2.  “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 changes 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 – Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Korea, genocide in the Congo, terrorism, 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 built 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 in Jerusalem it 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 remain 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.

It is what Oswald Chambers describes as the power of obedience:
“And as soon as I obey Him, I fulfill my spiritual destiny. My personal life may be crowded with small, petty happenings, altogether insignificant. But if I obey Jesus Christ in the seemingly random circumstances of life, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God. Then, when I stand face to face with God, I will discover that through my obedience thousands were blessed. When God’s redemption brings a human soul to the point of obedience, it always produces. If I obey Jesus Christ, the redemption of God will flow through me to the lives of others, because behind the deed of obedience is the reality of Almighty God.”

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 a uniform. 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, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-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. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none.”

3.  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 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. We talked last week about the hidden presence and revealing of Jesus after his resurrection. The same is true here. What has been hidden will be revealed. 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.

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 conquering but a choosing to be captive. I read this week an article about the number of performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth currently. 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.

“These days, any discussion of men choosing illegal or inappropriate behavior inevitably brings up Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. The comparison isn’t perfect (prostitutes and “selfies” are smaller gestures than killing your way to kingdom), but what’s pertinent is that voters have shown willingness to shrug off wrongdoing. “The time is right for ‘Macbeth’ because our culture encourages public glory over personal integrity,” said Mr. Gualtieri. “Macbeth throws away his honor, his integrity, for his ambition.”

This is the special irony of evil and the delight of Satan. It’s not overwhelming and overtly conquering against our will that interests him but the thrill is in having people choose him while he simply receives them. Their choosing evil over God makes it even better because betraying and seeming to hurt God is what drives Satan. He 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 effects of evil.

12 If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were rising against me,
I could hide.
13 But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
14 with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
at the house of God,
as we walked about
among the worshipers.

My companion attacks his friends;
he violates his covenant.
21 His talk is smooth as butter,
yet war is in his heart;
his words are more soothing than oil,
yet they are drawn swords.
22 Cast your cares on the Lord
and he will sustain you;
he will never let
the righteous be shaken.
23 But you, God, will bring down the wicked
into the pit of decay;
the bloodthirsty and deceitful
will not live out half their days.
But as for me, I trust in you.

4.  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:
15 So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings[c] we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. 16 May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, 17 encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

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