Sermon: A Rewired Society (Part One)

The Mystery of Lawlessness
#1779

Given 31-Aug-24; 69 minutes

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If we had a Rip Van Winkle experience, falling asleep 20 years ago and waking up today, we would be appalled at the stark difference between our memories and today's reality—a society which has become reprobate with Pride parades, transgenderism, men beating up women in Olympic boxing, homosexual marriage, and euthanasia. The freedoms we had 20 years ago are rapidly eroding. In addition, generation X,Y, and Z have become hampered by addiction to cellphones and video games, severely retarding their growth and maturity, short-changing them on a sense of responsibility. Young boys are forever dependent, have no social skills, and become addicted to pornography, while young girls on social media lose sleep, get depressed, and suffer anorexia or bulimia. Today, people are being rewired changing the way they think, with the social Internet and media dangerously altering thought processes making young and old more susceptible to believing lies. Ideologically, satanically inspired media has undermined the existence of absolute truth and standards and has impaired people's ability to think things through, leading to a post-truth, lawless world. As Charles Whitaker said in his article, "What Restrains the Man of Sin?," we have been temporarily protected from the man of sin rising until the "proper time," but when the lying wonders and unrighteous deception arise, only those who have received the love of the truth will be spared from its deadly power. The mystery of lawlessness has had a long build up since the garden of Eden, and our human nature has a pronounced impulse toward lawlessness. Today, as traditional biblical standards and values decline and are spurned, only the mind of Christ will save God's people.


transcript:

Have you ever had a Rip Van Winkle moment? You probably have. The original short story, "Rip Van Winkle," by American author Washington Irving, was about the title character who falls asleep after imbibing some particularly strong liquor sold by some Dutch people. And he goes to sleep after drinking this liquor and he does not wake up for 20 years. (If you have insomnia, find those Dutch people.) Well, in the meantime, for Rip Van Winkle the American Revolution has come and gone, and when he wakes up, the world is a very different place from when he went to sleep.

So a Rip Van Winkle moment, then, occurs to a person when he or she suddenly has a moment of clarity, when he or she suddenly wakes up to something, realizing that the world has drastically changed over a period of time.

Here is an instance, maybe it would be striking to you, it would be striking to me.

Imagine the last time you darkened a public school classroom and it was back in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. And then, they had a problem at the school and they came to you to substitute teach at a public school today. And you would go in there and be awakened to the stark difference between our memories of public school back when we had a actually a pretty good time at school, to how it is today. Most of us would come away saying, "How do the teachers do it? No wonder our education rank is so low in this country," because it has been slipping since about that time, the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Or we can have a Rip Van Winkle moment when we consider the wider society. A Christian waking up Rip Van Winkle style after going into a coma 30 years ago, would want to go back to sleep. Consider it: pride parades, transgenderism all over, men beating up women at the Olympics in Paris. (That is in boxing. It was official. Both of them won; that does not surprise me.) Homosexual marriage, euthanasia, artificial intelligence, riots. They are having a spate of rioting in the UK.

COVID. I had that just three weeks ago (and I wanted to thank Mark Schindler for filling in for me that week. I could not have done it.) And the COVID lockdowns. What about the border crisis? You know, TSA was not even around 30 years ago so going to the airport has gotten a whole lot worse. Let us not forget to mention things like housing prices. Thirty years ago, I bought my house for $84,000. Last time I saw it on Zillow it was $360,000—and we have not done anything to the place!

Oh, then there is other aspects of our inflationary economy. How about the national debt? $35 trillion and still rising. Suicide rates are through the roof. What about waking up and finding out that you had two terms of another Bush, two terms of a guy named Obama, a term—Donald Trump!—and then Biden and Harris. I am not saying she will be president. I am just saying she is running for president.

What about waking up and finding out that a Kennedy actually endorsed a Republican. We have our racial strife and we could go on and on and on with things that are new over the last 30 years that would shock a person if he learned about it after not being aware for such a long time. I do not think I need to go on now.

