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We have more to cover here in part two of our coverage of in the first twelve verse of 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2.
Remember, this letter was written to correct a misunderstanding that Paul’s first epistle, or a conversation they had with him that caused and the correction is pretty much handled in these first twelve verses of chapter 2.
Therefore, the whole epistle is only 3 chapters long. Because of the weight of the passages on eschatology we will begin by reading the text again.
2nd Thessalonians 2.1-12
Part II
September 20th 2020
Milk
2nd Thessalonians 2:1 Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him,
2 That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.
5 Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?
6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time.
7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.
8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,
10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
So, let’s go back to verse 7 where Paul says:
7 For the mystery of iniquity does already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.
And last week we talked about how two men, Jewish peace-fighters (that Josephus mentions by name) were taken out of the way (by death) at the hands of the Zealots in that day, fulfilling this passage Paul has given the bride. And now Paul says:
8 And then shall that Wicked . . . be revealed . . . whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
And then and only then shall the lawless one, anomos in the Greek with nomos meaning, LAW, so An -nomos will mean lawless or here the lawless one.
Now, in all probability this lawless one is singular but there is the possibility that it refers collectively to the group of Zealots – as the Lawless. That was the presentation I gave you last week.
But Paul explains his (or its) fate here, that once he or it is revealed (and again, it seems pretty certain that the lawless one was an individual) the second sign of the Lord’s eminent coming would be fulfilled, and then the believers could expect, relative to that lawless one that . . .
“the Lord will consume (him) with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy (him) with the brightness of his coming.”
The word used here in Greek translated consume is analisko and it means to wipe out or destroy.
And how does Paul say that the Lord would consume this lawless one who goes in the temple and makes himself God?
“With the Spirit of his mouth.”
This is a reference to a number of passages.
Isaiah 11:4 says, “With the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.”
Yeshua himself also says in John 6:63
“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”
So, we know that with his words, through his breath or the spirit of his mouth, Yeshua commands.
This is not surprising as YHWH commanded in the very first chapter of Genesis that there would be light – and there was light.
His Words, spoken in conjunction with the spirit of his mouth, have the capacity to heal, create, give life or to destroy, kill and eradicate.
The very power of words has been on my mind of late – as we too – created in his image, possess the power, through our words, to uplift, empower, and give life and to cause or bring death.
So, the application to us is readily apparent in scripture – our tongues, our words, have power.
And if this is the case with human beings imagine the power when coming from God himself.
So powerful that Paul tells the believers at Thessalonica that the lawless one would be
“consumed with the spirit of his mouth,” and
“shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.”
This sounds like a redundancy with consumed (which means destroyed) and destroyed but the term for destroyed is better understood as “made powerless.”
Taking John 6:63, which again says:
“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”
And then Revelation 1:16; 19:16 and 21, where Yeshua is described as having “a sharp two-edged sword that goes out of his mouth.”
And then Hebrews 4:12, where we read that the word of God is “sharper than any two edged sword,” and bringing these passages together we have a good picture confirming that Yeshua will destroy the lawless one with the Word of God in his commands, his doctrine through their cutting force, like a double-edged sword which divides deep and flays open the human heart.
“And shall destroy,” he will bring to nothing or put an end to this person or party with “the brightness of his coming.”
In Hebrew, “at his glorious appearing,” which in scripture is frequently associated with both light and his promised return.
It seems that this brightness, through the singular emphatic use of this word, possesses the power to eradicate all pollution, darkness and evil and when polluted souls would meet with it face to face it would be akin to the scene in Raiders where the German soldier melts when he opens the ark of the covenant.
At verse nine, Paul references this man of sin or lawlessness again.
But as a means to make the reference clear, let me read verse 8 and then 9. So at 8 he says:
8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
9 Even him, (that wicked one) whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,
When Paul says, referring to the Lawless one, that his coming is “after the working of Satan,” this is not a chronological reference but speaks to form – his coming into that world along with his works being modeled after Satan.
