Satan’s Activities & The Stronger Man

So, thankful to the powerful temple of worship. The Lord is granting to us this morning. So grateful to be worshiping with all of you, and especially with all the guests that we had a privilege to get to know this weekend through the wedding, and we’re so grateful to have Christine and Noel for the first time on a Sunday service as a married couple, worshiping with us this morning. We welcome you to our church, welcome all the guests to us. We are so grateful that you joined with us this morning, even though we are in a rental place, and we are so grateful. And we pray that as we worship the Lord this morning, as you hear from God’s Word, that you will be blessed by it, and the Holy Spirit will work in your hearts in the days to come by what you see and hear and experience this morning.

We have an encounter again this Saturday night, we’ll continue with our series on the Feast of the Old Testament. We’ll have our phone prayer again Wednesday night, I encourage all of you to be on it at 8 o’clock. But very importantly, I want all the adults who are able and all the children to mark off this date, which is November 19th, which is a Saturday morning, we’ll be at Our Calling, which is a homeless ministry that we have partnered with in the past. We will be actually conducting a service there for, we don’t know how many of the people who are in the streets of Dallas will come to that meeting. Last time we had close to 150 people, we’ll be able to share the gospel with them, and we’ll also give them a meal as a church. So please, we need a lot of volunteers for this event, at least a minimum of 30 of you to show up, and last time we had tremendous response. So please come and be a part of this event on November 19th, the week before Thanksgiving, as we will minister and use what God has given to us to help those who are less fortunate than us living in the streets of Dallas.

We’re continuing with our series in light of His coming, we are going through verse by verse the book of 2 Thessalonians. We find ourselves this morning in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-12. 2 Thessalonians 2:6-12. “And now you know what is holding Him back, 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, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of His mouth and destroy by the splendor of His coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

Anytime you have something that is quite unknown, mysterious, especially in the world and especially in God’s Word, we can also guarantee that a lot of false teachings arise out of it. We’re always fascinated with the future, aren’t we? We always want to predict and kind of be in control of when things are happening. But if God’s Word clearly tells us not to be so worried about when Jesus is coming back or when the rapture is taking place, rather be ready for it, the date and the times are in the hands of the Father, even the Son does not know about it. That has not stopped man from trying all throughout the ages to come up with all kinds of theories as to when the Lord Jesus Christ is coming back. I think I said this a few years ago. One of the telltale signs of a false prophet is when he predicts when Jesus is coming back. So that is kind of an easy measure right there. If anyone preaches about it, writes about it telling you that in this particular month or year Jesus is coming back, that’s a telltale sign that he is a false prophet. Because the Word of God says even the Son does not know when He is coming back. Surely something that is not known to the Son is not going to be revealed to any man on the face of the earth.

In fact, what we find in 2 Thessalonians 2 is something that was not only prevalent at that time, this idea of people already making the assumption that Jesus had come back. That’s what we talked about a couple of weeks ago. We talked about how they were already spreading these false teachings. Either—and the Apostle Paul mentions three things—either by saying that they got a revelation from God. There are people like that today as well. Or they wrote a counterfeit letter in the name of Paul to the people of Thessalonica. There was no way for them to verify it, making them believe that the day of the Lord had come. Or by some kind of word that was brought to them in the church. So they were trying to really deceive the people in Thessalonica. And so he gets his report back and he’s writing 2 Thessalonians 2 to remind them there are certain things that have to happen before the day of the Lord, the day of judgment, will come upon the face of the earth.

See, this has always been going on. The founder of Jehovah’s Witness, Charles Russell, taught that the world would end in 1874. Then he did a little bit more math when it didn’t happen. A lot of people sold their properties. Some of them even started living on top of mountains because they wanted to be close to when the Lord Jesus was coming back. He revised his calculations to 1914. His successor, J.F. Rutherford, when Jesus didn’t come back in 1914, started teaching that the advent of the First World War happened in 1914. So even though Jesus did not physically return, He spiritually returned to the earth in 1914. And that’s how they escaped the false teachings they were promoting. Some of you listen to a quite famous teacher among ours, so that I don’t want to mention her name. But some of you listen to her because you’ve asked me questions about her teaching, predicted that the tribulation will start this year in 2022. I recently read that in Facebook. One person challenged her on this assertion, and she called him, said, “You are challenging the revelation of God that has been given to me.” He said, “Well, we’ll talk at the end of 2022 and see who was right and who was wrong.” So this has been going on since the beginning of time, people making false prophecies.