A recent Rip Van Winkle issue is the condition and behavior of our children, especially since 2010. I have just finished reading, The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by a man named Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist at New York University. He specializes in the psychology of morality, cultural psychology, and moral foundations and emotions. His book examines the impact of modern technology and parenting methods on children's mental health. It is a good read. I would recommend it to everyone who has children especially. But also if you have grandchildren who are in the ages of what is called Gen Z and the Alpha generation.

This book focuses on the widespread use of smartphones and the dominance of overprotective parenting. These factors, he believes, have fundamentally altered how children grow up. In effect, as he says, these things have rewired childhood.

Now, I do not know how much you get on social media. I am on occasionally. But on social media, there are memes every now and then in which members of my generation or the Boomer generation before me, wax nostalgic about the unsupervised freedom we had as children. We were able to stay out all day with our friends in the neighborhood. We would play, we would roam wherever we wanted, especially on summer break.

During summer break we would get up and get out and we would be out until the cows started coming home. We just had to be home by supper. I spent all day playing ball with my buddies. We had an empty lot up the street and we would get out there probably about 9 or 10 o'clock and we would just play ball, with game after game after game because we had the time and our parents had understood that we would be safe there. It would be fine, we could take care of ourselves. If we got hungry, we would break for lunch or whatever and we would go back at it. And there was no problem with any of that. I would ride my bike for hours with my friends. We also had a section between us and the main road that was just kind of wilderness area, it had not been built on and there were bike trails back there. You could take back area all the way pretty much to the elementary school where I went in the 4th and 5th grade.

So there were lots of things to do and our parents let us do it. It was a fundamental part of our upbringing because it really helped to help us grow up, actually. In having that freedom to play with our friends unsupervised, we learned a lot about social interactions with our peers. We had to solve things on our own. If there was an argument or a fight, we had to figure out how to work it out. We learned things about leadership. We learned things about weighing risks. If something we were going to do was considered risky by some, they did not do it, they would hold back. There would be a lot of cajoling, "Ah, come on, you can do this!" And you learned how to weigh that decision, whether you were going to participate in something risky or not.

We learned how to take care of ourselves. We learned that when we fell off our bike and scraped our knee, it was not the end of the world. We learned a lot of things. I learned, well, when you play basketball and the ball is thrown at you and you have stiff fingers, you are going to break your finger. But all you do is go like this and keep playing. I did not run home to mom and dad and say, "Take me to the hospital." (I have still got that hump because I broke my knuckle.) But I did not care. I wanted to play basketball and I learned that breaking my finger hurt for a while but it was not the end of the world. That was on the same day, believe it or not, that Elvis died. I do not know why I have those two memories together, but that actually is the truth.

But today's children are different. Today's children, if they are not constantly supervised by one or more of their parents, a teacher, a coach, well, they are spending most of their free time looking at a screen, a cell phone, a smartphone. They are usually alone as well. As a matter of fact, they could actually be in a room full of their peers, but they are alone because they are sitting there all looking at their own screens, different screens, and they are usually not communicating with each other. And if they do communicate with each other, they are communicating through their screens, their phones, and they are sending each other text messages even though they may be sitting side by side!

But they are constantly being fed curated, algorithm-controlled photos, videos games, memes, music, and other forms of media on their smartphone.

Boys tend to spend countless hours playing games on their phones or on their other screens that they may have, a laptop, an IPad, a computer. Girls spend, believe it or not, equal or more hours on social media. They are usually not gamers. There is a small percentage of girls that like to go on and game like the boys do, but they are very small percentage. Most of them gravitate to Instagram, TikTok, and any kinds of other visual social media. Not so much tech social media, but ones that show pictures and videos are most highly sought after.

What Jonathan Haidt found out through using the statistics that are available to us these days, is that a large percentage of our children are always on the Internet. And another thing that recently was brought to my attention are the kids that always have one ear bud in their ears. They call them "one buds." They are constantly on the Internet either talking, that is rare, that is more the girls, or listening to music on their phones.

