Unshakeable #4 - Restraint (2 Thessalonians 2:5-12) | Dr. Kurt Bjorklund

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund unpacks 2 Thessalonians 2:5-12 to reveal how we're living in a divine "time of restraint" before ultimate deception is unleashed. Discover why God invites you to join His resistance by living with radically different values, status, and timeline than the world around you.

Message Summary & Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2025/8/25/unshakeable-4-restraint

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Transcript

Good morning. It's great to be together today. Just before we jump into today's teaching, I want to share an encouragement and an opportunity with you. Here at Orchard Hill Wexford, we've continued to see new families come, and so our kids ministry is full. We built the additional space a year ago.

That's an awesome encouragement. But it's also a challenge because as more and more people come, there is a greater need for volunteers. One of the temptations you can have when you come to a place like Orchard Hill Wexford is to say, "Everything runs, everything's good, they don't need me to do anything." But I was talking with our student ministry staff and kids ministry staff this week. There are 60 open volunteer roles on weekends for carrying out our kids ministry during the weekend services.

And so if you've been around Orchard Hill for a while and this is your church home and you say, "I haven't really taken a step in"—if you're interested in being a part of that team, what it can involve is as little as one service a month. So you can come to one morning worship gathering and then serve in another one, so it's like one a month. You could be somebody who helps make a big difference in the lives of families who come and in the lives of kids. You can just go to orchardhillchurch.com/serve or talk to one of the student ministry or kids ministry staff, and they can point you in the right direction as well in terms of being part of that.

That would make a big difference in serving people who come well as a church in the days ahead. So let's take a moment and pray together.

God, as we are gathered here today, we just ask that you would speak into each of us. We come from different places, different experiences. And God, even as the passage was just being read, I was reminded again that in many ways this passage feels disconnected from our lives. But I pray that you would speak into each of us and that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

The Illustration of Restraint

So I want you to imagine with me that you are walking in your neighborhood where you live and there's a house that has a fence around the yard. And inside the yard are three vicious dogs. We'll call them pit bulls.

Now I know if you're a pit bull owner, you're like, "They're misunderstood." Alright, I get it. And if you think I'm being mean to pit bulls, you can email marklunsford@orchardhillchurch.com.

But imagine that these three pit bulls, every time you walk by this fenced yard, charge the fence. They growl, they snarl, they look as if they are the meanest dogs around and that they would rip your head off if they ever got out. Just imagine this for a moment. And so you, as you walk, have to make a decision often. Do I walk by on the other side of the street? Do I go a different route altogether? Or do I just simply walk right by and say there's a fence—"Thank you for your dog, you're not getting me today," kind of a thing.

But either way, you know it's there, you see it, and it happens. But then one day you're walking by and you notice that the gate's open and you have a moment where you say, "Where are those dogs? Are they loose? Are they in the house? Why is the gate open? This does not feel right."

And you go about your walk, you get home, and later you're scrolling your social media and the neighborhood mafia where you live is like, "One of the pit bulls was out"—you know how that works, the neighborhood mafia, you know what I'm talking about—and evidently one of those pit bulls has attacked somebody's poodle. And now the owner has to put the pit bull down.

Now, again, mythical story. I know pit bulls can be friends.

Understanding the Passage

But here's why I tell you this. When we come to 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 5 through 12, which we just heard read, it is probably one of the more puzzling and disputed passages in the New Testament. And the tendency when we either read through the New Testament on our own or we're in a context of Bible study or church is to skip it, fast forward it because we say, "People have disputed this. I'm not really sure what it means. What relevance does it have for me?"

But what I want to say is that simple analogy about the dogs in the fence being restrained, the gate being opened, the dogs being unrestrained, and then the ultimate need for retribution or for some kind of score settling actually captures this passage very well. And I think it does speak to where we live in many significant ways.

And so what I'd like to do is talk about what this passage teaches in three different eras:

1. Now being the time of restraint
2. Next, there's coming a time without restraint
3. And then ultimately there's coming a time in which God will deal with what we have

1. Now: A Time of Restraint (verses 6-7)

First, we're going to talk about where we are now, which is a time of restraint, verses 6 and 7:

"And now you know what is holding him back."