And so the Apostle Paul writes and tests to us, and we talked about different things: the day of the Lord. The first thing that he mentioned to them is this: the day of the Lord will be unlike anything the world has ever seen before. What the believers at Thessalonica are going through are very, very difficult times—persecution. But the day of the Lord that the Old Testament talks about and the New Testament talks about will be a time unlike any other the world has ever seen. In fact, Jesus Himself told us that if those days are not shortened, not a single person will be left alive on the face of the earth. It will be unlike anything else the world has ever seen. Secondly, Paul taught them in the first section, the day of the Lord is directly connected to the revelation of the man of lawlessness, whom we know as the Antichrist, that the day of the Lord, the descending of the day of judgment upon the face of the earth, is not something that happens in a vacuum. There’s a man of lawlessness who will be revealed upon the face of the earth, just like the Lord Jesus Christ is revealed at His coming, same word is used, the man of lawlessness will be revealed as well. And not only that, his rebellion against God will reach the height of apostasy as he demands to be the object of worship. And we talked about that a couple of weeks ago as well, when he himself will demand the worship of the people. That will be the height of apostasy and the false teachings that will promote on the face of the earth.

Finally, what we talked about last week is this: the removal of the restraining work of the Holy Spirit is all that is needed to unleash unimaginable evil upon the face of the earth. That’s what we read again in verse 6 and 7 this morning as well. And the Word of God told us that now we know what is holding him back. In verse 7, He is identified as a Person, in the Person of the Holy Spirit who is in the world, living in the world through the believers who are living in the world. When that restraining power of God is taken away, there will be unimaginable evil on the face of the earth. The Holy Spirit, just like the two People of the Trinity, the Father and the Son, are omnipresent in nature. So when the Bible is talking about Him being taken away, it doesn’t mean that the presence of the Holy Spirit is completely absent from the world, because that would be an impossible thing for God to not occupy everything in the world. What it is talking about is God removing that restraining work that He has been doing for the last thousands of years. And that kind of a world is hard for us to imagine, but that is what is facing the world that we are living in today.

I told you a couple of weeks ago, if you think life on earth is bad today, we haven’t seen anything yet. Today believers live on the face of the earth. Every day, people who worship the living God sing praises to Him and worship Him, and thank Him for everything that they have in their life. Even if you think there is a lot of apostasy and false teachings and backsliding among believers, there are millions of people around the world who are faithfully serving Him every single day. They cry to Him, they pray to Him, they read their Word, they do good things for the Lord, and they evangelize and they spread the gospel, and they live their life to the best of their ability with the help of God, honoring God in their life. When that righteous effect on the world is removed from the face of the earth, and all that is left in the world is wickedness and utter and complete rebellion against God, that kind of a world is hard for us to imagine. And that is why the Bible tells us that day is going to be more horrific and more cruel and unimaginably unbearable than anything else that we have ever seen before.

And then he comes to verse 8 that we read this morning: “Then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of His mouth and destroy by the splendor of His coming.” I want you to read this verse very, very carefully. Look at the way our Lord is going to destroy the Antichrist. By a nuclear bomb? The Bible doesn’t say that. By some kind of weapon of mass destruction? The Bible doesn’t say that. In fact, it doesn’t even say that He has to lift a hand. How is He going to destroy the Antichrist who has been ruling over the world? This morning during Sunday school I told the Sunday school class that the depth of God’s grace you have not known. The depth of God’s mercy man cannot comprehend. The greatness of God’s love we cannot understand. How much God forgives we can never comprehend. You know why? Our sense of forgiveness, love, grace, and everything we measure by how much we can forgive, how much we can love, and how much grace we are able to show. But God is infinitely more graceful, merciful, loving, and forgiving than even the wildest imaginations of the human mind.

