jesus and tells the Thessalonian believers about someone called “the man of lawlessness” who would someday come on the scene.  From his description and by comparison with other Scriptures (e.g., Daniel 7 and 1 John 2) we know that this is the antichrist who will come to power at the time of the Great Tribulation described in the book of Revelation.  Isn’t it curious that Paul would speak to the first century Thessalonians about these things when they would never see them in their lifetime?  But then Paul reveals why he taught these things. It was because they had been greatly alarmed by false teaching that had claimed that the second coming had already occurred.   They were confused since, as believers, they didn’t expect to experience the wrath of God which they knew was to come at the time at that time.  They were alarmed that the persecution they were experiencing was because of the wrath of God – and perhaps they had been all wrong about everything they had believed and hoped for. 

There are some great parallels with what we see today.  So often false teachers will focus on prophesies about future events.  They will claim that they have secret knowledge about these things, knowledge that has been revealed to them just as the false teachers claimed in Paul’s day, “by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter” that carries divine authority.  An example of this is Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons.  Joseph Smith claimed that he had a spiritual experience in a visit by an angel named Moroni.  This angel supposedly provided Joseph with some golden plates and then translated the Book of Mormon from those plates.  Sounds impressive – a very spiritual experience – yet totally void of the Truth of the Word of God.  As to the future, note the formal name of the Mormons: “The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.” They purport to be something new, beyond the time of anything recorded in the Bible, and their teachings are filled with unbiblical claims about the future. 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are similar.  They have much to say about the future and base their views on their own aberrant version of the writings of the prophets and apostles who wrote the Scriptures.  Like the false teachers in Paul’s day, they falsely claim that the writers of the Scriptures are the actual source of these aberrant writings. And then they have the Watchtower Magazine, which is filled with unbiblical writings that the Jehovah’s Witnesses say have the same authority as the Bible. 

Other teachers have claimed Jesus would return on such and such a date and have led their followers to foolishly sell all of their property and wait for that date.  Of course, these dates have inevitably passed and the prophesies proven false.  So you see, the future is a target of false teachers today just as it was in the first century. Satan uses the same old tactics as he always has.  But to all of this the Bible speaks the truth, and it should always be the standard against which any “spirit, or spoken word, or letter” is judged. 

The church at Berea was a good example of this in that they weren’t as easily swayed as the believers at Thessalonica. We are told that these people were “more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).  Elsewhere, Paul warned the Galatian church that “even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8-9).  All of this is sound advice as so many voices cry out for our attention, voices that often focus on “prophesies” that raise alarms about future events, but prophesies based not on the Scriptures, but on aberrant teachings from “a spirit, a word, or a letter.”

May God help us to examine any teaching by the Scriptures, the only source of Truth which has actually come from God.