Deeper Daily Podcast- April 26, 2026

0:00Hello, my friends. Welcome again to the Deeper Daily podcast. I'm Paul. It's the 26th day of April. It's the Lord's Day. And I say it every week, enjoy community, enjoy it with the saints of the Lord, where we grow the roots that are happening as we experience life in Christ. They grow in a way they can't grow otherwise when we grow within the community of believers. There's something that happens in experience in Christ. And so I pray that you're able to do that today. I am in second Thessalonians. We are going to continue our journey in this passage on the man of lawlessness. I told you we're going to deal with this. It's been one of the most misunderstood passages to put it plainly, dispensational, futurist eschatology that sort of separates the covenants into Israel's gods chosen people. And then they're over here. And then there's the church of Gentiles that are the body of the new covenant.

1:03The church is removed through the rapture. And then there'll be all these subsequent things that happen. This is the passage that is used in that theology, that doctrine, to proclaim that an anti-Christ must come on the scene, a.k.a. the man of lawlessness. Let me read to you the verse. And then I want to talk to you about what I just said. Second Thessalonians chapter two, verse three, let no one deceive you in any way for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first. And the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. And so the day that won't come first, they claim to be, is the coming day of the Lord Jesus Christ or what is often taught. The rapture will happen. And then Jesus will return seven years later to take to for what is considered the final return of the Lord. And that won't happen unless the anti-Christ is revealed. Okay, there's a lot of problems there because the coming of the Lord according to

2:07rapture theology happens twice, at least pre-trib rapture theology it happens twice. Post-trib rapture theology has it happening at the end of a tribulation, but in either case a very important figure in that is the man of lawlessness whom they call the anti-Christ. I want to say something I've said to you many times before, but it bears repeating, there is no character in the Bible called the Antichrist. There's the word Antichrist appears only in John's first letter, first John. And there we are told that the spirit of Antichrist is already in the world. And that was those who deny that Christ had come in the flesh. So he does not position it as a person. And there's no prophetic language that positions as that a person. This shocks a lot of people what I'm about to say, probably won't shock my DDP audience, but shocks many Christians. There is no Antichrist in the book of Revelation. It never appears. So there is no figure in the book of Revelation called the Antichrist.

3:10So this character, the man of lawlessness that Paul says must come, he is functioning in a spirit of Antichrist fine, but he's not what you would call the Antichrist because there is no the Antichrist. All right. So then who is this man of lawlessness? Oh, make sure you get a little bit of history here. In 168 BC. So hundreds almost 170 years before Christ, Antiochus Epiphanies sacrificed a pig, set it up as an idol, set it up as a sacrifice to a foreign god inside the Jewish temple. We don't read about this in our Bibles because we don't have the scriptures that are often considered apocryphal. First and second Maccabees both talk about this. This is the original abomination that causes desolation that is prophesied, talked about in Daniel 1131. That's the

4:15original abomination desolation. Jesus warns in Matthew 24 that they will see an abomination that makes desolate. That's a phrase he's using from Old Testament scripture. All right. Titus, the general of the Roman legions who is leading his armies against the Jewish rebellion, specifically against Jerusalem in the summer of 1870. In August of 1870, they completely take over the temple mount and Titus's army worship the foreign idols of Rome and Caesar in the temple. Josephus talks about this in his book The Wars of the Jews and he states that they sacrificed a pig as part of their mockery. So not only do they mimic what Antiochus Epiphanies had done 200 years earlier, the original abomination that caused desolation, they also share in the way that he does it.

5:22By the second century BC, less than 100 years before Christ, in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish writing, it mentions that Antiochus Epiphanies is given the title The Lawless One. One, whenever Paul writes Second Thessalonians 2, he speaks of the coming of a lawless one. The lawless one, also known as the man of sin, could be called the little horn of Daniel 7. This is an anti-type of Antiochus Epiphanies, which was the quintessential nemesis in historical Judaism. What we learned from Josephus, who records the events of AD 70, is that Titus entered the Holy of Holies in August of AD 70. He worshipped in the temple in AD 70, didn't worship God, but he does what the fourth verse says he would do. He opposes and exalts

6:26himself above every so-called God or object of worship so that he takes his seat in the temple of God declaring himself to be God. That's the fourth verse of Second Thessalonians 2. Which is what he does. Josephus writes this, the Romans brought their insides to the temple and set them over against its eastern gate, and there they did offer sacrifice to them, and there they did make Titus in Perator. Now, you can argue about who wrote Second Thessalonians 2, we've argued it. You can argue about when this day of the Lord is supposed to occur, Paul's arguing it. We can argue whether or not this is future Antichrist. I don't know that that's much of an argument. But what seems hard to argue is that Israel had a man of lawlessness in their own literature who had offered a pig on the altar of the old temple. And when Paul mentions the man of lawlessness, coupled with Jesus mentioning the abomination that makes Desolate, they would have thought about someone entering the temple and sacrificing a pig

7:29when Titus does this in 8070. There's no one in that time period that could have read Second Thessalonians. I don't think they could have read anything and saw anything other than what had just occurred. We'll continue in Second Thessalonians 2 tomorrow. God bless.