We left Ezekiel last week bound with ropes and unable to speak while under house arrest as the elders did not want him speaking to the people. That didn’t stop him from acting out God’s message to the leaders in exile. Because they had desecrated the Temple, God’s judgment was upon those remaining in Jerusalem and they would soon be overwhelmed by the Babylonian army. The fast approaching siege would be horrible.

“Outside is the sword, inside are plague and famine..Calamity upon calamity will come, and rumor upon rumor. They will try to get a vision from the prophet; the teaching of the law by the priest will be lost, as will the counsel of the elders. The king will mourn, the prince will be clothed with despair, and the hands of the people of the land will tremble. I will deal with them according to their conduct, and by their own standards I will judge them. Then they will know that I am the Lord.”

Then total silence for fourteen months while still in house arrest until we begin this morning with Chapter 8 and the hand of the Lord comes upon him once again. He is taken by the hair of his head by the burning figure we saw in the first vision and transported to the actual Temple in Jerusalem. It reminded me of the movie version of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley, bound in chains visits Scrooge on Christmas Eve. He is then taken by the three ghosts to visit his past, present and future. Is it a vision or is it an literal visit? Maybe Ezekiel has the same question Paul did about his vision of Paradise. “Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know – God knows. And I know that this man – whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows – was caught up to Paradise.”  Neither do we know but we do know what Ezekiel saw there in Jerusalem.

He saw the corruption of the leadership – not only the priests but the elders. He saw the desecration of the Temple that resulted from the people mixing the worship of idols with the worship of God and, seemingly, being so accustomed to it that they could not tell the difference. We see violence in the streets and leaders meeting in secret in dark rooms to plot their schemes against God and the nation. We see religious and political anarchy. And while his visit takes him one step at a time from the outer courts through the gates getting closer and closer to the inner court and the Holies of Holies we see the slow and gradual departure of the glory of the Lord from the Temple at first and then from the city itself.

“Then the glory of the Lord departed from over the threshold of the Temple and stopped above the cherubim. While I watched, the cherubim spread their wings and rose from the ground…” 

What is left when the Lord leaves and there is nothing remaining to constrain the hearts of darkness in a nation? I’ve been thinking about that this week and remembered our time in the book of Second Thessalonians.  I’d like to return to that this morning.

From the beginning, there have been people teaching all sorts of doctrines about the second coming and the time of the end. Yes, there were and are false teachers but most of the confusion is either jumping to conclusions about certain signs or overly excited imaginations or just different readings of Scripture. Why else would we have pre/post/a millennial and pre/post tribulation interpretations of end times? No one knows for sure but everyone has an opinion or a feeling. That was true for the church at Thessalonika. There were people teaching that the only explanation for their suffering and hardship was the end times had begun. Others were teaching that their suffering was punishment imposed by God and others were teaching that this was just a taste of what they were going to experience. Do you remember Y2K? It was that sort of irrational fever about the unknown being perpetuated by people anxious about the future.

People in the early church were used to persecution and hardship. More of that was not their concern. What was their concern was that their hardship meant they were going to be left in a world without hope – the world of those who had been left behind. They had lost their confidence in their salvation and were prey to beliefs and interpretations based on fear and guilt. We all let ourselves be manipulated by modern versions of the same. People interpret every event as a sign that clearly spells doom and destruction. Certain individuals were identified as the antichrist. There were those who seemed to relish stirring up and alarming people. They seem to enjoy making people fearful and worried about the future. Every generation is afraid of being that last generation of the Church or, worse, of being one of those caught up in the lies of the age. Even then there was the worry that either as an individual or a church they had stepped over the line and were going to be lumped in with the deluded and the hopeless while the true believers were taken. There was a fascination with what would happen with those left behind. Many were haunted by what they imagined was waiting for those who were left behind and some were teaching that the true church had already been taken. That is why Paul feels it necessary to write them.

“And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed…”

The church is what restrains evil in the world. We do not conquer it or overwhelm it with good. Contrary to what some think, there will never be a time when the world is at peace but our work is to restrain the evil that is constantly desiring to break out and consume the world. We have to trust God and understand that each of us has a unique place and responsibility for restraining evil.

There are two dynamics in the church.

First, there is the conquering church – the church triumphant. There are those in the church who want to change the world and, in truth, they can relieve the world of some of the symptoms of the sin that is in the very nature of the world. We can combat and sometimes win over slavery, disease, poverty, injustice, and crime. We can create better conditions for people…and that is part of our calling.

Second, there is the restraining church. This is our role as holding out against the flood of evil. The Greek word here is “Katechon” or hold down something that keeps wanting to break out. It is our role of constantly struggling to restrain something that wants to overtake us. We’ve all seen pictures of communities being flooded by the Mississippi. Everyone is engaged in filling and piling sandbags to hold back the water. The water keeps rising and the people keep stacking to hold back the flood until the waters recede or the town is destroyed. No one sits by and watches.

We need both churches in this world. The church that treats the symptoms of a fallen world and the church that fills and stacks sandbags against the flood to restrain it. Neither is adequate on their own.