I have to admit here that the man of sin here, who I, at least in part, believe could have been a member of the Jewish Zealot party that caused the war with Rome, is generally interpreted as the Antichrist in most scholarly circles.
And so today I am going to give you another super strong lead into who this man of lawlessness is which will contradict what I presented last week.
So who was this antichrist, or if you are a futurist, who is or will he be?
From a fulfilled point of view, taking scripture in hand as seeing it as having application to the first century, the Antichrist is typically described as Nero.
If I maintain the theory that the man of lawlessness was a Jewish Zealot, along with Paul’s description of him, it makes it very difficult to also call Nero the Roman the Antichrist too.
So, something has to give. Perhaps, we can take an amalgam of the information I shared last week and the information I am about to share now and say that
The zealots were the ones who would push and drive the Jews into war with Rome (and that they were held back by the peacekeeping priests for a time until they were killed). And then when everything, due to their initial actions started to unravel all of Israel (and especially Jerusalem), Rome attacked, and the Man of Sin or Lawlessness was consummately (as there could have been many) revealed as the antichrist in the person of Nero.
In any case, Paul says that this man of lawlessness would show up after (or doing) the working of Satan, meaning he, after the power of Satan would do the works of Satan, as Paul says:
“with all power and signs and lying wonders,
(verse 10) And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish;
This appears to clearly be a description of the singular Antichrist and so I think its important to sort through some historical and scriptural references to him (found in Revelation 13) to try and see if Nero fits the bill best.
What we can say at this point is what Paul affirms – this man of lawlessness would evidence all the power of Satan.
And with that power he would do signs – which in scripture are often associated with miracles and with what Paul calls, “lying wonders.”
Yeshua, in describing the end of that age and his coming says in Matthew 24:24:
“For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”
False wonders appears to speak to miracles that are pretended or false. They appear to be supernatural and effective but are somehow not.
We might consider them to be something like a sign of appearing to heal a person of cancer, who later dies of it anyway, or something like that. In other words, typical of Satan, there is a pretense of truth to the wonders but in the end they would prove to be false.
Whoever this was Paul adds at verse 10:
10 And with all “deceivableness of unrighteousness” (in them that perish) because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
So before moving on of these passages I think it’s important to discuss Nero, as the Antichrist, and see if he is a qualified candidate as compared to the unnamed zealot or zealots we discussed last week.
The Roman historian, Seutonius, who I am going to reference here, along with others like Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Josephus, wrote:
“During his reign (Nero’s) many abuses were severely punished and put down, and no fewer new laws were made….Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.”
(Suetonius, Nero (XVI.2)
Aside from putting his mother to death along with others and doing all sorts of other unspeakable things I will not mention let me offer some summaries of Nero that was living in that age as Emporer of Rome.
Revelation 17:10 says:
“And there are seven kings: five are fallen, (are dead) and one is, (who would be the sixth king – which is the number of a Man) and the other (after the sixth) is not yet come.” (not yet in power).
The sixth (and last) of the Julio-Claudian emperors, was Nero. (both Suetonius and Josephus confirm this) (Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII.2.2).
Because this is written in the revelation as, “and one is,” we know Revelation was written before the end of Nero’s reign, which was in 66 AD by the way.
Let’s just hit on some low-lights of the mans reign.
1. Initially, Nero wasn’t expected to be emperor. However, after Emperor Claudius married his own niece, Nero’s mother Agrippina, Agrippina persuaded her husband Claudius to adopt Nero as his son. It was then – with Nero next in line for the throne – that Nero’s mother Agrippina supposedly poisoned Claudius and pinned the deed on another woman. This plan ultimately backfired, though, as once Nero took the throne (at the unbelievably young sage of 17), he was warned by both his advisors and his friends to watch out for Agrippina. In an attempt to secure his hold on the throne, Nero poisoned his stepbrother Britanicus and then, fearing his own mother’s wrath, he had her killed a few years after taking the throne.