But they have been doing studies on children these days and the first thing that they do when they wake up is they check their phones for notifications of messages. And the last thing they do at night is look at their phones for messages. And they put their phones under their pillows so that they can get their notifications through the night if they want to. And they most often want to.

Jonathan Haidt writes that the statistics are shouting at us that this way of growing up is not good, not good at all. It is equally bad for boys and girls, but just in different ways. For boys (we will start with them), they often fail to launch. That is the code that they use now among psychologists. The phrase means that boys are forever dependent, mostly on their parents, and cannot transition to adulthood. This is a rather large percentage. I do not know exactly, I cannot remember the exact percentage. But there are a growing number of boys that are in this failing to launch category. These are the ones that are loners, that stay in their rooms all day, all night, and all they do is game. They develop almost no social skills. They remain emotional children throughout their lives. They become especially addicted to pornography because a lot of them, when they are not gaming, they are at pornography sites. Their grades plummet and too many of them end up attempting and committing suicide because they see no future for themselves because they are lonely. They have no friends and they think I have no future. And the boys' suicide rate is astronomical compared to just a few years ago.

On the other hand, because they are on social media all the time, girls lose sleep. That is one of the biggest problems among young girls, that they are not getting enough sleep. They become depressed quite easily. Many of them begin cutting themselves or they will slip into suffering from anorexia or bulimia. Many of them take one of two routes: they become a bully or they become subjects of bullies.

Now, the reason why it affects them differently is because, remember I talked about this, they are mostly seeing visual media, pictures and videos, and what they do in staring at supposedly perfect girls all the time, they begin comparing themselves to the Internet's unreasonable beauty standards and they believe they come up short. Do you know that on Instagram, if a girl of any age starts looking at these pictures of the influencers that are on there and on TikTok, that within just a few hours, they will begin receiving curated messages about weight loss. It is part of the algorithm and they all begin getting messages about diets like the water only diet and other diets so that they can look like the girls on the Internet. And what happens is, girls have a more tribal way of doing things. They get into communities but these communities are all online, and so they talk to each other about what they are seeing online, and it is very soon that they start criticizing one another and there will be mean girls and there will be the bullied girls and their self-esteem just plummets and they begin to think of themselves as unworthy.

And I think as adults, we forget, we kind of gloss over our middle school and high school years and forget how mean kids are to each other. And it is harsh criticizing and judgment and it really leaves deep emotional scars and social pain that they can carry around for decades. Abigail Shrier, who recently wrote a book called Bad Therapy, chronicles that a lot of these girls end up in therapy and it does not work. They are just being therapeutized to death and it is a big problem out there. Another book by Jeanne Twenge titled, Generations, is helpful for understanding the differences between recent generations.

So overall, Haidt is saying that modern parenting and the social Internet are not allowing children to grow up following tried and true traditional methods that we know work. We have seen them work. They are not perfect, but they at least prepare children for adulthood. It at least matures them enough so that they can get a job and support a family and start making some good decisions about their lives and be members of the community and of the country. But they are finding out that this new way of growing up, stuck to a phone and overprotected by their parents, makes them unable to shoulder real world responsibilities and solve real world problems.

And so what does Haidt do? What does Haidt advocate for this generation of children? He advocates banning phones from schools completely. That the kids come there, if they have a cell phone it has to go in the locker or in a pouch that cannot be opened until school is over—and they spend the whole day without their phones. He said the ones that say they just have to make sure that they do not pull out their phones during class do not work because kids are devious. They pull their phones out, they put them behind a book and they play or they get on social media during class. And this is what the teachers are fighting. And you know what the last thing they do before class starts, check their phone. You know what the first thing they do when class ends, check their phone. And all the time between classes, what are they doing? They are on their phones, they are not with their peers talking and doing what school children do. So that is why he says no phones at all at school.