All of us have an individual responsibility to restrain evil but the temptation is to be overwhelmed with the enormity of it. I’ve told you the story before of Louis McBurney when he was doing his medical residency in an emergency room. He had a very simple task to perform – out the IV needle in the patient’s hand. Yet, he kept worrying about everything else until the ER director told him to just focus on that one small thing as that was his part – for the rest of it he would have to trust everyone else. There is no shortage and never will be of global worries. Just look at the papers today – Russia on the border of Ukraine, genocide in China, terrorism, the rise of autocrats, school shootings, corruption, and divisions of every kind. Yet, we have to come back to trusting God and doing our part in restraining evil.

Remember how Nehemiah rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem? Every family rebuilt the part where they lived. Everyone was responsible for their small section for both rebuilding and defending and restraining the enemy who was constantly wanting to break through. People were responsible for where they had the most investment – not the whole wall.

The restraint of evil is not a one front war. It has billions of fronts where every life is a front against the secret power of lawlessness. Every person and every family and every church is a front against a power that never sleeps and is relentless in its desire to break in and steal.

And just as was true then is true now. What you do to resist evil affects me and what I do affects you. Every time you tell the truth when you could have lied, every time you forgive instead of remaining angry, every time you pray or act with integrity you are restraining the power of hopelessness and lawlessness. No good act is neutral. It is one more sandbag stacked against the flood. This is the “secret power of goodness” Paul talks about.

We are engaged in a long drawn out war – and yet we recruit people by telling them they will be happy and at rest when they join the church.   We never tell them about their responsibility to everyone else – only about the benefits of joining up and getting the retirement benefits. Let me read part of a speech by Winston Churchill. It is titled the War of the Unknown Warriors and he delivered it after France fell to the Nazis.

“All goes to show that the war will be long and hard. No one can tell where it will spread. One thing is certain: the peoples of Europe will not be ruled for long by the Nazi Gestapo, nor will the world yield itself to Hitler’s gospel of hatred, appetite and domination. And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here..we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test – a prolonged vigil.”

At a certain point God will take the Church out of the world. And that is the time when there will be no law, no restraint, no truth, no hope, no pleasure. Only complete delusion. The smirk and disguise of evil will be removed and the mask peeled off. Evil that has been boiling below and ever present in the world will be revealed. What has been hidden will be obvious. That is the meaning of the word “apocalypse” – it is a revealing of what has been hidden. It is not an invasion from the outside but what has always been present but restrained.

The church will not be here for that. Just as Noah was taken out before the flood and Lot taken out of Sodom before destruction, the church will not go through these times. God will not desert the world but the righteous will not be there. It will be a world without the Church and as ineffective as the Church often appears to be there is no way to imagine what it will be like to live in a world with absolutely no goodness of any kind and no remorse or guilt or shame or pity. The glory of the Lord will have departed.

Paul says this power is already at work and creating a receptivity to delusion and a preference for deceit. Not just a vulnerability to deceit but a preference for it. It’s not a sudden conquest but a choice to be captive. I read this week an article about the resurgence of performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It talked about living in a time when men and women choose to lose their moral compass and are caught up in the lust for power and position.

This is the special irony of evil and the delight of Satan. It’s not overwhelming and overtly conquering us against our will that interests him but the thrill in having people choose him while he simply receives them. Their choosing delusion over God makes it even better as betraying and piercing the heart of God is what drives Satan. Just as the elders of Israel chose to mix the worship idols with the worship of God and desecrate the Temple. They were not forced. They did it willingly. Satan wants to break the heart of God – not just win the war. He wants to win in a particular way. We are simply pawns in the game. There are only two places in the New Testament where the term “son of perdition” is used – here and as a descriptor of Judas, the friend turned betrayer. That is why David’s cry in Psalm 55 is such a good description of the deluding effects of evil. It turns friends against friends who betray each other.

“If an enemy were insulting me,

I could endure it;

if a foe were rising against me,

I could hide.

But it is you, a man like myself,

my companion, my close friend,

with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship

at the house of God,

as we walked about

among the worshipers.”

But the delusion of evil is not the end. The man of lawlessness, the son of perdition is destroyed and, as Psalm 55 says, he is cast into the pit of corruption.

Look at Revelation 19:20-21:

“But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”

Yes, we are in a war that is constant. Bob Woodward described it in his book Bush At War: “The enemy is relentless, hidden, patient and hates us. The war will not be spectacular large battles but thousands of invisible actions.”  

We are in a war of restraint against deception, delusion and anarchy – and the greatest weapons are truth and prayer. Our continuing responsibility is to fight the battle on the front closest to where we live and to fight for each other whenever delusion and deceit break through. Again, evil does not overwhelm. It works to make someone prefer the lie and to break the heart of God.

So, that is Paul’s final admonition to the Church. Not to focus on fear or evil but to pay attention to their responsibility to restrain evil and take care of each other.

2 Thessalonians 2:15-17:

So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

Let it not be said that we chose darkness and exchanged the truth of God for a lie or that we were overwhelmed by despair and hopelessness.

Every single good deed and good word is a sandbag. God is in control. We have hope and eternal encouragement. Do not fear.