2. Ever the diva, Nero sought the theater -but he had a higher voice than normal and this caused the audiences to laugh at his delivery. So he had 5000 men called Augustines come to all of his performances whose sole job was to applaud whenever he spoke or sang.
Nero loved a woman named, “Poppaea Sabina.” So, he divorced his first wife to marry her, (whom he apparently later killed). Once they were married, old Poppaea mysteriously vanished too – some say he kicked her to death others say she died with miscarriage. However, after she dies Nero falls in love with someone who looked a lot like her. But he was male. So, Nero takes the guy, or boy (accounts vary) castrates him, and then taking him captive make him dress like a woman and wear wigs, calling him thereafter my queen or my lady.
In 59 AD, when Nero was 22, he finally started getting enough facial hair to merit a shave. In honor of this rite of passage, the emperor instituted “Juvenalia,” or “the games of youth,” literally it was a festival commissioned because Nero was going to shave.
Then it was five years later, when he was 27, that a fire (that began in the shops at the Circus Maximus on the night of July 18, AD 64) broke out and burned for nine days. Interestingly, the fire burned itself out on the sixth day, but then it suspiciously flared up again on the estate of one Tigellinus, Nero’s praetorian prefect (Tacitus, Annals, XV.40; Suetonius, Life of Nero, XXXVIII.2). The result of this fire nearly two-thirds of Rome burned and countless persons died.
Tacitus goes on to relate that innumerable buildings and temples were lost, including ancient shrines, the spoils of earlier victories, and (QUOTE) “the glories of Greek art, and yet again the primitive and uncorrupted memorials of literary genius” (XV.41); Suetonius adds, that the fire destroyed “whatever else interesting and noteworthy had survived from antiquity” (XXXVIII.2).
Cassius Dio wrote:
“There was no curse that the populace did not invoke upon Nero, though they did not mention his name” (Dio, Roman History, LXII.18.2-3).
Although many of the populace believed that Nero intentionally had started the fire (Dio, LXII.17.18.3; Pliny, Natural History, XVII.1), Nero openly blamed the Christians.
Because Christians, according to Nero “had a hatred of mankind,” he had them thrown to dogs, nailed to crosses and burned them alive (which was, by the way, the traditional punishment for arson).
Of course, we know that he also had them serve as living torches in the night by wrapping them in wax and setting them afire.
From Acts 25:10 it appears that Nero was taught by Paul, rejected it, and then became a raving maniac against Christians in that day.
It was Nero who put both Paul and Peter to death and we remember that Yeshua told Peter of his coming death when they were on the sea after his resurrection.
(Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, II.25.5-8; Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, XXXVI).
According to Church historian Eusebius, Nero was “the first that persecuted Christians” (II.25.4); for Tertullian, he was “the first emperor who dyed his sword in Christian blood, when our religion was but just arising at Rome.” (Apology, V); for Sulpicius Severus, “Nero was the first to began a persecution” of Christians (Sacred History, II.28).
After the Great Fire, Nero opted to spend the expansive Roman treasury not on rebuilding the city, but on building an opulent 100-acre palatial complex that came to be known as the Domus Aurea, or the “Golden House.”
At the center of the Domus Aurea was a 100-foot-tall bronze statue of Nero himself, which the emperor dubbed the “Colossus Neronis.”
According to Roman Historian Cassius Dio, “Nero would fasten naked boys and girls to stakes, and then putting on the hide of a wild beast would attack them and satisfy his brutal lust under the appearance of devouring parts of their bodies.”
But it was his treatment of Christians, leading into the destruction of Jerusalem, that epically speaks to him being the biblically described antichrist.
Nero killed himself at 30 years of age in AD 68, but there was widespread belief, especially in the eastern provinces, that he was not dead and somehow would return (this is reported by Suetonius, LVII.1; Tacitus, Histories II.8; Dio, LXVI.19.3).