He says that if we really want to get on top of this, that we should not give kids phones and access to social media until at least age 16. And he said 18 would be better. You know why? He says there is a risk even at 16 and 18 because the brain's prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for cognitive analysis, that is, learning how to put things together and make an analysis and come up with a decision and moderation of correct social behavior, is not fully developed until age 25, which means social media can still have an influence on rewiring the brain up to age 25.

And that is what happens when you spend all your time on the phone—and it can affect adult brains too. If adults are into social media, and gaming to a lesser extent, but into social media for sure, after age 25 their brains could also be rewired because they are still plastic. They still can be reconfigured into these same types of formations that many of our kids are being rewired into. It is just a little bit harder to do, takes a little longer.

So people are being rewired. That is the point I want to get here. And it is starting with our children. Society is showing evident signs that how people think is changing. People do not think like they used to 50 years ago. Something has been influencing the formation of our thinking habits over the the years. And they found that since 2010, it has sped up because of these factors, especially in our children.

Social media, the social Internet, and media in general are dangerously altering our thought processes starting with young people. And I think the reason is that people, just generally, will be readily susceptible to believing lies. One, by ideologically undermining the existence of absolute truth and standards. This is what postmodernism aims for. This is the goal of postmodernism and its spawned ideologies like critical race theory and all these other things that are coming up now, DEI and all of that. And two, our thinking processes are changing by impairing people's ability to think things through. So the first thing is by ideological means and the second is to try to impair people's ability to think rationally. And what I believe this is leading to is a post truth, lawless world. And it is not pretty.

I hope many of you read the Prophecy Watch that we published this week. It was titled, "What Restrains the Man of Sin?" It was written by Charles Whitaker. It was taken from a commentary that he gave in December, 2018 and I think he was on to something. I would encourage you to read that article, if you have not already.

Right now, I want us to go to II Thessalonians 2 in the section about the great apostasy at the end and the man of sin. We are going to read verses 3 through 12. I am using these verses to show why I think that what Jonathan Haidt has said in his book is true. It is a step in leading toward this end that Paul prophesized about here.

II Thessalonians 2:3-12 Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition [son of destruction], who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

The late Charles F. Whittaker concentrated on verses 5 through 7 in his article, that is, on the restraining force that keeps the man of sin, or the lawless one, from rising until the proper time. There is a restraining force on him so that it would be impossible for him to do what he will do at the end time unless this restraining force was taken out of the way.

In the article Charles shows very clearly that Paul's Greek in verses 5 through 7 does not use masculine words. No "He's" in terms of the restraining force. He says all of these words that are talked about in terms of the restraining force are neuter terms. That means they have no gender. We should understand gender now, right? This is one of the 72. Just kidding. Grammatical gender in Greek is masculine, feminine, and neuter, meaning neither.

So what we have is that any "he" in there should be an "it." So at the end of verse 7, "only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way," is wrong in the Greek. Grammatically it is incorrect. It should be something like, "only what now restrains will do so until it is taken out of the way." You notice how the gender disappears and the personality of the restraining force disappears. It is not a personality, it is something that is restraining the man of sin from rising.

Within the context, Paul hints at what the restraining force is when he says "the mystery of lawlessness is already at work." Now, the mystery of lawlessness is what the man of sin accomplishes, brings to its height at the end time. Lawlessness, there, is the Greek word anomia. It means "without law," there is no law. And that idea of there not being any law defines the man of sin. And of course, he is the one that is going to called the "son of perdition" because when there is no law, when there is lawlessness, that is going to end in destruction.

So by saying that what the man of sin does, what he brings to pass, that is, the fullness of the mystery of lawlessness, it defines then for us what the restraining force is: the opposite of lawlessness. Law. It is law, specifically the law of God and its immutable absolute standards. God's laws are fixed. We know God's laws. They are right here in the Bible. They help us to lead a life that is worthwhile, it is fruitful. We can have wonderful lives if we follow the laws of God. Because they are attuned, they are therefore bringing us into abundance. They are wonderful things.