Now who's "him" here? It is the man of lawlessness, chapter 2 verses 1 through 4. If you were here last week, we talked about this and we identified this person as the Antichrist—Antichrist, 1 John chapter 2 verse 18. There are many, but there is one ultimately. And I know that this can be confusing, and I don't normally do this, but if you weren't here last week, go back and listen. It will help you have context for what we're talking about here as well as we explained some of the millennial views last week.

But here it says: "And now you know what is holding him back so 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 until he is taken out of the way."

Who is the Restrainer?

So the question right away is: Who is this restrainer that's holding back this Antichrist? And there are different ways that people have seen this over time:

• Some would say it was the government. Some would look and say it was the government of that day, and they would hold what's sometimes called a Preterist position, which means they believe that all of these things took place in the past—a preterist, they've already happened. And some would say no, the government is the government today, and this is speaking to the future.
• Some would say it's the Holy Spirit. They would say the Holy Spirit because there's a neuter reference to this restrainer and a personal reference—it's the Holy Spirit that holds back this Antichrist, this man of lawlessness.
• Some would say it's Christians, because Christians have this role.
• Some would say it's the church.
• And still others would say, well, this is the archangel Michael, because in Daniel chapters 10, 11, and 12, Michael the archangel—the angel who protects God's people—is said to do battle with evil angels.

And so there are all kinds of different ideas that are out there on this. And you can probably tell just by the way that I'm talking about this that I don't know what it is. And I don't say that because I haven't looked at it. I'm saying that because I've actually tried to figure this out, studied it, and I don't know what the best answer is to this question. And there are some who will say, "Oh no, it's definitively this, it's this, I know for sure." And that's good, but I don't think it actually matters because the point is not what is doing the restraining—it's that we are now living in a time in which there is restraint. The man of lawlessness is being restrained.

Why Does God Have a Time of Restraint?

And here's why this matters: Why does God have a time of restraint? Well, 2 Peter chapter 3 tells us why. Here's what we read, verses 8 and 9:

"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."

So for God, a thousand years for us feels like a day to Him. And then it says this:

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."

Why are we living in a time of restraint instead of having the culmination of all things? Because God wants people everywhere to have time to repent. And so what he is doing right now is he's restraining this force, this Antichrist, so that there is time to have more and more people understand who Jesus is, come to put their faith in Jesus Christ and turn from their sins. That's what God is doing today.

Now by the way, this passage is probably one of the best arguments for what some people have called the pre-tribulational rapture because this is the idea that the church or the Holy Spirit's taken out of the way and then there's this period of tribulation that's coming. And that can't happen if there's no restraining influence. And so you can see how if you answer the question definitively—it's the Holy Spirit or Christians or the church—that must be taken out of the way. Now, there are others who see it differently, and again, I'm not convinced that helps us to nail it down, but this is probably one of the better passages to make that case in the New Testament.

2. Next: A Time Without Restraint (verses 8-9)

So now is a time of restraint. The second season: Next, what's coming is a time without restraint. So now the gate's open. And here's what we see, verses 8 and 9:

"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."

This is an allusion to Isaiah 11:4, where you have God acting through His mouth, the breath of His mouth.

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."

The Nature of Deception

And what's significant here is that when it says that the lawless one will be revealed, it's the same word that's used for the coming of Jesus Christ. It's the Greek word parousia, and it means that in many ways the coming of the lawless one will be a deception. It will be a copy of what God will do.

And this is where my dog analogy breaks down, by the way, because the dog is not unleashed to do evil to all kinds of things in the world or the man of lawlessness. The man of lawlessness comes to deceive. Matthew 24:24 says that he'll do all of these counterfeit signs. In other words, the goal of Antichrist—whether it be many along the way or the ultimate—is not to wreak evil, although there could be some of that, there is some of that. Ultimately it's to deceive. And Matthew 24:24 says, if possible, even the elect.

In other words, the dog comes and rolls on its back and says, "Pet me, love me. All is good here." That's more the picture of what's going on here.

The Problem with "More Evidence" Thinking

And the reason this is important is because what a lot of us tend to think is: "I would believe God more if God were more obvious." But there is always a sense of deception. In fact, in this very passage, one of the things that's stated is at the beginning of verse 11. It says: "For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie."