Suetonius relates how court astrologers had predicted Nero’s fall but that he would have power in the East well beyond the grace (XL.2).
At least three “false Nero’s” even popped up claiming to be him resurrected – all of them were put to death.
There are even pseudopigraphal works (called, The Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah) which write of him returning from the grave and having power over the earth.
There are other works that describe him seducing believers until Christ comes and consumes him, borrowing from our text for today.
So how could Christ devour Nero the Antichrist if he died in 68 AD by his own had and Yeshua came in 70 with reward and judgement?
It is believed that this reference means that he eliminated all that was associated with Nero and his continued influence over Israel at that time.
And there are a number of simple writings by people in his day that associated Nero with II Thessalonians 2 or “the man of sin [lawlessness]…who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God…shewing himself that he is God”
Even Augustine, in his comments on II Thessalonians 2:7 writes in his book, “The City of God.”
“Some think that the Apostle Paul referred to the Roman empire, and that he was unwilling to use language more explicit, lest he should incur the calumnious charge of wishing ill to the empire which it was hoped would be eternal; so that in saying, ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work,’ he alluded to Nero, whose deeds already seemed to be as the deeds of Antichrist.”
In the apocalyptic book of Revelation there is a second beast described who, risen from the sea, has seven heads, one of which once was wounded but then healed (13:1,3).
This beast was given power by Satan himself (13:4) “to make war with the saints, and to overcome them” (13:7), and this beast compelled that “all that dwell upon the land shall worship him” (13:8) and caused “that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed (13:15).
Moreover, this second beast marked everyone with its own mark, without which “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (13:17).
On December 5th, 15th, 20th and 30th of 2017 we covered the contents of Revelation 13 – took one month – and if you go to our archives you will locate all the details that relate to this mark, the coins used, and all the other historical proves that are tied directly to Nero therein.
But the one I want to wrap our time up with today is verse 18 where John writes:
“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six” (13:18).
Historically, and interestingly enough, this word riddle appears to have been almost forgotten by the ancients and it wasn’t until 1835, that light was shed on its purpose and significance – and this was probably because people assumed that when John wrote out “six hundred three score and six” that it was in Greek or Latin instead of it being a message in Hebrew, which John may have used as a means to obscure his word riddle from non-Jews.
In ancient languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Latin) letters also represent numerals with their values assigned according to the order of the alphabet.
So, and “A” would be numerical value of 1, B 2, C 3, etc. By adding these values up, words could then be represented as the sum of their numbers.
The Greeks called this “isopsephia” and the Jews called this “gematria”(which, in cabalistic practice, has been used to interpret Hebrew scripture).
Suetonius gives an example of isopsephia when he records that numerical graffiti appeared in both Greek and Latin that mocked Nero after he had his mother killed which read, once deciphered:
“A calculation new. Nero his mother slew” (Life of Nero, XXXIX.2).
If the Greek spelling of Nero Caesar (Neron Kaisar) is transliterated into Hebrew (nrwn qsr), and the numerical equivalent is 666.
But remember, the “number of the beast” was not expressed as “666” (infact, discrete Arabic numerals would not be invented for another five hundred years) but by the phrase “hexakosioi hexekonta hex” (but their numerical values of the Greek letters themselves, using isopsephia,)
equal chi (600), xi (60), and stigma (6).
But what is curious is not so much that 666 can be decoded to signify Nero but that the name is encoded in this particular and specific number, especially since it could have been represented as readily in other ways.
Interestingly, when the words are transliterated from Greek into Hebrew and then they are calculated that the numeration adds up to 666 (nrwn qsr equals 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200).
What is also interesting, is that 666 in its Latin expression is the sequential Roman numerals DCLXVI, which is the perfect roman numeral antithesis of the “Alpha and Omega” that John used to characterize both Christ (Revelation 22:13) and God (Revelation 1:8, 21:6).
