NOTES for Th2 2:1-12

In his second letter to the Thessalonian church, Paul again returns to the question of the end of time and the return of the Savior. Apparently this question never stopped troubling the Thessalonian Christians, who had not given up hope of calculating the exact date of the Second Coming, which they evidently imagined as an event of the very near future (vv. 1-2). The apostle, however, draws the addressees' attention to the fact that the Messiah's return is a lawful event; it can take place only when, in the course of world history, certain spiritual processes have reached completion. These processes proceed in their own way with the participation of people living on earth, whose choices determine their course. At the same time, it becomes clear that in his vision of the historical process Paul is very far from the idea of spiritual or moral progress so widely spread today.

Still, the apostle says nothing about regress either. Judging by his words, we should speak rather of a certain polarization toward the end of earthly history of the spiritual forces opposed to one another, a polarization that will reach its peak precisely at the moment of the Savior's return. Thus Paul mentions certain forces secretly at work in the world, opposing the Torah ("the mystery of lawlessness"), which cannot reveal themselves in all their fullness only because there has not yet appeared in their midst the one who will unite them around himself (vv. 6-7; according to the sense of the Greek text, v. 7 speaks of hidden forces of lawlessness being restrained by the fact that there has not yet appeared among them someone destined to become their center and whom the Synodal translation calls "the restrainer," that is, in this case, the one on whom everything rests).

As we can see, this unifier of all the forces opposed to God is marked above all by a denial of the Torah and its norms, so that Paul directly calls him the "man of lawlessness," doomed to destruction (the "son of destruction"), understanding by the Law the Torah, as in all his other letters (v. 3; in the Synodal translation the "man of lawlessness" is called the "man of sin"). It is no surprise that the consistent denial of the Torah brings the denier to the point that he puts himself in God's place, trying to refute the very possibility that anything sacred exists in the world (Paul says figuratively of him that he "will sit in the Temple," that is, in the place of God's presence, "proclaiming himself to be God," v. 4).

All this imagery undoubtedly goes back to the Book of Daniel, which in turn reflects the realities of the reign of the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean wars. It was Antiochus Epiphanes, who seriously considered himself a son of Zeus, who demanded that altars dedicated to Zeus and to himself be set up in the courtyard of the Jerusalem Temple, so that divine honors would be paid to both of them. It is no surprise that the story of Antiochus Epiphanes and his defeat became a symbol of God's triumph over His enemies, a symbol well known to the first generations of Christians.

Paul also turns to this symbol. For him, Antiochus Epiphanes, with his demand for divine honors, becomes a prototype of those forces that at the end of time challenge God, acting no longer secretly but completely openly (vv. 8-10). As we can see, the end of time comes when both the forces of the Kingdom and the forces of those who oppose it are revealed in the world to the end, so that all the masks previously used are thrown off. And the point here, of course, is not that these masks keep God from recognizing His enemies. The point, as we can see, is that a mask thrown off means a final choice. Then the day of Judgment comes - not because God no longer wants to wait, but because there is nothing left to wait for. The choice has been made. Now only the face-to-face meeting with God remains, a meeting during which God will give the final assessment of the choice that has been made, determining each person's destiny in eternity.