But the man of sin is on the opposite end of the spectrum. He advocates lawlessness, and lawlessness, as it says right here, specifically at the end of verse 3, leads to destruction.

So by Paul saying there in verse 7 that the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, implies that 2,000 years ago when the apostle Paul lived, there were elements of lawlessness that he could see. And so we can understand then that the mystery of lawlessness in its grander scheme has had a big build up between then and now. It was starting then or at least it was existing then. It did not start then. I do not want you to get that implication, that it only started in the first century. The mystery of lawlessness actually started in the Garden of Eden, but it has been building and building and building.

Paul could see it at work in his life, in his society, and it would just increase up until the time of the end. And it also gives us the impression that humanity under Satan's influence has a pronounced impulse toward lawlessness. As I just mentioned, it began in the Garden of Eden where Eve and Adam both practiced lawlessness, took the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and separated themselves from the Author of the law and began living lives that were part lawful and part lawless, that is, part good and part evil.

And you could see it in their offspring, certainly in Cain, who lived a life of lawlessness. You could see it in Lamech, who was worse than Cain, at least in his own mind. You could see it in all of humanity before the Flood. They ended up so lawless that God says, "I've had enough. It's too soon. Let's start over with Noah and his family."

But there has been something available ever since the Garden of Eden that has kept lawlessness in check. And that is the other side of the spectrum, the other half of the reality here is that we have had God imbuing society with His goodness in one way or another ever since the Garden of Eden. But His law has been imbued into human societies from very early in history. I mean, you get Cain and Abel, you have two men, one who decided he did not have to listen to God. He could go his own lawless way. But you had the other who decided that he was going to follow God. And so they balanced each other off. Obviously, Cain ended up killing Abel, but God gave Adam and Eve another son, Seth, and Seth carried forward on the side of good.

And there have been, down through history, these same infusions of God's law and God's way of life into the world that balances man's urge to go into lawlessness, every man for himself. And so we have Noah coming up at the time of the Flood and he brings in a strong influence of God's way over the time directly after the Flood. Then we have Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. And then you get to all of the children of Israel and Moses and the establishment of Israel, God's people, and their influence over the world.

And over time, we have some from among those people who God used to write His Word. And so we get it in black and white in a book called the Bible. Then God sends His Son, and His Son calls disciples and they go out into the world and they write more to add to the Word. And finally, we get Scripture, we get all this influence of God's way of life in the Bible, and the Bible's influence even in the false churches is so strong that 2,000 years later, it still has influence. The traditions that people have lived by over the last 2,000 years, in the West especially, have all come from the Book, from God's Word. And those have seeped out into society and became our traditional ideas and practices, making us a lawful people, at least in part, as a society. And because society supported God's laws, at least in part for all this time, it has held in check the mystery of lawlessness.

Now, there have been a lot of bad things that have happened over the last 2,000 years, lawless things. There have been terrible things like slavery and people cheating one another and war and murder and terrible deceit. But society has always had the pillars of what they think of as traditional, decent behavior and ideas. And that has kept the mystery of lawlessness in check. It has tempered man's lawless impulses. So there has been a witness of God's law either through the Bible, through the church, through the false churches, and through the influence of the churches in society for all this time.

But it is finally beginning to unravel. When Christian laws and morals are high and widespread, lawlessness is curbed. It is weak and sporadic. But as biblical or traditional standards and values decline and begin to be spurned by the people, lawlessness always takes advantage and grows almost entirely unchecked.

Now we have had revivals in this country, several, where we have tried to reform society with tent meetings and what have you. And it has often been good. It has often brought us back toward what is lawful and right. But as Charles shows through his article that basically after each revival, lawlessness is just a little bit stronger, and it has been building strength for centuries.