On the other hand, your God’s judgment and the almighty power of your God is also infinitely greater than anything you have ever imagined, and that’s why the Bible says it is dangerous to fall into the hands of the living God. These two things go hand in hand, and look at the way the Word of God describes the way God is going to destroy the Antichrist. The Antichrist is powerful. By this time he is ruling over the whole world. Every creature on earth is called to worship upon him. In fact, you can’t sell, you can’t buy, you can’t do any trade, no financial transactions unless you have his mark on your bodies. But look at the way the Lord Jesus Christ is going to dispatch him. It is not going to be a seven-year war. It is not going to be a thousand-year war. It is not going to be a drawn-out conflict like Ukraine and Russia. No, the Bible says, when my Lord Jesus comes, by the breath of His mouth and just by the splendor of His coming, He is going to destroy completely the Antichrist. What a great God we serve. What a powerful and almighty God we are privileged to worship this morning. The breath of His mouth. How powerful is that? In fact, as long as you have good breath, I want you to stand before somebody after church and try to blow them out of place. You will not be able to do that. Why? The breath in a way has no power. But we are not talking about the breath of a mortal man here this morning. We are talking about the breath that created everything, that also has the power to destroy everything by the power of the breath of His mouth.

The Apostle Paul is not in a vacuum here. In fact, he is directly quoting from Isaiah 11:4. “He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth; with the breath of His lips, He will slay the wicked.” This is a prophetic word, and the Apostle Paul is repeating that again in 2 Thessalonians. Jesus is going to destroy the wicked by the breath of His lips. He does not even need to lift a finger. Oh, how powerful our God is. Look at Isaiah 30:33. “The breath of the Lord, like a stream of burning sulfur, sets it ablaze.” The whole world is going to burn like anything else by the breath of His mouth. And I already mentioned that this same breath created everything that we know. Psalm 33:6. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of His mouth.” You won’t just read Scripture like that and not praise your God. Do you know how many stars there are? We have no idea. Only He does. You know who knows each one of them by name? He does. But we know for sure there are billions and billions of stars in the universe. And the Bible says what? God created all of those stars by the breath of His mouth. Oh, how great of a God we are privileged to worship this morning. But that same God who created everything by the breath of His mouth one day will become the righteous Judge where He will destroy the Antichrist and all the wicked by the breath of His mouth. What a great God we serve. The splendor of His coming is going to be so glorious, the majesty of His coming is going to be so wonderful, that only the breath of His mouth will be needed to completely destroy the Antichrist.

Continuing on, verse 9, “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie.” Satan finally has a man he can use, and he takes the Antichrist and he empowers him. Do you know that this morning that Satan has a lot of power? In fact, Lisa mentioned to me yesterday, reminded me, Satan is very strong. But thank God we have the stronger Man who is by our side. Don’t ever forget that Satan is very strong, and the Bible makes it very clear that Satan is strong. Remember, even in the plagues of Egypt, they were able to turn water of the Nile into blood. They were able to create all of the plagues until they came to the plague of the gnats, and finally they realized this is the finger of God Himself. Satan has a lot of power. Verses such as this in 2 Thessalonians 2:9 should be a great warning to believers. Just because somebody does miracles does not mean that they are from God. Just because somebody does signs and wonders does not mean that they are from God. We had a very unhealthy fascination with miracle crusades, and thank God that is kind of dying down in our communities. But that was a really bad disease of the 90s, what fascination with miracles. Miracles in a vacuum are not the work of God. But miracles that accompany the Word of God and the preaching of God’s Word and the propagation of gospel is the way in which God did it in the book of Acts. If you look at the Word of God, the Bible says the Word of God was preached. God strengthened the Word that was preached by accompanying the Word that was preached by signs and wonders that accompanied them. As I often tell you, your God is not just a miracle worker who just gives you whatever you want. His grand focus is what is happening on the inside of you and not on the outside of you. Yes, God can still heal. God still does wonders. God still does miracles. But that is not the primary way in which God works in the world today. The primary way in which He works is through the Word of God, the preaching of God’s Word, and the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believers is how He primarily works today.