As Deity represents “the beginning and end,” so the Antichrist is a reversal, in Latin, of the last, D (500) ending with the first I (1).
Nero proclaimed his divinity on coins, which continued to exist past his death and had stamped on them “the “Savior and Benefactor of the World,” and was the first emperor to persecute Christians.
What super radical is that if we take the Latin (rather than the Greek) spelling of “Nero Caesar” and transliterate it into Hebrew (nrw qsr), the final “n” (because Hebrew is read backward to us) is removed (and its corresponding value of 50), and that name computes to only 616.
Why is this important?
Because our oldest surviving copy of the New Testament has John describe six hundred and sixteen, not six hundred and sixty six.
Admittedly, it is entirely possible that the Catholic church changed the number to 616 because in Latin translated to Hebrew that is the number it created.
Nevertheless, each digit of 666 is one less than seven, which in numerology is the perfect number (just as there were seven planets, seven heavens, and seven days in the week), and such mathematical play may have tended to establish 666, rather than 616, as the oldest manuscripts suggest.
But here is the thing – regardless of the number, Nero is the only name that can account for both 666 and 616, which is the most compelling argument that he, and not some other person, such as Caligula or Domitian, was intended and the one John provided as number that Hebrews could calculate.
One final note. Last week our sister Elaine commented that God does things twice, and said this relative to the falling away, the antichrist and perhaps the second coming of Christ.
I’ve thought about this. But I looked backward with that truth instead of forward.
We mentioned last week that the word antichrist itself does not appear in John’s Revelation—nor in any other book of the Bible (except I John and II John), where it signifies anyone who “denieth the Father and the Son” (I John 2:22) and “confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (4:3).
The notion of antichrist first finds expression in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, when at the end time “the king of the north” (Daniel 11:40) is described as appearing, defeating some nations and sparing others, persecuting the saints and putting many to death.
There, in Daniel 11:31, he writes that “the abomination that maketh desolate” was to take place in their temple, and he shall “magnify himself above every god” (Daniel 11:36) – just like the description of the antichrist here.
But instead of looking out to our day for the second manifestation of all of this perhaps Nero was the second and final manifestation with the first “abomination” taking place at the hands of Antiochus Epiphanes, who was the king of Syria. And what did he do?
He captured Jerusalem in 167 BC and desecrated the Temple by offering the sacrifice of a pig on an altar to Zeus (which the Book of Maccabees refers to as “the abomination of desolation,”(1:54).
In seeking to Hellenize the Jews, Antiochus forbade their religious practices and commanded that copies of the Law be burned (pointing to the first man of lawlessness), again, all of which is related in the apocryphal book of I Maccabees (1:10ff) and by Josephus in the Antiquities of the Jews (XII.5.4).
It seems to me that this was the first advent of “the man of lawlessness” against Israel, and the second was Nero, wrapping the whole thing up then.
Just to let you know, there are four ancient codices written in uncial script that preserve the Bible in Greek:
Codex Sinaiticus (British Library), Codex Vaticanus (Vatican Library), Codex Alexandrinus (British Library), and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (National Library of France), all of them have the number of the Beast as hexakosiai deka hex (616).
The Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus records the number 666.
Codex Vaticanus does not include Revelation.
All of them, however, when transliterated through Hebrew, spell NERO.
Who, “with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; (meaning those who were deceived by him and the Spirt and Power of Satan – why? Paul says:
“because they received (past tense) not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. (from the coming promised destruction at his coming) And so Paul adds:
11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
And for this cause, Paul explains to them/then, what cause?
“because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved,” (two way street) “God shall send them strong delusion, (as he is in charge and works through our will and choices God would send them this strong delusion in the antichrist) that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
For the remainder of this chapter Paul will then speak to the condition of the Christians to whom he is writing.
And we will cover this next week.
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