I want to back this up biblically. Let us start in Genesis 6, verses 5 through 7. I just want to kind of show you a thumbnail sketch of the history of lawlessness and some of the commentary the Bible makes upon it.

Genesis 6:5-7 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man [that is, lawlessness] was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. [Lawlessness had reached a peak here.] And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them."

They had in 1600 years already fulfilled the mystery of lawlessness in their own lives. And He said, No, I have to cut them off because it is far too soon.

Let us go to Judges 21. His own people Israel reached this point. Judges is kind of a commentary to show what happens when there is not good leadership. The traditional morals and values and laws are not upheld and where does it lead? Well, it tells us in the very last verse,

Judges 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Everyone figured out for himself what right and wrong was and they made a mess of Israel. And there had to be a king, there had to be someone to hold the line. And ultimately, that man was David.

Let us move on. Let us go into the New Testament. I just want this to be a quick survey. We are getting to the end time already and Jesus says,

Matthew 24:12 "And because lawlessness will abound [that means it is going to get big], the love of many will grow cold."

It will have a particular effect on the church because they are the only ones that can show true agape love, which is mentioned here, and it is going to grow cold because of the abundance, the abounding of lawlessness. It is going to affect them too.

Let us move on. Luke the 17th chapter. I chose this one in particular because it also not only mentions like the time of the days of Noah, but also like the times of Lot at Sodom.

Luke 17:26-30 "And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man [meaning when He returns]: They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so it will be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed."

He is talking about a society continuing on doing the normal things of society. What He does not mention is all the rot that is underneath these societies. We think we are going along just as we were. Is that not what the mocker says in II Peter where it says, all things have just always been like this. But what is not mentioned here is that the rot that ate out the society in Noah's day was wickedness, evil, lawlessness. And what ruined Sodom and Gomorrah was evil, wickedness, lawlessness. Society looked the same. But it was not, because that society had allowed lawlessness to rise and cause destruction, perdition. God had to destroy it because it reached a level where it could not be taken anymore, could not be stood, or it would destroy everything. God did not want that.

Let us go on to one more into the book of Revelation, chapter 18. And we find a similar thing.

Revelation 18:4-6 And I heard another voice from heaven saying, "Come out of her, My people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities [her evil, her sins, her wickedness, her lawlessness]. Render to her just as she rendered to you, and repay her double according to her works; in the cup which she has mixed, mix double for her."

So it shows that this figure, Babylon the Great, is full of sin, full of lawlessness, full of anti-God doctrine and behavior. And so God says she has written her own death warrant and I want you people, My people, not to mess with her at all. Get out, do not follow her at all.

Let us go back to II Thessalonians 2. I want to read verses 8 through 12 again because we are going to concentrate here.

II Thessalonians 2:8-12 And then the lawless one will be revealed [That is kind of where we are now. We are somewhere between verses 7 and 8.], whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. [He is skipping ahead to the return of Jesus Christ here. But he goes back in verse 9.] The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Paul explains here what is going to happen. Satan will orchestrate the rise of the lawless one. He is going to see that his time is now. He will see certain signs in society that says, "Ok, now we're ready, we can throw everything we have at this society." So yes, his rise, because it has got Satan's full attention and authority behind it, will seem miraculous. Here it is called lying wonders. Satan always deceives us into thinking we are seeing things or hearing things or noticing things, and that is going to attract a lot of eyeballs. You know, the powers, the signs, the lying wonders. Those are going to have us transfixed, or the world transfixed.

But the real problem is mentioned in verse 10, "and with all unrighteous deception." That is a doozy of a Greek phrase. This is the big factor, "all unrighteous deception," and it is aimed at the uncalled, at those who do not believe the truth, those who have not received the love of the truth, those who reject the truth. This is an all-out assault on Satan's own people, the ones who follow him wherever he goes, it seems. They are willing to do whatever terrible thing that he throws out there in society.