But look what Satan does. He knows how fascinated we are with miracles. I think I’ve shared this story with you, but I’ll share it with you. Years ago, I will never forget this, I remember sharing the gospel with one of my friends who was a Hindu, and I started telling him about all the miracles in the Bible. He started telling me, “How do you know your God is real?” And I started telling him about the resurrection, all these things. And then he turned to me and he says, “Do you know that miracles happen in our temple also?” I was like, I didn’t know how to respond to that. He was like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah.” He said, “Two weeks ago, a blind man came to our temple and walked away from it seeing things. You don’t think our god has power? How do you know that your God is a real God and our god is not a real god?” You only need to go to the northern part of India to see the power of Satan. Here in the Western world, his power is kind of veiled behind the scenes because he does not want to make his ways known to man, because here the question is: Is there even a God? But in the East, the question is not, Is there a God? The question is, Which God is the bigger God? That is the question in the East. So he has no problem showcasing his powers. Those of you who came from India know exactly what I’m talking about. Satan has power. Satan can do a lot of damage. But thank God the stronger Man is living inside of us. Thank God that the One who is in us is greater than the one that is in the world.

And here, that’s exactly what Satan does. By counterfeit miracles, he does the work behind the scenes to deceive the minds of men. And because of the fact that the Antichrist is able to do counterfeit miracles—by the way, the word “counterfeit” here does not mean fake. These are real miracles. In fact, when you read the Book of Revelation, you see that many of the miracles of the Old Testament, the Antichrist repeats in the Book of Revelation. Why? To deceive the minds of people. And not only that, he gets a deadly wound and everybody thought that he was dead. What happens? Some days later, here he comes rising again, standing before them. What is he trying to do? Mimicking and imitating the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. All the people in the world, the Bible says, were marveled when the deadly wound on the beast turned out to be not so deadly. See, this is what Satan does. He always deceives, and he masquerades as the Prince of Light, and he comes deceiving. Satan never comes and tells us exactly who he is. That’s why we always have to be alert and watchful in our lives. Haddon Robinson, the famous preacher, once said, “When Satan approaches us, he never comes dragging the chains that will enslave us.” When Satan approaches us, he never comes dragging the chains that will enslave us. That would be so easy, right? You get up in the morning and Satan is standing at the door. And how do you know he’s Satan? He has the chains with him to enslave you. You will start praying. But the problem is that Satan sometimes shows up wearing white clothes and white pants and white shoes, and you have no way of knowing if it is Satan or an angel of God. Not only that, he continues. He comes offering us pleasure, expansiveness, money, popularity, freedom, and joy. He never hints about the consequences. He only promises he will fill all the desires of our hearts. That is how we are destroyed. Yes, Satan looks very much like the angel of God and he comes to deceive and fool even well-minded people. You all know the story of David Koresh in Waco. Don’t think that these people were just fools that were mindfully following him. There was a lot of enormous charm and great convicting power behind the work, behind these preachers. I always think about somebody like Jim Jones. You all know the famous story in 1978, before 9/11, it was the single biggest civilian calamity in American history when more than 900 of Jim Jones’s followers drank poison and committed suicide along with 300 children because of a promise to go to heaven. There is a 45-minute recording, live recording of the suicide that is available. It’s very demonic. I don’t recommend anyone listening to it, but you can listen to it and hear one after the other, children and adults dying one after the other, because they believed the word of one man, Jim Jones. Deception. Satan is always in the point of deception. He deceives men all around, and even today as we are here in the presence of God, there are so many thousands, hundreds, millions of people who are under the deception of Satan.

One of my favorite stories about how people can be so easily conned and deceived comes from two Spanish conmen who attempted to sell a forged Goya painting, which is worth a lot of money, but they found a buyer and they took this painting and they wanted to sell it to this buyer. The buyer happens to be a rich Arab sheikh, and he paid them 1.7 million Swiss francs for this painting. There was a problem. This Arab sheikh was a bigger conman than these Spanish men. The 1.7 million Swiss francs was counterfeit. So when they took it to the bank and tried to cash and deposit it, they were arrested. And so they had a forged painting. He had counterfeit money. The only one who made money in that deal was a middleman who brokered the deal. He got away with $363,000. This is what is happening in the world. So much deception, so many conmen because the spirit of Antichrist is alive and well in the world today. Exactly what Satan does in 2 Thessalonians 2:9 as well. He brings signs and wonders. Why does he do signs and wonders? Look at Revelation 13:13. “And it performed”—talking about the beast—“great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven.” Imagine this. The Antichrist one day is going to bring fire down from heaven. Is anyone left on the earth not going to believe in him? They’ll be like, oh, that’s a fire crusade, fire revival. Yeah, fire coming down. You should come. Cancel all the meetings. Next 40 days we are going to fire revival, not knowing that it’s Antichrist convention. Fire down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people. It’s not hidden. You have to be very vigilant in your life and recognize truth for what it is and falsehood for what it is.