So what does that mean? Does God send a delusion for people to believe a lie? I think, as I've studied this, that what it really means is that there's a sense in which God lets what we already believe be supported by the lie that comes. So it kind of supports it.

Let me put it this way. We tend to think, "If I could see more of God, I would believe more." But have you ever read through your Old Testament and been struck by how unbelieving and seemingly stupid the people were? I mean think about this.

In the Old Testament you have the children of Israel being rescued from Egypt, right? And when they go, they walk through the Red Sea on dry land—you know, the waters parted. It's like, okay, that feels like that could have been a God thing, right? And then they have manna that's coming down from heaven that feeds them every day. They have a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, so they only have to move when they see the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud. I mean, at some point you would say, "Okay, that seems pretty clear it's God."

Do you know what happened when Moses went up on Mount Sinai and was given the 10 Commandments? Do you know what they did? "We don't know what happened to this Moses guy or where our God is. Let's make a golden calf. Let's worship that."

Now we read that and we go, "How foolish could they be?" But, "God, if you just let me see something, then I could believe." But the truth of it is, even when God is obvious, if our hearts are bent not toward belief, then we will construct a golden calf in our own lives.

And God sending a delusion is God just simply saying, "You want to worship the golden calf? Here it is. Go ahead. Go your own way."

The Work of the Antichrist

And so the work of the Antichrist is deception—to get people to worship or serve something other than their true God. And what we talked about a little bit last week in terms of the Antichrist is that this isn't always an obvious figure. This can be a system. It can be a way of thinking. Yes, I believe there's a future figure, but it's this idea of saying there are many—they've come into the world, 1 John 2:18.

Therefore, it's anything that you're drawn to. And by the way, in Revelation 20, there's a little window into something that for many people feels hard to understand. So Revelation 20 is in most Bibles titled "the thousand years." This is where we get the idea of a millennium. So when you hear people talk about premillennialism, postmillennialism, amillennialism, millennium means a thousand years.

And so if you say "I'm a premillennialist," you believe Jesus comes back before the millennium—he reigns for a thousand years on Earth, coming from Revelation 20. If you're postmillennialist, it means you say, "Well I believe that the church brings about the millennium, then Jesus comes back at the end and enters into the eternal state." If you're amillennial, you'll say there is no millennium—it's basically a figurative language for how things work over time.

But notice this—this is verse 7 of Revelation 20. So you have a description of this millennium, whatever, however you take that. Here's what it says: "When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations."

So what do you have? Another unleashing! So if you hold to a postmillennial view—everything's getting better, everything's moving in a right direction—there still is a future deception. In other words, what's talked about here in 2 Thessalonians 2: we're in a time of restraint, but there is coming a time when this will be unleashed and there will be a season of deception.

3. Finally: A Time to Overthrow (verse 8)

And then there's the ultimate time—finally, a time, and I'm just going to say "to overthrow." And this is using the NIV's word in verse 8:

"And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth."

And to overthrow here means that He will take what has been unleashed and He will bring it back into full restriction and He, in many ways, will destroy. He will do what needs to be done in terms of bringing all things under his control.

Now, if this is to be understood the way that I'm explaining it here, I think what it means at least in part is: this isn't something to fear. Because even when God opens the gate, there's a delusion that's unleashed, but He will bring it back under ultimate control. And the judgments of God that we read about in Revelation and other places are God judging those who don't believe.

Truth vs. Lie

In fact, what you read in verses 11 and 12 of this section is that God does this for a reason:

"For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie, and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness."

Verse 10 says: "They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved."

So what's at stake? Believing the truth, loving the truth. Believing the lie, delighting in wickedness. That is what is at play. And where we still stand in the time of restraint is God saying, "I'm encouraging you, I'm inviting you to believe the truth and love the truth, not to believe the lie and delight in wickedness."

By the way, "delighting in wickedness" here—the word for wickedness or unrighteousness is the Greek word adikia. Ais a negation and dikia is a form of the word righteousness. So it doesn't mean basically everything that's as bad as it can be, but it means anything that isn't of God or to his end. And so to delight in wickedness by believing the lie is not necessarily that you act in ways that are offensive to everybody, but it's just simply saying, "I've chosen a life that is not in alignment with the things of God because I've believed a lie."