The Greek here in this phrase is adikias apate. It is actually two nouns, a genitive and a dative, back to back. You do not need to know all this grammar. But it is not an adjective and a noun like it is in ours, "unrighteous deception." These are two Greek nouns that Paul uses back to back. The first one, adikias, means unrighteousness, wickedness, evilness or evil, just plain evil, and deceitfulness. Whereas apate, this other second noun, simply means deceitfulness or deception.

Now, you know how the Hebrews (and Paul was a Hebrew) made superlatives by sticking the same word together. So we have Holy of Holies, which means the holiest of all. Well, that is kind of what he does here in Greek, but instead of repeating the same word, he uses two words that have basically the same meaning for the same purpose. That he wants to show that this wickedness, or this deceit, or this unrighteousness is really unrighteous, is really deceptive. As a matter of fact, probably a good literal translation of these two terms back to back is deceitful deception, but wicked, deceitfulness, or how it is here in the New King James, unrighteous deception, is fine.

But we have to understand that what Paul is doing here, he is trying to impress upon us that this will be the height of deception. At this time, when the man of sin arises, it is going to be so deceptive that you will probably be deceived. And certainly all of those people who have no love for the truth will be deceived—definitely will be deceived. So we have here that Satan pushes the man of sin into the limelight with the deceitfulness of deceit, with the worst kind of deception that has ever been perpetrated on the face of the earth. The phrase, adikias apate, indicates that the man of sin's wickedness is so deceptive to prevent worldly people from recognizing its true character and so they will be seduced into embracing it and embracing the man of sin.

Why? Why does it have to be so deceitful, so deceptive? Notice Paul's contrast here. (We will get the answer to that question in a minute.) Notice, Paul's contrast in the rest of this—of the truth and the lie. The truth, he says, leads to salvation, but the lie leads to condemnation. And he used the word perdition earlier, destruction.

The sense is, when you put all this together, that the Devil and the man of sin must pull out all the stops to bring the mystery of lawlessness to a crescendo, ensuring that even deceived people will fail to figure out that total lawlessness is a losing proposition. Humans are smart. Humans have brains made in the image of God. They cannot be fooled for long. And so Satan has to use deceitful deception, the height of deception to make sure man's drive of self-preservation does not kick in and realize that Satan is leading them like lemmings off a cliff. It has to be so deceitful, so bad, so evil that they are totally bamboozled. And God lets them!

God lets the Devil and his demons and the man of sin finally off the leash. And it says even, here, that God sends strong delusion. Why? Because God has a purpose, God has a plan. He knows that at the right time, He has to let this happen so that He had could send His Son back and establish the Kingdom of God; re-establish the truth, the law, the Word of God as the standard and start fresh in the Millennium.

Now, this strong delusion that God sends at the same time may well be just a strengthening of the blindness to the truth that He already employs. If you want to look at that, He says three times that He has given man over to his own debased mind. That is in Romans 1. He says that three times there. Paul has a paragraph about this in II Corinthians 4:4, that God has given men over to their delusions. And He here sends strong delusions and these delusions have blinded them from the truth. And it may just be that God will kind of ramp this up and make them even blinder, if that is possible. So it could simply be that He gives man over to His enmity toward God and to His law and allow them to follow their drives of human nature without any kind of impairment of that ability.

Anyway, our takeaway from all of this is that the end time deception will be so powerfully crafty and overwhelmingly wicked that it will fool almost everyone. The whole world will follow after the beast. Is that not what it says? The only ones who have any chance of seeing through it are those who have received the love of the truth. Look at what Jesus says in Matthew 24. This is how bad, how deceitful, how deceptive this end time lawlessness is going to be.

Matthew 24:23-25 "Then if anybody says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There!' do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders so as to deceive, if possible, the very elect. See, I have told you beforehand."

Forewarned is forearmed.

Now, you know why it is not possible? It is possible. It is possible if you are not following the urgings of God's Spirit in you. If you are not following the love of the truth, if you are not following the mind of Christ in you by the Holy Spirit, you may well be deceived. But if you remain close to God, in a good relationship with Him, if you are doing what He says, if you are keeping the law, if you are overcoming and growing, then chances are even this very terrible deception will not get by you. You will see it, you will see it coming.