And why do you do that? Look at Acts 2:22. “Fellow Israelites,” Peter says, “listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through Him, as you yourselves know.” He’s also imitating the work of the apostles as well. Hebrews 2:4. “God also testified to it by signs, wonders, and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.” So what Satan is doing is he’s taking what Jesus did, he’s taking what the disciples and apostles did, he’s empowering the Antichrist to do the very thing to deceive mankind left on the earth on that day. And it is going to be a day of deception.

Verse 10: they not only will have all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs, and wonders and every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing, “they perish because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved.” You know what we study in God’s Word? There’s a way in which God Himself pushes the wicked in the direction of wickedness. There’s a sense in which the disobedient continues to follow a path of more and more depravity in their lives. You know why? They’re already under the bondage of Satan. Satan controls their lives, and not only that, God abandons them as well. In fact, we can see that in the life of Pharaoh as well; God had a purpose behind it. Pharaoh was an evil man, but when you read the Book of Exodus, the Bible says who kept on hardening the heart of Pharaoh? God did. That’s exactly what God does in the world as well. Those who are living in wickedness, those who do not love the truth—these are not innocent people, by the way—God continues to allow them to be deceived by the lies in this world. And because of that, wickedness grows in the world. All kinds of deception grow in the world. The work of the Holy Spirit is beautiful as He prepares the bride to meet the Lord Jesus Christ. But the reality on the other side is that wickedness grows day and day as the world falls more and more into the deception that is in the world.

See, this is why it is happening. John 3:19-20. John says, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Anyone who does evil hates the Light and will not come into the Light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” Aldous Huxley, the famous philosopher, agnostic, once said, “Even if you completely prove the Bible to be correct to me, I will never become a follower of Christ, because if I become a follower of Christ, it will mean that I will no longer be able to justify all the immoral actions in my life.” That’s exactly what John says here. You know why they’re afraid to come to the Light? Because you know what Light does? It exposes the work of darkness. As long as you’re in the darkness, you can keep on doing what you’re doing. The Light scares them because the work of darkness cannot be in harmony with the Light. And so they keep on sinning. They keep on heaping up judgment upon themselves. They keep on being deceived by Satan, who keeps on deceiving those, entrapping those who are already living in evil, unable to turn to repentance.

What do we learn from this passage? Real quickly, what are some practical applications that we can take home? First of all, don’t ever underestimate the power of your enemy. Always be on guard, doctrinally, practically in your life. He is always prowling around like a roaring lion, looking to see who he might devour. Secondly, do not ever underestimate the power of deception on the work of the enemy. He comes masquerading as an angel of light. He comes sometimes even within the walls of church, through preachers and pastors and religious leaders and heads of different denominations. Be careful, be on guard, study your Word, let the Word of God dwell in your hearts richly so that you always recognize what is against the Word of God. Thirdly, be always glad that you came into the Light and that you know the One who is the Light so that you are not living in darkness anymore. Rather, you and I are children of Light, called to do the works of Light. Thank God for His grace that saved us. You are not in the Kingdom of God because you are smarter. You are not in the Kingdom of God because you somehow recognized the truth of God and all the other people in the world are foolish. No, they are under a spell of the enemy. He is deceiving them, unable to help them recognize the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only because of God’s grace that your heart and my heart was opened to the truth. Don’t ever lose the wonder of God’s grace and the gift of salvation in each one of our lives.

A day is coming unlike any other. Whether the world will believe it or not, everything that we know today will one day come to an end. And that day, that horrific day—oh, what a day that is going to be—it will be too late for the people of the world. But thank God that we are rescued and gone to be with the Lord, and thank God for the hope that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s look to the Lord in prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word, oh God. We thank You for reminding us that Satan is a liar. He is deceptive, extremely cunning, able to even deceive the righteous. Give us a heart that is always on alert, always focused on You and You alone. Implant Your truth so deeply in our hearts, oh God, so that we will always recognize what is counterfeit. We pray that Your Spirit will teach us, counsel us, always keep us in the center of Your will. We thank You again for this time. We pray that Your presence will be with us as we look to the cross. For it is in the name of the Lord Jesus that we pray, Amen. Amen.