So: believe and love the truth, or believe the lie and delight in wickedness.

So let me just try and help us think about this for a moment in terms of: "Okay, what does this mean for me?" Because my guess is very few people, if you said, "What's your favorite New Testament passage?" would go, "You know that one about the restrainer and being taken out of the way and the unleashing? That's mine." Very few of us would say that.

The Resistance Game Analogy

There are a couple party games, and I've played them at times with friends and family—they're popular. Secret Hitler, Avalon, The Resistance, if you've ever played any of these. They're all basically the same game—they have different rules. But you have two teams. You have teams that get cards that say you're going on missions and your job is to succeed the missions. And then you have people who get other cards—and nobody knows anybody else's identity. They get the other cards and their job is to fail the missions.

And what makes the games fun is people lie to one another, they get all upset. My wife hates it. One of my kids is diabolical when he plays it. He can get you to believe him so much and then he just laughs at you when he's duped you. And so it's a great game.

But here's my point to this, and that is: the point of the restraint is that God says you can love and believe the truth now. You can be part of my resistance now. You don't just simply say, "Well, I live my life, and then one day I go to heaven and that's kind of the end of the story." But as God is at work in the world, he invites people to be a part of it.

Christianity Isn't Boring

Have you ever heard somebody say Christianity is boring? Christianity is boring when it's understood wrongly. And what I mean by that—if your version of Christianity is: "God came to earth as Jesus Christ, Jesus' main mission was to help us all be good and nice, and then we die and go to heaven"—yes, that's boring. But Jesus wasn't crucified for telling people to be nice. He was crucified because His message was revolutionary to the religious establishment and to the political establishment of His day because He was saying something very different than just "be kind and get along with everybody."

And my point is this: the point of this passage is yes, God's in charge of this restraint, but when he talks about loving truth so that you will love the truth, he's inviting in a sense you and me to participate in his grand mission.

Living as Strangers

I was thinking about this the other day. I was preparing for our little podcast that we do called Five Good Minutes. And so I was reading through Hebrews 11, because it's a devotional podcast that goes through. And I saw something I hadn't seen before. And this is—I realized that it fits here. It's relevant to this.

And that is, Hebrews 11 is basically a chapter that says, "Now faith"—this is how it starts—"is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see." This is the definition of faith. And then what happens is the chapter just says "by faith," and it tells us about somebody in the Bible, and it says, "This is how they lived by faith."

But at one point, we get three different Greek words that connote something very similar but they're different. In the NIV, two of the three are translated as "stranger." Here's what I'm talking about.

Hebrews 11:9 says this: "By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country."

And the word "stranger" here means to live alongside. And so this is talking about people who live somewhere but live with different values.

When my wife and I were first married, we lived in the city of Chicago and I worked at a church and we lived in a church-owned house that was about a block away from the church. And so we would walk back and forth between the church and the house that we lived in. But on that walk, we could hear six different languages being spoken because people who had moved to Chicago from all over the world had moved there.

And what happened is many of them would keep their identity and their other culture. They would keep their language. They would keep their food habits. They would keep their traditions. They were still more wherever they were from than they were Chicago. And this word gives a picture of this.

Part of what it means to be part of the resistance is that you live with different values in the culture in which you live.

In Hebrews 11:13, we see two of these words. It says: "All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth."

So "stranger" is used again, but the word "foreigner" is used here. In the original language, this is the word xenoi or xenos. We get our word "xenophobia" from it. It means stranger, as the other words mean stranger here. But it means more of a refugee, somebody who doesn't have rights, somebody who's an outsider. In fact, in ancient literature, the way that this would often be utilized is people would talk about those who were part of a group and then there were the xenoi, the outsiders. So these were people who didn't have the same rights, the same status as everybody else.

And then the last word "stranger" that's used here is a word that means somebody who has another home and they're just here as a temporary resident. This speaks of a different timeline.

Three Dimensions of Faith Living

And here's what I mean when I say this is something I hadn't seen before. Living by faith means living in a culture where you live by different values, you live with a different status, and you live on a different timeline than the people around you.

And this is why I say Christianity is not boring, because when you live with different values and you say, "I'm part of the resistance, I'm not just simply trying to be nice and punch a ticket to some future heaven," what you're doing is you're saying, "I'm part of a mission, I'm part of something that God is calling me to do."

