The Mystery of Lawlessness

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years… But even in the best of all hearts, there remains an un-uprooted small corner of evil… Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

 

“And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft…" (Revelation 9:1,2).

 

John’s description of a pit from which demonic forces emerge, suggests that evil is provisionally contained in something like a black hole—a place of anti-matter, chaos and confusion. John did not, of course believe that there was an actual abyss somewhere answering to this description. It was a symbol, the point being that the full manifestation of evil is now contained, but a day is coming when God will remove every restraint and wickedness will be manifest in full.

 

This is what the Apostle Paul called “the mystery of lawlessness”—the revelation that there are evil, demonic forces under the surface of every culture waiting for an opportunity to appear. The containment of these forces is the restraint posed by God’s Spirit, natural law and the forces of law and order, restraints that are under assault today. When that “which is restraining” is taken out of the way, all hell will break loose. (2 Thessalonians 2:7). Literally. We may be very close to that day. 

 

Jesus in the Gospels spoke of another “black hole” out of which “evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, blasphemy, pride, and stupidity” emerge (Mark 7.1–23). “Even in the best of all hearts there remains an un-uprooted small corner of evil.” Wickedness is not color-coded; red and yellow, black and white—"all have sinned” (Romans 3:23).

 

Containment is impossible. Only a new creation will do (2 Corinthians 5:17; John 3: 1-19). 

 

David Roper

6.14.21