Let us bring back in my introduction about Jonathan Haidt's book and what he has found. What we have is that a large percentage of a generation and the same factors are at work on another generation, the Alphas, that this generation is being rewired. That is, he found that they do not think like previous generations. Yes, there is always a generation gap. Haidt is probably about my age so he would think that the generations that come after leave something to be desired. But it is not that. He is finding that statistics and anecdotal evidence shows that these generations do not think like the generations that came before. It is stunting their mental development and maturation, the circumstances that are at work today.

The smartphone and social media, along with ultra-structured helicopter parenting, are creating a generation that is severely behind by the time they get into their early twenties. Part of the problem is that even if they are, as I mentioned before, in their online communities, the truth is that they are mostly alone. They are usually holed up in a bedroom or something all by themselves. They do not get out, they do not see and have to interact with living, breathing people, and it leads them to loneliness. And I do not know if you have ever heard of this. A rising number of them are essentially abandoning real life for online life. It is warping them. As a matter of fact, the Japanese have coined a term for this kind of person. Those with the most severe social withdrawal problems from Internet addiction, they call them hikikomori. Literally, pulling inward, being confined. Self-confinement because they are contemplating their own navels all the time online.

Now, in my opinion, the most significant change is in their perception of reality. Their phone based or their screen based childhood has twisted their perception of reality, and this is where it gets scary. Because they value what they view or read or experience through their screens as more real, more exciting, more important than what happens in real life. IRL. You will see that online a lot—in real life. This always-connected lifestyle makes them apt to believe what they see online more readily than what they can perceive with their five senses. It is very sad. It is tragic. It is shocking. It is almost unbelievable for a person who has not had that experience to understand what these kids are going through.

But since it is easier to believe something already prepared and curated for them online, their young immature brains fail to develop thinking processes to help them reason through a problem or to determine whether something is actually true. If they get hit with it 15 times a day on their smartphones, they begin to believe it, and you add day after day after day after day of influencers and others telling them this is what is true.

It is like some kind of propaganda machine, some kind of mind warp device that they believe what they see online. In a word, they become manipulable. That is, they are gullible, they are easily swayed and led. And most importantly in terms of the sermon and II Thessalonians 2, they are easily deceived toward lawlessness and wickedness.

Who among groups are at the forefront of LGBT advocacy? Young people. Who are the ones that are most affected by transgender and transgenderism? Young people. Who are the ones that are all up in arms about critical race theory, other than the academics who are just beyond ignorant? Young people. Who are the ones that are at the forefront of what we call wokeism? Young people. They have all swallowed these lies because they are tuned in to Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and Twitter and Threads and all of these other things, 24 hours a day almost. It is not quite that much. They will get maybe two or three hours of sleep.

But they are hearing these things all the time from people that they respect because they are influencers online, and they are pretty or they are masculine or whatever it is that they think they are, and they are deceived. They do not have the ability to realize that they are being led by the nose down a path of destruction.

And then you have the Pontius Pilate's of the world who ask, what is truth? What is reality? Is it not just a personal construct? Do we not fashion our own truth or decide what we believe is the truth? That is what they are hearing, reading, seeing in all those millions of colors on their smartphones every day.

I am going to do a John W. Ritenbaugh and say, "I'm going to stop right here" because if I went any further, we would probably be here till at least quarter to five. And I do not want to do that. I hear stomachs rumbling already, so I will just stop here.

I already planned to have a second part to this where we will go into this question that Pontius Pilate proposed to Jesus Christ, "What is truth?" And why can these not people see it? And why are they more apt to believe the lie than to believe the truth? Why should they follow the lie when the truth has so much more going for it? Well, I can tell you right now, it is a lot of unrighteous deception.

RTR/aws/drm





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