And when you are working somewhere and everybody in your place of employment accepts certain practices that are not just to people or are unethical in some way and you say, "No I'm not going to be part of that"—your life goes from boring to being a significant part of the resistance.

When you take some of the resources that God's entrusted to you and you say, "I'm not just going to use it for myself but I'm going to invest it," and there's a point of trust when I give away money that causes me to say, "I'm living on a different timeline"—you are being part of the resistance.

When you decide to put yourself out there and invite somebody toward the things of faith by inviting a friend or a family member to come to a service or a study or something like that, you are not living the boring life—you're putting yourself as part of the resistance. You're living with different values, different status, because you're opening yourself up to being critiqued, to being somebody who's on a different timeline.

The Adventure of Faith

You ever been to one of these national parks with the visitor center? You know what I'm talking about? And usually right outside the visitor center there's a nice paved path that you can walk. And obviously there's some people where, rightly, that's the extent of what they can do to see the park. But you get a chance just to see a little bit of the park by going on the paved path.

But if you're physically able to go beyond the paved path, the best parts of the park are usually off the paved path. It takes you a little more work, there's a little more exposure, there's a little more danger in it. But there's something about it that when you go venturing you say, "I got to experience this place and I wasn't just on this little safe paved path."

But what's happened for some people in terms of faith journey is they've started to think that God's grand adventure for us is to keep us safe. Some people have started to think that the grand adventure that God has for their children is to keep them safe. God is not against safety, by the way. But he calls us to something that isn't always the safe path. He calls us to live as strangers, foreigners, strangers in a land that's against us—to live with different values, to live with different status, on a different timeline than the people who we live right around.

And this is what it means to be part of the mission of God. To say, "I believe the truth, I live by the truth. I don't live by a lie. I don't delight in a lie."

An Invitation to Something Greater

And if you're here and you're just saying, "Look, I'm just kind of trying to figure out who God is, and I'm wanting God to help me have a little less tumultuous life. And you're telling me that God's inviting me to this grand mission that could be dangerous. Not sure I want it. Thank you."

I get that. But I want you to know that God's inviting you to be part of something that's significant. It won't necessarily be easy. But it's much greater than simply saying, "I just want a deity who tries to make everything okay for me here and now."

By the way, when you play one of those games I mentioned, you never know who's on what side until the end of the game when the cards are revealed. In other words, the whole point of the game is you are in the dark until the very end. You think you figured it out and you're often misled.

But you know what's different about the invitation that God has? God has given us His word, and so you can know the truth as you study the truth, and you can say, "I'm choosing to love it, even here and now." And so when you're making your choices about living by different values, different status, different timeline, you're able to say, "You know what? Where I am today is based on truth even if it doesn't seem like it."

Because what is faith? It's the essence of things that we hope for, the things that we cannot see. And that is what it means to say, "I'm gonna live as part of this resistance movement of God today."

Conclusion

You know, I don't know how you come here today. My guess is very few of you woke up today and said, "I really hope that today at church we talk about the restraint passage." But I hope that you can see—and this is part of why we work through texts of the Bible because sometimes it forces us to look at things that we might not otherwise. But I hope what you can see is that what might feel like it's just kind of random events around us, that God is at work because we're living in a time of restraint.

There's coming a time without all of that restraint, but God is not done. And He invites you and me to be part of His mission and see His kingdom thrive in the world in which we live.

Let's pray together.

And just before I pray, I just want to say, if you're here, part of the contrast of truth and deception and the time of restraint is just being certain of where you are. And so for some of us, maybe this is a day just to say, "God, I do believe that you exist, that I've not lived up to your standard, that Jesus is the savior." And in doing so, you can become part of the resistance.

And if you're here and you've believed, then the real question for you is just: How are you living by different values, different timeline, different status than if you didn't believe?

Father, help us to be people who embrace a stranger status for a greater good. Understanding that we have a better country, as Hebrews 11 says. And we live for something greater than even what is seen in front of us today. And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Thanks for being here. Have a great day.

This transcript has been formatted and edited from the original recording for clarity and readability. While every effort has been made to preserve the speaker's intended meaning and message, some minor adjustments to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure have been made to improve readability in written form.